ANALYSIS OF PICURlS SONGS 



By Helen H. Roberts 



One of the most important reasons for maldng an analytical study 

 of this small group of Picuris songs is that they are, I believe, the 

 first collection of Indian, or, for that matter, of any exotic songs 

 ever so studied where all were sung by one individual and where 

 several additional renditions (from one to four) were secured of each.' 



A general statement concerning the nature of Picuris music could 

 hardly be made with safety on the basis of a study of so small a 

 number of individual songs as are presented in this collection, all 

 sung by one person. It would also be ill-advised to attempt to draw 

 comparisons between Picuris musical ability or musical output and 

 that of other peoples in the Southwest, unless such comparisons were 

 understood to be frankly tentative. However, for such considera- 

 tions, even so small a group of songs is better than none, and much 

 of value may be learned from a careful study of them, especially 

 since consistency of performance may be more correctly estimated 

 than is usually possible. Aside from all the renditions having been 

 sung by one singer, another good point is that the songs are all of 

 one type, that is, they all belong with myths. Therefore if any 

 stylistic feature is common to myth songs as a group, it should be 

 discoverable. With these considerations in mind, a critical study 

 of the songs may be taken for what it is worth. 



In writing the music, I have followed what has always seemed to 

 me the simplest and best procedure, that of employing our cus- 

 tomary notation in so far as it fulfills the demands of accurate pre- 

 sentation, only modifying it where it does not. In this particular 

 group of songs the melodies are for the most part so clearly comparable 

 to our major and minor schemes that I have gone so far as to employ 

 key signatures, although of course truly fixed major and minor scales 

 are unknown as such among the Indians, as indeed are any fixed 

 scales, presumably. Oilman's statement, made in the early nineties, 

 that their scales are not formed, but forming, presents the case for 

 all Indian music with which I am familiar. Pitches which do not 

 coincide with those of our diatonic or chromatic scales are rather 



• A somewhat comparable collection was made by the writer for A Study of Folksong Variants Based 

 on Field Work in Jamaica, published in the Journal of .Vmerican Folk-Lore, vol. 38, no. 14S, pp. 149- 

 216, for April-June, 1925, which appeared in January, 1927. Here, however, the opportunity to study 

 different songs as sung by one singer was rejected in favor of studying the vicissitudes of the individual 

 song at the hands of diflercnt singers, although the range of variation in repetitions of the same song by 

 a single singer was also observed. 



399 



