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 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, 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.[1] Smaller, similar revivals have occurred elsewhere in the world at other times, but the term folk music has typically not been applied to 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 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".[2] 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.[3] Though it is understood that folk music is the music of the people, observers find a more precise definition to be elusive.[4][5] Some do not even agree that the term folk music should be used.[4] Folk music may tend to have certain characteristics[2] but it cannot clearly be differentiated in purely musical terms. One meaning often given is that of "old songs, with no known composers,"[6] another is that of music that has been submitted to an evolutionary "process of oral transmission... the fashioning and re-fashioning of the music by the community that give it its folk character."[7]
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'".[8] One widely used definition is simply "Folk music is what the people sing."[9]
For Scholes,[2] as well as for Cecil Sharp and Béla Bartók,[10] 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),"[11] particularly in "a community uninfluenced by art music"[7] and by commercial and printed song. Lloyd rejected this in favor of a simple distinction of economic class[10] yet for him, true folk music was, in Charles Seeger's words, "associated with a lower class"[12] 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'."[13]
Music in this genre is also often called traditional music. Although 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.[14] Folk music may include most indigenous music.[4]
Characteristics
From a historical perspective, traditional folk music had these characteristics:[12]
, but these secondary enhancements are of the same character as the primary songs experienced in the flesh.
The music was often related to national culture. It was culturally particular; from a particular region or culture. In the context of an immigrant group, folk music acquires an extra dimension for social cohesion. It is particularly conspicuous in immigrant societies, where Greek Australians, Somali Americans, Punjabi Canadians, and others strive to emphasize their differences from the mainstream. They learn songs and dances that originate in the countries their grandparents came from.
They commemorate historical and personal events. On certain days of the year, including such holidays as Christmas, Easter, and May Day, particular songs celebrate the yearly cycle. Birthdays, weddings, and funerals may also be noted with songs, dances and special costumes. Religious festivals often have a folk music component.
Choral music
at these events brings children and non-professional singers to participate in a public arena, giving an emotional bonding that is unrelated to the aesthetic qualities of the music.
The songs have been performed, by custom, over a long period of time, usually several generations.
As a side-effect, the following characteristics are sometimes present:
There is no copyright on the songs. Hundreds of folk songs from the 19th century have known authors but have continued in oral tradition to the point where they are considered traditional for purposes of music publishing. This has become much less frequent since the 1940s. Today, almost every folk song that is recorded is credited with an arranger.
Fusion of cultures: Because cultures interact and change over time, traditional songs evolving over time may incorporate and reflect influences from disparate cultures. The relevant factors may include instrumentation,
In some traditions, tunes may be strung together in medleys or "sets."[17]
Origins
Throughout most of human prehistory and history, listening to
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.[22]
Some believe that folk music originated as
learning by ear, although notation has evolved in some cultures.[23] Different cultures may have different notions concerning a division between "folk" music on the one hand and of "art" and "court" music on the other. In the proliferation of popular music genres, some traditional folk music became also referred to as "World music" or "Roots music".[24]
The English term "
International Folk Music Council definition allows that 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."[26]
The post–
Grammy Awards of 1959;[27] in 1970 the term was dropped in favor of "Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording (including Traditional Blues)",[28] while 1987 brought a distinction between "Best Traditional Folk Recording" and "Best Contemporary Folk Recording".[29] After that, they had 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[30] from Scotland and American Bob Dylan,[31] who emerged in the 1960s and much more. This completed a process to where "folk music" no longer meant only traditional folk music.[6]
Subject matter
Traditional folk music often includes
Narrative verse looms large in the traditional folk music of many cultures.[32][33] This encompasses such forms as traditional epic poetry, much of which was meant originally for oral performance, sometimes accompanied by instruments.[34][35] 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 the outcomes of battles or lament tragedies or natural disasters.[36]
Sometimes, as in the triumphant
Song of Deborah[37] found in the BiblicalBook 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.[38][39] The narratives of traditional songs often also remember folk heroes such as John Henry[40][41] or Robin Hood.[42] Some traditional song narratives recall supernatural events or mysterious deaths.[43]
Green grow the rushes, O present religious lore in a mnemonic form, as do Western Christmas carols and similar traditional songs.[47]
Love poetry, often of a tragic or regretful nature, prominently figures in many folk traditions.[52]Nursery rhymes, children’s songs and nonsense verse used to amuse or quiet children also are frequent subjects of traditional songs.[53]
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 the songs they hear.
For example, the words of "
broadside in the 18th century, and seem to have an Irish origin.[54] In 1958 the song was recorded in Canada (My Name is Pat and I'm Proud of That). Scottish traveler Jeannie Robertson from Aberdeen, made the next recorded version in 1961. She has changed it to make reference to "Jock Stewart", one of her relatives, and there are no Irish references. In 1976 Scottish artist Archie Fisher deliberately altered the song to remove the reference to a dog being shot. In 1985 The Pogues took it full circle by restoring the Irish references.[original research?
]
Because variants proliferate naturally, there 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 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
While the loss of traditional folk music in the face of the rise of popular music is a worldwide phenomenon,[55] it is not one occurring at a uniform rate throughout the world.[56] The process is most advanced "where industrialization and commercialisation of culture are most advanced"[57] but also occurs more gradually even in settings of lower technological advancement. However, the loss of traditional music is slowed in nations or regions where traditional folk music is a badge of cultural or national identity.[citation needed]
Early folk music, fieldwork and scholarship
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.[58]
19th-century Europe
Starting in the 19th century, academics and amateur scholars, taking note of the musical traditions being lost, initiated various efforts to preserve the music of the people.[59] 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.[9]
Contemporaneously with Child, the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould and later Cecil Sharp worked to preserve 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).[60] 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.[61][62] Throughout the 1960s and early to mid-1970s, American scholar Bertrand Harris Bronson published an exhaustive four-volume collection of the then-known variations of both the texts and tunes associated with what came to be known as the Child Canon.[63] He also advanced some significant theories concerning the workings of oral-aural tradition.[64]
Similar activity was also under way in other countries. One of the most extensive was perhaps the work done in
Krisjanis Barons, who between the years 1894 and 1915 published six volumes that included the texts of 217,996 Latvian folk songs, the Latvju dainas.[65] 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.[66]
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[67] and Ralph Vaughan Williams[68] in England and Béla Bartók[69] in Hungary. These composers, like many of their predecessors, both made arrangements of folk songs and incorporated traditional material into original classical compositions.[70][71]
North America
The advent of
audio recording technology provided folklorists with a revolutionary tool to preserve vanishing musical forms.[72] The earliest American folk music scholars were with the American Folklore Society (AFS), which emerged in the late 1800s.[73] Their studies expanded to include Native American music, but still treated folk music as a historical item preserved in isolated societies as well.[74] In North America, during the 1930s and 1940s, the Library of Congress worked through the offices of traditional music collectors Robert Winslow Gordon,[75]Alan Lomax[76][77][78] and others to capture as much North American field material as possible.[79]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.[80] and 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.[81] Campbell and Sharp are represented under other names by actors in the modern movie Songcatcher.[82]
One strong theme amongst folk scholars in the early decades of the 20th century was
ethnically, racially, and regionally diverse citizens that other scholars, public intellectuals, and folklorists celebrated their own definitions of the American folk, definitions that the folk revivalists used in constructing their own understanding of American folk music, and an overarching American identity".[91]
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 the Great Depression.[92] 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.[92] Two related developments were the U.S. Communist Party's interest in folk music as a way to reach and influence Americans,[93] and politically active prominent folk musicians and scholars seeing communism as a possible better system, through the lens of the Great Depression.[94]Woody Guthrie exemplifies songwriters and artists with such an outlook.[95]
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.[97] One prominent festival was Sarah Gertrude Knott's National Folk Festival, established in St. Louis, Missouri in 1934.[98] Under the sponsorship of the Washington Post, the festival was held in Washington, DC at Constitution Hall from 1937 to 1942.[99] 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.[100]
The American folk music revivalists of the 1930s approached folk music in different ways.[101] Three primary schools of thought emerged: "Traditionalists" (e.g. Sarah Gertrude Knott and John Lomax) emphasized 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".[101] By the end of the 1930s these and others had turned American folk music into a social movement.[101]
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.[102] Ritchie, living in a time when the Appalachians had opened up to outside influence, 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.[103]
In January 2012, the
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.[104] 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.[105][106] This material from Alan Lomax's independent archive, begun in 1946, which has been digitized and offered by 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) — is the provenance of the American Folklife Center"[105]
Many Asian civilizations distinguish between art/court/classical styles and "folk" music.[113][114] For example, the late Alam Lohar is an example of a South Asian singer who was classified as a folk singer.[115]
Khunung Eshei/Khuland Eshei 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.[116]
are common, often competing in volume with a shawm/chuigushou band.
In southern
Yueju (Cantonese Opera) music,[134] which would later grow popular during the self-described "Golden Age" of China under the PRC.[135]
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.[136] 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.[137] The songs of northwest China are known as "flower songs" (hua'er), a reference to beautiful women, while in the past they were notorious for their erotic content.[138] The village "mountain songs" (shan'ge) of Jiangsu province were also well-known for their amorous themes.[139][140] 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.[141]
In the twenty-first century many cherished Chinese folk songs have been inscribed in the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.[142] In the process, songs once seen as vulgar are now being reconstructed as romantic courtship songs.[143] Regional song competitions, popular in many communities, have promoted professional folk singing as a career, with some individual folk singers having gained national prominence.[144]
The art, music and dance of Sri Lanka derive from the elements of nature, and have been enjoyed and developed in the Buddhist environment.[145] The music is of several types and uses only a few types of instruments.[146] The folk songs and poems were used in social gatherings to work together. The Indian influenced classical music has grown to be unique.[147][148][149][150] The traditional drama, music and songs of Sinhala Light Music are typically Sri Lankan.[151]
The temple paintings and carvings feature birds, elephants, wild animals, flowers, and trees, and the Traditional 18 Dances display the dancing of birds and animals.[152] For example:
Local drama music includes Kolam[156] and Nadagam types.[157] Kolam music is based on low country tunes primarily to accompany mask dance in exorcism rituals.[158][159] It is considered less developed/evolved, true to the folk tradition and a preserving of a more ancient artform.[160] It is limited to approximately 3–4 notes and is used by the ordinary people for pleasure and entertainment.[161]
Nadagam music is a more developed form of drama influenced from South Indian street drama which was introduced by some south Indian artists. Phillippu Singho from Negombo in 1824 performed "Harishchandra Nadagama" in Hnguranketha which was originally written in the Telingu language. Later "Maname",[162] "Sanda kinduru"[163] and others were introduced. Don Bastian of Dehiwala introduced Noorthy firstly by looking at Indian dramas and then John de Silva developed it as did Ramayanaya in 1886.[164]
Sinhala light music is currently the most popular type of music in Sri Lanka and enriched with the influence of folk music, kolam music, nadagam music, noorthy music,
film music, classical music, Western music, and others.[165] Some artists visited India to learn music and later started introducing light music. Ananda Samarakone was the pioneer of this[166][167] and also composed the national anthem.[168]
The classical Sinhalese orchestra consists of five categories of instruments, but among the percussion instruments, the drum is essential for dance.[169]
The vibrant beat of the rhythm of the drums form the basic of the dance.
crescendo of intensity. There are six common types of drums falling within 3 styles (one-faced, two-faced, and flat-faced):[171][172]
The typical Sinhala Dance is identified as the Kandyan dance and the Gatabera drum is indispensable to this dance.[173]
Yak-bera is the demon drum or the drum used in low country dance in which the dancers wear masks and perform devil dancing, which has become a highly developed form of art.[174]
The Daula is a barrel-shaped drum, and it was used as a companion drum with a Thammattama in the past, to keep strict time with the beat.[175]
The
Thammattama is a flat, two-faced drum. The drummer strikes the drum on the two surfaces on top with sticks, unlike the others where you drum on the sides. This is a companion drum to the aforementioned Dawula.[176]
A small double-headed hand drum is used to accompany songs. It is primarily heard in the poetry dances like vannam.[clarification needed]
The Rabana is a flat-faced circular drum and comes in several sizes.[177] The large Rabana - called the Banku Rabana - has to be placed on the floor like a circular short-legged table and several people (traditionally women) can sit around it and beat on it with both hands.[178] This is used in festivals such as the Sinhalese New Year and ceremonies such as weddings.[179] The resounding beat of the Rabana symbolizes the joyous moods of the occasion. The small Rabana is a form of mobile drum beat since the player carries it wherever the person goes.[180]
Other instruments include:
The Thalampata – 2 small cymbals joined by a string.[181]
The wind section, is dominated by an instrument akin to the clarinet.[clarification needed] This is not normally used for dances. This is important to note because the Sinhalese dance is not set to music as the western world knows it; rhythm is king.
The flutes of metal such as silver & brass produce
conch-shell (Hakgediya) is another form of a natural instrument, and the player blows it to announce the opening of ceremonies of grandeur.[182]
The Ravanahatha (ravanhatta, rawanhattha, ravanastron or ravana hasta veena) is a bowed fiddle that was once popular in Western India.[183][184] It is believed to have originated among the Hela civilisation of Sri Lanka in the time of King Ravana.[185] The bowl is made of cut coconut shell, the mouth of which is covered with goat hide. A dandi, made of bamboo, is attached to this shell.[185] The principal strings are two: one of steel and the other of a set of horsehair. The long bow has jingle bells[186][187]
Folk song traditions were taken to Australia by early settlers from England, Scotland and Ireland and gained particular foothold in the rural
The Bush, and the authors and performers are often referred to as bush bards.[190] The 19th century was the golden age of bush ballads.[191] Several collectors have catalogued the songs including John Meredith whose recording in the 1950s became the basis of the collection in the National Library of Australia.[190]
The songs tell personal stories of life in the wide open country of Australia.
squatters (landowners), and outlaws such as Ned Kelly, as well as love interests and more modern fare such as trucking.[194] The most famous bush ballad is "Waltzing Matilda", which has been called "the unofficial national anthem of Australia".[195]
Indigenous Australian groups.[200] Equal elements of musical tradition are common through much of the Australian continent, and even beyond.[201] The culture of the Torres Strait Islanders is related to that of adjacent parts of New Guinea and so their music is also related. Music is a vital part of Indigenous Australians' cultural maintenance.[202]
Asturian and Galician music is often included, though there is no significant research showing that this has any close musical relationship.[205][206]Brittany's Folk revival began in the 1950s with the "bagadoù" and the "kan-ha-diskan" before growing to world fame through Alan Stivell's work since the mid-1960s.[207]
Boys of the Lough,[230] and The Silencers[231] have kept Scottish folk vibrant and fresh by mixing traditional Scottish and Gaelic folk songs with more contemporary genres.[232] These artists have also been commercially successful in continental Europe and North America.[233] There is an emerging wealth of talent in the Scottish traditional music scene, with bands such as Mànran,[234]Skipinnish,[235] Barluath[236] and Breabach[237] and solo artists such as Patsy Reid,[238]Robyn Stapleton[239] and Mischa MacPherson[240] gaining a lot of success in recent years.[241]
During the Eastern Bloc era, national folk dancing was actively promoted by the state.[242] Dance troupes from Russia and Poland toured non-communist Europe from about 1937 to 1990.[243] The Red Army Choir recorded many albums, becoming the most popular military band.[244] Eastern Europe is also the origin of the Jewish Klezmer tradition.[245]
The Hungarian group Muzsikás played numerous American tours[261] and participated in the Hollywood movie The English Patient[262] while the singer Márta Sebestyén worked with the band Deep Forest.[263] The Hungarian táncház movement, started in the 1970s, involves strong cooperation between musicology experts and enthusiastic amateurs.[264] However, traditional Hungarian folk music and folk culture barely survived in some rural areas of Hungary, and it has also begun to disappear among the ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania. The táncház movement revived broader folk traditions of music, dance, and costume together and created a new kind of music club.[265] The movement spread to ethnic Hungarian communities elsewhere in the world.[265]
An important part of the whole Balkan folk music is the music of the local Romani ethnic minority, which is called tallava and brass band music.[271][272]
The many regions of the Nordic countries share certain traditions, many of which have diverged significantly, like Psalmodicon of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.[275] It is possible to group together the Baltic states (or, sometimes, only Estonia) and parts of northwest Russia as sharing cultural similarities,[276] although the relationship has gone cold in recent years.[277] Contrast with Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Atlantic islands of Iceland and the Faroe Islands, which share virtually no similarities of that kind. Greenland's Inuit culture has its own unique musical traditions.[278] Finland shares many cultural similarities with both the Baltic nations and the Scandinavian nations. The Sami of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia have their own unique culture, with ties to the neighboring cultures.[279]
folk music revival of the 1970s, vocalists and instrumentalists have also begun to perform together in folk music ensembles
The folk music of the Americas consists of the encounter and union of three main musical types: European traditional music, traditional music of the American natives, and tribal African music that arrived with slaves from that continent.
The particular case of Latin and South American music points to Andean music[285] among other native musical styles (such as Caribbean[286] and pampean), Iberian music of Spain and Portugal, and generally speaking African tribal music, the three of which fused together evolving in differentiated musical forms in Central and South America.
Nueva Canción
movement of the 1970s revived the genre across Latin America and brought it to places where it was unknown or forgotten.
Iberian
folk music, folk-inspired music, and socially committed music. In some respects its development and role is similar to the second folk music revival in North America. This includes evolution of this new genre from traditional folk music, essentially contemporary folk music except that that English genre term is not commonly applied to it. Nueva cancion is recognized as having played a powerful role in the social upheavals in Portugal, Spain and Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s.
Nueva cancion first surfaced during the 1960s as "The Chilean New Song" in Chile. The musical style emerged shortly afterwards in Spain and areas of Latin America where it came to be known under similar names. Nueva canción renewed traditional Latin American folk music, and with its political lyrics it was soon associated with revolutionary movements, the Latin American
Liberation Theology, hippie and human rights movements. It would gain great popularity throughout Latin America, and it is regarded as a precursor to Rock en español
.
Cueca is a family of musical styles and associated dances from Chile, Bolivia and Peru.
Afro-Cuban
rhythm and percussion elements.
Moda de viola is the name designated to Brazilian folk music. It is often performed with a 6-string nylon acoustic guitar, but the most traditional instrument is the viola caipira
. The songs basically detailed the difficulties of life of those who work in the country. The themes are usually associated with the land, animals, folklore, impossible love and separation. Although there are some upbeat songs, most of them are nostalgic and melancholic.
Canada's traditional folk music is particularly diverse.
Quebecois music
, etc.)
Traditional folk music of European origin has been present in Canada since the arrival of the first French and British settlers in the 16th and 17th centuries....They fished the coastal waters and farmed the shores of what became Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and the St Lawrence River valley of Quebec.
The fur trade and its voyageurs brought this farther north and west into Canada; later lumbering operations and lumberjacks continued this process.
Agrarian settlement in eastern and southern Ontario and western Quebec in the early 19th century established a favorable milieu for the survival of many Anglo-Canadian folksongs and broadside ballads from Great Britain and the US. Despite massive industrialization, folk music traditions have persisted in many areas until today. In the north of Ontario, a large Franco-Ontarian population kept folk music of French origin alive.
Populous Acadian communities in the Atlantic provinces contributed their song variants to the huge corpus of folk music of French origin centred in the province of Quebec. A rich source of Anglo-Canadian folk music can be found in the Atlantic region, especially Newfoundland. Completing this mosaic of musical folklore is the Gaelic music of Scottish settlements, particularly in Cape Breton, and the hundreds of Irish songs whose presence in eastern Canada dates from the Irish famine of the 1840s, which forced the large migrations of Irish to North America.[289]
"Knowledge of the history of Canada", wrote Isabelle Mills in 1974, "is essential in understanding the mosaic of Canadian folk song. Part of this mosaic is supplied by the folk songs of Canada brought by European and Anglo-Saxon settlers to the new land."[12] She describes how the French colony at Québec brought French immigrants, followed before long by waves of immigrants from Great Britain, Germany, and other European countries, all bringing music from their homelands, some of which survives into the present day. Ethnographer and folklorist Marius Barbeau estimated that well over ten thousand French folk songs and their variants had been collected in Canada. Many of the older ones had by then died out in France.
Music as professionalized paid entertainment grew relatively slowly in Canada, especially remote rural areas, through the 19th and early 20th centuries. While in urban music clubs of the dance hall/vaudeville variety became popular, followed by jazz, rural Canada remained mostly a land of traditional music. Yet when American radio networks began broadcasting into Canada in the 1920s and 1930s, the audience for Canadian traditional music progressively declined in favour of American Nashville-style country music and urban styles like jazz. The Americanization of Canadian music led the Canadian Radio League to lobby for a national public broadcaster in the 1930s, eventually leading to the creation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 1936. The CBC promoted Canadian music, including traditional music, on its radio and later television services, but the mid-century craze for all things "modern" led to the decline of folk music relative to rock and pop. Canada was however influenced by the folk music revival of the 1960s, when local venues such as the Montreal Folk Workshop, and other folk clubs and coffee houses across the country, became crucibles for emerging songwriters and performers as well as for interchange with artists visiting from abroad.
American traditional music is also called roots music. Roots music is a broad category of music including
musicologists as something distinctly new. It is considered "roots music" because it served as the basis of music later developed in the United States, including rock and roll, contemporary folk music, rhythm and blues, and jazz
. Some of these genres are considered to be traditional folk music.
African-American folk music in the area has roots in
geometric shapes that were designed to associate a shape with its pitch. Sacred harp singing became popular in many Oklahoma rural communities, regardless of ethnicity."[292] Later the blues tradition developed, with roots in and parallels to sacred music.[292] Then jazz developed, born from a "blend of ragtime, gospel, and blues"[292]
Anglo-Scots-Irish music traditions gained a place in Oklahoma after the
courts of China, India, and Indonesia are preserved in Asian communities throughout the state, and popular song genres are continually layered on to these classical music forms"[292]
"It's self-perpetuating, regenerative. It's what you'd call a perennial American song. I don't think it needs a revival, resuscitation. It lives and flourishes. It really just needs people who are 18 years old to get exposed to it. But it will go on with or without them. The folk song is more powerful than anything on the radio, than anything that's released...It's that distillation of the voices that goes on for a long, long time, and that's what makes them strong."[293]
"Folk music revival" refers to either a period of renewed interest in traditional folk music, or to an event or period which transforms it; the latter usually includes a social activism component. A prominent example of the former is the British folk revival of approximately 1890–1920. The most prominent and influential example of the latter (to the extent that it is usually called "the folk music revival") is the folk revival of the mid 20th century, centered in the English-speaking world which gave birth to contemporary folk music.[294] See the "Contemporary folk music" article for a description of this revival.
One earlier revival influenced western classical music. Such composers as Percy Grainger, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Béla Bartók made field recordings or transcriptions of folk singers and musicians.
In Spain,
Francisco Tarrega established the guitar as Spain's national instrument. Modern Spanish folk artists abound (Mil i Maria, Russian Red
, et al.) modernizing while respecting the traditions of their forebears.
Flamenco grew in popularity through the 20th century, as did northern styles such as the Celtic music of Galicia. French classical composers, from Bizet to Ravel, also drew upon Spanish themes, and distinctive Spanish genres became universally recognized.
Folk music revivals or roots revivals also encompass a range of phenomena around the world where there is a renewed interest in traditional music. This is often by the young, often in the traditional music of their own country, and often included new incorporation of social awareness, causes, and evolutions of new music in the same style. Nueva canción, a similar evolution of a new form of socially committed music occurred in several Spanish-speaking countries.
It is sometimes claimed that the earliest United States folk music festival was the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival,
National Folk Festival (USA) is an itinerant folk festival in the United States.[298] Since 1934, it has been run by the National Council for the Traditional Arts (NCTA) and has been presented in 26 communities around the nation.[299] After leaving some of these communities, the National Folk Festival has spun off several locally run folk festivals in its wake including the Lowell Folk Festival,[300] the Richmond Folk Festival,[301] the American Folk Festival[302] and, most recently, the Montana Folk Festival.[303]
The Newport Folk Festival is an annual folk festival held near Newport, Rhode Island.[304] It ran most years from 1959 to 1970 and from 1985 to the present, with an attendance of approximately 10,000 people each year.[305]
The four-day Philadelphia Folk Festival began in 1962.[306] It is sponsored by the non-profit Philadelphia Folksong Society.[307] The event hosts contemporary and traditional artists in genres including World/Fusion, Celtic, Singer-Songwriter, Folk Rock, Country, Klezmer, and Dance.[308][309] It is held annually on the third weekend in August.[310] The event now hosts approximately 12,000 visitors, presenting bands on 6 stages.[311]
Sidmouth Festival began in 1954,[313] and Cambridge Folk Festival began in 1965.[314] The Cambridge Folk Festival in Cambridge, England is noted for having a very wide definition of who can be invited as folk musicians.[315] The "club tents" allow attendees to discover large numbers of unknown artists, who, for ten or 15 minutes each, present their work to the festival audience.[316]
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^Forster, Michael (2019). "Johann Gottfried von Herder". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved October 16, 2021.
^Paskaleva Lipar, Blagomira. "The influence of Bulgarian folk music on Petar Christoskov 's Suites and Rhapsodies for solo violin". LSU Digital Commons. Retrieved October 17, 2021. During the last years of Ottoman rule Turkish administrators, Balkan merchants, and emigrant workers maintained continuous inter-city contact, spreading new styles through the Balkans. Their popularization marks the beginning of both professional and amateur institutionalized musical activity.
^"The Sami Yoik". www.laits.utexas.edu. Retrieved October 18, 2021.
^Kaminsky, David (2005) pp. 33–41. "Hidden Traditions: Conceptualizing Swedish Folk Music in the Twenty-First Century." Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University.
^Jersild, Margareta (1976) pp. 53–66. "Om förhållandet mellan vokalt och instrumentalt i svensk folkmusik. Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning 58(2): 53–66. (in Swedish)
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