Talk:Folk music/Archive 3

Mr. Fox
I like Mr. Fox, have what I think are their only two LPs and all that, but are they really important enough to mention here? If we want to name some semi-knowns out of the electric folk world, I'd be more inclined to mention Five Hand Reel or Malicorne since that would broaden the geographic scope. - Jmabel | Talk 21:17, 1 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Mr Fox are generally classiced as electric folk, which is a subgenre of folk rock. I plan to clean up their biography and include more of them in the electric folk article. They were probably not significant enough to appear in this main article.--Sabrebd (talk) 22:45, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

"Traditional Music" section needs editing
How can:

Grammy Awards

James Taylor to Stevie Wonder

Carole King

"Songwriters Hall of Fame"

fit under Tradtional Music?

This needs correction.Hohenloh (talk) 23:43, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Clean-up time
Bravely, and probably foolishly, I plan to do a clean-up of this article and Traditional music, taking into account the points above where possible, adding citations and trying to place material in the right article. If you have any points you think need to be addressed in such a process please let me know here. I will give some time before beginning so that this can be done fairly.--Sabrebd (talk) 11:12, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

This article looked better in April 2005
Look here. How much clearer the introduction is!

''Folk music, in the original sense of the term, is music by and of the people. Folk music arose, and best survives, in societies not yet affected by mass communication and the commercialization of culture. It normally was shared and performed by the entire community (not by a special class of expert performers), and was transmitted by word of mouth.''

Now, the introduction is messy, leaves out the essential definition, and for some reason ends with a random list of American and English folk musicians.

And then, the 2005 version has a great, long section about The decline of folk traditions in modern societies which is entirely absent from the article today. This is the information that I was looking for, and did not find in the current version.

If I didn't know better (and I'm not sure I do), I'd say that four years of improvements by editors with the best intentions in mind have in reality made the article substantially worse. Esn (talk) 03:44, 29 May 2009 (UTC)


 * You have a point. I will bear this version in mind when I get around to a cleanup. I have been waiting for a few more suggestions like this one.--Sabrebd (talk) 07:39, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Assembling citations on the definition of folk music
Ronald D. Cohen Folk music: the basics (CRC Press, 2006), pp. 1-2 and includes the following: "...we have to include in our story not only the development and collection of old songs, with no known composers, but also labor songs of the nineteenth century broadsides ... singer song-writers, such as Donovan and Bob Dylan, who emerged in the 1960s and much more."

scholes
Points from Percy Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, OUP 1977, article "Folk Song".


 * "The expressions "Folk Music", "Folk Song" and "Folk Dance" are comparatively recent. They are extensions of the terms "Folk Lore", which was coined in 1846 by W. B Thoms, a famous English antiquary {editor of "Notes and Queries"), to cover the idea of the traditions, customs, and superstitions of the uncultured classes." (later including arts and crafts)


 * The emergence of the term coincided with an "outburst of national feeling all over Europe" that was particularly strong at the edges of Europe, where national identity was most asserted - nationalist composers emerged in Eastern Europe, Russia, Scandinavia, Spain and Britain. Another contemporary development was a move to the towns that threatened the loss of valuable rural culture.


 * Folk music is normally that for which no single composer can be traced or postulated. It is said by some to be art music changed and probably debased by oral transmission, by others to reflect the character of the race that produced it.


 * Some continental European nations use the one term "Folk Lore". Germans use "Volkslied". In America and Germany the distinction between folk and mere national and popular song is sometimes loose - Stephen Foster may be called "folk" in America, where black and native American music have been used by composers.


 * Interest in the topic (from POV of poetry) dates back to Bishop Percy. (see Ballad) Town and Country. The Fitzwilliam Virginal book shows how often "English Elizabethan and Stuart composers evolved their music from folk themes". Folk music noted in Haydn and Beethoven.


 * Musically, there is frequent use of modal and pentatonic scales. Pieces are strophic in form. Purely instrumental genres are almost non-existent: all are related to song and dance, yet "Every form of vocal and instrumental music we possess has developed out of folk song or dance". Songs are rendered in free metre.


 * International Folk Music Council definition (1954/5), also given in Lloyd. "music that has been submitted to the process of oral transmission. It is the product of evolution and is dependent on the circumstances of continuity, variation, and selection.... The term can therefore be applied to music that has been evolved from rudimentary beginnings by a community uninfluenced by art music; and it can also be applied to music which has originated with an individual composer and has subsequently been absorbed into the unwritten, living tradition of a community. But the term does not cover a song, dance, or tune that has been taken over ready-made and remains unchanged. It is the fashioning and re-fashioning of the music by the community that give it its folk character."

end scholes
Johann Gottfried Herder To promote his concept of the Volk, he published letters and collected folk songs. These latter were published in 1773 as Voices of the People in Their Songs (Stimmen der Völker in ihren Liedern).

quote from above

Texts not consulted in this article include (to name a few of the most egregious ommissions):


 * Article on Folk Music in the latest edition of the Harvard Dictionary of Music
 * The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music [10 volumes] : Volume 8, Europe, Edited by Timothy Rice, James Porter and Chris Goertzen (2000), Series edited by Timothy Rice and James Porter (Bruno Nettle and Ruth M. Stone, advisory editors).
 * Ted Gioia's: Work Songs (Oxford University Press, 2006)
 * Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 by D.K. Wilgus (1959) (note: UCLA has just gotten a grant from the Grammy Foundation to digitize and make available Wilgus's folksong collection of 8,000 commercially recorded albums and 2,800 field recorded tapes.)
 * The invaluable Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1994) by Peter Burke.
 * C.J. Bearman "Who Were the Folk?  The Demography of Cecil Sharp’s Somerset Folk Singers" in Historical Journal (2000) 43, 3.  pp.751-775, and C. J. Bearman, "Cecil Sharp in Somerset: Some Reflections on the Work of David Harker" in Folklore (2002) 113, pp.11 - 34

I won't even mention David Evans, Robert Palmer, Bill Ferris, and Jeff Todd Titon. People interested in this topic should consult all of these first.

Some Trotskyite Marxist writers (notably Dave Harker and his followers) have claimed that "People like Lloyd, MacColl and, Lomax and Seeger in America, were somewhat eager to portray the rural idealism of some imagined past community" but a careful examination of their writings does not support this claim. See C.J. Bearman's "Who Were The Folk" for a careful examination of this question.

Eric Hobsbawn "the invention of tradition"

Benjamin Filene's 2000 book, Romancing the Folk opens with an encomium to Harker. Filene sees folk music as a 'construct" of folksong scholars as "elitists," implying, without actually coming out and saying so, that they financially exploited of the subjects of their study by collecting their songs and writing about them. Nevermind that contrarians Zora Neale Hurston and John A. Lomax nevertheless socialized exclusively with progressives Filene, who has a PH.D. degree in American Studies (not music) from Yale, has written that he dislikes folk music: and he also despises the New Deal. He is currently employed as a " historian at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. Romancing the Folk was acclaimed by rock critic Robert Cristgau  in a review in the NY Times Sunday (12, 10, 2000) Book Review section, which savaged  Francis James Child, Cecil Sharp, and the Lomaxes as condescending racists and exploiters. Cristgau-style attacks have been repeated by his friend, Dave Marsh and by others, in the pages of the NY Times, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere.

end quote

from page

Charles Seeger (1980) describes three contemporary defining criteria of folk music:
 * 1) A "schema comprising four musical types: 'primitive' or 'tribal'; 'elite' or 'art'; 'folk'; and 'popular'. Usually...folk music is associated with a lower class in societies which are culturally and socially stratified, that is, which have developed an elite, and possibly also a popular, musical culture." Cecil Sharp (1907)?,  A.L. Lloyd (1972).
 * 2) "Cultural processes rather than abstract musical types...continuity and oral transmission...seen as characterizing one side of a cultural dichotomy, the other side of which is found not only in the lower layers of feudal, capitalist and some oriental societies but also in 'primitive' societies and in parts of 'popular cultures'." Redfield (1947) and Dundes (1965).
 * 3) Less prominent, "a rejection of rigid boundaries, preferring a conception, simply of varying practice within one field, that of 'music'."

Folk songs are commonly seen as songs that express something about a way of life that exists now or existed in the past or about to disappear (or in some cases, to be preserved or somehow revived).

Gene Shay, co-founder and host of the Philadelphia Folk Festival, defined folk music in an April 2003 interview by saying: "In the strictest sense, it's music that is rarely written for profit. It's music that has endured and been passed down by oral tradition. [...] Also, what distinguishes folk music is that it is participatory&mdash;you don't have to be a great musician to be a folk singer. [...] And finally, it brings a sense of community. It's the people's music."

endquote

"Folk music is usually seen as the authentic expression of a way of life now past or about to disappear (or in some cases, to be preserved or somehow revived). Unfortunately, despite the assembly of an enormous body of work over some two centuries, there is still no unanimity on what folk music (or folklore, or the folk) is." (Middleton 1990, p.127)

Sharp, Cecil. Folk Song: Some Conclusions. 1907. Charles River Books Karpeles, Maud. An Introduction to English Folk Song. 1973. Oxford. Oxford University Press. English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. Collected by Cecil J. Sharp. Ed. Maud Karpeles. 1932. London. Oxford University Press. Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0335152759. Seeger, Charles (1980). Cited in Middleton (2002)

from Traditional music

redaction
Folk Music, Folk Song and Folk Dance are comparatively recent expressions, being extensions of the term Folk lore, coined in 1846 by the antiquary William Thoms to describe "the traditions, customs, and superstitions of the uncultured classes", the German expression Volk, in the sense of "the people as a whole" having being applied to popular and national music by Johann Gottfried Herder and the German Romantics over half a century previously.

A literary interest in the popular ballad was not new: it dates back to Thomas Percy and William Wordsworth. English Elizabethan and Stuart composers had often evolved their music from folk themes, the classical suite was based upon stylised folk-dances and Franz Josef Haydn's use of folk melodies is noted. But the emergence of the term "folk" coincided with an "outburst of national feeling all over Europe" that was particularly strong at the edges of Europe, where national identity was most asserted. Nationalist composers emerged in Eastern Europe, Russia, Scandinavia, Spain and Britain: the music of Dvorak, Smetana, Grieg, Rimsky-Korsakov, Brahms, Liszt, de Falla, Wagner, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, Bartok and many others drew upon folk melodies. The English term "folklore", to describe traditional music and dance, entered the vocabulary of many continental European nations, each of which had its folk-song collectors and revivalists.

However, despite the assembly of an enormous body of work over some two centuries, there is still no certain definition of what folk music (or folklore, or the folk) is. Folk music may tend to have certain characteristics but it cannot clearly be differentiated in purely musical terms. One meaning often given is that of "old songs, with no known composers", another is that of music that has been submitted to an evolutionary "process of oral transmission.... the fashioning and re-fashioning of the music by the community that give it its folk character." Such definitions depend upon "(cultural) processes rather than abstract musical types...", upon "continuity and oral transmission...seen as characterizing one side of a cultural dichotomy, the other side of which is found not only in the lower layers of feudal, capitalist and some oriental societies but also in 'primitive' societies and in parts of 'popular cultures'."

For Scholes, as for Cecil Sharp and Bela Bartok, there was a sense of the music of the country as distinct from that of the town. Folk music was already "seen as the authentic expression of a way of life now past or about to disappear (or in some cases, to be preserved or somehow revived)," particulary in "a community uninfluenced by art music" and by commercial and printed song. Lloyd rejected this in favour of a simple distinction of economic class yet for him too folk music was, in Charles Seeger's words, "associated with a lower class in societies which are culturally and socially stratified, that is, which have developed an elite, and possibly also a popular, musical culture." In these terms folk music may be seen as part of a "schema comprising four musical types: 'primitive' or 'tribal'; 'elite' or 'art'; 'folk'; and 'popular'."

But the distinction between this "authentic" folk and national and popular song in general has always been loose, particularly in America and Germany - for example popular songwriters such as Stephen Foster may be termed "folk" in America. The International Folk Music Council definition allows that the term "can also be applied to music which has originated with an individual composer and has subsequently been absorbed into the unwritten, living tradition of a community. But the term does not cover a song, dance, or tune that has been taken over ready-made and remains unchanged."

However the post World War 2 folk revival in America and in Britain brought a new meaning to the word. The popularity of "contemporary folk" recordings caused the appearance of the category "Folk" in the Grammy Awards of 1959: in 1970 the term was dropped in favour of "Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording (including Traditional Blues)", while 1987 brought a distinction between "Best Traditional Folk Recording" and "Best Contemporary Folk Recording". In the proliferation of popular music genres, some music became categorised as "World music" and "Roots music", while the term "folk", by the start of the 21st century, could cover "singer song-writers, such as Donovan and Bob Dylan, who emerged in the 1960s and much more".

Defining characteristics
From a historical perspective, folk music had these characteristics:


 * It was transmitted through an Oral tradition.

Before the twentieth century, ordinary farm workers and factory workers were illiterate. They acquired songs by memorising them. Primarily, it is not mediated by books, recorded or transmitted media. Singers may extend their repertoire using broadsheets, song books or CDs, but these secondary enhancements are of the same character as the primary songs experienced in the flesh.


 * The music was often related to national culture.

It was culturally particular - from a particular region or culture. In the context of an immigrant group, folk music acquires an extra dimension for social cohesion. It is particularly conspicuous in the United States, where Polish-Americans, Irish-Americans and Asian-Americans strive to emphasise differences from the mainstream. They will learn songs and dances that originate in the countries where their grandparents came from.


 * They commemorate historical and personal events.

On certain days of the year, such as Easter, May Day and Christmas hoe, particular songs celebrate the yearly cycle. Weddings, birthdays and funerals may also be noted with songs, dances and special costumes. Religious festivals often have a folk music component. Choral music at these events brings children and non-professional singers to participate in a public arena, giving an emotional bonding that is unrelated to the aethetic qualities of the music.

As a side-effect, the following characteristics are sometimes present:


 * Lack of copyright on songs

There are hundreds of songs from the nineteenth century have known authors. However, they have continued in oral tradition, to the point where they are classified as "Traditional", for purposes of music publishing. This has become much less frequent since the 1970s. Today, almost every folk song that is recorded is credited with an arrangement e.g. "Trad arr Dylan".


 * Fusion of cultures

In the same way that people can have a mixed background, with parents originating in different continents, so too music can be a blend of influences. A particular rhythmic pattern, or a characteristic instrument, is enough to give a traditional feel to music, even when it has been composed recently. It is easy to recognise the presence of a bagpipe or a tabla in a piece of music. The young are usually much less offended by the dilution or adaptation of songs this way. Equally an electric guitar can be added to an old song. It is a matter of personal taste as to whether this is an enhancement to the music, or a cheap gimmick. The relevant factors may include instrumentation, tunings, voicings, phrasing, subject matter, and even production methods.


 * Non-commercial.

Celebrations of cultural identity are occasionally performed without any profit motive. The absence of financial reward for the organiser was much more common in the past.

endquote

Redheylin (talk) 23:29, 17 June 2009 (UTC) refs