400 PICURIS CHILDREN'S STORIES [eth. ans. 43 



frequently heard, in some songs with considerable consistency in 

 repetitions, a point which will be discussed later. Such pitches, 

 however, do not, on the whole, displace what are to our hearing 

 ordinary scale tones in these Picurls songs. They rather supplement 

 them, enriching the melodic color, but even so, scarcely attaining 

 to the importance of the diatonic or chromatic scale tones. Even 

 according due weight to the fairly consistent use of them in different 

 renditions of the same melody, it is a cpiestion in how far theu" pres- 

 ence is due to the individual habit of this one singer and to what 

 extent the "deflections" from the diatonic or chromatic intervals 

 may be due to exigencies of language, that is, accent, pronunciation, 

 and the relation of certain phonetic sequences. These last questions 

 could be answered only by a minute study of the language, followed 

 by a study of series of the same song sung by many individuals, not 

 once each, but several times, so that the degree of fluctuation in the 

 different performances of each singer might be observed and compared 

 with the amount and Idnds of variation observable between the 

 versions of different singers. In the songs here presented the pitches 

 used by only one singer are available and the degree of consistency 

 in his performance is all that may be studied. 



I have indicated these pitches by means of ordinary notation where 

 this will serve, but for mtermediate tones single or double acute or 

 grave accents are placed over the notes which without them would 

 represent true staff pitches. Ordinarily I prefer oblique Imcs drawn 

 directly through the head of the note representing one of these inter- 

 mediate pitches, because it seems to me to make for easier reading 

 to see them on the note itself. But in type-set music the difficulties 

 of the music printer also come in for their share of consideration and 

 in this paper the accents have proved the only workable compromise. 

 One acute accent above the staff means that the note lying immedi- 

 ately beneath it is about a quarter tone higher than its staff position 

 indicates. A double acute accent means that the "sharping" is less 

 than a quarter-tone. (It might be reasoned that the logical plan 

 would be to use double accents for the larger differences in pitch 

 and single for the smaller, except that the finer nuances are much 

 less frequent and simplicity of diacritical marks is desirable wherever 

 possible.) Conversely, grave accents indicate shnilar degrees of 

 "flatting." It has not seemed essential to the study to define these 

 pitches more accurately than this, nor is it maintained that the 

 single accent indicates exactly a quarter tone and the double accent 

 an eighth of a tone. Without the aid of instruments havmg fixed 

 scales of such finely graded tones (which these people do not possess) 

 it seems quite unlikely that with the numerous extraneous influences 

 constantly at work affecting pitch production by the human voice, 

 the Picurls should consistently produce or use very small accurately 



