110-461: The British folk revival incorporates a number of movements for the collection, preservation and performance of folk music in the United Kingdom and related territories and countries, which had origins as early as the 18th century. It is particularly associated with two movements, usually referred to as the first and second revivals, respectively in the late 19th to early 20th centuries and
220-482: A chuigushou . Ensembles consisting of mouth organs ( sheng ), shawms ( suona ), flutes ( dizi ) and percussion instruments (especially yunluo gongs ) are popular in northern villages; their music is descended from the imperial temple music of Beijing, Xi'an , Wutai shan and Tianjin . Xi'an drum music, consisting of wind and percussive instruments, is popular around Xi'an, and has received some commercial popularity outside of China. Another important instrument
330-619: A pipa , as well as other traditional instruments. The music is generally sorrowful and typically deals with love-stricken people. Further south, in Shantou , Hakka and Chaozhou , zheng ensembles are popular. Sizhu ensembles use flutes and bowed or plucked string instruments to make harmonious and melodious music that has become popular in the West among some listeners. These are popular in Nanjing and Hangzhou , as well as elsewhere along
440-474: A tune is a short instrumental piece , a melody , often with repeating sections , and usually played a number of times. A collection of tunes with structural similarities is known as a tune-family . America's Musical Landscape says "the most common form for tunes in folk music is AABB, also known as binary form ." In some traditions, tunes may be strung together in medleys or " sets ." Throughout most of human history, listening to recorded music
550-512: A "Traditional music" category that subsequently evolved into others. The term "folk", by the start of the 21st century, could cover singer-songwriters, such as Donovan from Scotland and American Bob Dylan , who emerged in the 1960s and much more. This completed a process to where "folk music" no longer meant only traditional folk music. Traditional folk music often includes sung words , although folk instrumental music occurs commonly in dance music traditions. Narrative verse looms large in
660-401: A class dynamic to popular understandings of American folk music. This was the final element of the foundation upon which the early folk music revivalists constructed their own view of Americanism. Sandburg's working-class Americans joined with the ethnically , racially , and regionally diverse citizens that other scholars, public intellectuals, and folklorists celebrated their own definitions of
770-585: A further sharp decline in traditional music. British folk song might have become a purely academic interest had it not been for a second wave of revival with a very different emphasis. The second revival in Britain followed a similar movement in America, to which it was connected by individuals such as Alan Lomax , who had moved to Britain in the era of McCarthyism and who worked in England and Scotland. Unlike
880-587: A great body of English rural traditional song, music and dance, under the aegis of what became and remains the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). Sharp campaigned with some success to have English traditional songs (in his own heavily edited and expurgated versions) to be taught to school children in hopes of reviving and prolonging the popularity of those songs. Throughout the 1960s and early to mid-1970s, American scholar Bertrand Harris Bronson published an exhaustive four-volume collection of
990-548: A living by playing to a small but committed audience. Some clubs developed policies around their musical preferences and which artists they would book. These ranged from "the rural idyll" through "anything which entertains" to "stick to your own culture," the latter meaning "if you're British don't copy American songs and styles." Artists such as Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger refused to confine themselves to rural or even early industrial songs, but wrote or brought burning political issues into their repertoire. Other artists who built
1100-619: A more charitable view of the 'morally dubious' elements of traditional folk than the first revival, with Lloyd recording an entire album of erotic folk songs, The Bird in the Bush (1966). The expansion of the revival scene has been attributed to the short-lived British skiffle craze of 1956–58. Spearheaded by Lonnie Donegan ’s hit " Rock Island Line " (1956) it dovetailed with the growth of café youth culture, where skiffle bands with acoustic guitars, and improvised instruments such as washboards and tea chest bass, played to teenage audiences. Beside
1210-652: A musical tradition that was rural in origin, oral in transmission and communal in nature. In Scotland collectors included the Reverend James Duncan (1848–1917) and Gavin Greig (1856–1914), and in Wales, Nicholas Bennett (1823–99). There was a strong nationalist element in the motivation for collecting folk song. As part of a general mood of growing nationalism in the period before the First World War ,
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#17327904413391320-432: A new form of popular folk music evolved from traditional folk music. This process and period is called the (second) folk revival and reached a zenith in the 1960s. This form of music is sometimes called contemporary folk music or folk revival music to distinguish it from earlier folk forms. Smaller, similar revivals have occurred elsewhere in the world at other times, but the term folk music has typically not been applied to
1430-404: A particular interest in folklore. Carl Sandburg often traveled the U.S. as a writer and a poet. He also collected songs in his travels and, in 1927, published them in the book The American Songbag . Rachel Donaldson, a historian who worked for Vanderbilt, later stated this about The American Songbird in her analysis of the folk music revival. "In his collections of folk songs, Sandburg added
1540-695: A possible better system, through the lens of the Great Depression. Woody Guthrie exemplifies songwriters and artists with such an outlook. Folk music festivals proliferated during the 1930s. President Franklin Roosevelt was a fan of folk music, hosted folk concerts at the White House , and often patronized folk festivals. One prominent festival was Sarah Gertrude Knott 's National Folk Festival , established in St. Louis, Missouri in 1934. Under
1650-480: A range of influences including medieval and eastern music into their compositions. Some of this, particularly the Incredible String Band, has been seen as developing into the further subgenre of psych or psychedelic folk and had a considerable impact on progressive and psychedelic rock . There was a brief flowering of British progressive folk in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with groups such as
1760-621: A reference to beautiful women, while in the past they were notorious for their erotic content. The village "mountain songs" ( shan'ge ) of Jiangsu province were also well known for their amorous themes. Other regional song traditions include the "strummed lyrics" ( tanci ) of the Lower Yangtze Delta, the Cantonese Wooden Fish tradition ( muyu or muk-yu ) and the Drum Songs ( guci ) of north China. In
1870-692: A reputation performing traditional songs in British clubs included English singers the Copper Family , The Watersons , the Ian Campbell Folk Group , Shirley Collins and Martin Carthy , and from Scotland Alex Campbell , Jean Redpath , Hamish Imlach , and Dick Gaughan and groups such as The Gaugers and The Corries . A significant factor in the early growth of the revival was the output of Topic Records , founded as an offshoot of
1980-553: A revolutionary tool to preserve vanishing musical forms. The earliest American folk music scholars were with the American Folklore Society (AFS), which emerged in the late 1800s. Their studies expanded to include Native American music , but still treated folk music as a historical item preserved in isolated societies as well. In North America, during the 1930s and 1940s, the Library of Congress worked through
2090-479: A simple distinction of economic class yet for him, true folk music was, in Charles Seeger 's words, "associated with a lower class" in culturally and socially stratified societies. 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'." Music in this genre is also often called traditional music. Although
2200-566: A traditional element in their music, including Jansch and Renbourn who, with Jacqui McShee , Danny Thompson , and Terry Cox , formed Pentangle in 1967. Others totally abandoned the traditional element and in this area particularly important were the Scottish artists Donovan (who was most influenced by emerging progressive folk musicians in America like Bob Dylan ) and the Incredible String Band , who from 1967 incorporated
2310-567: A traditional song would undergo a process of improvement akin to biological natural selection : only those new variants that were the most appealing to ordinary singers would be picked up by others and transmitted onward in time. Thus, over time we would expect each traditional song to become more aesthetically appealing, due to incremental community improvement. Literary interest in the popular ballad form dates back at least to Thomas Percy and William Wordsworth . English Elizabethan and Stuart composers had often evolved their music from folk themes,
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#17327904413392420-434: A tragic or regretful nature, prominently figures in many folk traditions. Nursery rhymes , children's songs and nonsense verse used to amuse or quiet children also are frequent subjects of traditional songs. Music transmitted by word of mouth through a community, in time, develops many variants, since this transmission cannot produce word-for-word and note-for-note accuracy. In addition, folk singers may choose to modify
2530-408: Is an ancient folk song from India, a country of Asia, of Meiteis of Manipur , that is an example of Asian folk music, and how they put it into its own genre. Archaeological discoveries date Chinese folk music back 7000 years; it is largely based on the pentatonic scale . Han traditional weddings and funerals usually include a form of oboe called a suona , and apercussive ensembles called
2640-530: Is generally no "authoritative" version of song. Researchers in traditional songs have encountered countless versions of the Barbara Allen ballad throughout the English-speaking world, and these versions often differ greatly from each other. The original is not known; many versions can lay an equal claim to authenticity. Influential folklorist Cecil Sharp felt that these competing variants of
2750-417: Is played on traditional instruments, music about cultural or national identity, music that changes between generations (folk process), music associated with a people's folklore , or music performed by custom over a long period of time. It has been contrasted with commercial and classical styles . The term originated in the 19th century, but folk music extends beyond that. Starting in the mid-20th century,
2860-486: Is simply "Folk music is what the people sing." For Scholes, as well as for Cecil Sharp and Béla Bartók , 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)," particularly in "a community uninfluenced by art music" and by commercial and printed song. Lloyd rejected this in favor of
2970-402: Is the sheng , a type of Chinese pipe , an ancient instrument that is ancestor of all Western free reed instruments, such as the accordion . Parades led by Western-type brass bands are common, often competing in volume with a shawm/chuigushou band. In southern Fujian and Taiwan , Nanyin or Nanguan is a genre of traditional ballads. They are sung by a woman accompanied by a xiao and
3080-672: Is the provenance of the American Folklife Center" at the library of Congress. Africa is a vast continent and its regions and nations have distinct musical traditions. The music of North Africa for the most part has a different history from Sub-Saharan African music traditions . The music and dance forms of the African diaspora , including African American music and many Caribbean genres like soca , calypso and Zouk ; and Latin American music genres like
3190-475: Is understood that folk music is the music of the people, observers find a more precise definition to be elusive. Some do not even agree that the term folk music should be used. 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 ...
3300-654: The Albion Band . It was rapidly adopted and developed in the surrounding Celtic cultures of Brittany , where it was pioneered by Alan Stivell and bands such as Malicorne ; in Ireland by groups such as Horslips ; and also in Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man and Cornwall , to produce Celtic rock and its derivatives. It has been influential in those parts of the world with close cultural connections to Britain, such as
3410-505: The Board of Education in 1906 officially sanctioned the teaching of folk songs in schools. One of the major effects of the folk song revival was the creation of a distinctive English form of classical music , known as the English "national" or "pastoral" school. Sharp, among others, promoted the revival of English folk music as a response to the commonly held view that English art music since
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3520-474: The Great Depression . Regionalism and cultural pluralism grew as influences and themes. During this time folk music began to become enmeshed with political and social activism themes and movements. Two related developments were the U.S. Communist Party's interest in folk music as a way to reach and influence Americans, and politically active prominent folk musicians and scholars seeing communism as
3630-752: The PRC . Folk songs have been recorded since ancient times in China. The term Yuefu was used for a broad range of songs such as ballads, laments, folk songs, love songs, and songs performed at court. China is a vast country, with a multiplicity of linguistic and geographic regions. Folk songs are categorized by geographic region, language type, ethnicity, social function (e.g. work song, ritual song, courting song) and musical type. Modern anthologies collected by Chinese folklorists distinguish between traditional songs, revolutionary songs, and newly invented songs. The songs of northwest China are known as "flower songs" ( hua'er ),
3740-546: The South Kensington Museum , with which he had been connected for many years. One of his nephews (a son of his sister Elisabeth) was Carl Peters (1856–1918). Peters came to London in 1881 and lived in his uncles' house. Engel offered Peters to procure for him a British citizenship , which would have come with many advantages, but Peters refused for nationalistic reasons. Engel later committed suicide and bequeathed his fortune to Peters. His books treat of
3850-559: The Third Ear Band and Quintessence following the eastern Indian musical and more abstract work by group such as Comus , Dando Shaft , The Trees , Spirogyra , Forest , and Jan Dukes De Grey , but commercial success was elusive for these bands and most had broken off, or moved in very different directions, by about 1973. Perhaps the finest individual work in the genre was from early 1970s artists such as Nick Drake , Tim Buckley and John Martyn , but these can also be considered
3960-481: The Traditional 18 Dances display the dancing of birds and animals. For example: Musical types include: The classical Sinhalese orchestra consists of five categories of instruments, but among the percussion instruments, the drum is essential for dance. The vibrant beat of the rhythm of the drums form the basic of the dance. The dancers' feet bounce off the floor and they leap and swirl in patterns that reflect
4070-439: The samba , Cuban rumba , salsa ; and other clave (rhythm) -based genres, were founded to varying degrees on the music of enslaved Africans , which has in turn influenced African popular music . Many Asian civilizations distinguish between art /court/classical styles and "folk" music. For example, the late Alam Lohar is an example of a South Asian singer who was classified as a folk singer. Khunung Eshei/Khuland Eshei
4180-418: The 1880s and 1890s. Similarly, John McEwen 's Pibroch (1889), Border Ballads (1908) and Solway Symphony (1911) incorporated traditional Scottish folk melodies. The first revival has been criticized, particularly by David Harker, as having a romanticized view of agricultural society, of ignoring urban and industrial forms of music such as work songs and those performed in music hall, and of bowdlerising
4290-525: The 18th century publications included Playford's Original Scotch Tunes (1700), Margaret Sinkler's Music Book (1710), James Watson's Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems both Ancient and Modern (1711), William Thomson 's Orpheus caledonius: or, A collection of Scots songs (1733), James Oswald 's The Caledonian Pocket Companion (1751), and David Herd 's Ancient and modern Scottish songs, heroic ballads, etc.: collected from memory, tradition and ancient authors (1776). These were drawn on for
4400-412: The 1940s this particular tendency among composers had begun to subside and other fusions would be more significant in the second folk revival. Similar developments could be seen in Scotland in the work of Sir Alexander Mackenzie , who celebrated his native Scotland in three Scottish Rhapsodies for orchestra (1880–81, 1911), and in various concerted works for piano or violin and orchestra composed during
4510-411: The 1990s, often children of major figures in the second revival. The arrival and sometimes mainstream success of acts such as Kate Rusby , Nancy Kerr , Kathryn Tickell , Spiers and Boden , Seth Lakeman , Eliza Carthy , Runrig and Capercaillie , all largely concerned with acoustic performance of traditional material, marked a radical turnaround in the fortunes of the tradition. This was reflected in
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4620-432: The American folk, definitions that the folk revivalists used in constructing their own understanding of American folk music, and an overarching American identity". Prior to the 1930s, the study of folk music was primarily the province of scholars and collectors. The 1930s saw the beginnings of larger scale themes, commonalities, and linkages in folk music developing in the populace and practitioners as well, often related to
4730-575: The Association for Cultural Equity, is "distinct from the thousands of earlier recordings on acetate and aluminum discs he made from 1933 to 1942 under the auspices of the Library of Congress. This earlier collection—which includes the famous Jelly Roll Morton, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Muddy Waters sessions, as well as Lomax's prodigious collections made in Haiti and Eastern Kentucky (1937) —
4840-487: The Ballads and Blues Club in 1953. These clubs usually met in urban locations, but the songs sung in them often harked back to a rural pre-industrial past. In many ways this was the adoption of abandoned popular music by the middle classes. By the mid-1960s there were probably over 300 folk clubs in Britain, providing an important circuit for acts that performed traditional songs and tunes acoustically, where some could sustain
4950-483: The Peasantry of England (1846). These developments, perhaps combined with changes in the nature of British identity, led to a much more intensive and academic attempt to record what was seen as a vanishing tradition, now usually referred to as the first English or British folk revival. The first British revival concentrated on transcribing, and later recording, songs by remaining performers. An important catalyst for
5060-452: The US and Canada, and gave rise to the subgenre of medieval folk rock and the fusion genres of folk punk and folk metal . By the 1980s the genre was in steep decline in popularity, but has survived and revived in significance as part of a more general folk resurgence since the 1990s. While in Scotland the circuit of ceilidhs and festivals helped prop up traditional music, from the late 1970s
5170-769: The Whale , Mumford & Sons , Johnny Flynn and that in Scotland, centred on Glasgow and with a more Celtic tinge, with artists such as Findlay Napier and the Bar Room Mountaineers and Pearl and the Puppets . Folk music Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival . Some types of folk music may be called world music . Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted orally, music with unknown composers, music that
5280-491: The Workers' Music Association in 1939. From about 1950 Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd became heavily involved, producing several records of traditional music. In 1960 the label became independent and was financially secure after the release of The Iron Muse in 1963. In the 1970s Topic released a series of albums by ground-breaking artists including Nic Jones , Dick Gaughan , The Battlefield Band , as well as major figures on
5390-454: The approach pursued by MacColl/Seeger and their adherents The Critics Group saw their view of the industrialised working class and "urban" songs in general as romantic as Sharp had been about agricultural workers. Since most folk clubs were located in cities and towns, their audiences were a mix of mainly urban workers, professionals, intellectuals, students, activists and visitors. Few were rural workers, but those who could be said to belong to
5500-467: The attendance at, and numbers of, folk clubs began to decrease, probably as new musical and social trends, including punk rock , new wave and electronic music , began to dominate. Although many acts such as Martin Carthy and the Watersons continued to perform successfully, there were very few significant new acts pursuing traditional forms in the 1980s. This all began to change with a new generation in
5610-465: The classical suite was based upon stylised folk-dances, and Joseph 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 Central Europe, Russia, Scandinavia, Spain and Britain:
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#17327904413395720-445: The complex rhythms of the drum beat. This drum beat may seem simple on the first hearing but it takes a long time to master the intricate rhythms and variations, which the drummer sometimes can bring to a crescendo of intensity. There are six common types of drums falling within 3 styles (one-faced, two-faced, and flat-faced): Other instruments include: Carl Engel (musicologist) Carl Engel (6 July 1818 – 17 November 1882)
5830-504: The death of Henry Purcell had relied heavily on European composers and styles and was therefore indistinguishable from other national forms. This connection between the English folk revival and the English Musical Renaissance movement has been heavily emphasized in historical accounts of English art music throughout the 20th century (for example, see Frank Howes, The English Musical Renaissance (1966)). In any case,
5940-417: The early modern era, often seen as creating greater divisions between different social groups, led from the mid-17th century to the beginnings of a process of rediscovery of many aspects of popular culture, including festivals , folklore , dance and folk song . This led to a number of early collections of printed material, including those published by John Playford as The English Dancing Master (1651),
6050-546: The elements of nature, and have been enjoyed and developed in the Buddhist environment. The music is of several types and uses only a few types of instruments. The folk songs and poems were used in social gatherings to work together. The Indian influenced classical music has grown to be unique. The traditional drama, music and songs of Sinhala Light Music are typically Sri Lankan. The temple paintings and carvings feature birds, elephants, wild animals, flowers, and trees, and
6160-554: The end of the 18th century this was becoming increasingly common, with collections including Joseph Ritson's The Bishopric Garland (1792) in northern England. In Scotland the earliest printed collection of secular music was by publisher John Forbes in Aberdeen in 1662 as Songs and Fancies: to Thre, Foure, or Five Partes, both Apt for Voices and Viols . It was printed three times in the next twenty years, and contained seventy-seven songs, of which twenty-five were of Scottish origin. In
6270-481: The end of the 1930s these and others had turned American folk music into a social movement. Sometimes folk musicians became scholars and advocates themselves. For example, Jean Ritchie (1922–2015) was the youngest child of a large family from Viper, Kentucky that had preserved many of the old Appalachian traditional songs. Ritchie, living in a time when the Appalachians had opened up to outside influence,
6380-557: The explicit references made by Cecil Sharp to Engel's essays in English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions (1907, p. 2). Among the most influential of the revival's earliest figures were the Harvard professor Francis James Child (1825–96), Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), Frank Kidson (1855–1926), Lucy Broadwood (1858–1939), and Anne Gilchrist (1863–1954). Kidson and Broadwood were important in
6490-505: 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'". One widely used definition
6600-574: The first among the British 'folk troubadours' or 'singer-songwriters', individual performers who remained largely acoustic, but who relied mostly on their own individual compositions. The most successful of these was Ralph McTell , whose " Streets of London " reached number 2 in the UK Single Charts in 1974, and whose music is clearly folk, but without and much reliance on tradition, virtuosity, or much evidence of attempts at fusion with other genres. British folk rock developed in Britain during
6710-508: The first revival, which wholly concerned itself with traditional music , the second revival was a part of the birth of non-traditional contemporary folk music. Like the American revival, it was often overtly left wing in its politics, and the leading figures, the Salford-born Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd , were both involved in trade unionism and socialist politics. Several individuals emerged in England who had learnt
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#17327904413396820-413: The folk scene including Martin Carthy. From the 1980s they also began to reissue their back catalogue on CD. In the late 1990s, with the resurgence of traditional folk, spearheaded by children of the revival such as Eliza Carthy , Topic gained both commercial and critical success. Criticisms of the second revival include disagreements about native language, style, accompaniment and authenticity. Critics of
6930-567: The foundation of the Folk Song Society in 1898. Later, major figures in this movement in England were Cecil Sharp (1859–1924) and his assistant Maud Karpeles (1885–1976) and the composers Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1951), George Butterworth (1885–1916), and the Australian Percy Grainger (1882–1961). Of these, Child's eight-volume collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–92) has been
7040-427: The general population to British and Irish folk music in the period. However, the second revival differed in several important respects from the first. In contrast to Sharp's emphasis on the rural, the activists of the second revival, particularly Lloyd, emphasized the work music of the 19th century, including sea shanties and industrial labour songs , most obviously on the album The Iron Muse (1963). It also took
7150-521: The introduction of the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards in 2000, which gave the music a much-needed status and focus and made the profile of folk music as high in Britain as it has been for over thirty years. In the 2000s bands and artists appeared who function as cross-over acts between the indie rock and folk scenes. Their music often uses traditional instruments beside electronic music. London's nu-folk scene includes artists such as Laura Marling , Noah and
7260-682: The key figure was Dafydd Iwan , who founded the Sain record label in 1969. The second revival built on the work of the first, exploiting many of its resources. MacColl recorded many of the Child Ballads and Lloyd eventually joined the board of the EFDSS. The society was also responsible for sponsoring a BBC Home Service radio program, As I Roved Out , based on field recordings made by Peter Kennedy and Seamus Ennis from 1952 to 1958, which probably did more than any other single factor to introduce
7370-399: The laborers who sing them to 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 oral tradition preserves jody calls ("Duckworth chants") which are sung while soldiers are on the march. Professional sailors made similar use of a large body of sea shanties . Love poetry , often of
7480-405: The large provincial towns who might achieve good results if they would spend their autumnal holidays in some rural district of the country, associate with the villagers, and listen to their songs. The significance of Engel's influence on the development of the English folk revival is evident in both the close resemblance of folk music collectors' activities to the fieldwork model he suggested and in
7590-563: The last 20 years of his life working on an Interactive Multimedia educational computer project he called the Global Jukebox , which included 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes , and 5,000 photographs. As of March 2012, this has been accomplished. Approximately 17,400 of Lomax's recordings from 1946 and later have been made available free online. This material from Alan Lomax's independent archive, begun in 1946, which has been digitized and offered by
7700-408: The loss of traditional music is slowed in nations or regions where traditional folk music is a badge of cultural or national identity. Much of what is known about folk music prior to the development of audio recording technology in the 19th century comes from fieldwork and writings of scholars, collectors and proponents. Starting in the 19th century, academics and amateur scholars, taking note of
7810-494: The many later jazz, blues, pop and rock musicians that started performing in skiffle bands were a number of future folk performers, including Martin Carthy and John Renbourn . It also brought a greater familiarity with American roots music and helped expand the British folk club movement where American folk music also began to be played and which were an important part of the second revival. This started in London where MacColl began
7920-411: The mid- to late 1960s by the bands Fairport Convention and Pentangle , which built on elements of American folk rock , and on the British folk revival. It uses traditional music, and compositions in a traditional style, played on a combination of rock and traditional instruments. It was most significant in the 1970s, when it was taken up by groups such as Pentangle, Five Hand Reel , Steeleye Span and
8030-516: The mid-20th century. The first included increased interest in and study of traditional folk music, the second was a part of the birth of contemporary folk music. These had a profound impact on the development of British classical music and in the creation of a "national" or "pastoral" school and led to the creation of a sub-culture of folk clubs and folk festivals as well as influential subgenres including progressive folk music and British folk rock . Social and cultural changes in British society in
8140-409: The modern movie Songcatcher . One strong theme amongst folk scholars in the early decades of the 20th century was regionalism , the analysis of the diversity of folk music (and related cultures) based on regions of the US rather than based on a given song's historical roots. Later, a dynamic of class and circumstances was added to this. The most prominent regionalists were literary figures with
8250-474: The most influential collection, The Scots Musical Museum , published in six volumes from 1787 to 1803 by James Johnson and Robert Burns , which also included new words by Burns. The Select Scottish Airs collected by George Thomson and published between 1799 and 1818 included contributions from Burns and Walter Scott . With the Industrial Revolution the process of social stratification
8360-502: The most influential on defining the repertoire of subsequent performers and the music teacher Cecil Sharp was probably the most important in understanding of the nature of folk song. Sharp produced the five volume Folk Songs from Somerset from 1904 to 1909 and founded the English Folk Dance Society in 1911, an indication of his parallel interest in dance music. His lectures and other publications attempted to define
8470-567: The music of Dvořák , Smetana , Grieg , Rimsky-Korsakov , Brahms , Liszt , de Falla , Wagner , Sibelius , Vaughan Williams , Bartók , and many others drew upon folk melodies. While the loss of traditional folk music in the face of the rise of popular music is a worldwide phenomenon, it is not one occurring at a uniform rate throughout the world. The process is most advanced "where industrialization and commercialisation of culture are most advanced" but also occurs more gradually even in settings of lower technological advancement. However,
8580-529: The musical traditions being lost, initiated various efforts to preserve the music of the people. One such effort was the collection by Francis James Child in the late 19th century of the texts of over three hundred ballads in the English and Scots traditions (called the Child Ballads ), some of which predated the 16th century. Contemporaneously with Child, the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould and later Cecil Sharp worked to preserve
8690-514: The nationalist impulse had subsided and with the tradition disappearing there were fewer singers available as sources. In 1932 the Folk-Song Society and the English Folk Dance Society merged to become the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). New forms of media such as the phonograph and sound film meant that from the 1920s American music began to be increasingly important and even dominant in popular British culture, leading to
8800-472: The new music created during those revivals. This type of folk music also includes fusion genres such as folk rock , folk metal , and others. While contemporary folk music is a genre generally distinct from traditional folk music, in U.S. English it shares the same name, and it often shares the same performers and venues as traditional folk music. The terms folk music , folk song , and folk dance are comparatively recent expressions. They are extensions of
8910-408: The offices of traditional music collectors Robert Winslow Gordon , Alan Lomax and others to capture as much North American field material as possible. John Lomax (the father of Alan Lomax) was the first prominent scholar to study distinctly American folk music such as that of cowboys and southern blacks. His first major published work was in 1911, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads . and
9020-490: The old songs in the oral tradition from their communities and therefore preserved the authentic versions. These individuals, such as Sam Larner , Harry Cox , Fred Jordan , Walter Pardon , and Frank Hinchliffe , released albums of their own and were revered by folk revivalists. In Scotland the key figures were Hamish Henderson and Calum McLean who collected songs and popularised acts including Jeannie Robertson , John Strachan , Flora MacNeil and Jimmy MacBeath . In Wales
9130-650: The other. In the proliferation of popular music genres, some traditional folk music became also referred to as " World music " or "Roots music". The English term " folklore ", to describe traditional folk music and dance, entered the vocabulary of many continental European nations, each of which had its folk-song collectors and revivalists. The distinction between "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 could be termed "folk" in America. The International Folk Music Council definition allows that
9240-805: The outcomes of battles or lament tragedies or natural disasters . Sometimes, as in the triumphant Song of Deborah found in the Biblical Book of Judges , these songs celebrate victory. Laments for lost battles and wars, and the lives lost in them, are equally prominent in many traditions; these laments keep alive the cause for which the battle was fought. The narratives of traditional songs often also remember folk heroes such as John Henry or 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 notation
9350-449: The pace of many activities such as planting , weeding , reaping , threshing , weaving , and milling . In leisure time , singing and playing musical instruments were common forms of entertainment and history-telling—even more common than today when electrically enabled technologies and widespread literacy make other forms of entertainment and information-sharing competitive. Some believe that folk music originated as art music that
9460-400: The preservation of songs as artifacts of deceased cultures. "Functional" folklorists (e.g. Botkin and Alan Lomax) maintained that songs only retain relevance when used by those cultures which retain the traditions which birthed those songs. "Left-wing" folk revivalists (e.g. Charles Seeger and Lawrence Gellert) emphasized music's role "in 'people's' struggles for social and political rights". By
9570-512: The private collections of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) and the Roxburghe Ballads collected by Robert Harley , 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer (1661–1724). In the 18th century there were increasing numbers of such collections, including Thomas D'Urfey 's Wit and Mirth: or, Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719–20) and Bishop Thomas Percy 's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). The last of these also contained some oral material and by
9680-547: The rapid expansion of this movement around the turn of the 20th century was the work of German expatriate musicologist Carl Engel , who provocatively claimed, in a collection of essays published in 1879, that it seemed to him: rather singular that England should not possess any printed collection of its national songs with the airs as they are sung at the present day; while almost every other European nation possesses several comprehensive works of this kind. Engel went on to suggest that: there are English musicians in London and in
9790-637: The search for a distinctive English voice led many composers, such as Percy Grainger (from 1905), Ralph Vaughan Williams (from about 1906) and George Butterworth (from about 1906), to use their folk music discoveries directly in composition. Vaughan Williams was also the editor of the English Hymnal (1906) and used many collected tunes and set poems to them to produce new religious songs. Similarly, other composers such as Gustav Holst (1874–1934) and Frederick Delius (1862–1934) wrote music that adopted sections, cadences or themes from English folk music. By
9900-471: The songs they hear. For example, around 1970 the song Mullā Mohammed Jān spread from Herat to the rest of Afghanistan , and Iran where it was recorded. Due to its repetitive refrain and the predictability of the second half of each verse, it allowed for both its popularization, and for each singer to create their own version of the song without being overly-concerned for a melody or restrictive poetic rhythm. Because variants proliferate naturally, there
10010-497: The southern Yangtze area. Jiangnan Sizhu (silk and bamboo music from Jiangnan ) is a style of instrumental music, often played by amateur musicians in tea houses in Shanghai. Guangdong Music or Cantonese Music is instrumental music from Guangzhou and surrounding areas. The music from this region influenced Yueju (Cantonese Opera) music, which would later grow popular during the self-described "Golden Age" of China under
10120-643: The sponsorship of the Washington Post , the festival was held in Washington, DC at Constitution Hall from 1937 to 1942. The folk music movement, festivals, and the wartime effort were seen as forces for social goods such as democracy, cultural pluralism, and the removal of culture and race-based barriers. The American folk music revivalists of the 1930s approached folk music in different ways. Three primary schools of thought emerged: "Traditionalists" (e.g. Sarah Gertrude Knott and John Lomax ) emphasized
10230-536: The term folklore , which was coined in 1846 by the English antiquarian William Thoms to describe "the traditions, customs, and superstitions of the uncultured classes". The term further derives from the German expression Volk , in the sense of "the people as a whole" as applied to popular and national music by Johann Gottfried Herder and the German Romantics over half a century earlier. Though it
10340-565: The term "folk music": newly composed songs, fixed in form and by known authors, which imitated some form of traditional music. 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 favor of "Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording (including Traditional Blues)", while 1987 brought a distinction between "Best Traditional Folk Recording" and "Best Contemporary Folk Recording". After that, they had
10450-435: The term can also apply to music that, "...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." The post– World War II folk revival in America and in Britain started a new genre, Contemporary Folk Music , and brought an additional meaning to
10560-526: The term is usually only descriptive, in some cases people use it as the name of a genre. For example, the Grammy Award previously used the terms "traditional music" and "traditional folk" for folk music that is not contemporary folk music. Folk music may include most indigenous music . From a historical perspective, traditional folk music had these characteristics: As a side-effect, the following characteristics are sometimes present: In folk music,
10670-892: The texts of 217,996 Latvian folk songs, the Latvju dainas . In Norway the work of collectors such as Ludvig Mathias Lindeman was extensively used by Edvard Grieg in his Lyric Pieces for piano and in other works, which became immensely popular. Around this time, composers of classical music developed a strong interest in collecting traditional songs, and a number of composers carried out their own field work on traditional music. These included Percy Grainger and Ralph Vaughan Williams in England and Béla Bartók in Hungary. These composers, like many of their predecessors, both made arrangements of folk songs and incorporated traditional material into original classical compositions. The advent of audio recording technology provided folklorists with
10780-424: The texts. The focus on collecting performed songs also disregarded the complex, but important, relationship between printed and oral forms, particularly the role of broadside ballads , which were sometimes records of existing songs and sometimes the origin or transmission point for others. Although collectors, from Grainger in 1905 onwards, experimented with new recording technology, it was generally rejected and there
10890-530: The then-known variations of both the texts and tunes associated with what came to be known as the Child Canon. He also advanced some significant theories concerning the workings of oral-aural tradition. Similar activity was also under way in other countries. One of the most extensive was perhaps the work done in Riga by Krisjanis Barons , who between the years 1894 and 1915 published six volumes that included
11000-478: The traditional folk music of many cultures. This encompasses such forms as traditional epic poetry , much of which was meant originally for oral performance, sometimes accompanied by instruments. Many epic poems of various cultures were pieced together from shorter pieces of traditional narrative verse, which explains their episodic structure, repetitive elements, and their frequent in medias res plot developments. Other forms of traditional narrative verse relate
11110-658: The twenty-first century many cherished Chinese folk songs have been inscribed in the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity . In the process, songs once seen as vulgar are now being reconstructed as romantic courtship songs. Regional song competitions, popular in many communities, have promoted professional folk singing as a career, with some individual folk singers having gained national prominence. The art, music and dance of Sri Lanka derive from
11220-718: The urbanised middle class were unlikely to include entrepreneurs, landlords, stockbrokers or senior civil servants. Despite these issues, and the limited scale of the revival, it ensured the continuation of British folk music as a living and performed tradition. The fusing of various styles of American music with British folk also helped to create a distinctive form of fingerstyle guitar playing known as ' folk baroque ', pioneered by Davy Graham , Martin Carthy , John Renbourn and Bert Jansch . This led in part to progressive folk music, which attempted to elevate folk music through greater musicianship, or compositional and arrangement skills. Many progressive folk performers continued to retain
11330-534: Was a German writer of music, and a collector of musical instruments. Engel was born in Thiedenwiese, near Hanover , and studied the pianoforte under Hummel . He emigrated to Manchester around 1844–45, and in 1850 settled in London , where he attained success as a teacher of music and writer on musical subjects. He owned a large collection of rare musical instruments, many of which were given after his death to
11440-470: Was a concentration on transcribing folk song in Britain, in contrast to America, where in a parallel movement John Avery Lomax made extensive recordings for the Library of Congress from 1933. This is thought to have created difficulties, since subtleties of performance have been lost and collectors often adjusted notation to fit their own, often classical, views of music or to fit their own preconceptions. Folk-song collecting continued after World War I, but
11550-538: Was arguably the most prominent US folk music scholar of his time, notably during the beginnings of the folk music revival in the 1930s and early 1940s. Cecil Sharp also worked in America, recording the traditional songs of the Appalachian Mountains in 1916–1918 in collaboration with Maud Karpeles and Olive Dame Campbell and is considered the first major scholar covering American folk music. Campbell and Sharp are represented under other names by actors in
11660-424: Was changed and probably debased by oral transmission while reflecting the character of the society that produced it. In many societies, especially preliterate ones, the cultural transmission of folk music requires learning by ear , although notation has evolved in some cultures. Different cultures may have different notions concerning a division between "folk" music on the one hand and of "art" and "court" music on
11770-472: Was intensified and the themes of popular music began to change from rural and agrarian life to include industrial work songs . Awareness that older forms of song were being abandoned prompted renewed interest in collecting folk songs during the 1830s and 40s, including the work of William B. Sandys ' Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern (1833), William Chappell, A Collection of National English Airs (1838) and Robert Bell 's Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of
11880-405: Was not possible. Music was made by common people during both their work and leisure, as well as during religious activities. The work of economic production was often manual and communal. Manual labor often included singing by the workers, which served several practical purposes. It reduced the boredom of repetitive tasks, it kept the rhythm during synchronized pushes and pulls, and it set
11990-411: Was originally created to preserve the lines of Gregorian chant , which before its invention was taught as an oral tradition in monastic communities. Traditional songs such as Green grow the rushes, O present religious lore in a mnemonic form, as do Western Christmas carols and similar traditional songs. Work songs frequently feature call and response structures and are designed to enable
12100-499: Was university educated and ultimately moved to New York City, where she made a number of classic recordings of the family repertoire and published an important compilation of these songs. In January 2012, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress , with the Association for Cultural Equity, announced that they would release Lomax's vast archive of 1946 and later recording in digital form. Lomax spent
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