I appreciate that there is an intangible something about music, which may prove baffling when it comes to reducing it to cold scientific symbols and descriptions.  Take, for instance, quality of tone.  Each one of us knows perfectly the various qualities of the different speaking voices of friends and acquaintances, yet how many of us can so accurately describe those qualities to a stranger that he also may be able to identify the voices among a thousand others.  The tabulation of such elusive qualities would have to be in very general terms.  Such indefinable characteristics would, to some extent, have to depend for comparison upon the memory of those workers who had received first-hand impressions.  It would be something like a present-day musician identifying an unfamiliar composition as belonging to the “French school,” the “Italian school,” or the “Russian school;” and yet, this same musician might not be able to point out with definiteness a single characteristic of that particular so-called “school.”

Though I have held these opinions for several years, I am more than ever convinced, since examining these few Tinguian records, that something really tangible and worth while can be deduced from the music of various primitive peoples, and I trust this branch of ethnology will soon receive more serious recognition.

Manifestly it would be unwise to draw any unalterable conclusions from the examination of but fourteen records of a people.  But even in this comparatively small number of songs, ranging as they do over such a variety of applications and uses, it is possible to see tendencies which the examination of more records may confirm as definite characteristics.

While it would be presumptuous at this time to attempt to formulate a Tinguian style, I trust that what I have tabulated may prove valuable in summing up the total evidence, which will accumulate as other surveys are made; and if perchance, the findings here set down and the conclusions tentatively drawn from them help to clear up any obscure ethnological point, the effort has been well spent.

Albert Gale.

CONCLUSIONS

The first impression gained by the student of Philippine ethnology is that there is a fundamental unity of the Philippine peoples, the Negrito excepted, not only in blood and speech, but in religious beliefs and practices, in lore, in customs, and industries.  It is realized that contact with outside nations has in many ways obscured the older modes of thought, and has often swamped native crafts, while each group has doubtless developed many of its present customs on Philippine soil; yet it seems that enough of the old still remains to proclaim them as a people with a common ancestry.  To what extent this belief is justified can be answered, in part, by the material in the preceding pages.