There is one particularly lovely thing about folk songs and dances and that is the natural labels which they bear, marking them as belonging to France, Spain, Germany, Russia and so on. As with people, they all have similarities and yet no two are the same in looks or in actions. It would not take you long to know whether you were hearing a Spanish folk dance, an Irish Jig, a Russian Hopak, a Norwegian Halling or an American Foxtrot, because each has its own kind of rhythm and melody.
Some nations have gay, bright folk music, and others have sad, mournful music. In northern countries where living is hard on account of the long, dark, cold winters, and the people are forced to spend much time indoors and away from neighbors, where money and food are scarce, they are likely to be sad and lonely. In the centuries gone by they made up songs that pictured their lives and their surroundings. On the other hand, in countries where the sun shines most of the time, where people live out of doors, are happy, and have many friends and much fun, the music is gayer and usually lighter. This is why the music of Finland, Sweden, Norway and northern Russia is so much in the minor key, and seems grey, and why the music of Italy Spain, France and other southern countries is in the major key and seems rosier in color and happier in mood. Other reasons, too, for sad folk music is oppression, harsh rulers and harsh laws. So the Finns and Russians, the American negroes and the Hebrew tribes sang sad songs.
“The Music Making Boys,” by Frans Hals, from the Kassel Gallery, Germany.
Boys with a Lute.
After a painting by Teniers, in the gallery at Munich.
A Peasant Wedding.
Again you see history in the songs, particularly in the Russian folk music, which shows us in musical portraits, the tragedy of their lives under cruel czars and serfdom. They sang in ancient scales which make the music all the more mournful to our ears.
The rhythms in these songs are different from those of romance languages or those derived from Latin, for the Russians have a language of Slavic birth. The Russians have some Oriental blood from the Tartars who invaded Russia and who were descended from Tartar, a Mogul or Mongol from Asia. When you hear Russian songs that sound Oriental, you will agree with Rimsky-Korsakov, the Russian composer, that the Russian, deep down below the skin is an Oriental even though he has been living in Europe for many centuries.
In Russia, from the Baltic Sea on the north to the Caucasus Mountains on the south, from the sunny slopes of the Ural Mountains on the west, to the bleak desert wastes of Kirghiz on the east, these mixed races have a common tie in their love for folk story and folk music.
Marvelous tales have been handed down by word of mouth about the river gods and the wood-sprites, about the animals who talked like men, and the ugly old witch, Baba-Yaga, whose name alone was enough to quiet the naughtiest child! Through these folk tales you can follow the Russians from the time they were primitive men and pagans through all their battles and the invasions of barbarous tribes, to the time when they became Christians and had to struggle against the Tartars, the Turks and the Poles. All these happenings were put into songs and are the epic, or tale-telling folk music of the Russians.
But one of the most interesting things, we think, in all the growing of music into maturity, is that Russia never had anything but folk music until the 19th century! Music always belonged to the people, and there were no musical scholars making it the possession of the educated classes only.
Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and other Russians took the folk song from its humble surroundings and used it in their compositions, for they realized its beauty and its richness.
The Russians have instruments brought down from very early times, which are found today in no other country. Perhaps you may have heard a Russian balalaika orchestra. The balalaika is a stringed instrument, with a triangular body and long neck, having three or sometimes four strings, which are plucked and sound something like a guitar. It dates back to the end of the 13th century. They also have an instrument like a mandolin, with three strings, that dates from the 13th century also. It came from Asia at the time of the Mongolian invasion.
Another instrument, a descendant of the Greek psalterion and known to have been in Russia since the 9th century, is the gusslee. It is something like a zither, and is composed of a hollow box, strung with any number from seven to thirteen up to twenty-four strings. It is held on the lap, and the strings are plucked with the fingers.
There is also a sort of lute or bandoura with many strings, dating from the 16th century, played principally by the blind who belong to groups of minstrels. There is also a wooden clarinet, on which one scale can be played. Its special purpose was for use at funerals, and its name, which comes from a word meaning tomb, is jaleika.
The Finns, a northern people, although often dominated either by Sweden or Russia, have their own songs and peculiar rhythms. The Kalevala is their great epic poem, like the Iliad of Greece, Beowulf of the Anglo-Saxons, and the Eddas of Iceland. From this narrative poem or epic, have come many a folk-tune. Besides, they sing of their beautiful country, often called the country of lakes.
The typical rhythm of Finland is the ⁵⁄₄ time which sounds most attractive. They have the kantele, a plucked string instrument, and they glory in their folk music which they use as an everyday joy and do not “turn it on” only for “hey-days and holidays.”
The Polish people have loved music as the Russians love it, and although Poland has been reconquered, divided and redivided among the surrounding kingdoms of Europe, it has always kept its own music. So we have another set of Slav songs but with certain rhythmical differences, not found in the music of other nations. (Chapter IX.)
There is an Oriental strain in this music, too, and it must be very ancient indeed, for Oriental tribes have not lived in this country for ages.
In addition to an instrument like the Russian gusslee, and a violin like the Arabian rebab, the Polish have a clarinet made of wood, called by its old name of chalumeau, the lute, and an instrument called the kobza, belonging to the bagpipe family. This is of great age, but is still in use among the mountaineers of Carpathia, and is made of goat skin with three pipe attachments. The kobza can replace an entire orchestra!
Gypsies! The name fires our imagination and brings up pictures of dark-skinned, black-eyed people with glossy black hair, dressed in gay colored shawls, with bright kerchiefs wound around their heads. We think of them as being on “one grand picnic,” living out of doors, cooking their meals over bonfires in the open, sleeping in their covered wagons or tents, or under the stars, always gay, care-free and dirty! Then, think of the Gypsy music,—the dances, the songs, and the wonderful violin playing! So wild, so weird, so out-of-doors is it, that we are thrilled by the very thought of it.
Where did these folk come from? Who are they? What are they? They have spread over most of Europe, and are found in Hungary, Bohemia, Roumania, Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia, England, Turkey, and even America. They are a race and they have a language of their own. Theirs is a mixture of the ancient Prakrit or Indian, with the different languages with which they have come in contact in the course of many centuries. Men who make a study of the history of languages say, that in their idioms, they show traces of roving for many centuries in Asiatic countries, before reaching Europe in or before the 15th century. They are often called “Bohemians” because Bohemia (Czecho-Slovakia) seems to have been their main European camping-ground. It is generally agreed that they came from India and that they are Asiatic, but they got their name Gypsy, a contraction of the word Egyptian, because people at first thought that they came from Egypt.
The Gypsies have an extraordinary gift for music. They do not study it as an art, as we do, and cannot even read musical notes, but they imitate and memorize, and reach a high degree of skill in playing, particularly the violin. They have such great power of imitation, that they rapidly learn to play the instruments, and accustom themselves to the folk music they find wherever they wander. However, they always keep something of their own sadness and wildness. In Spain, they accompany themselves on the guitar, and mark the rhythm with castanets, as do the Spaniards themselves, borrowing the Spanish folk songs which they sing in their own way. In Russia, England, Turkey and everywhere they do the same with the folk music of those countries.
The special traits, then, of the music of the Gypsies, are found rather in the way they play, interpret and express the music of others, than as composers of their own music. Yet they use strongly marked rhythms, florid ornamentation, and scales that are Oriental, which show us from where they came. Here is one of their most used scales:
There are many kinds of scales among the Gypsies,—a mixture of the Oriental scale with the pentatonic, and with the European major and minor.
The Hungarian Gypsy has made more music than any other branch of the Gypsy people. In fact, when we hear music that makes us exclaim, “Oh, that is real Gypsy music!” it is almost always Hungarian. At least one quarter of the inhabitants of Hungary, a name which comes from the barbarian tribe of Huns, are Magyars, descendants of Tartars and Mongolians of Asia, who settled in the land of the Huns in the 9th century. In the national music of Hungary, we find it hard to tell just what is Magyar, and what is Gypsy, because the two have intermingled for so long.
The important thing is that this Magyar-Gypsy folk music has been the inspiration of hundreds of trained composers, like Haydn (see the Gypsy Rondo from his piano trio, also arranged for piano alone), Franz Liszt who wrote many famous Hungarian Rhapsodies, Hector Berlioz who made the Hungarian Rakoczy March famous, Johannes Brahms who used many folk songs in his compositions and wrote a set of Hungarian Dances. Even Bach, perhaps the greatest of all composers, seems to have been influenced by the Gypsy music as played on the Hungarian cembalo.
No Hungarian Gypsy orchestra is complete without a cembalo, which looks something like an old-fashioned square piano with the top off. This is strung with metal strings covering a range of four octaves, and is played with two small limber hammers. The cembalo players perform with great rapidity and agility; they are able to play scales, arpeggios, trills, and the tricks of Gypsy music with great skill and ease. It is not known just when this instrument came into use, but it is a descendant of the dulcimer and psaltery, instruments we hear of in the Bible, and in Arabia and Persia, probably brought into Europe during the Crusades.
The czardas (pronounced chardas) is an old Hungarian dance in which are all the national characteristics of this folk music, well marked in syncopated rhythms (rhythms out of focus, page 144, Chapter X), strong accents, many ornaments. The Gypsies dance the czardas every time they get a chance, for they love it. It has two contrasting parts, one is called lassan which is very slow and sad, and the other called friska which is very fast and fiery.
Panna Czinka, a Gypsy Queen, who lived in the 18th century was the daughter of the chief of a band of Gypsies and she inherited his title when she was very young. She married a ’cellist of her tribe and went all through Hungary, Poland and Roumania playing on a wonderful Amati violin, in a very wonderful way. She brought the Rakoczy March to the people, although it is not known whether or not she composed it. She always wore men’s clothes of most picturesque type and when she died she requested to have her beloved violin buried with her! Long after her death she was still an inspiration to young Gypsy fiddlers, who all longed to play as beautifully as Panna Czinka.
Bohemia is rich in folk dances, most of which are named for places where they originated or the occasions for which they were used, or from songs by which they are accompanied.
The Bohemians have a bagpipe called the Dudelsack and the player is called a Dudelsackpfeiffer!
To the outsider, there is a national color, rhythm, and charm in Spanish music that is unmistakable. We recognize it immediately as Spanish, but the Spaniard will be able to tell you the province from which it came, for there is as much difference between a Castilian song and a Basque, as we find between the speech of a Virginian and a Vermontian! (Chapter IX.)
Portugal, although Spain’s next door neighbor, has quite a different music; it is peaceful, tranquil and thoughtful, but doesn’t thrill you as does the Spanish music. The Portuguese are calmer and less excitable than the Spaniards, so here again you see the character and qualities of people coming out in the music or what we like to call the musical portrait of a nation. There are no exaggerated rhythms but instead a steady melancholy flow of melody.
The portrait of France that we get from her folk music is much like the one we find in songs of her troubadours and trouvères. In southern France, the folk songs are gay and filled with poetic sentiment and religious feeling; from Burgundy come some of her loveliest Noëls (Christmas songs) and also the drinking songs. From Normandy, come songs of ordinary everyday doings; their mill songs, when sung out in the open on a summer night by the peasants are very beautiful and often show strong religious feeling. Brittany whose inhabitants were originally Celts have a music not unlike the Welsh, Scotch and Irish. Long ago, the famous French writer and musician of the 18th century, Jean Jacques Rousseau, said of it, “The airs are not snappy, they have, I know not what of an antique and sweet mood which touches the heart. They are simple, naïve and often sad—at any rate they are pleasing.”
The Volkslieder or folk songs of the Germans are the backbone of the great classical and romantic periods of the 18th and 19th centuries which made Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Schumann, Wagner and Brahms the music masters of the world.
As early as the 14th century collections of these songs had been made, the subjects of which were mostly historical. By the 16th century music had grown so much that every sentiment of the human heart and every occupation of life had its own song: students, soldiers, pedlars, apprentices all had their songs. These are folk songs of Class A, because their composers forgot to leave their names and no musical archæologist has been able to dig them up. (Page 108. Chapter IX.)
These songs became melodies independent of the accompaniment. They also put the major scale on a firm basis which took the place of the church modes. Their spirit and power were felt in every branch of music, and they supplied melodies for the chorales or hymns, for the lute players and organists in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries.
Every town had its own band called the Stadt Pfeifferei (town pipers). The peasant boys played the fiddle, and the shepherds the schalmey, (a kind of oboe). Every festivity was accompanied by song and dance.
No people in the world have more fancy and imagination, a keener sense of humor, are more fun-loving and more superstitious than the Irish. All these qualities come out in their vast treasure of folk music, which is considered the most beautiful and the most varied of all the music that has come from peasant folk. The subjects cover practically every phase of life from the castle to the cot, and songs of every heading we have included in the last chapter. There are reels, jigs, marches, spinning-tunes, nurse-tunes, planxties (Irish or Welsh melodies for the harp in the nature of a lament), plough-songs and whistles. The Irish folk songs are rich historically as well as beautiful musically.
The form of the Irish folk music is perfect, and is a model of what simple song form has been for several centuries. In fact, all large forms have been built on just such principles of balance and contrast as are found in an Irish folk song called The Flight of the Earls.
The Scotch and Welsh also have a very rich store of folk song and ballads. Along with the Irish they are children of the early Celts and have brought down to us the music of early times. In all this music we find the pentatonic scale, and a rhythm of this character ♩ a dotted note followed by a note of shorter value, which gives a real lilt to Irish, Welsh and Scotch music. We told you about the Welsh bards and their queer violin without a neck, called a crwth, and their little harp that was handed around their banquet tables from guest to guest.
The Gaelic music, or that of the Scotch Highlands, dates back to prehistoric times. You have seen a Scotch Highlander in his plaid and kilties playing on his bagpipe, and it has a special kind of scale (two pentatonic scales put together) like this:
| G | A | B | D | E | G | |||
| A | B | C♯ | E | F♯ | A |
and a drone bass (one tone that does not change and is played all through the piece) which makes it hard to get the same effect on the piano. Scotch bagpipes are heard in districts where the milk-maids and serving folk get together in the “ingle,” and still “lilt” in the good old-fashioned way.
The thing that makes us know Scotch music from any other is a queer little trick of the rhythm called the snap in which a note of short value is followed by a dotted note of longer value, instead of the other way around which is more commonly found. Thus: but the two ways are always combined, thus: and so on. If you want to make up a real Scotch tune yourself, just play this rhythm up and down the black keys of the piano from F# to the next F#!
Many of the lovely poems of Robert Burns have been set to old Scotch airs. He saved many of the old songs, for he gathered the remains of unpublished old ballads and songs, and snatches of popular melodies, and with genius gave life to the fragments he found. In his own words, “I have collected, begged, borrowed and stolen all the songs I could meet with.”
Canada has the folk songs of the habitant which are French in character. They are very beautiful and full of romance and many of them can be traced back to France. Many, however, were born in Canada and reveal the hearts of people who lived in the great lonely spaces of a new country.
Most of the English folk songs are very practical accounts of the doings of the people. The English seemed more interested in human beings than in Nature, like the Scotch and Irish, or in romantic love songs like the Latin races in Spain, France and Italy. The English had to be practical for they were always leaders and at the head of things, while the Scots and Irish were further away from the center and rush of life and so went to Nature for their subjects.
There are about five thousand English folk songs which sing of the English milk-maid and her work, the carpenter, the hunter and his hounds, and hunting calls. They have the Morris Dance tunes, the May-day songs, the sailor’s chanties, they even sing of criminals famous in history and always very definitely tell the full name and whereabouts of a character in a song. They also have songs of poachers (those who hunt on land forbidden them), of murderers and hangmen as well as shepherds and sailors. But England’s finest songs are the Christmas carols which sing of the birth of Jesus. So, if they sang little of Nature they did sing of man and God and have given us much that is beautiful and worth while.
We come now to a question that has been the subject of many arguments and debates. Many claim that we have no folk music in the United States, and others claim that we have. It would take a whole volume to present both sides and we must reduce it to a sugar-coated capsule.
Although we know that Stephen Foster wrote Old Folks at Home, The Old Kentucky Home, Uncle Ned, Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground, and Old Black Joe, they express so perfectly the mood and spirit of the people that they are true folk songs. Harold Vincent Milligan in his book on Stephen Foster says: “Every folk-song is first born in the heart and brain of some one person, whose spirit is so finely attuned to the voice of that inward struggle which is the history of the soul of man, that when he seeks for his own self-expression he at the same time gives a voice to that vast ‘mute multitude who die and give no sign.’”
And again speaking of Stephen Foster, Mr. Milligan says: “Although purists may question their right to the title ‘folk songs’ his melodies are truly the songs of the American people.”
The folk music of which we have told you has been the music portraits of different peoples such as the Russian, the Polish, the French, the German, the English, the Irish and so on. If there has been a mixture of peoples or tribes as in England where there were Britons, Danes, Angles, Saxons and Normans, it happened so long ago that they have become molded into one race. We are all Americans but we are not of one race, and we are still in the process of being molded into one type.
We unite people of all nations under one flag and one government, but we have been sung to sleep and amused as children by the folk songs of the European nations to which our parents and grandparents belonged! And so we have heard from childhood Sur le Pont d’Avignon, Schlaf Kindlein Schlaf, Wurmland, The Volga Boat Song, Sally in our Alley, or The Wearing of the Green, none of which is American.
In spite of all these obstacles to the growth of a folk music in America, we have several sources from which they have come.
As our earliest settlers in Virginia and New England were English, they brought with them many of their folk songs and some of these have remained unchanged in the districts where people of other nations have not penetrated. The Lonesome Tunes of the Kentucky mountains, also of Tennessee, the Carolinas and Vermont are examples of this kind of English folk song in America.
In Louisiana which was settled by the French, we find a type of folk song that is very charming. It is a combination of old French folk song with negro spiritual, and is brought to us by the Creoles.
In California there is a strong Spanish flavor in some of the old ballads that date from the time of the Spanish Missions. There are also mining songs of the “days of ’49,” including Oh Susannah, by Stephen Foster, and we defy you to get rid of the tune if once it “gets you!”
Then there are cow-boy songs of the Plains, The Texas Rangers, The Ship that Never Returned, The Cow-boy’s Lament and Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie; the Lumberjack songs of Maine; the well known air of the Arkansas Traveller, which was a funny little sketch for theatre of a conversation between the Arkansas traveller and a squatter which is interrupted by snatches of a tune; and in addition a whole book full of songs sung in the backwoods settlements, hunting cabins and lumber camps in northern Pennsylvania.
So if you seek, you can find a large number of folk songs without going to the Indian or the Negro.
The Civil War brought out a number of new national songs among them Glory Hallelujah and Dixie. Dixie was written in 1859 as a song and “walk-around” by the famous minstrel Dan Emmett, and became a war song by accident. It had dash and a care-free spirit, and the rollicking way it pictured plantation life attracted the soldiers of the South when they were in the cold winter camps in the North. Its rhythm is so irresistible that it makes your hands and feet go in spite of yourself. Besides these two the soldiers of the Civil War marched to Rally Round the Flag, Boys, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys are Marching, Home, Sweet Home, Lily Dale, The Girl I Left Behind Me, Hail Columbia and The Star Spangled Banner.
We have told you so much about the Indian and his song that it is unnecessary now to dwell at length on his music. Of course some American composers have used Indian folk legend and music, but after all it remains the musical portrait of the Red Man and has not become the heart language of the white man.
We have, however, a real folk-expression that has had a great deal of influence on our popular music and will probably help to create a serious music to which we can attach the label “Made in America,” and that is the music of the American Negro.
In Chapter II we showed you what the Negro had brought from his native Africa, and also that he had been influenced by his contact with the white race. His music is not the result of conscious art and of study but is a natural outburst in which he expresses his joys and sorrows, his tragedies and racial oppression. Also we find rhythms, melody and form that have grown as a wild flower grows, and are different from any we have met heretofore.
Mr. Krehbiel in his book Afro-American Folksongs says of the Negro slave songs: “They contain idioms which were transplanted hither from Africa, but as song they are the product of American institutions; of the social, political and geographical environment within which their creators were placed in America, of the influences to which they were subjected in America, of the joys, sorrows and experiences which fell to their lot in America.”
The Negro has cultivated, like all races, songs and dances. As we said of the Russian, his song is sad and full of tragedy, but the dance is gay, wild and primitive. From the dance of the Negro we borrowed the rhythm formerly called ragtime, which is now jazz. The principle of the Negro rhythm is syncopation, that is, the accent is shifted to the unaccented part of a measure or of a beat, like this,—♩, ♩, ♩. All sorts of combinations are possible in this rhythm, and it is this variety that is fascinating in a good jazz tune.
The banjo is the instrument of the southern plantation Negro, and when a crowd gathers for a “sing” or a dance, the hands and feet take the place of drums and keep time to the syncopated tune and is called, “patting Juba.”
A curious dance was the “shout” which flourished in slave days. It took place on Sunday or on prayer meeting nights and was accompanied by hymn singing and shouting that sounded from a distance like a melancholy wail. After the meeting the benches were pushed back, old and young, men and women, stood in the middle of the floor and when the “sperichel” (or spiritual) was started they shuffled around in a ring. Sometimes the dancers sang the “sperichel” or they sang only the chorus, and for a distance of half a mile from the praise house the endless thud, thud of the feet was heard.
In the beautiful Spiritual, the song of the Negro, we see also the syncopated rhythm. The religious song is practically the only song he has, and he sings it at work, at play, at prayer, when he is sick and his friends sing it after he is dead. To our ears the words are crude and homely, but always reveal a fervent religious nature as well as a childlike faith.
No doubt you have heard Nobody Knows the Trouble I See, Deep River, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Go Down Moses, Weeping Mary and many others.
Such a wealth of feeling and beauty could not fail to leave its mark in the land where it was born.
Just how it will bear fruit we cannot say, but it is making its appeal more and more, not only to the American, but to the foreign composers as well, and they believe that this music,—the syncopated rhythm that the American is at last developing in his own way—in spite of its humble origin, is the one new thing that America has given to the growth of music, and they envy us that wealth of rhythm that seems to be born in the American.