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.