Excerpt from History of Foreign Music
Poetry, music and the dance are phases of one thing to primitive man. In the beginnings of human culture, they did not exist separated. They began together as expressions of the rhythmic impulse. Of course, to us poetry exists independent of these other two. Grosse defines poetry as the expression of emotion in aesthetic form with the idea of giving pleasure. When we analyze its elements, it seems that the first expression of poetry is the chanting of words as distinguished from ordinary speech. Such chanting is agreeable to savage man and arouses pleasant emotions in himself and in his hearers. To civilized man the most striking characteristic of the poetry or song of lower cultures is repetition. Just as the child delights to repeat the same sounds, so the man of primitive mind loves to repeat indefinitely. Songs of our own Indians are frequently mere repetitions of the simplest phrases. I knew an old Tonkawa who had a medicine-song of which he was extremely fond. It consisted of the single native word for pig; this he would sing, over and over and over again, for hours at a time. Rhythm, of course, is the very essence of the whole combined expression, poetry-music-dance. It depends upon two elements, quantity or length, and quality.
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