ojibwe music #4

Back in August, I posted a number of times (here, here, and here) on the subject of Ojibwe music. The posts focused on material that Gilfillan either published himself or collected, and the third post included an excerpt from an article that originally appeared in the the New York paper, The Evening Post. Gilfillan pasted it into his scrapbook, which is how I came to read it. I thought I'd post a bit more material from it. This is a section called 'appreciation of harmony'.

There is [...], in all their songs, a distinct tonality. It is not often one that will lend itself readily to harmony, for most of their songs are in a five-note scale, and the omission of the seventh, or leading note, of the European scale makes the employment of the dominant chord hazardous if not impossible.

Although Harmony does not enter into Ojibway music, the Indians are appreciative of it, and at times seek to utilize it in their own way. About midnight recently a party of them came from the village of Desbarats down the river to the camp in their canoes, and when opposite the hotel burst forth sonorously in one of their love songs; and the powerful voice of Kaboosa, the scholar of the band, was given forth in a series of thirds below the melody. I called his attention to it afterward, and asked if it were accidental. He replied that he gave the "undertones," as he called them, purposely, but he did not often venture to do so in the regular performance, because it disturbed the other singers and caused them to wander from the correct "tone." I asked if it was common for the Indians thus to attempt harmony, and he replied with smiling pride that he was the only Indian on the shores of Lake Huron or Lake Superior that could do so. Kaboosa, however, attended school in Marquette, Mich., and there got an idea of singing, and his accomplishment may not be wholly unrelated to his experiences in school. Kaboosa believes the Indians could readily be taught harmony, and says his own children pick up the melodies of the whites very readily. Lewis Tetebahbundung, another of the "Hiawatha band," gives forth a beautifully sweet tenor, and obviously could easily be trained in a more highly developed music than that of his tribe. Indeed, I am surprised to find that the Indians as a class have ordinarily good singing voices.

Mr Burton used to wonder whether the Indians would welcome or resent the employment of harmony with their melodies, and he put the question to test one evening when they had assembled for social relaxation, after a performance of "Hiawatha." First he asked them to sing one of their own lyrics in their own way. They did so, in unison, repeating the melody three times. Then a quartet of whites sang the piece in English as Mr. Burton had previously arranged it. The Ojibways were greatly excited. They clapped their hands and split the air with their falsetto shrieks of pleasure, and when the quartet had sung the harmonized version again the Indians surrounded him, asking eagerly if he thought they "could learn to sing it that way." He told them they could, and they were delighted when he offered to teach them to sing by note, using their own songs as a basis for exercises.

I find the phrase 'using their own songs as a basis for exercises' particularly poignant, somehow.