The Amerind singing at first seems extremely monotonous to our ears and the impression is that all tribes sing alike, but each stock has its own methods and peculiarities. A foundation principle with all in the men’s singing seems to be an explosive quality of vocalisation—that is, violent explosive tones instead of, as with us, tones long drawn out. The Moki seems generally to sing nothing but “ho, ho, ho, ho, he, he, he, he, hay, hay, hay,” etc., and he has quite a different rhythm from the Ute, while the singing of the Navajo, when the singer opens out all the stops, is more like the voice of a cat in the back yard than any other sound in civilisation that I can think of. Farther north the sounds change again: the Tlinkit vocalisation suggests death by strangulation. [Illustration: MENOMINEE TAMBOURINE DRUM A common form with many tribes ] [Illustration: OMAHA BOX DRUM A common form with most tribes. Originally made from a hollow log ] Fillmore states that the Navajo songs were the most primitive of any he studied. “They form in fact the connecting link between excited howling and excited singing. The quality of tone is indescribable, being more like a yelp than anything else; but the intervals yelped are unmistakably those of the major chord or of the minor chord. The tone-quality is that of shouting, or even of howling, but the pitch-relations into which they tend to fall are those of the major chord.... Some of the Navaho songs are illustrations of melody so primitive as to bring us very near to the beginning of music-making.... I started my investigations with the impression that there might be essential differences in structure between the Indian music and our own. I studied the Indian music for ten years with the utmost care and thoroughness of which I was capable. I have failed to find one single interval in Indian music which we do not use. It is true, I have often heard Indians sing these intervals out of tune; but this is a phenomenon by no means confined to savage or uncivilised races. In every such case, when I was singing with Indians and was able to get at their real intentions, I have found that they meant to sing exactly the interval we should sing in their place.... I have also found that increase of power is almost always accompanied with increased elevation of pitch, and diminution of intensity with a lowering of pitch, seemingly without the Indian being aware of it.... The evidence of the essential unity of all music, from the most primitive to the most advanced, is cumulative. The Navaho howls his song to the war gods directly along the line of the major chord; Beethoven makes the first theme of his great ‘Eroica’ symphony out of precisely the same material. The Tigua makes his ‘Dance of the Wheel’ out of a major chord, and its relative minor; Wagner makes Lohengrin sing ‘Mein lieber schwan’ to a melody composed of exactly the same ingredients. In short there is only one kind of music in the world.”