Chapter 5

Many Indian songs have no words at all, vocables only being used to float the voice. On classifying these wordless songs, we discover that those which are expressive of the gentle emotions have flowing, breathing vocables, but, where warlike feelings dominate the song, the vocables are aspirate and explosive. In this determinate use of vocables we happen upon what seems to represent the most primitive attempt yet discovered to give intellectual definition in verbal form to an emotion voiced in rhythm and melody.

In songs where words are employed, we also find vocables which are in accord with the spirit of the song, used to make the words conform to the musical phrase. These vocables are either appended to the word or else inserted between its syllables, to give length or added euphony. We also note a desire for rhyming, since vocables similar in sound frequently occur at the end of each musical phrase.

It would lead into too many details to present the various devices discernible in this aboriginal material by which the Indian sought euphony and measure. Nor can it be easily illustrated how words of many different languages were bent by elisions or stretched by vocables, that they might conform to the musical phrase. There is abundant evidence that the ear, accustomed to the pleasure of the rhythmic cadence of the song, was beginning to demand a corresponding metrical use of words in expressing the poetic thought involved in the dramatic story which gave birth to the music.

The art of poetry is here in its infancy, giving even less sign of its future development than music, which had already acquired the outline of that form which has since crystallised into the art of music. Notwithstanding, we find that words were chosen for their descriptive power, and that they were made rhythmical to fit the melody. Like the swelling buds on the bare branch, which hint the approach of summer's wealth, so these little vocables and rhythmic devices whisper the coming of the poets.

End of Project Gutenberg's Indian Story and Song, by Alice C. Fletcher