YII. Eskimo Music from North-G-reenlaiid. 



In ethnographical museums, Eskimo musical instruments 

 are unknown with the exception of the drum. It seems as if 

 the Eskimo have never known nor used any other artificial 

 musical instrument than this. Still they find pleasure in music, 

 namely in the music that is produced by means of that natural 

 human instrument, the vocal chords. Wherever Eskimo have 

 been found in their natural state, they have known the art of 

 singing, but we know nothing about what outside influences 

 may have given rise to their manner of singing. 



Before the coming of the Europeans, the Greenlanders' 

 ideas about music were undoubtedly very different from ours. 

 Even if the melodies from North-Greenland given here, which 

 have come down from olden times, contained no evidence of 

 this difference, we should be able to infer it from those spec- 

 imens of Eskimo music which we have from other branches of 

 this race*). On comparing all these specimens, we find that 

 there must be a certain primitive musical culture among the 

 Eskimo and that this musical tradition is to be traced far back 

 in time ; for the music in all of these specimens is highly 

 characteristic and its style is always easy to recognize even in 

 songs heard for the first time. It is not only monotony that 

 characterizes these songs — for that is a feature in all kinds 

 of primitive music — but rather certain stereotyped or tradi- 

 tional relations between the few tones constituting the Eskimo 



*) F. Boas: The Central Eskimo (Sixth annual report of the Bureau of 

 Ethnology (Smithsonian Institution) 1884—85. Washington 1888). — 

 H. Stein: Eskimo Music (The White World. New York 1902 and Globus 

 Vol. LXXXIII). 



