This selection from the song bag of the Senecas, recorded at Cold Spring, N. Y., on the Allegheny River and issued as a second album from the Iroquois Indians of the Northeast, presents the voices of two singers who are well known the length of the Iroquois Longhouse, from Syracuse, N.Y., to Brantford, Canada, for the roles that they perform in the ceremonies of the Handsome Lake Religion. This album, with the exception of one record (5-A), was collected on a single field trip in November 1945, for the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution on a grant-in-aid of research from the Viking Fund. We recorded at the Friends Indian School at Tunessassa (Quaker Bridge, N.Y. in 1941, at Clifford Crouse's home near Coldspring Longhouse in 1945, both places on the Allegany Reservation of the Seneca Nation.

What we have said of the people of the longhouse in the program notes to Songs from the Iroquois Longhouse (Smithsonian Institution, Publication 3691, 1942; Folk Music of the United States, vol. 6) holds a background for this album, which is localized to one community and somewhat more specialized in content. In particular, we are asking listeners to open their ears to hear out two rituals, as sung by two singers, almost in their entirety.

Of these, the Drum Dance, or Thanksgiving Dance, is one of the Four Sacred Rituals that is addressed to the Creator, and therefore belongs in the same class with the Great Feather Dance (album VI, record 1A).

Quavering-Changing-a-rib is a women's rite of curing, and its songs recount the courtship of a reluctant bachelor and a frog-woman, but the Seneca men love to sing these songs in the spring and early summer for their sheer musical qualities. It was Jesse Cornplanter and the Tonawanda Seneca singers who introduced me to it in 1934.

Bear Society Dance is also a curing rite, but of the shamanistic variety which accepts its member through dreams and also by possession. Its celebration is familiar as part of the Midwinter Festival, and Cringan (1898, p. 148) published a transcription of a Seneca Bear Dance song from Six Nations, Canada.

Fish Dance is the favorite Iroquois diversion and is offered as pure dessert. Indian young people still like to dance it as much as when Morgan first described it (L. H. Morgan, The League of the Hodenosaunee or Iroquois (1851) 2 vols., N.Y., 1901: 1, p. 273). Cringan (1898, p. 151) transcribed a Fish Dance song.

There is little to add to what I wrote (1942) about collecting songs among the Iroquois. I merely arrived at Allegany on the way home from Canada in the Recording Laboratory sound truck, picked up Chauncey Johnny John, stopped for Albert Jones, who had a good drum and rattles, and drove into Clifford Crouse's, where there is 60-cycle current, announcing that we had come to sing, and we went to work setting up the recorder on the dining-room table and the microphone in the living room. In two days we had made more than enough records for this album, including Fish Dance, which I had taken at the First Conference on Iroquois Research at Red House a month earlier, and Bear Dance, selected from the 1941 collection.

Chauncey Johnny John sang Great Feather Dance for album VI, and he received extended notice in the program notes. Albert Jones had recorded for me on wax cylinders in 1933, when he led the Coldspring Singers and Mutual Aid Society. As an official of the Snipe clan, his name "Ha'nodyenen's," is frequently announced for leading roles in the ceremonies in Coldspring Longhouse. He has a fine speaking and singing voice, he enunciates clearly, and he is an earnest preacher. But he prefers second parts to first, protesting, "I do not have the head for songs, and long speeches;" but leading singers seek Albert as a helper "to prop up the songs." On the other hand, Hau'no'on, "treads the swamp," as Chauncey says his name means now, although I understood it to mean "cold voice" in 1941, has always taken leading roles, which have been limited to song leader and ritualistic because Turtle clan matrons have identified his mother with the "Cayuga" in Canada, although his relatives there are considered "Senecas"; but now he likes to hear the ladies of his clan greet him, "Hai ha'nowagen'hji'," greetings, oldest Turtle man. His star reached the rim of heaven last summer (1946) when they came after him to serve as "professor" at the Summer Linguistics Institute at the University of Michigan. So now he has done everything.

The water drum and horn rattle, which were described in previous notes (1942), provide the accompaniment to the songs.

Comment on the Music by
MARTHA CHAMPION HUOT

Although the Iroquois have known Western music for almost 300 years–the seventeenth century Jesuit missionaries taught church music to Huron and Iroquois, and choirs and instrumental bands flourished in the late nineteenth century–the quality of these Iroquois songs remains distinctly primitive and shows many of the characteristics typical of other North American Indian singing styles. Relatively short phrases, limited tonal range, and generally descending melodic line are features of wide distribution among primitive peoples.

In common with vocal music accompanied only by percussion instruments the rhythm tends to be less variable than the tonality. Much of the interesting strangeness is due to the Iroquois drum and rattle technique, which consists of an unbroken series of evenly spaced beats, a style of frequent occurrence in North America. This technique is sometimes varied with vibrato passages, such as occur during repeats of the Fish Dance and in introductory phrases elsewhere.

These songs cannot properly be considered either major or minor in tonality since not all of the tones of our diatonic scale are present, nor is the relationship of the intervals harmonically conceived. (Cringan noted the pentatonic scale in some songs.) Consequently, the best key to understanding the tonality is provided by tracing the melodic importance of the tones and intervals. The rhythms are for the most part simple and consistently duple, though triplets as an embellishment occur. The melodic units are phrases of between five and nine drum beats' duration and the simplest songs consist of but one phrase, repeated with minor and perhaps unintentional variations in tone and rhythm. The more involved songs consist of two, three or four phrases of varying length–there seems to be no drive toward making the phrases of equal duration–the repetition of such phrases in varying order resulting in an asymetrical type of balance.

Of the songs included in this album the prayer songs for the Drum Dance are the simplest. A single phrase elaborated rhythmically in repetition, is tonally limited to a monotone of a second, although the final examination at the close may be a fifth to an octave. [Cf. Baker, 1882, p. 37, on this point.]

The Drum Dance songs also are essentially simple; they have an increasingly wide tonal range, those in the beginning of the record have a range of an octave, or a ninth, late ones show an octave and a third or fourth, and three song have a range of an octave and a fifth. The fifth, fourth, second, and both major and minor thirds occur. The antiphonal response of a second singer and the singing in unison of the two singers make these the most interesting songs. Generally the response duplicates the original motif, but an occasional shift to a second higher or second lower adds variety as do the infrequent semitones and the minor rhythmical differences. The antiphonal response is reminiscent of Catholic church responses, but since the Iroquois employ similar antiphony in other songs, and it is used by some Indian tribes in the southeastern United States with whom the Iroquois have other cultural affiliations, antiphony well may be a native feature.

The Quavering-Changing-a-rib sequence illustrates the dramatic qualities of Iroquois ceremonial songs. Variety in tempo, rhythm, tonal range; repetitions, responses, variations, and embellishments by the two singers–all are factors in holding interest and attention. Musically, they present no new features except that the pentatonic scale is more prevalent and the slow songs, particularly, show, in my opinion, European influence.

The quaver is especially prominent in some of these songs, particularly the Bear Society songs. This vocal embellishment seems to be a particularly sophisticated and controlling feature of Iroquois singing, compared with a wide, loose vibrato tone found in Plains Indian's singing, for example.

The Fish Dance songs are lively rhythmically. They accentuate the importance of the major or minor third, although the fifth is by far the most stressed interval. Their range is limited to a sixth. One can well imagine the Indians dancing to such music.