For more detailed discussion of traditional music, see under separate country headings. See also Europe, pre- and proto-historic.
3. Historical contexts and forms.
JAMES PORTER
Compared with the polyvocal rhythms of sub-Saharan Africa and the heterophony found in most of Asia, Europeans have evolved a rich density of harmonic and melodic structures in their traditional music, some of these derived from culture contact with Africa, the Americas or Asia but most nurtured within Europe itself. Some structures are almost pan-European in regional modifications (e.g. the ballad, calendrical songs, moresca dances), others unique to a region (e.g. Icelandic rímur, Andalusian flamenco, Romanian doină). Furthermore, the growth of art music and urban popular music over ten centuries reflects a dynamically changing set of social structures, each with its special view of music's purpose, from Plato's sanctions on certain modes in ancient Greek society, to the patronage systems of feudalism and capitalism celebrating heroic or bourgeois virtues, and to 20th-century Marxist concepts that contrasted traditional folksongs with songs of a ‘progressive’ character within a strictly controlled polity.
Ethnologists usually divide Europe into Mediterranean, Western and Eastern zones on the basis of language, religion and social structure. One factor in the east-west division has been an unstable zone of political change stretching from Finland to the Balkans, a zone that also marks a transition in the rate of historical change between east and west. But an equally important lateral division cross-cutting the Alps can be posited as a result of settlement by Ionians, Carthaginians, Moors and Ottoman Turks in the Mediterranean littoral, Iberia and the Balkans, and because of a shift north and west in centres of commerce, wealth and political power during the period of world exploration after 1500. Furthermore, one could argue for a ‘central Europe’ that includes the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland on the basis of these countries' lengthy contact with western Europe and their mainly Catholic rather than Orthodox affiliation. The pattern of religion in eastern Europe proper is complicated, in any case, by historical ties to Rome or Vienna, notably in Croatia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Transylvanian Romania, Ruthenia and Ukraine. Islamic groups are also part of this complexity, in Bosnia, for instance, or Chechenia. Peoples who have been conventionally excluded from historical views of European culture (e.g. Armenians, Kazakhs, Sami) are likewise important for tracking stylistic influence from Asia.
Cultural analysts could reasonably propose, again, a horizontal segmentation of Europe into north, central and south in terms of climate, topography and vegetation, factors that affect not only animal husbandry, food production and occupation but also activities such as the making of musical instruments: the willow flute of the Norwegian shepherd (seljeflřyte), for example, can be cut from the tree only at a certain time in spring, while the special type of cane needed to make the Sardinian triple clarinet (launeddas), for example, grows only in certain parts of Sardinia and nowhere else in the Mediterranean region. A lateral division of Europe is in many ways more helpful than a vertical one for understanding sonorities: the dominance of string textures (bowed or plucked) in northern Europe from the Baltic to Iceland; the rich harmonies of strings and winds in the central, circumalpine belt and Danube basin (where the symphony orchestra developed); the clashing vocal polyphonies and gritty or gleaming idiophones of the Balkans and Mediterranean. This picture is complicated, however, by such pan-European instruments as the bagpipe, fiddle, six-hole flute or accordion in their local and supraregional forms.
Similarly, vocal idioms cannot always be easily fitted into a lateral division since styles are spread across climatic regions. The Baltic countries and the Balkans, for instance, may share analogous polyphonic styles because of ancient trade routes. A freely melismatic line, idiomatic to the westernmost Hebrides and south-west Ireland, may stem from pre-18th century bardic practice or quite possibly from contact with the Mediterranean over long stretches of time. ‘Fringe’ areas such as the Baltic, Balkans or Britain and Ireland, as well as evolving distinctive styles of their own, have conserved or transformed musical ideas imported from elsewhere, although as a principle this could also be extended to Europe as a whole in its historical debt to west Asia and Saharan Africa. But styles are also shaped by tonal structures: wide-ranging, modally inclined melodies predominate in northern Europe; in central Europe, the sharpened leading note and a harmonic underpinning systematize tonal schemes; while in eastern Europe and the Mediterranean a darker, drone-based tonality of narrow range, with links to ancient Byzantine or Islamic practice, has evolved alongside pentatonic tunes.
The diffusion of singing styles, song genres, dance types and instruments has been in progress, of course, since before the Roman Empire. Early modern imperial powers such as Austria-Hungary, Russia or the Ottomans, by facilitating contact among their peoples until World War I, perpetuated a mosaic of popular urban and rural styles that continued to interact into the 20th century. Radical political change, however, such as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 seriously damaged the traditional culture of Russia and especially the Ukraine under Stalin in the 1930s. But the interest, beginning around the ferment of the Napoleonic period, in traditional and national forms of expression in Europe, especially music, dance and song, is still evident. This interest was extended by the invention of the phonograph in 1877 and by a burst of collecting activity just before World War I and again shortly after World War II. The revitalization of traditional materials, resulting from ideological goals, scholarly curiosity, or reassertion of cultural identity emerges most obviously today in the folk festivals that proliferate in towns and villages from Ireland to Finland and from Iceland to the Black Sea.
Europe, bounded geographically by the Atlantic, Mediterranean, the Caucasus and the Urals, in commonly thought of as a unified culture area. But it is also an agglomeration of regions and nation states that are linked, often loosely, by history, politics and culture. These regions, with their border areas in which culture contact is most pronounced, can be subdivided as follows: 1. Britain and Ireland (Northern Ireland); 2. Scandinavia (Arctic, Baltic); 3. Germany and the Low Countries; 4. France and francophone areas (Belgium, Switzerland); 5. Iberia and the Atlantic islands (Azores, Madeira); 6. Italy and the Central Mediterranean islands (Malta, Sardinia, Sicily); 7. East-central Europe; 8. The Balkans and Greek islands (Cyprus); 9. Baltic countries and Finland; 10. Russia, Belarus and Ukraine (Caucasus). These divisions overlap at obvious points and some contain diverse languages. Using the analogy of a ‘Balkan’ region, again, one could argue for a musically-distinct ‘Alpine’ or ‘Caucasus’ region in which peoples share a lifestyle less wholly dependent on language or ethnicity. On the other hand, forced migrations and shifting populations have affected musical life, and supranational groups such as Gypsies (see ‘Gypsy music’ for information on Gypsies, Roma, Gitan and related terms), Jews and Travellers have played significant roles as performers and disseminators. Europe's regions, in any case, contain within them conflicts of class, ethnicity and gender that are mirrored in musical expression, as in the case of minorities (children, criminals, deviants, the urban poor), whose musical life ‘national’ collections have often neglected. An analysis, therefore, that accounts for differences as well as similarities within regional divisions allows for a more balanced, ethnographic view of Europe's musical traditions as a whole.
In the late Renaissance a new consciousness of history spurred interest in traditional music. Given the central position of the Alps, it is not surprising that the cowherd's song known as ranz des vaches or Kühreihen figures early in the literature (RISM 15456). A song collection in which many items are traditional folksongs is Georg Forster's Frische teutsche Liedlein (1539–56). Energetic publishing of European songs and dance tunes continued in Britain and Ireland with such compilations as Playford's English Dancing Master (1651–1728), D'Urfey's Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719–20), John and William Neale's A Collection of the Most Celebrated Irish Tunes (1724), and William Thomson's Orpheus Caledonius, a Collection of the Best Scotch Songs (1725, rev. 2/1733). In France, songs of urban entertainment began to be gathered in compilations such as J.-B.-C. Ballard's La clef des chansonniers, ou Receuil des vaudevilles depuis cent ans et plus, which appeared in 1717. Allan Ramsay's Scottish pastoral, The Gentle Shepherd (1725), included songs and became a ballad opera following the huge success of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728). This vogue for ballad opera and for ‘Scotch’ tunes in Britain marked a reaction to the dominant Italian style of urban classical music and stimulated the discovery of older song materials: the impact of James MacPherson's Ossianic Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760) and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) was felt in European literature, art and music throughout the 19th century.
A pivotal figure at this point in the study of musical traditions was J.G. Herder (1744–1803), who early in his career as critic, philosopher, theologian and leading figure in the Sturm und Drang literary movement became acquainted with Latvian folksongs in Riga. Herder felt that the soul of a people (Volk) was most readily perceived in its songs. He coined the word Volkslied in the early 1770s, and his best-known compilation, Volkslieder (1778–9), influenced collections such as Arnim and Brentano's Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806–8). By this time, interest in native song had accelerated across Europe: James Johnson, aided by Burns, published The Scots Musical Museum (1787–1803); L'vov and Pratsch brought out their compilation of Russian folksongs (1790, 5/1955); and the material for Kirsha Danilov's collection of Russian epic songs was being gathered in the 1780s, mostly in south-west Siberia (1804, 2/1818 with melodies). ‘National’ compilations began to proliferate: in Sweden (e.g. Geijer and Afzelius, C1814–18), Austria (Tschischka and Schottky, F1819), Germany (Erk and Irmer, D1838–45), Bohemia (Erben, F1842, 2/1862–4, enlarged 3/1886–8) and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Herder's interest in language had launched the field of comparative philology, which established affinities among European languages derived from the parent language, Sanskrit. At this time, comparative folklore studies noted similarities in European tales and songs, and later students of myth and religion identified common patterns of social organization in early European communities.
Field collecting of songs and music grew proportionately with this disciplinary expansion. As the 19th century progressed, scholars of musical traditions began to withdraw from idealism and to replace armchair compiling with field research. Massive ethnographic collections that included songs or music were undertaken by scholars such as Oskar Kolberg in Poland (Pieśni ludu polskiego (‘Songs of the Polish people’), 1857/R), Evald Tang Kristensen in Denmark (Jyske folkeminder (‘Folklore from Jutland’), 1871–97), or the Czech painter and writer Ludvík Kuba, who assembled a vast collection of Slavonic music he had begun to publish privately (Slovanstvo ve svych zpevech (‘The Slav world in its song’), 1884–1929). Compilations of this sort naturally had political aspects to them: Kolberg's work, for example, was undertaken while Poland was still partitioned (in the period 1795–1914); Kuba's folksong collecting was encouraged by President Masaryk after Czechoslovakia became a republic in 1918.
The major impact on scholarship during the later 19th century, however, was the invention of the phonograph (1877), which not only expanded the possibilities of field research but allowed greater accuracy in transcribing music. Capitalizing on the phonograph's ability to play back music as well as speech, pioneers in the recording of traditional music and song at the turn of the 20th century were Béla Vikár (Hungary), Yevgeniya Linyova (Russia), Humbert Pernot (Greece), Hjalmar Thuren (the Faeroes), Karol Medvecky (Slovakia), Kodály and Bartók (Hungary), Grainger (England), Otakar Zich (Bohemia) and Matija Murko in Bosnia-Hercegovina. At this time, the phonogram archives in Vienna (1899) and Berlin (1900) were founded, the latter becoming especially important for the study of traditional music worldwide. Later national archives were the Discoteca di Stato, Rome (1928), the BBC Gramophone Library (1931), the Phonothčque Nationale, Paris (1938), International Archives of Folk Music, Geneva (1944) and the British Institute of Recorded Sound (1948).
With his editions and studies of folk music from Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Yugoslavia, Bartók's centrality to comparative musical folklore (as it was then known) is not in dispute. No other scholar accomplished as much in field research and analysis, which is astonishing when his brilliance as a composer is also considered. Yet the influence of Bartók's methods, developing from a context of late 19th-century evolutionism in which natural science was the model, has not always been positive, especially in eastern Europe. Academies of science emphasized structural analysis and classification to a degree that resulted in abstraction from the texture of real music-making. An argument could be made that Bartók's best analyses are often to be found, as a synthesis of musical elements, in his arrangements of folk music. The Romanian scholar Constantin Brăiloiu (1893–1958) extended Bartók's methods to specific genres (G1951, Eng. trans., 1984). Meantime, Stalinist policies in the Soviet Union had created difficult conditions for the study of traditional music in its context, though the field research of Klyment Kvitka (1880–1953), on instruments, performers and the distribution of Slavonic songs, is significant. Of the same generation, Vasil Stoin (1880–1938) solidified a research tradition in Bulgaria, collecting over 9000 melodies, and Adolf Chybiński (1880–1952), a noted historian of Polish music, carried out ethnomusicological studies of the Tatra mountain people.
In Austria, Josef Pommer (1845–1918) founded the influential journal Das deutsche Volkslied (1899), through which his work on the yodel became widely known; Robert Lach (1874–1958) also studied the genre in 1928. The German scholar John Meier (1864–1953) initiated the German Folksong Archive at Freiburg in 1914 in order to study German folk music, especially ballads. But the theory that led Meier to posit the idea of Kunstlieder im Volksmund (‘art songs in the mouth of the people’) followed that of the folklorist Hans Naumann (1922), who offered the notion of ‘sunken culture’ (gesunkenes Kulturgut) to explain the origins of folk culture in the culture of the upper classes. This concept, which naturally tended to underestimate the extent of folk creativity, was known as Rezeptionstheorie, a doctrine also adopted in France by Patrice Coirault (1875–1959) in contradistinction to the ideas of Julien Tiersot (1857–1936) and others who followed, in the main, Herder's original idea of collective creation by ‘the people’.
The English scholar Cecil J. Sharp (1859–1924) was something of a rival to Bartók, at least in terms of initial influence. While Bartók later in life took a more positive stance about urban music and music of Roma groups in Hungary, Sharp's conception of folk music as essentially rural remained constant. Carried into a larger arena by his disciple, Maud Karpeles (1885–1976), Sharp's definition was officially adopted by the International Folk Music Council in 1954 (though quietly abandoned by 1980). The tripartite process delineated by Sharp consisted in continuity (of melodies over time), variation (by individual singers) and selection (of aesthetically pleasing songs by the community), a Darwinian view of folksong that idealized the rural context from which it was supposed to spring but ignored the influence of popular street literature. Sharp's concept was allied to his desire to educate children in musical taste and to stimulate a school of English composition. The latter goal bore fruit in Holst, Vaughan Williams and others. But Sharp was less meticulous than Bartók (or Grainger) in transcribing and publishing texts and tunes. His idealism, though it energized the Folk-Song Society (see English Folk Dance and Song Society) and influenced concepts of folk music far beyond England, finally gave way after the death of Maud Karpeles to more perceptive studies of traditional and popular music-making.
The founding of the International Folk Music Council (IFMC) in London in 1947 was an attempt to coordinate the interests of researchers, most of them working in Europe. In this development Maud Karpeles was central as honorary secretary from 1947 to 1965. The Council's first president, Vaughan Williams, was later succeeded by Jaap Kunst and Zoltán Kodály, all figures involved with regional musical traditions in Europe. The body was renamed the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) in 1980 as the term ‘folk’ was considered inappropriate for many societies outside Europe, as well as for its overtones of romanticism. This followed a general trend in west and central Europe to purge the terms ‘folklore’, ‘folksong’ and ‘folk music’ and to substitute ‘traditional’, ‘popular’ and ‘vernacular’ or, for the study of the subject matter, ‘music ethnology’ or, more prominently, ‘ethnomusicology’.
The methods for studying the totality of music in Europe are rapidly developing, even for prehistory. Curt Sachs (A1939) adumbrated the problems of European musical prehistory which from the 1980s were taken up by the ICTM Study Group on Music Archaeology. Werner Danckert (F1939, 2/1970) had categorized European musical idioms on the basis of language groups, using the rather static, historically derived Kulturkreis (culture circle). In a similar vein, though without the Kulturkreis perspective, Walter Wiora postulated unity in melodies he believed to be genetically related over time (A1952), also pointing to the fertile use of folk melody by composers (A1957). Scholars in Hungary, stimulated by their unique Finno-Ugric language island, eagerly pursued comparative studies: Bartók's essay on the music of Hungary and its neighbours (F1934) led the way, while Bence Szabolcsi (F1950) attempted a history of melody, like Marius Schneider (D1934–5) reaching beyond Europe to Asia to explain the presence in Europe of maqām-like structures or pentatonicism. Influenced by the Marxist philosopher Gyorgy Lukács, János Maróthy (F1966) used social rather than historical or geographical determinants to analyse the history of European song. Alan Lomax (A1968) tried a novel approach to global musical idioms based on behavioural anthropology, employing factors of singing style rather than structure to identify an ‘old European’ (central, eastern), a ‘north-western’ and an ‘old high culture’ (Mediterranean) singing style (A1974), though his hypotheses are often based on uneven samples from each country or region.
The work of the ICTM Study Groups has improved both ethnographic and comparative methods in studying the traditional music of Europe. The group on folk music instruments (founded 1962) has, from 1969, produced volumes of proceedings of its annual meetings. The group has also sponsored a handbook series of regional instruments (Studia instrumentorum musicae popularis). The study group's aims were to build a typology of European folk instruments and to solve problems of documentation. These aims were taken up by other groups, the first by the Study Group on Analysis and Systematization of Folksong Melodies (Elschek, A1991) and the second by the Study Group on Historical Sources of Folk Music (Suppan, A1991). The impetus to classify melodies originally came from Bartók and Kodály and was implemented by Hungarian scholars (e.g. Járdányi and others, F1961) within the framework of a national collection that grouped music into genres (Corpus musicae popularis hungaricae, 1951–). Another early ICTM Study Group with a partial focus on Europe was that an ethnochoreology; members set forth a ‘European’ approach to the holistic analysis of traditional dance (Giurghescu and Torp, A1991). The first groups of the 1960s were joined in the 80s and 90s by others on a range of subjects.
In these developments, which under the influence of anthropology tended to assign less prominence than before to the technical analysis of musical structure, central and eastern Europe remained somewhat apart. Here analytical methods reflect a diversified perception of elements and their relative importance. Classification, for example, has depended on conflicting systems developed in the various regions: the use of melodic structure as a basis in Hungary, for example, or that of metro-rhythmic features in Moravia, Poland and Slovakia. The Ukrainian scholar V.L. Hoshovsky evolved a system to compare regional styles that would lead, in his view, to an international catalogue of melodic types (H1975). In cross-cultural research, Nikolai Kaufman has sought common Slavic elements in Bulgarian and east Slavic folk music (G1968), and Anna Czekanowska (G1972) has analysed narrow-range melodies in the Slavic countries using a taxonomic system (dendrite) developed in Wrocław. Scholars in the Soviet orbit have also researched important single genres such as calendar songs (Zemtsovsky, H1975; Mozheiko, H1985).
Current research, which is pursued by North American scholars as well as Europeans, is balanced between quantitative and qualitative patterns. Quantitative research, now often computer-driven, tends to engage entire musical genres, though computers have also been used to analyse vocal timbre. A ‘systematic’ orientation links this field to comparative study and the sociology of music on the one hand and to biological, perceptual and acoustical investigation on the other. Large-scale comparative studies are offset by field research in villages; such studies complement a parallel focus on families or individual musicians, latterly locating performers within a process of ‘endofolklorization’ that is a response to tourism or a crisis in personal or regional identity (Lortat-Jacob, E1982). As a consequence, facets of gender, power, ideology and metaphoric explanation have marked a new phase in uncovering conceptions of music and how these might be considered ‘personal’, ‘regional’, ‘national’ or even ‘European’. The shift of focus is significant for methodology: a result has been to narrow the social and communicative gap between scholar and performer that had, in any case, been lessening since World War II. Until more information is available, cross-cultural method is limited to broad features such as history, content and style, structure and texture. Mediation of various sorts must also be taken into account: who provided the evidence, and why, are important clues to its nature.
Although ‘traditional’ musical forms, styles and behaviour in Europe largely crystallized in the 17th century with the growth of cities, trade and exploration, some older historical traits are worth noting. Classical writers such as Tacitus, Strabo and Diodorus Siculus cite music in connection with warfare, the latter two mentioning the function of the bard among the Celtic peoples encountered by the legions of an expanding Roman Empire. Later, Hilary of Poitiers (c315–67) and Augustine of Hippo (354–430) mention the melismatic jubilus, the wordless song of peasant labourers that could have a numinous significance, as in accompanying ritual punishment. A Tyrolean martyrology of 397 cites the tuba (possibly some kind of alphorn) exorcising evil, summoning the people to worship and sounding the alarm for battle. Bells of various kinds had similar functions. Somewhat later, chordophones were used for eulogistic purposes: the Roman lyre, ‘barbarian’ harp and British rotte (the last of these cognate in name at least with the early medieval Irish ‘cruit’, Welsh ‘crwth’ and English ‘crowd’) and other northern types of plucked or bowed instrument. The bow was used in west Asia in the 9th century and seems to have reached Europe fairly quickly. The Muslim invasion of Iberia (711) created an important watershed for the introduction of Arab musical concepts.
Another stream of influence came about through the Celtic-inspired sequence (c850–c1150), a sacred chant set syllabically with a Latin text that was often tied to a saint's feast day. The assimilation of pre-Christian practices by the Church, however, was not entirely successful. Dance and drama continued to reflect central moments in the seasonal and life cycles with music playing a part. Pre-Lenten carnivals had their popular, often ribald songs, as did the Feast of Fools, a 15th-century record of which accuses the lower Paris clergy of singing bawdy songs in church. Under the banner of religion pilgrims, Crusaders and flagellants sang or danced to music on their way to Rome, Santiago de Compostela or Canterbury, picking up songs and tunes or diffusing them as they passed through towns and villages. Itinerant minstrels and jongleurs also carried secular songs and dance to much of Europe: German minstrels were playing in Estonia and Lithuania in the 14th century and could also be found, with Croatian, Serbian and Greek colleagues, in the cities of the Adriatic in the 14th and 15th centuries. Venetian influence allowed French and Italian musicians to visit the Greek islands, where they introduced ballads which are still sung. Church music could also find its way into secular life: a ceremonial harvest-home song from Zobor, Hungary (now western Slovakia), derives from a Passiontide alleluia that belongs originally to the repertory of Gregorian chant (ex.1).
A borrowing process among church, popular and learned forms is evident in monody (caroles, estampies, pastourelles) and in the melodies of penitential laudi or Geisslerlieder. Later contrafacta and parodies show the same tendency. Oddly, the French musical theorist Johannes de Grocheio (fl c1300) does not mention laudi or Geisslerlieder in his concept of musica vulgaris (vernacular music), possibly because of a papal edict against popular motets. His term covered, rather, orally transmitted vocal genres (rural and urban), professional genres influenced by folk practice and the growth of towns, didactic or school songs and artistic genres for the wealthy and privileged. Polyphony or multi-voiced singing may well have existed in some kind of developed form before the notation of organum in the 9th-century Musica enchiriadis, but whether this resembled the parallel organum-like Icelandic tvisöngur (twin-song) practised into the 20th century, or the apparent heterophony in Welsh and northern English singing described by Gerald of Wales in the 12th century, is uncertain. It is possible that examples of partsong such as the 12th-century Hymn to St Magnus in the Orkney Islands or the 13th-century English round Sumer is icumen in reflect practice at a popular as well as a cultivated level.
Traditional instruments in the Middle Ages are documented by such scholars as Odo of Cluny (d 942), who describes the organistrum, a predecessor of the hurdy-gurdy, while John Cotton (c1100) and the Anglo-Norman poet Wace both mention the bagpipe. The bagpipe also appears in the pastourelle drama Jeu de Robin et de Marion (1283) by Adam de la Halle, the French trouvčre poet and composer. The instrument of the jongleurs, the itinerant entertainers, was the vičle (fiddle) and wandering musicians created a vogue for pipe and tabor, a solo combination still found in scattered patches of Europe (Basque region, Provence and a revived form in England). Skomorokhi (buffoons) were noted in Russia for their humorous or comic songs. The guitar, which accompanied lyric song in the Mediterranean region, appears pictorially for the first time in the glorious Cantigas de Santa Maria, commissioned by King Alfonso el Sabio (1221–84), along with some contemporary instruments. Somewhat earlier, the short-necked lute had already been introduced by the Moors, who in other respects were spreading urban music of Arab-Persian origin over much of southern Europe.
The transition from feudalism to capitalism in the West in the later Middle Ages saw the decline of epic songs such as the older Hildebrandslied or Beowulf and the rise of compact, rounded forms such as the ballad (from about 1200), which suited a newly confident bourgeois class more interested in trade than in heroism, wars and territorial gain. Towns began to hire musicians in official capacities, and the secular theatre, firmly established in France, Spain and Italy during the 15th and 16th centuries, included songs as part of the action. In Germany, musically educated classes affected music-making through the use of printed materials, while artisan guilds (e.g. Meistersinger) practised individualistic composition rather than folksongs of the older, anonymous style. With the ascendancy of the Franco-Flemish school in learned music, the significance of the Low Countries as the matrix for musical activity of all kinds became apparent, and the Netherlands, not surprisingly, also became a cultural mediator between north and south.
Upheavals between the 14th and 16th centuries were mirrored in topical and satirical songs. A growing cultural bias toward the values of the bourgeoisie can be found in songbooks such as the Lochamer Liederbuch (1455–60) and the souterliedekens (1540), the latter a compilation of Dutch Reformation tunes in everyday use. In Spain, the Cancionero Musical de Palacio (c1500), besides containing common European elements, includes songs of the ordinary people alongside those of the aristocracy. The exchange and transformation of musical material among different social strata that this implies continued on two levels: in the widespread use of popular tunes by church and court composers, and in the formation and diffusion of popular melodic models. Kodály notes how a song from the Zobor region (now in Slovakia), for example, used for keeping spinners awake at night, borrows a 13th-century tune from a Spanish manuscript that probably came to Hungary through the medium of a Czech hymnbook of 1576 (1971, p.107).
The evolution of a widespread melodic model is exemplified by the tune first printed around 1470 as the basse danse melody Le petit roysin, later transformations of which have been noted as far apart as England and Romania (ex.2). The Spanish vihuelistas (lutenists) drew on folktunes and English virginal composers borrowed melodies such as the Irish Callino custurame (Cailín ó chois tSiúire mé: ‘I am a girl from the Siur-side’), although the garbled title indicates that they probably had no idea what it meant. Roma and Jewish migrations also prompted melodic and harmonic fertilization as well as the diffusion of popular tunes. By the 16th century, supranational features co-existed with regional ones, and extensive cultural contact gave rise to melodic formulas modified by local performing styles. The impact of Islam reinforced the division of Mediterranean Europe into a northern and a southern zone and solidified elements in Balkan song that were already present as a result of the region's crossroads position. The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans and Hungary (14th–16th centuries), however, had a decisive effect on peasant genres in those areas by suspending their natural development.
From 1500 to 1800 the most striking cultural and musical differences were religious ones. The Jews of Spain had their own minstrels and folksongs, taking their ballads from the host culture but adapting the content to free them of Christian references. Iberian Muslims also retained their cultural identity after forcible conversion, continuing to practise their religion in secret. In spite of the edicts of their own clergy, Moriscos danced the zambra and sang their ballads in which the Muslim hero always won. Jews and Moriscos were ethnic as well as religious minorities, as were the Roma groups who flooded into Europe from the 14th century onwards. The importance of Roma as performers, with their essentially oral culture, make them central figures not only in the diffusion of musical materials but also in the adaptation and transformation of popular musical forms among those peoples from whom they found acceptance or at least a temporary home. Balkan Roma also acted as a bridge between Turkish and native forms. Having formerly played for Turkish occupiers, they took their repertory to the villages when they changed patrons (Balkan music had in any case displayed eastern influence long before the Turks arrived in the 14th century).
An important mechanism for the diffusion of popular culture and music during these centuries, both in northern and southern Europe, was the broadside sheet containing folk and popular song texts, often sung by balladmongers or bench-singers (German: Bänkelsanger; Italian: cantimbanchi) who might accompany themselves on the hurdy-gurdy (French vielle; German: Drehleier), show off illustrations of their ballads and sell them afterwards. In Italy, the cantastorie (singers of tales) wandered from one piazza to another, earning a living by relating heroic songs and accompanying themselves with a one-string fiddle rather like the Yugoslav guslar. Street cries, too, became popular in 16th- and 17th-century German and Italian quodlibets. Singers and entertainers sought out places of congress, such as squares and bridges, and the Pont-Neuf in Paris became such a cultural crossroads after 1600, to the extent that pont-neuf came to mean no more than ‘song’.
Social strife gave rise to song: political songs developed in Russia and Germany before the Peasant Wars of 1524–5. While feudalism lasted in some parts of eastern Europe until the 20th century, colonialism, despite its negative political basis, did not always impede musical interaction. Yet world exploration in the 16th century coincided with continuing political conflict: the Jacobite period (1688–c1750) gave rise to partisan songs in Britain while the Duke of Marlborough's victories in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) spread songs about him as far as Canada. Meanwhile, the eradication of the Celtic clan system in Wales, Ireland and Scotland (16th–18th centuries) made the itinerant harper a familiar if down-at-heel figure, one who had become a relic of the past, in Ireland at least, by the time of the notable Belfast Harp Festival of 1792. By the time of the French Revolution, Europe was a musical complex in which traditional songs and instrumental styles had both expanded and come under strong urban influence. This in turn resulted from economic forces that, on another plane, were leading Europeans to probe cultures beyond their own shores.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw a continued growth of urban culture and entertainments, not least popular musical comedies with characters derived from the commedia dell'arte, and the songs in these puppet or marionette plays reflected the popular musical taste of the day. Ballad opera, which arose in Britain in the early 18th century as a reaction against the florid arioso style of Italian opera and the demands of urban fashion, picked up folktunes as well as popular tunes of the day and incorporated them into the play. John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) showed how easily remembered, singable and older (as well as more recent) tunes could be incorporated into urban theatre. By 1733, 70 ballad operas had been staged in London. A little later, Mozart's Singspiel Die Zauberflöte (1791) effectively employed folklike tunes as part of its appeal, also mirroring a popular tradition of music theatre in Vienna. Rural traditions, in the craze for pastoral culture influenced by Rousseau's ‘return to nature’ philosophy, were rapidly taken up by fashionable society, as in the cult of the vielle ŕ roue (hurdy-gurdy) among French aristocrats.
During the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath, the Romantic movement derived a great deal of its strength from consciousness of ‘national’ traditions. This awareness inspired the partitioning of Europe after the Congress of Vienna (1815). With the great revolutions of 1848, European empires were threatened by peoples who saw the right of self-determination as a logical extension of their cultural heritage. Composers such as Chopin and Smetana incorporated folklike tunes into their compositions in an expression of national feeling that differed in scope and purpose from Haydn's, Beethoven's, Schubert's or Schumann's Ossian- or Burns-inspired settings of folksongs. Mid-century agitation was frequently in the form of political songs and theatre. In another 70 years, World War I finally swept away the illusion of progress, bringing to the fore the demands of the exploited and powerless. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 came on the heels of 19th-century recording of the epic bďlinď with plots, mostly set in medieval Russia, which were remembered and sung by peasants. It was at this juncture that the invention of the phonograph allowed scholars influenced by theories of cultural evolution to ‘discover’ and ‘rescue’ songs and music more effectively from the old, pre-1914 Europe. Bartók, Janáček and Stravinsky, all of whom saw folk music materials as a means of freeing themselves from 19th-century Romanticism, captured the spirit of peasant art in their compositions written between 1900 and, in Bartók's case at least, World War II.
A long history of documentation in Europe means that musical culture must be interpreted in historical terms. Distinctive strophic song forms developed in Europe in the later Middle Ages, for example, and styles of performing song and dance accompaniment were shaped by individuals caught in changing social structures and values. The old world dominated by the Church and its festivals (e.g. carnival, in which both upper and lower classes mingled) continued on a popular level in the carnivals of Paris, Florence, Nuremberg and countless smaller cities, and there is evidence that poets and aristocrats in the 15th and 16th centuries delighted in popular culture and music. These upper classes began to note down folksongs in great numbers by the 16th century, even though they may at the same time have felt ambivalent about the cultural systems of the lower classes. Aristocrats were able to participate in popular traditions such as the Lenten carnival, but the reverse was rarely true. This suggests that the creative stream of tradition flowed from popular sources towards the élite rather than the other way around.
The end of feudalism meant new audiences in the towns and cities and urbanization, which met the new demands of capitalism, began soon after 1200. But differences in language, ideology and territorial ambition ensured that the more populous peoples, still governed by autocratic rulers, would attempt to overpower smaller nations (culturally as well as politically). In the British Isles, for instance, Plantagenet and Tudor monarchs attempted to suppress the Gaelic- and Welsh-speaking peoples in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. As a result there is a sizeable body of political protest song, especially in Ireland, that marks the struggle for autonomy. The borrowing and exchange of styles of dance, poetry and song across cultural boundaries, on the other hand, could defy old antipathies: Swedish dances imitated those of Poland in the rhythms and tunes for the polska dance, the English adapted the French carole, and border zones such as Alsace-Lorraine, south Tyrol, Thrace or Ulster acted as conduits for musical idioms as well as for specific song genres. In this process of borrowing and transmission itinerant craftsmen or journeymen, pilgrims, shepherds, soldiers, sailors and thieves, as well as minstrels and professional beggar-musicians grinding the hurdy-gurdy, played a part.
The shape of the land is significant in shaping musical expression. Heroic songs and leaping dances, for example, are common to mountainous regions such as the Basque country, Norway, the Scottish Highlands, Albania and the Carpathians. In the far north, too, isolation or rugged terrain ensured the continuity of older localized practices: narrative dance-song in the Faeroes is an idiom that has remained vigorous, even allowing for recent revival. The singing of heroic rímur in Iceland still draws adherents. Norway has promoted its folk music mainly through the Hardanger fiddle as an emblem of national identity; the instrument also communicates complex cultural codes by musical means. Like the deep glacial valleys of Norway and Sweden, pastoral areas of the Alps have high-pitched and wide-ranging forms such as the yodel, which evolved from signalling over a distance. These calls have also been linked to apotropaic or religious ideas associated with herding and have been better preserved in Catholic than in Protestant areas, where 18th-century pietism outlawed many folk practices. The formation of national and regional yodel clubs and tourism, most of all in Switzerland, have affected these styles since the 19th century, most noticeably by modifying ‘irregular’ or non-tempered pitches to make them more acceptable.
The distinction between herders and farmers, too, has shaped musical production. The culture of shepherds, for instance, involves a migratory life, special clothes and instruments (the flute or bagpipe). Freer than most, shepherds were often the envy of peasants, evolving a rich complex of festivities in central Europe. St Bartholomew's Day (24 August) marked the transition from summer to winter quarters, and towns like Markgröningen, Rothenburg and Urach in southern Germany were the site of festivals to elect their king and queen and to dance their special dances. In Italy and Spain, they acted out the adoration of the shepherds in nativity plays, or crowded (as they still do) into the streets and alleyways of southern towns like Naples, playing the piffero (oboe) and zampogna (bagpipe), believing their temporary movement to echo that of the shepherds in the Christmas story. Further east, in Slovakia or Thrace, their pastoral life spread the ‘Valachian’ and related musical styles over Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Greek and Turkish territory.
Industrialization made its impact more rapidly on the northern continental lowlands, although in pockets of rural France older styles of music-making exist. Urban workers also have their songs: in German carnivals the butchers' guild played a prominent part, sometimes performing a weapon-dance with their carving knives; in France, the unions known as compagnons still sing their group songs. These guilds often had initiation rites and were particular about who was admitted: in Germany the sons of shepherds, beggars, hangmen, gravediggers or even minstrels might be excluded because they were unehrliche Leute (‘dishonourable people’). Miners developed their distinctive culture in part because they were feared by the general population, possibly through the nature of their task and their appearance, which sometimes involved wearing hoods. They had their own chapels, plays, dances and songs (Bergreihen, Bergmannslieder). The printed songbook tradition of German miners, in fact, stems from the 16th century (Heilfurth, D1954).
Craftsmen such as weavers, carpenters or tailors had their occupational songs as well as songs to accompany physical movement such as (in the case of the weavers) the rhythm of the loom. Many of these songs were recorded in the 19th century, from England to Germany, at a time when handloom-weaving was in decline. As in the case of the miners, weaver culture transcended national boundaries. Shoemakers, too, were in the forefront of political or religious change and were known for heretical attitudes in general in the 16th and 17th centuries. They appear as heroes in folksongs (as in the French Le petit cordonnier) and their work songs have survived in Scandinavia, Germany, Poland and elsewhere. Soldiers, like miners or sailors, were perforce deprived of women's company; it was a soldier's song of farewell that inspired Achim von Arnim to compile the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (‘The Youth's Magic Horn’). Sailors' shanties, while a distinctive part of sailing culture, were often kept alive by fishermen or other occupations once sail had become a thing of the past. Beggars and thieves, though, who tended to reject the world around them, composed bitter satirical or parodic songs that reflected an urge to overturn the existing order. Stylistically, however, these songs reinforce rather than contradict the norms of purely musical behaviour.
Women, as well as singing songs in common with men, had their own repertories, or were called on for special kinds of song, such as lamenting: the lamenting of post-menopausal women, who were regarded as having special powers, is well documented in Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland and elsewhere. Male attitudes to gender roles and social mores were traditionally more conservative in the Mediterranean, where women who sang in public were poorly regarded by men. But even in northern Europe guilds historically excluded women, as did the more dubious world of the tavern. The women of French villages, like their counterparts at spinning bees in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, gathered in the evening for veillées to spin, tell stories and sing. The evidence of music connected with women's domestic tasks and the labour involved, such as milking songs, butter-making songs, or waulking songs for fulling cloth in the Scottish Highlands suggest that women's culture was more conservative and at the same time less literary than that of men. Women often tended to become the guardians of more traditional musical forms.
In the end, however, traditional culture and music are essentially regional (even though they can be understood at a more general European level) because of a complex process of diffusion. Rural people think of themselves as belonging to a region rather than a nation (an overlay which intensified during the Romantic era) or a class (especially after the Soviet Revolution of 1917). But ‘regional culture’ can signify various levels or types: village culture, defined by the expressive forms and artistic creations of a small, bounded community; ecological culture, influenced by the shape of the land and its cultural ecosystem; or religious culture, characterized by intense devotion, such as evening prayers sung to local saints in the Alps. Hostility towards those in a neighbouring village (one factor suggested by the Swedish folklorist Carl von Sydow as a barrier to learning) is balanced by knowing and speaking the same language, though it is language-group that has been proposed as the true boundary in Europe in the transmission of items such as ballad plots. Tunes on the other hand travel easily, separated as they often can be from their original words.
Regional culture, as a construct arising out of regional identity, includes a complex set of notions representing gender, ethnicity, occupation or religion, all variable depending on context. Comparisons can be made on all these levels to determine how they affect music-making in any one of the broad cultural zones of Europe, whether split laterally or vertically. The music of a Breton fishing village has a number of levels on which it can be understood as culture: Catholic, maritime, Celtic or French, depending on whether its départementis upper or lower Brittany. But even this runs the risk of seeing more homogeneity than heterogeneity, especially when women, children or ethnic minorities are omitted from the picture as a whole. For persecuted minorities such as the Roma or the Jews of eastern Europe, singing in the ghettos and concentration camps of World War II was a vital way to survive as a people and as a distinct culture. European folk and popular music is as much a matter of vastly differentiated and subjective experiences, consciousness and perception, by insiders as well as outsiders, as it is of ‘objective’ description.
Song style, as a concept involving the manipulation of form and content, was first characterized by such scholars as Curt Sachs and Bartók who tended to view songs in dualistic terms. Sachs's ‘tumbling strains’ and ‘one-step melodies’ may be contrasted with Bartók's ‘parlando rubato’ and ‘tempo giusto’ as extreme points on a spectrum of forms. In Bartók's view, formed by his familiarity with Hungarian practice, parlando rubato veers toward domination by the verbal content of a song, tempo giusto by the musical, strictly metrical, dance-like aspects. Some scholars feel that the freely ornamental parlando rubato song is the mark of an older style, though this is difficult to prove given the lack of records and the functions associated with the two singing styles. They most likely existed side by side for a long time, although the notion of areas of recession (i.e. remote regions where older styles linger on) has raised the possibility of an archaic style co-existing with a newer, post-18th century one.
The development of cross-cultural or comparative studies of melody was undertaken by Mieczyslaw Kolinski, an assistant to Hornbostel at the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, who has used melodies from Europe and elsewhere to work out a system of melodic shapes determined by ‘tint affinity’ derived from the circle of 5ths. In his study of the melodic structure of the English-language ballad Barbara Allen, Kolinski uses as comparative material French, Polish, Hungarian, Croatian and Slovak folksongs (B1968 and B1969). His later study of seven Canadian versions of Malbrough s'en va-t-en guerre analyses melodic contour, rhythmic structure, metric structure and pulse (E1979). George List, similarly, has used a well-known melodic formula (Ah! vous dirai-je, maman) to raise the issue of diffusion or polygenesis in the distribution of tune structures (A1979). By the 1970s, however, the importance of transcription as a means to understanding traditional music was on the wane and its limitations evident. Studies of structure, melodic or metro-rhythmic, had tended to dominate research on style, especially since Bartók and the Berlin group led by Hornbostel emphasized the internal organization of melodies rather than singing as communication or as cultural activity.
A bold attempt to describe European song styles from the latter point of view was made by Lomax in 1968 and 1974, using sound recordings to identify three main styles: ‘old European’, ‘modern European’ (‘north-western European’) and ‘Eurasian’ (‘old high culture’). His hypothesis is that each culture has a dominant style determined by such factors as means of subsistence, organization of the sexes and social structure. The ‘old European’ style he considers typical of societies where the agricultural cycle, country dance and music-making are linked; this zone stretches from eastern Europe through southern Germany, northern Italy and Spain to north-eastern France and Wales, using a style that integrates its materials of text and music closely in performance, is often polyphonic, and reflects ‘the communal, complementary character of the region’. The ‘modern European’ style Lomax finds characteristic of northern Europe, where shepherds, woodsmen and isolated farmers evolved the solo narrative song performed in an impersonal manner. His ‘Eurasian’ style is found mainly in the Mediterranean region, where a ‘complex system of irrigation is supported by specialized pastoralism, centralized political systems, and a multi-layered social stratification’. These aspects are mirrored, he asserts, in ornate texts and long, through-composed, non-strophic melodies ornamented by elaborate techniques of vocal production.
Lomax's conclusions are based on limited samples of each culture, and these samples are, by definition, unable to reveal the totality of song style in the region. That members of a society sing in only one generalized way is hard to substantiate, even when broad, cross-cultural comparison rather than ethnographic detail is the goal. While Lomax's picture is possibly useful at a simple level of predominant song style, it is unable to provide an accurate picture of all the styles in a given area, especially in eastern Europe where the monophony of Romania, for instance, is surrounded by a sea of Slav polyphonies. The ornamental Irish sean-nós style or Hebridean psalm-singing, for example, have more in common with the ‘Eurasian’ style of the Mediterranean, perhaps as a result of early, continuous contact, than with the so-called north-west European style based on the tendency of the Germanic languages to allot one note to a syllable.
Cross-cultural influence in musical style is admittedly difficult to determine, especially in the northern and southern Mediterranean zones. The songs of northern Spain and Portugal share more features, at least in terms of general stylistic drift, with those of Provence or even northern Italy than with those of Andalusia, where the latter has been embellished with Byzantine, Moorish and Romani elements. Strident, ornamental singing in the islands of the Mediterranean seems to indicate prolonged Islamic influence or at least similar cultural imprinting over long periods. The singing style of Sicilian tuna-fishers, according to one view, displays encroaching African elements (Lomax, E1955–6). In the music of the Spanish Basques, a few remaining idiosyncratic features such as the 5/8 zortzico metre have not prevented a general move in style towards the more ‘popular’ idioms of northern Spain as a result of mass communication.
In any case, mass-produced popular music from North and South America has affected traditional repertory and performance styles alike. But regional music in Europe in the 20th century has retained more features of traditional style than might be expected: this is due to strategies of performance organization (e.g. folk festivals, folk revival), recreative techniques such as parody, the expanding or borrowing of instrumental styles and repertories (often on ‘exotic’ or period instruments, e.g. banjo or hurdy-gurdy) and the production of songs and music to meet the needs of fragmenting social groups. On top of these are laid the still-growing effects of tourism and political ideology, the latter ironically contributing to the maintenance of traditional musical behaviour as well as reinforcing cultural patterns.
The tone-colour and density of traditional music in western Europe vary according to environmental conditions, particular settings for performance and aesthetic preferences. In northern Europe singers prefer unforced vocal qualities in narrative and lyric song, though some Irish, Scottish and Traveller singers cultivate a nasal tone. Though in traditional and revival contexts most singing is unaccompanied, informal performances allow the use of instruments such as the guitar, harp (Ireland, Scotland, Wales) or fiddle, concertina and melodeon (England). Other types of singing may imitate instruments, such as canntaireachd (vocables employed to teach the idioms of the Highland bagpipe), as well as derivative, non-didactic vocables for dance music when instruments were lacking. There is relatively sparse use of idiophones and membranophones, but both are evident in the types of drum found in flute or bagpipe marching bands (e.g. Lambeg drums of Northern Ireland) and in domestic utensils such as spoons. Of the three extant types of bagpipe in Britain and Ireland, the Northumbrian small-pipes and uilleann pipes, as bellows-blown, indoor instruments with a mellow, clarinet-like tone, contrast with the incisive, bellicose reedy sound of the outdoor Highland bagpipe. Céilidh (evening social) or dance bands dominated by fiddles and accordions (sometimes also including flutes) are common in Scotland and Ireland.
A similar restraint in ballad and lyric song in Scandinavia contrasts with the tense intonation of Icelandic rímur or the high tessitura of cattle-calls. Solo singing with the fiddle occurs in Sweden, but the greatest range of tone-colour in Scandinavia occurs in the purely instrumental traditions: rattles, clappers and bullroarers persist as children's toys, while the ancient lur (a wooden or animal horn) with whistles and flutes of bark all suggest a preoccupation with the sounds of nature. Above all, the rich string sonorities of such instruments as the Hardanger fiddle with its sympathetic strings (Norway), nyckelharpa or keyed fiddle related to the hurdy-gurdy (Sweden), langeleik (ancient Norwegian folk zither) and the revived langspil (bowed zither) in Iceland indicate a deep-rooted preference for resonant textures based on the vibrating string, bowed or plucked, and often played by large groups of amateur players.
Vocal textures in the continental lowlands further south vary from the monotone unisons of French village singers to the glottal stops of Breton sailors and the vibrato of drovers in the Nivernais. Idiophonic textures are represented by spoons, wooden clappers, bells and carillons in parts of the Netherlands. Membranophones such as the friction drum (rommelpot or, more revealingly for the symbolic, fertility associations of the instrument, fockepot) accompanied children's song in Flanders. Aerophones in use include shells and earthenware whistles, duct flutes, bark, wood and metal trumpets (such as the famous midwinterhoorn of Drenthe in the Netherlands), bagpipes of various sizes, jew's harps and accordions. Chordophones are represented by hurdy-gurdies, dulcimers (pinet, épinette des Vosges) and fiddles, even shoe-fiddles similar to the Swedish träskofiol. Ensembles consist of traditional combinations such as the rustic shawm (bombarde) and small Breton bagpipe (biniou) and the equivalent piffero and zampogna in southern Italy, clarinet and violin in Charente (western France) and the clarinet with accordion and hurdy-gurdy in Burgundy. Whether these combinations will survive as sonic preferences is open to question, though the kinds of texture that have evolved, in town and country alike, display a feeling for aerophonic or mixed timbres of strings and woodwind, often with a drone effect. The music produced by such combinations is often intentionally polyphonic, the players favouring multiple drones.
The triadic structures of the Alpine regions in central Europe are recognizable in the alternating head and chest vocal production of the yodel, a genre which has undergone transformation through the various yodel clubs formed since the 19th century; the ‘neutral’ intervals are now often modified to fit notions of diatonic harmony. In the Swiss region of Appenzell the solo yodel is supported by an improvised vocal harmony enlivened by shaken cowbells, and a comparable accompaniment is found in the Talerschwingen, the singers circling a coin in a basin as they sing. Rattles, clappers and (in French and Italian areas) carillons are adjuncts to the many holidays of the Catholic church calendar. Drums accompany marching and hunting activities, as do pairs of Seitenpfeifen (six-hole wooden transverse flutes) in Austria, while the accordion and melodeon dominate Alpine ensembles alongside the zither, guitar, fiddle and dulcimer (Hackbrett).
In Iberia and the Mediterranean islands rattles, castanets, domestic utensils and bells all accompany singing. The idiosyncratic glottal shake of Ibizan singers, for instance, is accompanied in Christmas Eve songs by castanets and the beating of a suspended sword with a nail. North of Madrid, in Segovia, small brass pestles and mortars provide a background for serenading male groups. The pandero (frame drum, with or without jingles) is frequently played in groups, while the ximbomba (friction drum) and side drum are also popular membranophones, the small tabor sometimes accompanying the gaita (pipe, or bagpipe such as the Galician gaita gallega). Other aerophones of note are the pito (Basque txistu, a three-hole flute), xirimía (Basque alboka, an oboe with animal-horn bell) and the Sardinian launeddas, a triple clarinet of ancient lineage. Chordophones include the guitar and its relatives, the zanfona (hurdy-gurdy), rabel (one-string fiddle) and the salterio (hammered dulcimer).
Richly analogous textures can be found in Italy and its islands. The south is noted for players of the zampogna (bagpipe), an instrument in modern times progressively displaced in the north by the fisarmonica (accordion), which like other tempered instruments has supplanted the characteristic intonation of the bagpipe and older conceptions of tonality. But the south also includes triangles, castanets, jew's harps and the ghittarra battente (rustic plectrum guitar) of Apulia in the south-east. The choral textures of the Sardinian su tenore and the multi-part trallalero of Genoese longshoremen (once a genre extending further inland in Lombardy) appear to be related to a single polyphonic style, possibly archaic, that extends through the central Mediterranean region into the Balkans.
There, in Bulgarian Thrace, forced nasal singing is the aesthetic norm; in the neighbouring Rhodope region a gentler, more mellifluous vocal style is preferred. In Albania, all singing north of the Shkumbin river is homophonic, whereas in the south almost all songs except lullabies and funeral laments are polyphonic. All along the Carpathian chain and into Bulgaria, shepherds' cries and vocal signals emerge from these mountainous regions, utterances that are often halfway between speech and song or, like the Alpine yodel, alternate between head and chest voice. Projected over a distance, vocal signals could inform about flocks, local events or even manoeuvres of an invading enemy. They also appear, stylized, in songs as interjections or entire refrains and may be the origin of one sort of refrain type in European song. The polyphonic songs of Vlach shepherds in Albania, Bulgaria, Greece or the Dobrogea region of Romania include signal dialogues that can be embellished with a yodelled top line. Command calls, used by foresters and barge-haulers on the rivers of Russia, range from musical yells to more shaped melodies.
Laments and their characteristic vocal texture flourish across eastern Europe. Found in Albania, Finland, Greece and Hungary (though less so than formerly), the lament genre has receded in Celtic and Baltic areas, Poland and Slovakia. Once a major force in Russian peasant life, the lament was sung not only at weddings or funerals but also, for instance, on the departure of a recruit to army service. Wedding laments in Russia were often closely related to funeral laments: at the crucial moment the bride would fall to the ground and lament ‘in the voice of the dead’ (i.e. using the funeral lament melody). The vocal tone in such laments is one of sobbing or crying, the words distorted and the articulation halfway between speech and song. In Moldova the lament may be accompanied by an endblown flute into which the player growls a drone as he plays, a practice that is characteristic of pastoral communities and may well be ancient.
The six-hole shepherd flute, end-blown or with a duct, is common throughout eastern Europe. The large alphorn can be found along the Carpathian chain, although its wooden construction is now giving way to zinc versions. This type of alphorn demands virtuoso performance. Romanian shepherds produce compositions for the instrument that contain flourishes based on the harmonic series; these melodies, which are used as signals as well as funeral music, have affected the vocal styles of the Carpathian region. A more widespread instrument is the oboe (zurla, zurna) that reaches from the Adriatic to China. Usually found in train with the large drum (davul, tapan), its strident tone is still heard at village dances and weddings. Roma, known throughout the region for their skill as instrumentalists, are the usual executants.
The bagpipe, both bellows- and mouth-blown, appears in a variety of types. The lighter-sounding, bellows-blown duda, found in Czech, Polish and Ukrainian regions, is seen now in folk festivals rather than as an integral part of village life. The mouth-blown gaida (Albanian gajdë, Greek tsambouna) extends from Albania through the former Yugoslavia to Bulgaria, where at least three types are known, while five different types of bagpipe (cimpoi) are found in Romania. Until the 1870s the bagpipe in Poland (kozioł) were usually accompanied by mazanki, small three-string fiddles, tuned a 5th higher than normal and playing an octave above the bagpipe. Bagpipe-like sounds are a special effect that extend the textural range of instruments, especially in Romania. Here, leaves or pieces of birch bark are blown like a reed, accompanying midwinter ceremonies, when masked dancers file through the villages, sometimes with cowbells round their waist and playing the raucous friction drum (bika, ‘bull’). Albanian weddings also feature the friction drum, along with rattles and the rhomboid wooden bullroarer that is now rare in Europe.
Few Roma, however, play the shepherd instruments in south-eastern Europe, and few peasants play violins or lutes. But in Bulgaria and Greece, peasants play the rebec-like fiddle (gadulka) and, as in Albania and the former Yugoslavia, the long-necked lute (tambura, çifteli). In Romania the violin gradually displaced the Turkish type of fiddle during the 19th century. The usual accompaniment to the fiddle was the kobza, a short-necked lute with bent-back pegbox, with the kobza providing a rhythmic framework. Normally found with fiddle and kobza is the cimbalom, the trapezoid zither which, in the large version on legs developed by the Budapest maker Schunda in the 1870s, is much cultivated by Hungarian and Slovak Roma bands. Romanian players have a portable type, suspended by straps from the neck. Urban Roma bands in Romania add the nai (panpipes), now rare in the rest of Europe. Folk ensembles are based on one or two fiddles, a viola and cello or string bass, as in Moravia or the Tatra mountain region of Poland. In the Tatra bands the first fiddle plays a decorated version of the tune while the second fiddle and three-string viola mark the rhythm by playing chords across the strings. High-sounding fiddles with a thread bound across the strings one-third of the way along the neck form the standard ensemble in southern Poland.
The most striking feature of content in European traditional songs is the separability of musical and verbal elements. The style of the vocal line can even be at odds with the sense of the text because a certain impersonality of delivery is the aesthetic norm. This is the case in genres such as the ballad, which extends from north-western Europe into the northern Mediteranean zone and the Balkans. Ordinarily the ballad singer, who may identify deeply with the events of the narrative, attempts to maintain a distance from these events as he or she sings, allowing the ‘story’ to become the object of the audience's attention rather than vocal technique or personality. The tunes of ballads, like those of other strophic or stichic songs, are shaped more in terms of repetitive pattern or memorability than as reflections or reinforcement of the semantic content.
As a pan-European song that arose in the late Middle Ages, the ballad embodies a narrative interest in domestic, love-related topics rather than the warlike themes of the feudal epic. While ballads may occasionally celebrate a battle or other historical or legendary event, the bulk concern human relationships and are usually couched in strophes varying in number from a handful to several dozen stanzas. The traditional ballad of western Europe was affected in its development by street literature and the broadside industry (c1550–1850), when orally transmitted ballads were supplemented and often rewritten or modified by printed versions and by new ballads that relayed current events or popular protest. These newer ballads tended to introduce a personal tone against the objective cast of the older type. The European ballad is not a unified genre, in any case, and is known by different terms (e.g. romance, vise, ballata) that represent regional developments. In south-eastern Europe and Russia, as elsewhere, the ballad can share musical content with other song forms.
In Britain and Ireland, older work songs that were integrated into a pastoral or agricultural life are now rare or have been adapted for dancing. On the other hand, songs with themes derived from urban industrial life now appear in the repertory of both traditional and revival singers with the religious songs or carols that grew out of an agricultural past. Special or professional genres still exist, however, such as Welsh penillion, in which a lyrical idea is realized by means of a vocal counter-melody improvised against a harp tune. Medieval French influence on the Gaelic love song in Ireland resulted in elaborate imagery and reinforced an ornate melodic style. The lyrical elegy, also sung in this style, is to be marked off generically from the obsolescent keen (caoine), the ritualized lament with analogues in southern and eastern Europe.
Thematic links with balladry in Scandinavia are evident in the content of the older Norwegian stev, most of the surviving tunes being also variants of the medieval dream-ballad Draumkvedet, which tells of the terrors of Judgment Day. The lyrical nystev (new stev), on the other hand, has gradually acquired an archaic ‘tumbling-strain’ character. Many present-day narrative and satirical songs in central and northern Europe derive from 19th-century broadsheets published in the towns and sold in the streets or at country fairs. Religious songs have also been an important part of a tradition that Scandinavia shares with northern countries. Those melodic traditions founded, for example, on Thomas Kingo's Gradual (1699) have developed a melismatic style that can be compared with the Hebridean psalm-singer's absorption in a religious text or mood. Similar traits can be found in the devotional singing of Germans settled around the Volga river from the 18th century. Religious fervour in 19th-century Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Highland Scotland outlawed instruments, especially the fiddle, on the grounds that it was the Devil's work. In modern times, though, fiddle bands have flourished all over northern Europe.
Transfer of function has often affected content. In French folk music, for example, magical songs have become children's songs or dance tunes in a modern environment. Urbanization in the Netherlands, too, has given rise to street songs with humorous or satirical subject matter, though whether these songtypes enter tradition has depended on many factors: a memorable tune, catchy words and popular acceptance are fundamental conditions as well as basic factors in this process. Older, rarer types of Dutch music and song in some North Sea offshore islands (e.g. Terschelling) have still, despite the dense population of the mainland, been recorded this century by such scholars as Jaap Kunst (D1916 and D1918–19).
In Germany, prolonged opposition by Church and State since the Reformation eroded the use of satirical songs, though some exceptions have been found in the Legendenlieder of German colonists in eastern Europe. Music composed ‘in folk style’ has been a continuing phenomenon in central Europe since the 18th century, and some scholars have interpreted the refurbishing of folk material to meet new conditions (e.g. tourism) as a ‘second existence’ of folk music or as ‘musical folklorism’. In contrast to staged performances, religious, vocational or other songs connected with entertainment are now more common in Switzerland than pre-18th century types like the Betruf (prayer call) or the Viehlöckler (cattle call, in French-speaking regions lyoba), though these are observed in a few cantons (Bolle-Zemp, E1992).
In the less affluent areas of southern Europe, singing to accompany labour, such as the Corsican tribbiera (threshing song), is still found, many of these songs overlaid with a Christian interpretation. The Spanish lullaby, known in various provinces as nana, arrorro and lo-lo, belongs to a type widespread in the Mediterranean region and has a religious theme; the villancico (carol) too is often addressed to the Christ-child. Such themes dominate the Spanish romerias (pilgrimages), and feast days are often the occasion for begging songs with amorous or sarcastic content. Intense emotion characterizes certain kinds of song: the solo saeta (rehearsed rather than, as formerly, improvised) sung in Holy Week in Seville, or, in Portugal, the secular urban fado that now shows strong signs of Latin-American influence. Reflective, symbolic imagery stands out in Sephardi wedding songs of Hispanic origin and in the alborea of the gitanos celebrating the bride's virginity. In the narrative romance the historical or legendary encounters of Spaniards and Moors reveal it, rather than the ballad, to be the true successor of the older European epic song tradition. The association of instruments such as the friction drum with calendrical events such as Christmas may be compared with the arrival, at Advent, of bagpipers in the towns of southern Italy.
As the rate of change increases, or as a sense of cultural and economic value intensifies, the fusion of melody, text and ritual setting in traditional folk music is becoming less frequent. Newer rituals generate their own traditions, of course, but events such as the Italian maggi (May plays), which have texts by Dante and other poets and a rustic style of recitative, are now performed outside their original context. Older customary songs have been recorded in recent times among the ethnic Albanians of Calabria, Lucania and Sicily, but these too may be on the verge of being immersed in a more sweeping process of urbanization. Wider thematic links have been noted between some Italian songs and Jewish tradition: the Piedmontese La cavra has been interpreted as a paraphrase of the Passover song Chad Gadya, which is otherwise known among Italian Jews as Un capretto (‘One kid’). In the north the narrative canzone is closely related in substance to the European ballad but now often fuses traditional story material with a modern, more lyrical singing style. By contrast the southern storia (stichic narrative song) is replete with colourful textual detail and a more dramatic, personalized type of presentation.
Calendrical and life-cycle songs are rife in eastern Europe, as well as charms, lullabies and laments sung by women. Laments were often sung for the bride as she left her parents' home, or for a recruit leaving for army service. Calendar songs fall into genres in Russia: winter, New Year, Lent, spring, Easter, St George's Day, Trinity, summer solstice and harvest songs. Elsewhere, luck-wish processions with maskers sing carols (some of them Christian) recounting apocryphal events. Others are heroic, such as the Romanian carol of the brothers transformed into stags that Bartók used for his Cantata profana (1930). Bartók also noted the warlike character of these carols, especially when they are accompanied by dubă, small double-headed drums. Such songs make for contrast with the spring carols sung by groups of girls who deck themselves with vegetation, or the rain-making songs (paparuda, ‘rain-caller’) still performed in Romania by boys or female Gypsies, who dress themselves in green leaves and go from house to house to be splashed with water (the term paparuda is said to derive from an invocation to Perun, the ancient Slavonic god of thunder).
Songs and dances of occasion, in fact, mark the perpetuation of ancient content in folk tradition. So, too, do heroic epics and ballads, which recount not only legendary tales but also the exploits of heroes such as Digenis Akritas in Greece or Marko Kraljevic in the south Slavic area. Such epics were sung in both Muslim and Christian areas, and skilled singers could often extend songs that were already thousands of lines long through techniques of formulaic composition. Those who resisted the Tatars or Ottoman Turks are similarly celebrated, as are outlaws (e.g. the Slovak Jánošík) who challenge the existing social order. Jánošík songs are usually in strophes, and resemble west European ballads, whose topics are echoed in the more recitative-like ballads of, for instance, Bulgaria or Romania. Russian narrative song encompasses the epic bďlinď, spiritual songs, songs of the medieval buffoons, and historical songs and ballads. Epic themes there have existed at various times and differ in local performance traditions; distinctions by content, therefore, are difficult to apply. Pre-Revolutionary bďlinď (the peasant term was starini) have no specially definitive musical content, but in semantic content they recount the deeds of the bogatiri (heroes): Il'ya Muromets, Dobrinya Nikitich, Alyosha Popovich and others, reflecting the popular aspiration for a unified, independent homeland in the feudal period.
The traditional music of western Europe is mainly strophic, being arranged in patterns of two, three, four or more lines or phrases. Interaction with literary poetry and the country dance seem to have brought this about in western Europe by the end of the 17th century when printers first published popular music. In song, the repetition of a rounded melody in stanza form had displaced the stichic form of epics that were performed in eastern Europe into the 20th century. But non-strophic melodies, with polyphonic forms, cries, laments, yodels and melismatic or partsong types based on imitation or a drone are still to be found, especially in rural or remote areas. Diatonic, though not necessarily equal-tempered, schemes predominate and this feature seems to have accompanied the development of church and ‘composed’ forms in medieval times. Narrow-range melodies of two, three or four notes commonly occur in ritual, children's and play songs, though the assumption that these are somehow ‘older’ than five- or seven-note structures is unprovable. Both types existed side by side for different contexts and purposes.
In the English-speaking regions of Britain and Ireland, the four-line stanza, often in ballad metre and with an intercalary or separate refrain, is possibly the most popular song structure, the non-recurrent melodic type ABCD predominating. Gaelic songs often begin with the refrain, and ornamentation of the melodic line in Ireland is more the norm than the syllabic style of English-language songs, whether in Ireland or elsewhere. Irish singers also tend to decorate the text syllables as well as the tune, though this has also been noted in England. In both England and Ireland the heptatonic C mode is the preferred tonal framework, though D, G and A modes co-exist with the hexa-forms (Bronson, A1969). These also occur in Scotland and Wales where the penta-modes (Scotland) and the D mode (Wales) are also common. Modal ambiguity is a common feature of Goidelic music (e.g. in the melodic sequences on triads a tone apart). Irish fiddlers and pipers often inflect the fourth, sixth and seventh degrees. Ambivalence in these and other notes led some to posit the existence of a ‘neutral mode’ in British and Anglo-American folk music, but such ‘natural tones’ are also found in Norwegian traditions.
Ballad stanzas in Scandinavia usually consist of two or three lines. The tune, however, is not necessarily the same length as the text. The Norwegian nystev, for example, has four lines of text but only two of melody. Rhythmic symmetry is often combined with tonal complexity in the anhemitonic heptatonism of melodies played on the langeleik (Norwegian zither). Similar combinations of rhythm and tonality occur in instrumental music: the additive patterns of Hardanger fiddle tunes or the modal transformations of Icelandic song, especially the tyísöngur (‘twin-song’) where two voices often sing in parallel 5ths, suggesting connections (to some) with medieval plainchant. Structural variation is especially striking in the two-bar motifs of Hardanger tunes as opposed to the four-bar patterns of ordinary fiddle melodies in Norway and Sweden. As in the Alps, the F mode appears in vocal and instrumental music alike and other tonal systems are found alongside diatonic schemes.
Until World War I some French regions had song forms built on older styles and techniques (e.g. the briolée chanted by the ploughman as he drove his horse over the furrows, now obsolete, or the tribbiera in Corsica). In general, melodic formations tend to match corresponding verbal forms, and the tripartite structure ABA is the principal one. Some song types are combined with acceptable kinds of melodic organization (e.g. a narrow range for lullabies, a wide range for the romance, the A mode for satirical and wedding songs). As elsewhere in Europe, the modes are occasionally influenced by stress patterns or instruments. Further north in Belgium there are clear differences between the Walloon songs, which combine Romance and Teutonic linguistic and musical patterns, and the straightforward syllabic style of Flemish songs.
The most striking feature of post-Reformation German folk music is regularity of strophic form, melodic shape, rhythm and tonality. This is offset to some extent by the older practices of German colonists in eastern Europe, many of whom have been recorded by the Institut für Ostdeutsche Volkskunde in Freiburg. Special forms such as the Zwiefacher with its changing 2/4 and 3/4 metres, however, have remained popular in Bavaria. In some German-language regions of Switzerland (such as Schwyz and Appenzell) there is a preference for the sharpened Alpenfa (11th harmonic of the Alphorn, probably derived from the vocal intonation of the yodel). More modern or revived forms of the yodel are distinguished by partsinging and by replacement of the original vocalization by words. Alpine polyphonic music in general tends to use parallel part movement and triadic harmony, now mostly in a ‘major’ tonality.
Whereas melodic phrases, metres and rhythms in northern and central Europe are the norm, songs of the west Mediterranean area, both north and south, often show a freer treatment of poetic and melodic ideas, with melismas and a syllabification suitable for both duple and triple rhythms, as well as principles of organization akin to Arabic maqām. A variety of strophic types exist: Portuguese quatrains and Spanish correntia types with lines of seven syllables, the Galician ‘bagpipe verse’ shaped by the regional dance known as muńeira and the varied construction of Andalusian seguidillas. The strophic villancico with its device of the initial refrain has been transformed throughout its history, from the dance songs of its origin in Galician-Portuguese cantigas de vilhao, through the popular religious songs stemming from the Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso el Sabio, to the later literary form. Irregular metre is common in Andalusian songs (not only flamenco), and Basque song structures can be asymmetrical, even within such well-known types as the zortzico and its apparent 5/8 time. In the peninsular north, in fact, a variety of modes occurs, including the modern major and minor, while in the south Islamic and gitano influences introduced, modified, or reinforced certain ‘oriental’ modes. Flamenco sub-genres are categorized according to tonal range (e.g. jondo, grande, liviano) and microtonal inflections are frequent within these ranges, which are in any case usually confined to the compass of a 6th or less.
The ballata of northern Italy is related to Provencal and Castilian types of narrative song, and provides a structural as well as a thematic contrast to the storia of the south, which is founded on a traditional 11-syllable line within strophes of three, six or eight lines. The ottava rima of eight 11-syllable lines is the main vehicle for improvisation in central Italy, whether the words derive from Renaissance or modern writers. Polyvocal songs of Sard shepherds and Genoese longshoremen, on the other hand, retain older techniques of song-building on short texts, and a similar practice forms the basis of lullabies, laments and various types of labour song. Laments in Sicily, such as those sung on Good Friday, owe a great deal to the impact of styles from the east Mediterranean region. This influence, at times Byzantine, Greek, Arab or Roma, has left its traces all over the southern Mediterranean, especially in narrow-range melodies (ex.3).
Narrow-range melodies, both ceremonial songs and lyrical tunes, are the norm in eastern Europe: Serbian luck-wish songs in spring often use a melody of two adjacent notes, and Romanian lyrical songs celebrating spring use three notes and non-lexical syllables. Such melodies extend through the entire Slavonic area. Laments are both strophic and freely extemporized outpourings; a metrical recitative forms the basis for this extemporization in the Balkans, with breaks caused by excess of emotion. Non-strophic melodies, in fact, are plentiful, and the text strophe is unknown in most of the south. The notion of strophe can be absent in Balkan ballad performance, with irregular breaks that often lend the singer breathing space; regular breaks occur in the heroic ten-syllable line (6+4) of the older epic style in Bosnia. Structured melodies are mostly from one to four lines and within the range of a pentachord, especially the lower pentachord of the minor mode. Narrow range melodies are complemented by pentatonic melodies (Hungary, southern Albania, Rhodope mountains in southern Bulgaria) and the F mode. Tunes based on chromatic intervals are found usually in the cities, where urban popular styles display Turkish influence.
Unlike Slav village songs and their variety of line lengths, Romanian songs reveal two syllabic systems, an earlier six-syllable line and a later eight-syllable version. Either can be used for the semi-improvised melodic styles such as ballad recitatives. The doina is a lyrical improvisation with more or less invariable melodic elements and opening and closing formulaic recitatives. Ballads partly resemble the doina in their melodic and scalic structure. Romanian homophonic structures as a whole contrast strikingly with Slav polyphonic types, which proliferate in Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia and Serbia, usually based on the drone called ison. Most are in two-part, diaphonic style within a restricted compass of up to a 5th. The characteristic interval is the 2nd, which is regionally regarded as a consonance: to performers within the group singing known as ganga in Hercegovina both tones of the final (a 2nd apart) are equally important. A three-part or four-part multivoice style is found in southern Albania, and there may be historical links in Balkan polyphony with those types in Sardinia or the Baltic, such as the Lithuanian sutartines with their parallel 2nds.
Hungarian music is homophonic, with an older layer of pentatonic tunes that descend, many of them with the typical shift of a 5th: these have been traced to different areas of west Asia. But they have now been supplanted by newer-style melodies in the D, G or A modes with the structures AA'A'A (where A' involves a shift of a 5th) or ABBA, and in the 2/4 or 4/4 metre now prevalent across eastern Europe. Slovak songs also have 5th displacement in the mainly tetrachordal four-line melodies (A'A'AA) of older dance tunes. The tunes of the Carpathian shepherd culture have a descending pentachordal shape in the F mode that accounts for more than 60% of those collected. In terms of rhythm, the asymmetric metres that Bartók called ‘Bulgarian rhythm’ are now termed aksak (‘limping’) after Brǎiloiu's usage (1951) since they are found in other areas, such as Albania and the former Yugoslavia. The Bulgarian seven-beat rachenitsa (2+2+3) and the Greek kalamatianos (3+2+2) are examples of rhythmic cells composed of either two or three beats. The system is rare in Romania but common elsewhere, especially in refugee communities in Macedonia.
and other resources
A General. B Britain and Ireland. C Scandinavia. D Germany and Low Countries. E France and francophone areas, Iberia and Atlantic islands, Italy and central Mediterranean islands. F East-central Europe. G Balkans and Greek islands. H Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Baltic countries and Finland.
h: russia, belarus, ukraine, baltic countries and finland
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J.L. Campbell, ed.: Hebridean Folksongs (Oxford, 1969–81) [score; transcribed by F. Collinson]
J. Porter: ‘Jeannie Robertson's “My Son David”: a Conceptual Performance Model’, Journal of American Folklore, lxxxix (1976), 7–26
D. Harker: Fakesong: the Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes, 1985)
R. Finnegan: The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town (Cambridge, 1989)
H. Shields: Narrative Singing in Ireland: Lays, Ballads, Come-All-Yes and Other Songs (Dublin, 1993)
J. Porter and H. Gower: Jeannie Robertson: Emergent Singer, Transformative Voice (Knoxville, TN, 1995)
E.G. Geijer and A.A. Afzelius: Svenska Folkvisor [Swedish folksongs] (Stockholm, 1814–18, rev. 3/1957–60 by J. Sahlgren)
H. Thuren: Folkesangen paa Faerřerne [Folksongs in the Faeroes] (Copenhagen, 1908)
K. Tirén: Die lappische Volksmusik, ed. E. Manker (Stockholm, 1942)
S. Walin: Die schwedische Hummel (Stockholm, 1952)
N. Schiřrring, ed.: Selma Nielsens viser (Copenhagen, 1956)
T. Knudsen: ‘Ingeborg Munchs viser’, Folkeminder, vii (1961), 89–104
J. Ling: Nyckelharpan: studier i ett folkligt musikinstrument [The keyed fiddle: studies on a folk instrument] (Stockholm, 1967)
S. Nielsen: ‘Om Maren Ole og hendes sange’, Folk og Kultur, ii (1973), 87–112
R. Sevĺg: ‘Neutral Tones and the Problem of Mode in Norwegian Folk Music’, Festschrift to Ernst Emsheimer, ed. G. Hilleström (1974), 207–13
S. Nielsen: Stability in Musical Improvisation: a Repertoire of Icelandic Epic Songs (Rimur) (Copenhagen, 1982)
P. Hopkins: Aural Thinking in Norway: Performance and Communication with the Hardingfele (New York, 1986)
V. Holmboe: Danish Street Cries: a Study of their Musical Structure and a Complete Edition of Tunes with Words Collected before 1960 (Copenhagen, 1988)
J.G. Herder: ‘Stimmen der Völker in Liedern’, Volkslieder (1778–9/R)
L.C. Erk and W. Irmer: Die deutschen Volkslieder (Berlin, 1838–45/R)
W. Tappert: Wandernde Melodien (Leipzig, 1868, 2/1889/R)
J. Meier: Kunstlieder im Volksmunde (Halle, 1906/R)
J. Kunst: Terschellinger volksleven (Uithuizen, 1916, 3/1951)
J. Kunst: Het levende lied van Nederland (Amsterdam, 1918–19, 4/1947)
M. Bringemeier: Gemeinschaft und Volkslied: ein Beitrag zur Dorfkultur des Münsterlandes (Münster, 1931)
J. von Pulikowski: Geschichte des Begriffes Volkslied im musikalischen Schrifttum: ein Stück deutscher Geistesgeschichte (Heidelberg, 1933/R)
M. Schneider: Geschichte der Mehrstimmigkeit (Berlin, 1934–5, 2/1969)
J. Meier and others: Deutsche Volkslieder mit ihren Melodien (Berlin, 1935–96)
E. Klusen: Das Volkslied im niederrheinischen Dorf (Potsdam, 1941, 2/1970)
W. Wiora: Das echte Volkslied (Heidelberg, 1950)
G. Heilfurth: Das Bergmannslied (Kassel, 1954)
W. Steinitz: Deutsche Volkslieder demokratischen Charakters aus sechs Jahrhunderten (Berlin, 1954–62)
J. Künzig, ed.: ‘Ehe sie verklingern…’: alte deutsche Volksweisen vom Böhmerwald bis zur Wolga (Freiburg, 1958)
E. Stockmann, ed.: Des Knaben Wunderhorn in den Weisen seiner Zeit (Berlin, 1958)
W. Danckert: Unehrliche Leute: die verfemten Berufe (Berne, 1963)
J. Künzig and G. Habenicht, eds.: Quellen deutscher Volkskunde (Freiburg, 1967)
R.W. Brednich, Z. Kumar and W. Suppan: Gottscheer Volkslieder (Mainz, 1969–84)
M. Bröcker: Die Drehleier: ihr Bau und ihre Geschichte (Düsseldorf, 1973–7)
I. Adler: Musical Life and Traditions of the Portuguese Jewish Community of Amsterdam in the 18th Century (Jerusalem, 1974)
W. Suppan and W. Stief: Melodietypen des deutschen Volksgesanges (Tutzing, 1976–83)
E. Brockpähler, ed.: Lied, Tanz, und Musik im Brauchtum: Protokoll der Arbeitstagung der Kommission für Lied-, Musik- und Tanzforschung in der deutschen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde (Münster, 1985)
G. Probst-Effah: ‘Das Lied im NS-Widerstand: ein Beitrag zur Rolle der Musik in den nazionalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern’, Musikpädagogische Forschung, ix (Laaber, 1989), 79–89
K. Schindler: Folk Music of Spain and Portugal (New York, 1941)
M. Schneider: La danza de espadas y la tarantela: ensayo musicológico, etnográfico y arqueológico sobre los ritos medicinales (Barcelona, 1948)
M. Schneider: ‘Tipología musical y literaria de la canción de cuna in Espańa’, AnM, iii (1948), 3–58
A. Lomax: ‘Nuovi ipotesi sul canto folcloristico italiano nel quadro della musica popolare mondiale’, Nuovi Argomenti, nos.17–18 (1955–6), 109–36
D. Carpitella: ‘L'exorcismo coreutico musicale del tarantismo’, E. de Martino: La terra del rimorsi (Milan, 1961), appx. iii, 334
A.F.W. Bentzon: The Launeddas: a Sardinian Folk Music Instrument (Copenhagen, 1969)
D. Carpitella: Musica e tradizione orale (Palermo, 1973)
M. Kolinski: ‘Malbrough s'en va-t-en guerre: Seven Canadian Versions of a French Folksong’, YIFMC, xi (1979), 1–32
B. Bachmann-Geiser: Die Volksmusikinstrumente der Schweiz (Leipzig, 1981)
W. Laade: Das korsische Volkslied: Ethnographie und Geschichte, Gattungen und Stil (Wiesbaden, 1981–7)
B. Lortat-Jacob: ‘Theory and “Bricolage”: Attilio Cannargiu's Temperament’, YTM, xiv (1982), 45–54
Glattalp, CNRS Audiovisual and Ateliers d'ethnomusicologie videotape, dir. H. Zemp (Geneva, 1986)
K. Schindler: Música y poesía popular de Espańa y Portugal, ed. I.J. Katz and M.M. Alonso (Salamanca, 1991)
M. Sorce Keller: Tradizione orale e canto corale: ricerca musicologica in Trentino (Bologna, 1991)
S. Bolle-Zemp: La réenchantement de la montagne: aspects du folklore musical au Haute-Gruyčre (Geneva, 1992)
T. Magrini, ed.: Il maggio drammatico: una tradizione di teatro in musica (Bologna, 1992)
T. Magrini, ed.: Antropologia della musica e culture mediterranee (Venice, 1993)
F. Tschischka and J.M. Schottky: Österreichische Volkslieder mit ihren Singweisen (Pest, 1819, 2/1844, rev. 3/1906 by F.S. Kraus)
K.J. Erben: Prostonárodní ceské písne a rikadla [National Czech songs and proverbs] (Prague, 1842, 2/1862–4, enlarged 3/1886–8)
B. Bartók: Cantece poporale romanesti din Comitatul Bihor (Ungaria) [Romanian folksongs from the Bihor district] (Bucharest, 1913) [incl. Fr. summary]; repr. with texts in Béla Bartók: Ethnomusikologische Schriften, ed. D. Dille, iii (Budapest, 1967)
V. Stoin, ed.: Narodni pesni ot Timok do Vita [Folksongs from the Timok river to the Vit river] (Sofia, 1928)
B. Bartók: A magyar népdal [Hungarian folksong] (Budapest, 1924/R; Eng. trans., 1931/R)
B. Bartók: Népzenénk és a szomszéd népek népzenéje [Hungarian folk music and the folk music of neighbouring peoples] (Budapest, 1934); Ger. trans., Ungarische Jahrbücher, xv (1935), 194–258; Fr. trans., Archivum europae centro-orientalis, ii (1936), 197–232, pp.i–xxxii
W. Wünsch: Die Geigentechnik der südslawischen Guslaren (Brno, 1934)
B. Bartók: Melodien der rumänischen Colinde (Weihnachtslieder) (Vienna, 1935); repr. with texts in Béla Bartók: Ethnomusikologische Schriften ed. D. Dille, iv (Budapest, 1968); Eng. trans. in Béla Bartók: Rumanian Folk Music, ed. B. Suchoff, iv (The Hague, 1975)
L. Kuba: Cesty za slovanskou písní, 1885–1929 [Journeys in search of Slavic song], ii (Prague, 1935, 2/1953)
S. Baud-Bovy, ed.: Chansons du Dodécančse (Athens, 1935–8)
Z. Kodály: A magyar népzene [Hungarian folk music] (Budapest, 1937, enlarged with exx. by L. Vargyas, 3/1952, 6/1973; Eng. trans., 1960, enlarged 3/1982/R)
W. Danckert: Das europäische Volkslied (Berlin, 1939, 2/1970)
L. Vargyas: Aj falu zene élete [Musical life of the village of Aj] (Budapest, 1941)
P. Jardányi: A kidei magyarság világi zenéje [Secular music of the village of Kide] (Koloszvár, 1943)
B. Szabolcsi: A melódia története (Budapest, 1950; Eng. trans., 1965, as A History of Melody)
B. Bartók and Z. Kodály, eds.: Corpus musicae popularis hungaricae (Budapest, 1951–73)
R. Kacarova: ‘Tri pokolenija narodni pevici’ [Three generations of folksingers], HM, i (1952), 43
I. Halmos: A zene Kérsemjénben [The musical life of Kérsemjén] (Budapest, 1959)
B. Bartók, ed.: Slovenské l'udové piesne: Slowakische Volkslieder, i–ii (Bratislava, 1959–70) [vol.iii unpubd]
P. Jardányi and others: Magyar népdaltípusok [Hungarian folksong types] (Budapest, 1961; Ger. trans., 1964)
J. Maróthy: Zene és polgár – zene és proletár [Music and the bourgeois, music and the proletarian] (Budapest, 1966; Eng. trans., 1974)
B. Sárosi: Die Volksmusikinstrumente Ungarns (Leipzig, 1967)
L. Kunz: Die Volksmusikinstrumente der Tschechoslowakei, i (Leipzig, 1974)
B. Sárosi: Gypsy Music (Budapest, 1978)
O. Elschek: Die slowakischen Volksmusikinstrumente (Leipzig, 1983)
Traditional Music of Ethnic Groups – Minorities: Zagreb 1985
G. Flam: Singing for Survival: Songs of the Łódź Ghetto, 1940–1945 (Urbana, IL, 1992)
M. Slobin, ed.: Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe (Durham, NC, and London, 1996)
H. Pernot and P. le Flem: Mélodies populaires grecques de l'ile de Chio (Paris, 1903)
D. Christov and G. Jankov: Balgarski narodni pesni ot Bessarabija [Bulgarian folksongs from Bessarabia] (Sofia, 1913)
M. Murko: Bericht über phonographische Aufnahmen epischer, meist mohammedanischer Volkslieder im nordwestlichen Bosnien im Sommer 1912 (Vienna, 1913)
B. Bartók: Volksmusik der Rumänen von Maramures (Munich, 1923); repr. in Béla Bartók: Ethnomusikologische Schriften, ed. D. Dille, ii (Budapest, 1966); Eng. trans. in Béla Bartók: Rumanian Folk Music, ed. B. Suchoff, iv (The Hague, 1975)
B. Bartók: Melodien der rumänischen Colinde (Weihnachtslieder) (Vienna, 1935); repr. with texts in Béla Bartók: Ethnomusikologische Schriften, ed. D. Dille, iv (Budapest, 1968); Eng. trans. in Béla Bartók: Rumanian Folk Music, ed. B. Suchoff, iv (The Hague, 1975)
B. Bartók and A.B. Lord: Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (New York, 1951)
C. Brăiloiu: ‘Le rhythme aksak’, RdM, xxx (1951); Eng. trans. in Problems of Ethnomusicology (New York, 1984), 133–67
G. Keremidchiev: Narodnijat pevec djado Vico Boncev [Folksinger Vinco Bonchev] (Sofia, 1954)
A.B. Lord, ed.: Serbocroatian Heroic Songs (Cambridge, MA, and Belgrade, 1954)
C. Brăiloiu: Vie musicale d'un village: recherches sur le répertoire de Dragus (Roumanie), 1929–1932 (Paris, 1960)
D. and E. Stockmann and W. Fiedler: Albanische Volksmusik, i: Gesänge der Çamen (Berlin, 1965)
B. Suchoff, ed.: Béla Bartók: Rumanian Folk Music (The Hague, 1967–75)
N. Kaufman: Nyakoi obshti cherti mezhdu narodnata pesen na bulgarite i iztochnite slavyani [Common features of Bulgarian and East Slavic folksong] (Sofia, 1968)
A. Czekanowska-Kuklinska: Ludowe melodie waskiego zakresu w krajach slowianskich [Narrow range melodies in Slavonic countries] (Kraków, 1972)
G. Holst: Road to Rembetika: Music of a Greek Subculture, Songs of Love, Sorrow and Hashish (Athens, 1975, 3/1983)
A. Petrovic: Ganga: a Form of Traditional Rural Singing in Yugoslavia (diss., Queen’s U. of Belfast, 1977)
A. Elscheková, ed.: Stratigraphische Probleme der Volksmusik in den Karpaten und auf dem Balkan (Bratislava, 1981)
S. Baud-Bovy: Essai sur la chanson populaire grecque (Nauplion, 1983)
Z. Kumer: Die Volksmusikinstrumente in Slowenien (Ljubljana, 1986)
J. Cowan: Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece (Princeton, NJ, 1990)
M.H. Beissinger: The Art of the Lautar: the Epic Tradition of Romania (New York, 1991)
M.D. Goldin and I.I. Zemtsovsky, eds.: Jewish Folk Songs (St Petersburg, 1994)
T. Rice: ‘May It Fill Your Soul’: Experiencing Bulgarian Music (Chicago, 1994)
N.A. L'vov and I. Prach: Sobraniye narodnikh russkikh pesen s ikh golosami [Collection of Russian folksongs with their melodies] (St Petersburg, 1790)
K. Danilov, ed.: Drevniia ruskiia stikhotvoreniia (St Petersburg, 1804, 2/1818 with melodies)
A. Serov: Russkaya narodnaya pesnya kak predmet nauki [The Russian folksong as a subject for science] (Moscow, 1868–71/R)
E. Lineva: Velikorusskiye pesni v narodnoy garmonizatsii [Greater Russian songs in the people's harmonization] (St Petersburg, 1904–9; Eng. trans., 1905–12, as The Peasant Songs of Great Russia as they are in the Folk's Harmonization)
K. Kvitka: Narodni mel'ody z holosu Lesi Ukrainky [Folksongs of Lesya Ukrayinka] (Kiev, 1917–18, enlarged 2/1973 by S. Hrytza and O.J. Dey, 3/1977)
G. Schünemann: Das Lied der deutschen Kolonisten in Russland (Munich, 1923)
E. Mahler: Die russische Totenklage (Leipzig, 1935/R)
Y.M. Sokolov: Russian Folklore (New York, 1950/R)
B.V. Asaf'ev: Muzikal'naya forma kak protsess [Musical form as a process] (Moscow, 2/1963 by Ye.M. Orlova)
K. Vertkov, G. Blagodatov and E. Yazovitskaya: Atlas muzďkal'nďkh instrumentov naradov SSSR [Atlas of the musical instruments of the peoples of the USSR] (Moscow, 1963, 2/1975 with 4 discs and Eng. summary)
H. Tantsyura: Pisni yavdokhy zuyikhy (Kiev, 1965)
E. Stockmann and others, eds.: Sowjetische Volkslied- und Volksmusikforschung (Berlin, 1967)
I.I. Zemtsovsky: Russkaya protyazhnaya pesnya [The Russian ‘prolonged’ song] (Leningrad, 1967)
Z.Ya. Mozheyko: Pesennaya kul'tura belorusskogo Poles'ya: selo Tonezh [The song culture of the Belarusian Poles'ye: the village of Tonezh] (Minsk, 1971)
D. Holy: Probleme der Entwicklung und des Stils der Volksmusik: volkstümliche Tanzmusik auf der mährischen Seite der Weissen Karpaten (Brno, 1969)
K. Kvitka: Izbrannďye trudi [Selected works], ed. V.L. Hoshovsky (Moscow, 1971–3)
F. Rubtsov: Stat'i po muzikal'nomu fol'kloru [Articles on musical folklore] (Leningrad, 1973)
A. Banin, ed.: Muzykal'naya fol'kloristika [Musical folkloristics] (Moscow, 1973–86)
I.I. Zemtsovsky: Melodika kalendarnďkh pesen [The melodies of calendar songs] (Leningrad, 1975)
Machine Aspects of Algorithmic Formalized Analysis of Musical Texts: Yerevan-Dilijan 1975
O. Ronström: Balalaijkan: en instrumentstudie (Stockholm, 1976)
R. Zguta: Russian Minstrels: a History of the Skomorokhi (Philadelphia, 1978)
K. Brambats: ‘The Vocal Drone in the Baltic Countries: Problems of Chronology and Provenance’, Journal of Baltic Studies, xiv/1 (1983), 24–34
P. Suojanen: Finnish Folk Hymn Singing: Study in Music Anthropology (Tampere, 1984)
Z.Ya. Mozheyko: Kalendarno-pesennaya kul'tura Belorussi: opďt sistemno-tďpologicheskogo issledovaniya [Calendar song culture in Belarus: attempt at a systemic-typological study] (Minsk, 1985)
W. Noll: ‘Music, Life and Death among the Village Minstrels of Ukraine’, Folklife Center News, xv/2 (1993), 3–5