THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF FOLK-MUSIC, as Exemplified in the Welsh National Melodies: by Kenneth Morris
GREAT attention is being paid nowadays to the collecting of old folk-songs in such countries as Ireland, Wales, and England; and there has been much discussion raised as to the nature and origin of a folk-song, properly so called. The subject is one of considerable interest, because it leads one to a point where the known and visible things melt away, and forces and influences of a deeper nature are at work. These may be called spiritual and formative; there is a hand guiding, but no one can see any hand; there is a creative mind at function, but it is not the mind of any human being.
In Wales one can still see the genuine folk-song coming into being; one can still watch, more or less, the processes incidental to its birth. In that country, poetry was never held to be a mere string of words that you could repeat as if you were reading an article from the newspaper; conversational methods of utterance are kept for conversation, or for the lower levels of prose, and there is a peculiar chant used for verse. The poem is born with a music of its own; and if it have no such music innate in it, and inseparable from its words, then for all its rhymes and scansion it is no poetry. So in speaking their poems the bards give full value to this music, using a kind of chant which is called "hwyl." The word means simply "sail"; the idea being that the inner music of the poem swells and extends and drives along the words, as the wind will fill and drive the sails of a ship. The method is perfectly natural; the least introduction of artificiality into it is absolutely damning: there you would get the desolating thump, thump, thump, of the motor boat instead of the free flow of the winds of heaven.
As regards the musical scale, this hwyl is mainly monotonous; there is another kind or direction of scale in it, depending on the varying vowel sounds, which, though you chant them upon one musical note, have a certain rise and fall in them proper to themselves. If one imagines the scale of do, re, mi, fa, and the rest as being in a vertical line; then this scale of a, e, i, o, oo, etc., would fall horizontally; we can think of no better way of making a likeness for it. The richness of the vowels will make the music, and therefore the poetry. One can see this by comparing two lines, both popularly supposed to be poetry.
I am monarch of all I survey;
there is no music in that, and if one should attempt to put the hwyl into it, he would be guilty of the sin of untruth, which is the greatest of the crimes against poetry, according to the ancient doctrine of the bards.
I saw Osirian Egypt kneel adown
And one would be guilty of the same sin, should one repeat that lifelessly, and without the hwyl that existed around the mind of Keats before the line took verbal form, and out of which magical and alchemic element it was precipitated.
The bard, then, chants his poem, and the words are noted down, and pass from mouth to mouth; and as they pass, the horizontal scale takes on gradually some coloring of the vertical scale, and the chant becomes more and more a tune. The process is natural, and dependent upon no brain-mind; no composer gets to work upon it, and no one inserts in it consciously any ideas of his own. The Dorian mode, which (we quote from Mrs. Mary Davies, an authority on Welsh music) has a minor third as well as a minor seventh; and the Aeolian or la mode, in which the third as well as the sixth and seventh are minor, are still largely in use in Wales; and we believe that these two modes represent a stage in the passing of the chanted poem, or the chant of the poem, into the full-fledged folk-tune. For one will sometimes hear an air which, in the printed collections is given in the arbitrary modern major or minor scales, sung a little differently, according to these older modes; and it would appear that all or nearly all the well-known Welsh national tunes have passed through such or similar stages.
It is here worthy of note that the Welsh hwyl—which is used not only in poetry, but in all the higher levels of prose as well, particularly in pulpit rhetoric—is not found, we believe, elsewhere in Europe, at any rate as a popular custom (for all poets chant and do not say their verses); but it is to be heard in Morocco, along the coast of Northern Africa, in Arabia, Persia, and throughout the East; where also certain of these older modes of music, such as the Dorian, are said to be in vogue to some extent. We imagine that the chant and the music-modes both vary as they go eastward; but it is a gradual growth or differentiation, not an abrupt change. The Persian poet, chanting his Hafiz, and the Welsh preacher, giving out the hymn, have much more in common with each other than either has with the modern conventional drawing-room reciter.
And then there is the national air, the last stage in the growth of that which began with some village bard's arrangement of his deep vowels and diphthongs. Long ago the words were forgotten, or lost all connexion with the tune they gave birth to; because at a certain stage the harpers took the tune up, and sang whatever words to it they might make up for the occasion. Such a tune as All through the Night, for example, would set out with such and such a bard on his wanderings. He would come to a wedding, and play it there, singing extempore verses to it filled full of joy and merriment. Then he would come to a house where there might be one newly dead; and his tune would again be called for; now it would be a dirge laden with mystical wailing and the joy that hides behind wailing. At the village fair it would appear as a dance; in the house of the warward chieftain it would ring and clamor with all the pomp and surging and uplift of the old wild, Quixotic, ridiculous wars. There would be different songs for it on each occasion; one hardly troubled much with the preservation of them, for song was a thing that a gentleman could call upon himself for at any time. Why keep the songs you sang today, when tomorrow you would surely sing other songs as good? Poetry was of all things the cheapest and most general where every other man, as you might say, was a poet.
One hears this kind of thing at the present day. Very few of the Welsh national tunes have any traditional words to them. If there is any special song attached to this tune or that, it will probably be the work of Ceiriog, who may be called the Robert Burns of Wales, or of some individual bard in the last two or three centuries, who sang such and such words to the tune on such an occasion, or in whose tragic or amusing history those words and that tune blended were pivotal, and have passed into a popular tradition.
Generally speaking, the words sung to all these airs are what are called Pennillion—hen bennillion, old verses; a kind of traditional folk-poetry arising no one knows from whom, and commemorating popular wisdom, historical events, personal peculiarities and eccentricities of long dead countryside celebrities, the beauties and delights of this or that locality, and so on. There will be war-songs, love-songs, dance-songs, dirges and nature-songs; a pennill on the three best dancers of Wales, and a pennill on the three prized things of three neighboring villages: the yews of Bettws, the bridge at Llandeilo, the sacred well at Llandybie. Unnumbered are these pennillion; perhaps more many than the tunes themselves to which they may be sung.
II
THE old Welsh choirs and singing-parties—and they still do it, though of course foreign music, both the work of the great composers and the ribald stuff of the music halls, is making grand inroads—the old choirs would delight to take such and such a tune for the work of their evening, and sing song after song to it, now a dance, now a war-song, and now a dirge, one after the other; and whichever kind of song they might be singing, you would say that that tune was composed as, and could inevitably be, only suitable for that. You would say that, of course, by its very structure it would be impossible for it to be anything but martial; there was the very pride and beat of war in it; no blood could keep still, no feet forget to march at the sound of it. And then you would change your mind, and know that it could never be anything but a dirge; there as obviously the whole secret of sorrow in it; you were at one, hearing it, with everyone who might be mourning for their dearest dead; and you too, with them, were initiated into marvelous hopes and superhuman certainties and joy—carried out of time wherein men die, into that timelessness wherein they neither die nor are born. And that too would pass, and the singers would bring you into careless summer-evening merriment, and for the life of you, there was no keeping your feet from the shaking and wandering of dance.
One hears the multifold music of the world; the innumerable rhythms and variations of melody; combinations and intricacies many as the thoughts in the minds of terrestrial beings. And of those thoughts themselves, there will be all manner of ranks and no democratic equality. Some will be clansmen, so to say, in the house of merriment, others in the house of grief; mere commonalty of the mind, wearing at any time all the badges of their clan. These are cheap, every-day wayfarers, and stir the same emotion, or bring the same colorlessness, into whatever mind they may enter and whenever they may enter it. Others will be chieftains and tribal leaders, entering with greater circumstance, and imposing a larger subjection. Good or evil, they too bear always their own colors; grief will be grief and joy will be joy; love will be love, and hatred never anything but hatred, of the emotions that follow in their train.
But there are some few archetypal thoughts that you cannot so docket and always rely upon. They are the kings and high bards, standing beyond the limitations of tribe and sept. They will come in what insignia and royal robings they may choose, and rouse up gladness or sorrow, stillness or militancy according to their will. Such thoughts are those of death, of duration, of humanity, of compassion. You have spoken no true nor final word on death, when you have proclaimed him the king of terrors; though indeed, the thought of august death comes often in sorrowful and terrible disguise. Yet behind that dark regalia, what serenity, what unstirred meditative calm, what "peace that passeth all understanding," lie hidden! Compassion, too, comes doubly robed in the purple; dark with the sorrow that is in pity; glowing with the regality and gladness of unity with universal life. It is at once the martial conqueror of the world, boundless in hope and exultation; the sweet ministrant of the wounded, and the mourner at the graves of the fallen.
I think that there are expressions of music that correspond to these supernal and superpersonal thoughts; and that they are in fact simple tunes, and that many of them must be to be found in the folk-music of all nations. They are, as it were, archetypal patterns of song, root rhythms, sprung absolutely from the fountains of feeling, where feeling has not yet been diversified into all its countless forms of pain and delight. I think that the most beautiful of the Welsh airs fall into this class, or into that other corresponding with what we have called the tribal leaders of the thought plane. The Marches of the Men of Harlech, of Glamorgan or Meirionydd—indeed every district in Wales seems to have had its own war-tune in the ancient days—these are always distinctly martial, and there is no possibility of mistaking them or of making them anything else. Y Galon Drom, Anhawdd Ymadael, Morfa Rhuddlan and a thousand others, again, are always dirges; to Gyrru'r Byd o'm Blaen, or to Pwt ar y Bys, you would never dream of doing anything but dance. All have with them a certain distinction and aristocracy in their own kind: about folk-music there is nearly always a bearing and a value, and vulgarity is impossible to the bulk of it. But beyond and higher than these there are those archetypal tunes which stir the source of whatever feeling they may be directed towards; one might mention perhaps Llwyn On the Ash Grove, as a good example. There are hundreds of them among the Welsh airs.
Now the whole point of our inquiry is this—what was the creative or directing mind that brought these things to be? It was not the bard who first chanted the song; it was no one of the thousands of singers who modified and modified it as they passed it on, until presently the fixed tune was evolved, and changes and modifications ceased. These were all instruments in its evolution; but there was also an evolver. For it was brought, if indeed it is a primeval and radical thing, to no haphazard conclusion. The music that you make up is one thing; the music of the spheres is another: though it might happen indeed, that sitting down to compose, there should be revealed to you a measure from the music of the spheres. No doubt that would have happened occasionally—probably only occasionally—with the great transcendent geniuses of music: but then, there was no great transcendent genius, neither Wagner nor Bach nor Beethoven, concerned in the making of the folk-tune. We can posit the soul of Beethoven, wrapt up into the universal soul, hearing immortal immeasurable things, and after, producing some fragment of them in a sonata or a symphony! But what soul was it here, who heard the rhythm and measure of the star-music, and what the mountains are singing in their hearts to make them eternal, and the song that drives the rivers and the rain, and the bardic carol of the sun, and the ineffable yearning of the souls of men, upward towards their divinity and evolutionary destined grandeur—who heard, and set all these things bleakly and magnificently down in the folk-song? I will not apologize for speaking of the folk-song and the sonata in one breath: of the gods also are the mountain and the pansy.
Do we not see here the working of a Soul greater than that of any individual; the soul of the nation; the God that is this people or that? His compositions are marked by a unity, as are those of any composer: you can tell an Irish Air at a hearing, or a Welsh Air. And He, or It, reveals through them greater and deeper things than are known to any individual among his people; ancient memories that they may have wholly forgotten; aspirations after spiritual glories which not one of them may have ever foreseen or hoped for. So all the deepest things that are in the national consciousness may be poured through the playing of these composerless compositions; and we cannot doubt that they remain a most potent link between the people and its hidden divinity.