Traditional music 1

Traditional music

Traditional musicStylistic origins Traditional music

Cultural origins Individual nations or regions

Typical instruments See Folk instruments

Mainstream popularity Highly popular until recently

Derivative forms Popular music • Contemporary music

Fusion genres

Electric folk • Folk metal • Folk rock • New Age music • Neofolk • Space music

Other topics

Roots revival

Traditional music is the term increasingly used (e.g by the Grammy Awards) for folk music that is notcontemporary folk music. More on this is at the terminology section of the World music article. Other organizationshave made similar changes, although it remains common to refer to traditional music as "folk music".

Defining characteristicsFrom a historical perspective, traditional 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 songsby memorising them. Primarily, this was not mediated by books, recorded or transmitted media. Singers mayextend their repertoire using broadsheets, song books or CDs, but these secondary enhancements are of thesame 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, folkmusic 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 themainstream. They will learn songs and dances that originate in the countries where their grandparents camefrom.

• They commemorate historical and personal events.On certain days of the year, such as Easter, May Day and Christmas hoe, particular songs celebrate the yearlycycle. Weddings, birthdays and funerals may also be noted with songs, dances and special costumes. Religiousfestivals often have a folk music component. Choral music at these events brings children andnon-professional singers to participate in a public arena, giving an emotional bonding that is unrelated to theaethetic 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 continuedin oral tradition, to the point where they are classified as "Traditional", for purposes of music publishing. Thishas become much less frequent since the 1970s. Today, almost every folk song that is recorded is credited withan arrangement e.g. "Trad arr Dylan".

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

• Non-commercialCelebrations of cultural identity are occasionally performed without any profit motive. The absence offinancial reward for the organiser was much more common in the past.

Subjects of traditional music

Armenian traditional musicians

Apart from instrumental music that forms apart of traditional music, especially dancemusic traditions, much traditional music isvocal music, since the instrument that makessuch music is usually handy. As such, mosttraditional music has meaningful lyrics.

Narrative verse looms large in the traditionalmusic of many cultures. This encompassessuch forms as traditional epic poetry, muchof which was meant originally for oralperformance, sometimes accompanied byinstruments. Many epic poems of variouscultures were pieced together from shorterpieces of traditional narrative verse, whichexplains their episodic structure and oftentheir in medias res plot developments. Otherforms of traditional narrative verse relate the outcomes of battles and other tragedies or natural disasters. Sometimes,as in the triumphant Song of Deborah found in the Biblical Book of Judges, these songs celebrate victory. Lamentsfor lost battles and wars, and the lives lost in them, are equally prominent in many traditions; these laments keepalive the cause for which the battle was fought. The narratives of traditional songs often also remember folk heroessuch as John Henry to Robin Hood. Some traditional song narratives recall supernatural events or mysterious deaths.

Hymns and other forms of religious music are often of traditional and unknown origin. Western musical notationwas originally created to preserve the lines of Gregorian chant, which before its invention was taught as an oraltradition in monastic communities. Traditional songs such as Green grow the rushes, O present religious lore in amnemonic form. In the Western world, Christmas carols and other traditional songs preserve religious lore in songform.Work songs frequently feature call and response structures, and are designed to enable the labourers who sing themto coordinate their efforts in accordance with the rhythms of the songs. They are frequently, but not invariably,composed. In the American armed forces, a lively tradition of jody calls ("Duckworth chants") are sung whilesoldiers are on the march. Professional sailors made use of a large body of sea shanties. Love poetry, often of a tragicor regretful nature, prominently figures in many folk traditions. Nursery rhymes and nonsense verse also are frequentsubjects of traditional songs.

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Variation in traditional music

Korean traditional musicians

Chinese traditional musicians

Music transmitted by word of mouththrough a community will, in time, developmany variants, because this kind oftransmission cannot produce word-for-wordand note-for-note accuracy. Indeed, manytraditional singers are quite creative anddeliberately modify the material they learn.For example the words of "I'm a Man YouDon't Meet Every Day" (Roud 975) areknown from a broadside in the BodleianLibrary.[1] The date is almost certainlybefore 1900, and it seems to be Irish. In1958 the song was recorded in Canada (MyName is Pat and I'm Proud of That). JeannieRobertson made the next recorded version in1961. She has changed it to make referenceto "Jock Stewart", one of her relatives, andthere are no Irish references. In 1976 ArchieFisher deliberately altered the song toremove the reference to a dog being shot. In1985 The Pogues took it full circle byrestoring all the Irish references.

Because variants proliferate naturally, it isnaïve to believe that there is such a thing asthe single "authentic" version of a balladsuch as "Barbara Allen". Field researchersin traditional song (see below) haveencountered countless versions of this balladthroughout the English-speaking world, andthese versions often differ greatly from eachother. None can reliably claim to be the original, and it is quite possible that whatever the "original" was, it ceased tobe sung centuries ago. Any version can lay an equal claim to authenticity, so long as it is truly from a traditionalsinging community and not the work of an outside editor.

Cecil Sharp had an influential idea about the process of folk variation: he felt that the competing variants of atraditional song would undergo a process akin to biological natural selection: only those new variants that were themost appealing to ordinary singers would be picked up by others and transmitted onward in time. Thus, over time wewould expect each traditional song to become esthetically ever more appealing — it would be collectively composedto perfection, as it were, by the community.On the other hand, there is also evidence to support the view that transmission of traditional songs can be rathersloppy. Occasionally, collected traditional song versions include material or verses incorporated from different songsthat makes little sense in its context. Sarah Cleveland (b 1905) is a respected traditional Irish-USA singer. Herversion of "Let No Man steal Your Thyme" contains a mixture of another song - "Seeds of Love". (Sarah's version[2]). Flowers occur in both songs, but the theme is quite different. Equally, many traditional songs are known only asfragments. In the extreme case only one or two lines may have been recorded.

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Regional variationWhile the loss of traditional music in the face of the rise of popular music is a worldwide phenomenon, it is not oneoccurring at a uniform rate throughout the world. While even many tribal cultures are losing traditional music andfolk cultures, the process is most advanced "where industrialisation and commercialisation of culture are mostadvanced".[3] Yet in nations or regions where traditional music is a badge of cultural or national identity, the loss oftraditional music can be slowed; this is held to be true, for instance in the case of Bangladesh, Hungary, India,Ireland, Latvia, Turkey, Portugal, Brittany, and Galicia, Greece and Crete all of which retain their traditional musicto some degree, in some such areas the decline of traditional music and loss of traditions has been reversed. This ismost obvious where tourist agencies brand some regions with the word "Celtic". Guide books and posters fromIreland, Scotland, Cornwall, Brittany and Nova Scotia refer to live music performances. Local government oftensponsors and promotes performances during tourist seasons, and revives lost traditions.

Fieldwork and scholarship on traditional music

19th century EuropeStarting in the 19th century, interested people - academics and amateur scholars - started to take note of what wasbeing lost, and there grew various efforts aimed at preserving the music of the people. One such effort was thecollection by Francis James Child in the late 19th century of the texts of over three hundred ballads in the Englishand Scots traditions (called the Child Ballads). Throughout the 1960s and early to middle 1970s, American scholarBertrand Harris Bronson published an exhaustive, four-volume collection of the then-known variations of both thetexts and tunes associated with what came to be known as the Child Canon. He also advanced some significanttheories concerning the workings of oral-aural tradition.Contemporaneously with Child came the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, and later and more significantly CecilSharp who worked in the early 20th century to preserve a great body of English rural traditional song, music anddance, under the aegis of what became and remains the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). Sharp alsoworked in America, recording the traditional songs of the Appalachian Mountains in 1916-1918 in collaborationwith Maud Karpeles and Olive Dame Campbell. Campbell and Sharp are represented under other names by actors inthe modern movie "Songcatcher".Similar activity was also underway in other countries. One of the most extensive was perhaps the work done in Rigaby Krisjanis Barons who between the years between 1894 and 1915 published six volumes including the texts of 217996 Latvian folk songs; the Latvju dainas.Around this time, composers of classical music developed a strong interest in traditional song collecting, and anumber of outstanding composers carried out their own field work on traditional song. These included PercyGrainger and Ralph Vaughan Williams in England and Béla Bartók in Hungary. These composers, like many of theirpredecessors, incorporated traditional material into their classical compositions. The Latviju dainas are extensivelyused in the classical choral works of Andrejs Jurāns, Jānis Cimze, and Emilis Melngailis.

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North AmericaIn North America, during the 1930s and 1940s, the Library of Congress worked through the offices of traditionalmusic collectors Robert Winslow Gordon, Alan Lomax and others to capture as much North American field materialas possible.People who studied traditional song sometimes hoped that their work would restore traditional music to the people.For instance, Cecil Sharp campaigned, with some success, to have English traditional songs (in his own heavilyedited and expurgated versions) to be taught to school children.One theme that runs through the great period of scholarly traditional song collection is the tendency of certainmembers of the "folk", who were supposed to be the object of study, to become scholars and advocates themselves.For example, Jean Ritchie was the youngest child of a large family from Viper, Kentucky that had preserved many ofthe old Appalachian traditional songs. Ritchie, living in a time when the Appalachians had opened up to outsideinfluence, was university educated and ultimately moved to New York City, where she made a number of classicrecordings of the family repertoire and published an important compilation of these songs. (See also Hedy West)

References

Notes[1] Bodley24 OX.ac.uk (http:/ / bodley24. bodley. ox. ac. uk/ cgi-bin/ acwwweng/ ballads/ image. pl?ref=Harding+ B+ 20(69)& id=08664. gif&

seq=1& size=0)[2] http:/ / www. pilgrimsall. org/ bardofavalon/ Singer/ thyme. html[3] Alison Vardy, et al., About Traditional Music Page (http:/ / www. celticharpsheetmusic. com/ about/ traditional-music. htm), Celtic Harp

Sheet Music site. Accessed 16 February 2007.

Further reading• English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. Collected by Cecil J. Sharp. Ed. Maud Karpeles. 1932.

London. Oxford University Press.• Karpeles, Maud. An Introduction to English Folk Song. 1973. Oxford. Oxford University Press.• Sharp, Cecil. Folk Song: Some Conclusions. 1907. Charles River Books• Bronson, Bertrand Harris. The Ballad As Song (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).• Bronson, Bertrand Harris. The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, with Their Texts, According to the Extant

Records of Great Britain and North America, 4 volumes (Princeton and Berkeley: Princeton University andUniversity of California Presses, 1959, ff.).

• Bronson, Bertrand Harris. The Singing Tradition of Child's Popular Ballads (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1976).

• Poladian, Sirvart. "Melodic Contour in Traditional Music," Journal of the International Folk Music Council III(1951), 30-34.

• Poladian, Sirvart. "The Problem of Melodic Variation in Folksong," Journal of American Folklore (1942),204-211.

• Rooksby, Rikky, Dr Vic Gammon et al. The Folk Handbook. (2007). Backbeat

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External links• An online video channel of traditional music (http:/ / www. dailymotion. com/ group/ musictrad)• Welsh Ballads Website (http:/ / www. cardiff. ac. uk/ insrv/ libraries/ scolar/ digital/ welshballads/

insrv-scolar-welsh-ballads-website. html)• Free scores of Traditional music in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)• Free scores (songs) at www.traditional-songs.com (http:/ / www. traditional-songs. com/ )• www.balladtree.com/folk101/001a_def.htm (http:/ / www. balladtree. com/ folk101/ 001a_def. htm/ ) Definitions

of folk music by Hugh Blumenfeld, www.balladtree.com

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Article Sources and ContributorsTraditional music  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=432832863  Contributors: 4meter4, A Softer Answer, ALadinN, ArielGold, Astral, Bigmamababy, BokicaK, Camembert,Charles Matthews, Ckatz, Clarince63, Conversion script, Crystallina, Cymi, D6, Docu, Dolphinling, Dycedarg, Emptymountains, Eraserhead1, Feline Hymnic, Fishnet37222, Footwarrior,Fratrep, GVnayR, Gaston28, Geanixx, Grm wnr, Hohenloh, Hyacinth, IL7Soulhunter, Infrogmation, J.delanoy, Jbvoinet, Kohoutek1138, Kookyunii, Leprachauncrazy, Leuko, Lord Wikipedista,Malcolma, Manuel Anastácio, McGeddon, Mentifisto, MrRogersLovesYou, Munci, Netrat, North8000, Octahedron80, Ogg, Omnipedian, Opus33, Oxymoron83, PK2, Parsifal, Pauluswiki, PetriKrohn, Pinkadelica, Pustelnik, Redheylin, Rgamusic, RobHutten, Sabrebd, Sardanaphalus, Satori Son, Shaliya waya, Shawnhath, SnapSnap, Spanghew, Stepnwolf, SunCreator, TUF-KAT,TaintedMustard, The Nut, The Shadow-Fighter, TimNelson, Tomaxer, Travel2dance, Virgolette, Ww2censor, 68 anonymous edits

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