I
The brothers Grimm, profound students of popular lore, used to say that they had never found a single lie in folk-poetry. This sounds strange as we think of the giants and fairies who appear in it, along with historical events given a completely new twist for the sake of artistic attractiveness. Obviously the meaning of the brothers Grimm was somewhat profound. And so, too, is the truth in folk-poetry.
For the imagination of folk-poetry is not the promulgation of lies, but the interpretation of facts. The folk-poets meant something as they sang their songs, though they may not have been entirely conscious about it. Why, for instance, is there never a good stepmother in folk-song? There have been good stepmothers, undoubtedly, but the folk-poets knew that it is not in the nature of things that stepmothers will be as good to children as natural mothers. Or why does Jack the Giant Killer not make a pact with the giant when he holds the tyrant finally at his mercy, and live in luxury on a part of the spoils ever afterward? It would be a realistic ending. It would be true to modern politics and correct according to the latest canons of art. But Jack is a popular hero, and a popular hero does not betray the people he fights for. If you want to know some fact in the history of a people don’t go to the official records; they may be tainted by the vanity of the king or by the personal bias of the recorder. But go to the people’s folk-lore. If the fact is there, it is a truth as solid as the mountains. The song may tell you that their good king had thirty-seven horses shot under him in one day, that he fought and killed, single-handed, ten men at arms who surrounded him. It may tell you this, and you will perhaps suspect that the arithmetic is faulty, but you will know that the essential statement—that of the heroism and the popularity of the king—is true. The king’s minstrel might have made a song making a coward and tyrant a hero and a popular leader; but he could not have made people sing it. ‘The ballad-maker only wields his power for as long as he is the true interpreter of the popular will. Laws may be imposed on the unwilling, but not songs.’[7] Written histories may tell you that under such and such a king the people were happy—that the revolution which came afterward was a factitious or fomented one. Go to your folk-song. Bujor the Red-Headed, a Moldavian brigand and a popular hero, was ‘pitiless toward officers of government and toward nobles; he was, on the contrary, most gracious toward peasants and the unfortunate.’ This is historical evidence more reliable than sealed parchment. The government of that land was not good, the nobles were not beneficent. No written history of a people can be considered reliable as long as it conflicts with that people’s folk-lore.
Truthfulness to facts—this is what the brothers Grimm claimed for folk-lore. Goethe ascribes to it truthfulness to art. ‘The unsophisticated man,’ he writes, ‘is more the master of direct, effective expression in few words than he who has received a regular literary education.’ The observation has been made hundreds of times by competent judges. The simple mind has a wonderful power of seeing the essential in a thing and expressing it briefly and exactly. To have command over expression in the simplest terms—is this not the beginning of art?
This power which is revealed by folk-poetry is also revealed by folk-music. The people’s melodies have the same ‘direct, effective expression’ in a few notes that Goethe noticed in their poetry. As truly as the greatest composers, folk-songs can say universal things in a few notes. Beethoven may have equalled, but he never surpassed, the ‘direct, effective expression’ of ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ The majesty of this song can hardly be equalled in the whole of musical literature. Many people have noticed the peculiar effect of the refrain which makes it seem as though a mighty and harmonious orchestra of trumpets and trombones were joining in the chorus. And this with a melody denuded of every merely decorative tone, written in a scale of just five notes!
Everywhere in folk-music we find this power of expressing the highest things in the fewest notes. Only the very greatest of conscious composers have been able to compete with the folk-song on its own terms, within its rigid limitations. Art-songs have elaborated and refined. But it seems as though the essence is always in the folk-tunes. Like the popular stories that furnished plots to the old dramatists, these melodies have supplied the simple musical resources which conscious composers have developed. Every sort of emotion is expressed in the folk-songs, every degree of passion, every quality of mood—provided only it is human, common to all men.
Do not think that folk-songs are an affair of the past, a subject for the archeologist. One is inclined to think that it is so among Anglo-Saxon people, especially in America. But folk-songs are not only sung this moment in many a land, but are yet living and growing in more than one country. The quantity of very recent Italian folk-songs is enormous. Every year, at the fair of Piedegrotta, near Naples, the popular singers of the city stand on a cart and sing the songs they have composed in the past months. For hours these concerts continue, the crowd moving from one singer to another. The songs are caught up and sung by the listeners. At the end of the festival no vote is taken, but everyone knows which song has been the winner in the competition. It is being sung from one end of the city to the other. And the successful songs of the year’s festival pass into folk-music of the people.
It is true of these songs (as was not true of earlier folk-music) that the composers are known and remembered. Indeed, the songs are promptly printed and circulated. But the composers are nevertheless true sons of the people. They have little knowledge of letters and musical laws; they compose from the heart and from the instinct for fitness. The music of such composers can justly be classed as folk-music, since it is utterly in the popular spirit and receives the visé of the masses. It is more unfortunate that in Naples a phonograph firm has undertaken to make commercial capital out of the Fair of Piedegrotta, and every year takes records of the successful songs, which it circulates all over Europe. Under such conditions the composers must necessarily soon lose the celebrated ‘folk simplicity,’ if they have not lost it already.
It is fair to say that in Italy folk-music is still very much alive. All that is new in life is celebrated by these folk-poets. The famous ‘Funicula,’ a modern Italian folk-song par excellence, was made to celebrate the funicular or inclined railroad in the days when this was a novelty. There is a well-known Neapolitan song in honor of the telephone, and current events, such as the Turkish war, receive generous attention.
In many other countries the growth of folk-song has all but ceased, though the songs of former times are sung with almost as much zest as ever. But these songs (including most of those familiar to us) are usually not of great age. At least they have generally been remade in more up-to-date form and do not plainly show evidences of their age. Generally speaking, we may be sure that any folk-song in the common major scale is to be dated within the last two hundred years. It may have been founded on an older song, but its modern changes have been such as to give it a totally new flavor. This is not to say that all old songs which remain living in the hearts of the people become changed according to musical fashions. Those which have a strong enough traditional hold may keep their ancient form after Debussy has been forgotten. Thus many an English folk-song, startling and inspiriting in its originality, is in a modal scale—with a minor that is not commonly in use to-day, or else a shifting between one tonic and another which carries us clearly back into the days when tonality was not yet felt in scales. Yet these songs were not committed to paper in Henry VIII’s or Queen Elizabeth’s time, when they attained their present form. They have mostly been discovered by earnest searching only within the last ten years. They lived, in unsophisticated, out-of-the-way places, in their ancient form.
In general, of course, the question of the age or authenticity of a folk-song is one for the musical archeologist, rather than for the mere lover of music. The folk-songs that are in the hands of the general public are in all stages of authenticity and purity. There was a time when no publisher who knew his business would think of publishing a folk-song in its true form. It was barbarous, not fit for the graces of the drawing-room. So some composer of the fashion (or, failing such, some hack) was hired to ‘arrange’ them and to supply an accompaniment in approved style. And, naturally, under such a régime it was not the most characteristic of a country’s folk-songs that were chosen, but those most similar to polite music—that is, the least characteristic. Often the songs had been transcribed by little-trained listeners or else not transcribed at all, but only imperfectly remembered. There was little of the national essence left in such music. And the composers of the day discovered the fact and turned it to their account. Why go to Sicily to pick up folk-songs when Sicilian folk-songs can be written without stirring out of your study in London? And this is precisely what Sir Henry Bishop, for instance, did. And it is to such a hoax that we owe the tune of ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ which was at first published in a book of alleged Sicilian songs ‘edited’ by Bishop, few, if any, of which were genuine.
These days, however, are past. The modern attitude toward folk-songs is one of respect, almost of reverence. The greatest of pains have been taken to preserve the songs as they were actually sung, ‘mistakes’ and all. No tune of two notes is too slight to be worth the trouble of accurate transcription. Especially since the invention of the phonograph the scientific study of folk-songs has prospered. Thousands upon thousands of songs have been taken down by the phonograph among the Indians of North America, the negroes of Africa, and the Russians of the Caucasus. The results, it is true, are likely to be regarded as scientific—ethnological or psychological—data rather than as artistic entities. But the tunes are accessible to musicians and often appear in the art music of the time—as we well know from Russian symphonies or even from Charles Wakefield Cadman’s interesting arrangements of Indian lyrics. And the value of the accurate transcriptions as data for scientific æsthetic theory cannot be overestimated.
However, most of the folk-songs available to the music lover have not the stigma of ‘science’ attached to them. Nearly all that have been published in the last ten years show some care of editing, some concern that the tunes, if they be not exactly as they were in their habitat, shall be true to the spirit of the original. Some editions give the original unaccompanied form of the tunes, perhaps with interesting variants. Few, in fact, try to pull the wool over the reader’s eyes. Scientific or not, modern editions of folk-songs show a candor which the subject has long needed.
Many folk-songs, like the modern German, approximate ‘art’ music in their musical basis and can be understood as they stand. That is, they have the prevailing scales and are sung with accompaniments in the accented harmony. But most folk-songs are not sung with accompaniment. And when the editors begin to supply accompaniments trouble ensues. For the songs have their own style and will not coalesce with a type of accompaniment made for another style. And editors, trained in the schools, cannot produce a new musical style at a moment’s notice. So the original melodies may be changed and adapted more nearly to a diatonic scale which will fit a ready-made accompaniment. Or the accompaniment may do its best to suit the modal or unusual style of the melodies. Or both sides may be forced to make concessions. It would be most satisfactory, if our ears could get used to it, to sing these more unusual folk-songs without accompaniment and not try the barbarous experiment of making the right foot fit the left shoe. But even when they are altered, these melodies retain much of their beauty, and one would much rather have them ‘edited’ than not have them at all.
We must also mention that great class of songs which are not strictly folk-songs at all, but deserve to rank as folk-songs by every title except the technical one. They are those songs written by conscious composers, published and sold, but intended for wide circulation and great popularity—those, in short, which by their simplicity and genuineness evoke a human response similar to that evoked by true folk-songs. Such are the immortal songs of Stephen Foster in America—‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ ‘Old Black Joe,’ and the rest. Such is ‘Annie Laurie,’ one of the most beautiful of melodies. And such are the German songs of Silcher—Die Lorelei, Scheiden, and many others. Nearly all these composers have been without aptitude in the larger musical forms—often persons of little education and culture. Very few great composers have succeeded in thus writing folk-songs. Weber, of all of them, is the nearest to the folk-spirit, and the slow movement of Agathe’s aria, Leise, leise, from Der Freischütz, is now a permanent folk-song with the best of them. Schubert’s Lindenbaum and Heidenröslein have the same quality. Mendelssohn is a folk-composer by virtue of his song Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rath. But in general it has seemed next to impossible for a conscious and highly trained composer to catch the spirit of the folk in simplest terms.
The most available folk-music for the average student is that which is freely arranged and edited by a man whose name is a guarantee of honest and musicianly work—such a man as Weckerlin, collector and editor of French songs from the earliest to the most recent; or Cecil Sharp, collector of forgotten songs in Somersetshire, England. Such an editor may keep the songs intact or may vary them, may adopt some one else’s accompaniment or write one of his own, but he will always do it intelligently, altering only what it is reasonably necessary to alter, and keeping always true to the spirit, if not to the letter, of the original.
It should be borne in mind that the songs to be described in the following pages are, many of them, sung quite spontaneously and naturally to-day by the peasants and unsophisticated people of the various countries. The writer, while crossing the ocean, once listened for hours to the Dutch steerage passengers amusing themselves with songs and dances. And he recognized among the songs the famous ‘William of Nassau,’ probably centuries old. Thus simple people in European countries are constantly singing enduring masterpieces of music along with much, of course, that is ephemeral.
In the very brief survey which we shall make of folk-songs as the student finds them to his hand to-day we shall be able to do no more than suggest the national characteristics of each group. Anything like a list of the fine songs of each nation, or an adequate appreciation of its popular music, would be impossible in less than a volume. Likewise, all the interesting questions of racial characteristics as affecting art, of technical development and international interchange, of æsthetic theory and melodic analysis, must be left quite to one side until there shall be written the adequate book on folk-music which as yet does not exist in the English language. The present chapter attempts only to suggest the contrasting characteristics of the different folk-song traditions and the amazing extent of the treasure which has until so recently remained for the most part unknown, or known only to be snubbed.