Share page | Visit Us On FB |
I |
|||
THE ROTE-SONG OF THE HOPI
In my paper on Zuni Melodies I called them examples
![]() A new artistic principle, ethnic in scope, demands a name. The old word " rote-song " (route) signifies, by the analogy of a pathway, the pursuit of a beaten track of tone, and is here taken to imply the substitution of melodic autonomy for the support and limitation compared in the word " scale " to a stairway.
Defining music as the fine art of interval, a scale is an interval-order auxiliary in its production. What is an order
![]() An order of intervals is a complex relation in tone. Tones differ from noises, the other species of auditory sensation, in presenting themselves arranged in a continuous series, having one dimension, called |
|||
1 Page 89. "What we have in these melodies is the musical growths out of which scales are elaborated, and not compositions undertaken in conformity to norms |
of interval order already fixed in the consciousness of the singers. In this archaic stage of the art, scales are not formed but forming." |
||