by Brandon Trail

      The timbre or tone quality of the Inuit music is somewhat dark.  The music moves to a slower beat and is not something that one would think of as a happy dance beat.  The texture is thin consisting of only a drum beat and repeated vocals.  The Inuit music has a very simple melody and form and is almost always repeated twice, with the second repetition being more emphatic with the drum and vocals. 

      The Inuit music has a monophonic texture and contains no harmony in the simple chants and drumbeats. The rhythm stays the same throughout most of the songs with the drumbeat staying at the same pace and the chanting following the beat.

           

      “Text settings are generally syllabic; there is some melismatic prolongation of certain vowels in large, downward melodic leaps, but only in specific positions within words. Dance songs are generally single strophes (except in some inland communities of the southwest, such as Pilot Station), but many are performed twice, first with vocables and light drumming on the rim, then slightly faster with lexical text and heavier drumming involving membrane strokes. More vigorous dancing parallels the appearance of song words in the second part” (Oxford University Press).

      “The most common meter is 5/8, but heterometric sections, often parallel to the rhythms of the text, are frequent. Some areas have distinctive meters; for example, 7/8, related to Siberian styles, is characteristic of St. Lawrence Island (ibid., p.16. Song and drum pulses (as well as dance motions) generally coincide, but the metric grouping of vocal and drum rhythms often diverges, producing polyrhythms and syncopation” (Oxford University Press).