On the Eskimo Music. 7 
plays a very great part; in the choruses indeed we often find — just 
as among other primitive races — only the text of the refrain, stanzas 
with exclamations such as “aja А hrä” and the like. For this reason 
earlier Greenland expeditions not rarely obtained the impression, 
that the Eskimo did not have songs at all with text in which there 
was any meaning. 
This alternation of text and refrain strophes, often carried out 
by a single voice with chorus, is found among most uncultured 
nations — among others, in such widely separated races as the 
North American Indians, the South African Kaffirs and the South 
Sea Islanders — and this primitive method of expression everywhere 
forms the basis in the poetical composition of civilized races down 
to our time. The history of the refrain has for this reason been 
made the subject of the closest study, and the question of the 
priority of the text-strophe or refrain, chorus or single voice, is still 
an open one. 
As we shall see, the Eskimo songs are constructed logically 
throughout. 
Text strophes and refrain strophes follow one another in definite 
order, and the subdivision of the refrain constantly returns in the 
same form, or at any rate with quite inconsiderable change. The text 
strophes in a song use the same melodic basis, and however different 
the text may be, the singer always seeks to fit it into the framework 
of melody once chosen, so that the length of the single melodic period 
and the principal rhythm are preserved as far as possible through- 
out the song. No. 17 is characteristic of the Greenlanders’ power to 
force a quantity of text into a given rhythmic framework. 
In almost all cases melodic periods correspond to the natural 
grouping of text and refrain. As a rule each group closes with a 
stop or a pause; in the latter case the rest is often distinctly marked 
by a strong aspiration after the last tone of the period. It is only 
in rare cases that two melodic periods, which correspond to two 
quite separate groups of words, are directly joined to one another 
(e.g. No. 124 B'A). In melodic strophes with text, we should expect 
that the natural accent of the words would be retained and influence 
the accentuation of the melody. This is not always the case how- 
ever. Often the movement of the melody is directly opposed to the 
natural declamation of the text, and we receive the definite impression 
that the principal rhythm once accepted is intended to be retained, 
even if at the cost of the normal sounds of the words. F. Boas 
has noted something similar in the case of the Central Eskimo. ! 
' The Central Eskimo, р. 651. 
