folk music

1. music, usually of simple character and anonymous authorship, handed down among the common people by oral tradition.

2. music by known composers that has become part of the folk tradition of a country or region.

[1885-90]

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Music held to be typical of a nation or ethnic group, known to all segments of its society, and preserved usually by oral tradition.

Knowledge of the history and development of folk music is largely conjectural. Musical notation of folk songs and descriptions of folk music culture are occasionally encountered in historical records, but these tend to reflect primarily the literate classes' indifference or even hostility. As Christianity expanded in medieval Europe, attempts were made to suppress folk music because of its association with heathen rites and customs, and uncultivated singing styles were denigrated. During the Renaissance, new humanistic attitudes encouraged acceptance of folk music as a genre of rustic antique song, and composers made extensive use of the music; folk tunes were often used as raw material for motets and masses, and Protestant hymns borrowed from folk music. In the 17th century folk music gradually receded from the consciousness of the literate classes, but in the late 18th century it again became important to art music. In the 19th century, folk songs came to be considered a "national treasure," on a par with cultivated poetry and song. National and regional collections were published, and the music became a means of promoting nationalistic ideologies. Since the 1890s, folk music has been collected and preserved by mechanical recordings. Publications and recordings have promoted wide interest, making possible the revival of folk music where traditional folk life and folklore are moribund. After World War II, archives of field recordings were developed throughout the world. While research has usually dealt with "authentic" (i.e., older) material not heavily influenced by urban popular music and the mass media, the influence of singer-songwriters such as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan expanded the genre to include original music that largely retains the form and simplicity of traditional compositions.

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Introduction

      type of traditional and generally rural music that originally was passed down through families and other small social groups. Typically, folk music, like folk literature, lives in oral tradition; it is learned through hearing rather than reading. It is functional in the sense that it is associated with other activities, and it is primarily rural in origin. The usefulness of the concept varies from culture to culture, but it is most convenient as a designation of a type of music of Europe and the Americas.

The concept of folk music

      The term folk music and its equivalents in other languages denote many different kinds of music; the meaning of the term varies according to the part of the world, social class, and period of history. In determining whether a song or piece of music is folk music, most performers, participants, and enthusiasts would probably agree on certain criteria derived from patterns of transmission, social function, origins, and performance.

      The central traditions of folk music are transmitted orally or aurally, that is, they are learned through hearing rather than the reading of words or music, ordinarily in informal, small social networks of relatives or friends rather than in institutions such as school or church. In the 20th century, transmission through recordings and mass media began to replace much of the face-to-face learning. In comparison with art music, which brings aesthetic enjoyment, and popular music, which (often along with social dancing) functions as entertainment, folk music is more often associated with other activities, such as calendric or life-cycle rituals, work, games, enculturation, and folk religion; folk music is also more likely to be participatory than presentational.

      The concept applies to cultures in which there is also an urban, technically more sophisticated musical tradition maintained by and for a smaller social, economic, and intellectual elite in cities, courts, or urbanized cultures. Generally, “folk music” refers to music that broad segments of the population—particularly the lower socioeconomic classes—understand, and with which they identify. In this respect it is the rural counterpart to urban popular music, although that music depends mainly on the mass media—recordings, radio, television, and to some degree the Internet—for dissemination.

      Traditionally, folk music performers were amateurs, and some folk songs were literally known to all members of a community; but specialists—instrumentalists and singers of narratives—were important to folk communities. In the 20th century, the role of professionals as performers and carriers of folk traditions expanded dramatically. Folk music as it is believed to have existed in earlier times may be discussed separately from periods of revival such as that of 19th-century European nationalism and the 20th-century revivals, shortly before and after World War II, that were motivated by political agendas. In the context of popular music, performances of “folk music” may be distinguished by the use of songs with political agendas and the use of traditional instruments and acoustic guitars. On the other side of the musical spectrum, lines between folk music and art music were blurred beginning in the 19th century, when art music composers introduced songs from folklore into urban musical culture.

      The terms used for folk music in different cultures illuminate aspects of the concept. The English term and its French and Italian analogues, musique populaire and musica popolare, indicate that this is music associated with a social class, the “folk.” The German Volksmusik (“people's music”) combines the concept of class with the unification of an ethnic group, as does the Hindi term log git (“the people's music”) in India. Czech, like some of the other Slavic languages, uses the term narod (“nation”) and its relatives, indicating that folk music is the musical unifier of all Czechs. Conversely, the Persian term mūsīqī-ye maḥallī (“regional music”) emphasizes the distinctions in folk music style and repertory among different areas of Iran. The term folk music has also, perhaps unwisely, been used for traditional art musics of Asian and African cultures, to distinguish them from the Western classical system.

      The typical 21st-century conception of folk music comes from beliefs about the nature of music and musical life in the village cultures of Europe from the 18th into the 19th century; but this traditional folk music culture was affected greatly by the rise of industrial society and of cities, as well as by nationalist movements beginning in the 19th century. Both the threat to folk culture and the rise of nationalism spurred revival and preservation movements in which learned musicians, poets, and scholars provided leadership. In the 20th century, further revivals associated folk music with political and social movements and blurred the musical distinctions among folk, art, and popular musics. Nevertheless, vigorous remnants of the traditional culture of folk music were retained in 19th-century western Europe and in eastern Europe into the 20th century; these are the bases for the following characterization.

General characteristics of folk music

Creation and adaptation

      Where a folk song originated is rarely known to its community, and thus the anonymity of the creative process was once considered a major criterion of folk music identification. It has become clear, however, that folk songs (song) and other pieces are the result of individual creation, either by villagers or by professional or church musicians whose work is somehow taken up in the folk culture. The repertory of a folk community probably always included songs of very diverse origins.

      The form of a folk song as heard at any one time, however, is likely to have been very much affected by the entire community because of its life in oral tradition. Once introduced, a song could be easily dropped from the repertory. More likely, however, as it was passed from parents to children and to friends and associates and coworkers, it would be changed. Numerous influences acted on a song, including creativity, forgetfulness, previously learned songs, and stylistic expectations. As a result, it might become shorter or more like new styles of popular or church music, for example. Any new song would be likely to undergo this process of communal re-creation. An important characteristic of a song or piece in traditional folk culture is, thus, its dependence on acceptance by a community—that is, by a village, nation, or family—and its tendency to change as it is passed from one individual to another and performed.

Transmission and variation (musical variation)

     Because a folk song lives largely through oral transmission, it ordinarily does not exist in a standard form. In each region of a country, community, village, or family, and even in the repertory of each singer over time, it may have significant differences. Each performance of a song may be unique. In colloquial discussions of folk songs (or tales), the terms variant and version are used to highlight the differences in ways of singing the same song (or telling the same story). In the technical literature about folklore, the terms version, variant, and form may be used to express degrees of relationship. Thus, for example, several quite similar performances by one singer might constitute a version of a song. Several versions, not so similar to each other, would constitute a variant. Several variants, comprising a body of performances of the song that are clearly related but not homogeneous, might be designated as a form. Groups of songs (words or music) that appear, on the basis of analysis, to be related are called tune families or text types. Text types, such as narratives that form the basis of ballads, may have numerous variants and versions. The ballad usually known as "Lady Isabel and the False Knight," studied by Iivar Kemppinen, has about 1,800 renditions, collected in nations throughout Europe and the Americas. Bertrand H. Bronson, assembling all available versions of the English ballad "Barbara Allen," found 198 versions of the story sung in the English-speaking world, accompanied by tunes belonging to three tune families.

      In the development of variants, for example, a song with four musical lines (e.g., ABCD) may lose two of these lines and take on the form ABAB. In turn, two new lines may be substituted for the initial two, giving it a form EFAB. Folk tunes also change when they cross ethnic or cultural boundaries. A German variant, for example, may exhibit characteristics of German folk music, while its variant in the Czech Republic, although recognizably related, will assume the stylistic traits of Czech folk music.

      Folk cultures seem to vary greatly in the internal relationships of their repertoires. English folk music, for example, is believed to consist largely of about 40 tune families, each of which descends from a single song. And the majority of English folk songs appear to be members of only seven such tune families. Hungarian folk music, on the other hand, contains some 200 units that could be described as the equivalent of tune families. In the folk music of eastern Iran, some types of poetry—e.g., the widely loved quatrain type chahār-baytī—are all sung to versions of a single tune.

Compositional patterns

      The process by which members of folk communities compose new songs is not well understood, although the study of how tunes are related may provide some insight. When it is first composed, each song is the work of one composer; as others learn and sing it, it is re-created constantly. The compositional process of folk music differs little from that of popular and classical music. For example, the composer may create new songs by drawing together lines, phrases, and musical motifs from extant songs, possibly combined with entirely new ones and with standard opening or closing formulas. The characteristic musical structures, scales, and rhythms of folk music are also found in the other types of music of the same culture. Systematic improvisation as a method of composition is found only occasionally, as in the epic songs of what was once Yugoslavia and of Ukraine. It is often difficult to ascertain whether the same composer created both the words and the music in a folk song; many songs are known to have separate sources for words and music.

      In spite of its dependence on oral tradition, folk music has tended to be closely related to music in written tradition, and this relationship has intensified in periods of urbanization and revival. Many folk songs originated in written form. For many centuries, popular and classical composers have adapted folk music and in turn influenced the oral tradition. Music from art music culture, such as Franz Schubert's songs "Heidenröslein" (“Little Moorland Rose”) or "The Linden Tree" and arias from Mozart's The Magic Flute, found their way into folk tradition. A modern analogue of written tradition, recording, substantially influenced the oral tradition, as folk singers could hear various arrangements of folk music in private and commercial recordings. Thus, the transmission of folk music has not been an isolated process but one intertwined with other kinds of musical transmission.

      Tunes often migrate between neighbouring countries. A few tune types are found throughout the European culture area, and textual types (such as ballad stories) are more widely distributed than tune types. Each country, however, tends to have a repertory of its own, with stylistic features as well as tunes that are not shared with neighbours.

Folk music in society

      Traditional village society had a vigorous musical life, in which many songs in most genres were known to, and often sung by, a large proportion of the population. Nevertheless, a degree of musical professionalism must have obtained; instrumentalists, though not formally educated, were specialists, as were singers of epic narratives (in the Balkans and Finland, for example) and singers of occupational songs such as sea shanties. Western cultures generally share the same genres of folk music. One of the most important is the ballad, generally a short narrative song with repeated lines. Epics are longer narratives in heroic style, which sometimes require many hours to sing. Some songs are ceremonial, meant to accompany events in the human life cycle or in the community's year (such as those related to the agricultural seasons). Other common genres are work songs, love and other lyrical songs, songs to accompany games, lullabies, and children's songs for enculturation (e.g., alphabet songs, proverbs, and riddles). These genres are usually differentiated through their texts, but some cultures also make musical distinctions. Instrumental folk music is most frequently an accompaniment to dance.

      By the 19th century in western Europe, and some decades later in North America and eastern Europe, folk songs had become less widely known in villages, and it seems that they were known to and sung largely by older individuals. At the same time, urban folklorists (stimulated first by Thomas Percy (Percy, Thomas) in Britain and Johann Gottfried von Herder (Herder, Johann Gottfried von) in Germany and continuing with Cecil Sharp (Sharp, Cecil) in England and the United States) began to collect and publish folk songs for an audience of urban intelligentsia, emphasizing the age of the songs and their national character. In the 19th century, songs were transcribed and notated from live performance, but then were often altered, “corrected” to conform to expected norms, and published. Composers of art music—including Johannes Brahms (Brahms, Johannes), Antonín Dvořák (Dvořák, Antonín), and Joseph Canteloube (Canteloube, Joseph)—fashioned elaborate piano accompaniments, and folk songs were added to classical concert programs. Choral arrangements and their use by amateur choirs became part of folk music culture.

      Further, by the 18th century a tradition had become established in urban working-class districts of composing songs, especially ballads, that narrated or commented on current events such as crimes and accidents. These songs, which might qualify as a predecessor of the “popular music” genre, were usually called “broadside ballads,” because they were printed on large sheets along with advertisements and sold on the streets. They were composed by urban poets and tunesmiths, usually anonymously, and they often passed into oral tradition, thus joining the body of more traditional folk music. These songs were current in villages as well as urban coffeehouses and bars. As nationalism developed, topical folk songs often found their way into the repertories of militant student organizations (e.g., in Germany) and soldiers, and they were sometimes (e.g., in the Habsburg empire) parts of the shows put on by traveling officers to recruit villagers in the provinces.

 In the course of the 20th century, as the importance of folk music in rural cultures declined in the Western world, folk songs were taken up by political and social movements of many sorts. Thus, the Nazi and fascist movements of the 1920s to 1940s in Germany and Italy introduced folk songs into the canons of their military ceremonies. In the Soviet Union and elsewhere in eastern Europe after 1945, the folk music of ethnic groups was institutionalized, taught in special conservatories, and performed by professionals (sometimes in large orchestras of folk instruments), symbolizing the equality of folk and classical traditions. The Russian balalaika-and-domra orchestras, which also toured internationally, are typical. In North America, folk music, usually learned from songbooks and taught in ethnic clubs, often in choral or band arrangements, became a major factor in the expression and maintenance of group identity for urban ethnic groups, such as Polish Americans and Austrian Americans and their Canadian counterparts.

      Most significant perhaps has been the use of folk music by dissident movements (social movement), such as those seeking social and economic reform, opposing wars, or protecting the environment. In the United States, the phenomenon began in the Great Depression of the 1930s. The first major composer of this protest music, Woody Guthrie (Guthrie, Woody), was said to have composed more than 1,000 folk songs (including "This Land Is Your Land" and "Union Maid," the latter set to a traditional German tune); they are identified as folk songs because they voice the concerns of the rural and working-class “folk,” are stylistically similar to older folk songs, and were performed with acoustic guitar accompaniment. The best-known figure in post-World War II U.S. folk music culture is Pete Seeger (Seeger, Pete), who helped to revive many traditional folk songs, performing them together with songs of liberal advocacy that he reworked or composed, including the antisegregation "We Shall Overcome" and the antiwar "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" At the end of the 20th century, the concept of folk music was dominated by recent creations of current relevance drawing on musical and poetic features that associate them with older traditions. The relationship to popular music also intensified, through the creation of mixed genres such as folk rock and through the use of folk-music elements to help create distinct national variants of mainstream rock music.

Performance characteristics of folk music

Singing styles

      Although each culture has its distinct style, folk music across Europe has important common features. Vocal and instrumental performance qualities differ considerably from those of Western art music. The sometimes strange, harsh, and tense voice and the elaborate ornamentation in folk song is no more or less natural—or intentional—than the vocal style of formally trained singers. The manner of singing and the tone colour of instrumental music vary by ethnicity and class.

      In his studies of east European folk music, the Hungarian composer and ethnomusicologist Béla Bartók (Bartók, Béla) identified two primary singing styles in European folk music, which he named parlando-rubato and tempo giusto. Parlando-rubato, stressing the words, departs frequently from strict metric and rhythmic patterns and is often highly ornamented, while tempo giusto follows metric patterns and maintains an even tempo. Both singing styles can be heard in many parts of Europe and in European-derived folk music. Using different criteria, the American folk music scholar Alan Lomax (Lomax, Alan) identified three main singing styles, which he called Eurasian, old European, and modern European. The Eurasian style, which is found mainly in southern Europe and parts of Britain and Ireland, as well as in the Middle East and South Asia, is tense, ornamented, and essentially associated with solo singing. The old European style, characteristic of central, eastern, and parts of northern Europe, is more relaxed; the sound is produced with full voice. The style is often associated with group singing in which the voices blend well. The modern European style, which is mainly of urban and western European provenance, is in effect something of a compromise between the other two.

The forms of tunes

      The typical folk song is strophic: the tune is repeated several times with successive stanzas of a poem. Tunes may have from two to eight lines, but most often there are four. The musical interrelationship among the lines is described as the form. Although many form types are used universally, each culture favours certain ones. For example, in English folk music, four lines with different content are common (ABCD), but forms whose endings revert to materials presented at the beginning are also found (e.g., ABBA, AABA, ABCA, ABAB). Similar forms are found in eastern Europe, where the use of a melodic line at successively higher or lower levels is also important (indicated here by a superscript number indicating interval of transposition upward and a subscript number indicating interval of transposition downward). Thus, in Hungarian folk music, the form AA⁵A⁵A or AAA₄A₄ is common. In Czech folk music, AA⁵BA and AA³A²A are common forms.

      Departures from these norms are most common in eastern Europe. For example, some Romanian Christmas carols illustrate a three-line form, ABA, in which the lines have, successively, 9, 11, and 9 beats, and a song with five lines that are all variations of the first line, AA′A″AA″.

      Among the exceptions to the strophic form are children's songs and ditties as well as some epic narratives. Children's game songs, lullabies, counting-out rhymes, and nursery rhymes use limited scales and rhythms and small melodic range, and they may consist of only one musical line repeated many times. Their simplicity and their similarity throughout the world suggest that they may constitute an archaic layer in the history of music.

 Epic folk singing, once widespread throughout Europe and in western and southern Asia, had three main European traditions that persisted in the 20th century: Russian, Finnish, and Balkan. The Russian and Ukrainian epic traditions include ornamented singing, often improvised, in which refrains were sometimes sung polyphonically by the audience. The Finnish Kalevala stimulated 19th-century interest in epic poetry and was influential in works such as Henry Longfellow (Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth)'s The Song of Hiawatha. South Slavic epics from the Balkans, accompanied on the one-string fiddle gusla (or gusle), are organized in 10-syllable lines with music that may be endlessly repetitive, or significantly varied and full of contrasts, depending in part on the narrative content of the moment. These epics, based on historical events such as the Battle of Kosovo (1389) between Muslim and Christian forces and often narrated from the Muslim perspective, are improvised in their details and their music; they are typically sung by professionals in coffeehouses.

      The influence of popular music on folk music, which became very strong in the 19th and 20th centuries, has tended to limit and standardize forms. The variety of melodic forms is greater, for example, in older English, Anglo-American, German, and Czech folk music than in later music.

Rhythms (rhythm) and scales

      In the older traditions of folk music, rhythm and metre largely depend on the metre of the poetry. Thus, in western Europe, where poetry is organized in metric feet, there is a tendency toward even isometric structure based on one type of metre—typically, ⁴/₄, ³/₄, or ⁶/₈, although ⁵/₄ also appears. In eastern Europe, generally, the number of syllables per line is the main organizing factor, regardless of the number of stressed syllables. Accordingly, the number of notes but not the number of measures is important, and repeated but complex metric units (e.g., ⁷/₈, ¹¹/₈, ¹³/₈) are present, particularly in Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Romanian songs.

      Rhythmic structure is closely related to singing style. Singers in the older, ornamented styles frequently depart from rigid metric presentation for melismata (i.e., a single syllable sung to a series of notes) and other expressive effects. Generally speaking, instrumental music is more rigorously metric than is vocal music. Nonmetric material, some of it consisting of long, melismatic passages, is also found in vocal and instrumental music in the parts of Europe influenced by Middle Eastern music, such as the Balkan and Iberian peninsulas.

      In general, the scales (scale) of European folk music fit into the same tonal system as European art music. Pentatonic scales (pentatonic scale) (i.e., consisting of five notes to the octave), usually consisting of minor thirds and major seconds, are used throughout the continent, especially in songs and song types that are not strongly influenced by the art music and popular music of the cities. diatonic modes (i.e., using stepwise scales of seven tones to the octave) are another important group. The modes most frequently used are Ionian (or major), Dorian, and Mixolydian, but Aeolian (or natural minor), Phrygian, and Lydian are found as well. See mode: Plainchant (mode) for a more complete description of the modes. The major mode is the most common in western and central Europe, an indication of the influence of nearby art music; others are found in eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and England (as well as in English-derived music around the world). Scales with a predominance of small intervals close to semitones are found in areas, such as the Balkans, that have been significantly influenced by Middle Eastern music.

polyphony and accompaniment

      In its 21st-century urban and institutional manifestation, folk music is normally performed by singers accompanied by stringed instruments, by instrumental ensembles, or by choruses. By contrast, in its traditional rural venues, most folk music is monophonic (that is, having only one melodic line). Yet polyphonic folk music, with several simultaneous melodic lines, is part of the old traditions in some parts of the world.

      Polyphonic vocal folk music is more common in eastern and southern Europe than in western Europe. Styles vary; the simplest include two-voiced structures that use drones (drone) (i.e., sustained sonorities) and parallel singing of the same tune at different pitch levels; more-sophisticated styles include choral songs in three or four voices. The round, another polyphonic structure, is found throughout Europe. Many polyphonic singing techniques are used on the Balkan peninsula and in the mountainous parts of Italy. Italian rural polyphony derives from ancient folk practices, medieval church music, and modern urban choral sounds. heterophony—the simultaneous performance of variations of the same tune by two singers or by a singer and his accompanying instruments—is important in Bulgarian, Serbian, and Croatian song. Parallel singing is the most common type of folk polyphony; parallel thirds—that is, singing the same tune at an interval of a third—are found throughout Europe but are particularly characteristic of Spain, Italy, and the German-speaking and western Slavic countries; parallel seconds, fourths, and fifths are sung in the Slavic countries.

 Instrumental polyphony in folk music, sometimes closely parallel to vocal practices and sometimes totally independent, is geographically more widespread than its vocal counterpart. Bagpipes, for example, which use the drone principle, are ubiquitous in Europe. The Croatian oboelike sopila is played in ensembles that practice complex group improvisation; on the double-recorder dvojnice one player can produce two simultaneous melodies. Although Scandinavian vocal music is largely monophonic, complex styles of instrumental polyphony were developed in the repertoires of instruments such as the Swedish nyckelharpa (a type of keyed fiddle) and the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle (which has four melodic strings and four or more sympathetic strings that are not bowed or plucked).

      Though all cultures have unaccompanied solo singing, the instrumental accompaniment of melody is widespread as well. Styles of accompaniment in western Europe appear to have changed over the last thousand years. At one time, it seems, simple, dronelike accompaniments were performed by stringed instruments such as harps, zithers, and psalteries. By the 19th century, simple harmonic sequences closely related to the practices of 18th-century classical music came to be used, with a variety of largely plucked instruments, such as mandolins, guitars, and banjos. The popular folk music of modern cities embodies still more-complex harmonic idioms, but the enormous role of guitars in popular music seems to have been a contribution of the folk traditions.

      It must be borne in mind that certain cultures, such as the British, the Hungarian, and the Mari people of Russia, who have very little polyphonic folk music, have developed highly complex repertoires of monophonic folk song. The predominance of polyphony does not indicate that the music is somehow more advanced.

Instruments (musical instrument)

      Folk music instruments vary in type, design, and origin. Historically and by origin, they can be divided into roughly four classes.

      The first group, which consists of the simplest instruments, includes those that European folk cultures share with many tribal cultures around the world. Among them are the following: rattles; flutes with and without finger holes; the bull-roarer; leaf, grass, and bone whistles; and long wooden trumpets, such as the Swiss alpenhorn. These instruments tend to be associated with children's games, signaling practices, and remnants of pre-Christian ritual. They evidently became widely distributed many centuries ago.

      A second group consists of instruments that were taken to Europe or the Americas from non-European cultures and often changed. From western Asian predecessors, the folk oboes of the Balkan countries and possibly bagpipes were derived; from Africa came the banjo and the xylophone; and of Central Asian derivation were folk fiddles such as the southern Slavic one-stringed gusla.

      The third group of instruments may be the product of village culture itself. An example of those made from handy materials is the Dolle, a type of fiddle used in northwestern Germany, made from a wooden shoe. A more sophisticated one may be the bowed lyre, once widespread in northern Europe but later confined (as the kantele) mainly to Finland.

      The fourth group, which is probably of greatest importance, comprises instruments taken from urban musical culture and from the traditions of classical and popular music and then sometimes changed substantially. Prominent among these are the violin, bass viol, clarinet, and guitar. In a number of cases, instruments used in art music during the Middle Ages and later, but eventually abandoned, continued to be used in folk music into the 21st century. Some of these are the violins (e.g., the Hardanger fiddle) with sympathetic strings found in Scandinavia (related to the viola d'amore) and the hurdy-gurdy, derived from the medieval organistrum and still played in France.

Folk music in historical context

      Since folk music lives in oral tradition, its history can best be understood through a study of its relationship to other musics. Many folk songs collected in oral tradition have been traced to literary sources, often of considerable antiquity. In medieval Europe, under the expansion of Christianity, attempts were made to suppress folk music because of its association with heathen rites and customs; yet some aspects of European folk music became assimilated into medieval Christian liturgical music, and vice versa. Folk music has also been consciously incorporated into European art music compositions throughout history, especially during periods of renewal, beginning with the Renaissance.

      During the late 15th and 16th centuries, the literate urban classes responded more favourably to folk music than their predecessors had in the medieval period. The humanistic attitudes of the Renaissance, which brought about the elevation of nature and of antiquity, encouraged the acceptance of folk music as a genre of rustic antique song. Some music in Renaissance manuscripts is presumed to be folk song by virtue of its musical simplicity and the rural and archaic evocations of its texts. Renaissance composers made extensive use of folk and popular music. Typical genres include polyphonic folk song settings and folk song quodlibets, or combinations of familiar songs. Folk tunes were often used as structural and motivic raw material for motets and masses; likewise, the music of the Protestant Reformation borrowed from folk music.

      The use of folk music receded in the Baroque period (about 1600–1750), but the relationship of folk music to art music became a topic of interest in the late 18th century, when Western intellectuals began to glorify folk and peasant life. Folk music came to be venerated as a spontaneous creation of peoples unencumbered by artistic self-consciousness and aesthetic theories; it was considered to embody the common experience of inhabitants of the locale. These traits make folk music a fructifying source for art music, particularly when it is intended to evoke a particular nation or ethnic group. The nationalist movements of 19th- and early 20th-century art music drew on folk tunes and their styles, as well as folk dances and themes from folklore and village life, to develop distinctive repertories. Leaders in these movements included Bedrich Smetana (Smetana, Bedřich) and Dvořák (Dvořák, Antonín) for Czech music, Edvard Grieg (Grieg, Edvard) for Norwegian, Mikhail Glinka (Glinka, Mikhail) and Modest Mussorgsky (Mussorgsky, Modest) for Russian, Bartók for Hungarian, Georges Enesco (Enesco, Georges) for Romanian, and Aaron Copland (Copland, Aaron) and Roy Harris (Harris, Roy) for American cultures.

      Folk music is closely related to popular music in several ways. Societies that have developed popular music also have a folk music tradition, or remnants thereof. The partial duplication of repertories and style indicates such cross-fertilization that a given song may sometimes be called both folk and popular. With reference to music, folk and popular are two points on a musical continuum, rather than discrete bodies of music. Popular music, like folk music, has become a significant marker of ethnicity and nation, and folk music has become gradually more like popular music, produced by professionals and disseminated through mass media for consumption by an urban, nonparticipating mass audience.

      Church music and folk music have been related at various times. Some church music derives from the application of religious texts to secular folk tunes. This practice may be seen, for example, in the hymns (hymn) of the Protestant Reformation and in the revival hymns of 19th-century American camp meetings, which were called folk hymns because of their origins and associations with folklike groups.

      A very significant way in which folk music is preserved is through its association with folk dance. Throughout European history, dancing by rural folk and village dances in urban and court society provided a major venue for folk music; although most of this music is instrumental, vocal folk dance music, sometimes sung by the dancers themselves, is common. In northern Europe even narrative ballads were used for dancing. There are many types of folk dance, some widespread throughout Europe, others peculiar to nations and regions, each with its typical musical style. Certain musical forms are characteristic of the folk dance music of various parts of Europe. Most prominent is a form type with paired lines, the second a variation of the first (e.g., AA′BB′ and so on). From the 1980s on, it would seem that practices of folk dancing in urban and student society have been responsible for the very preservation of folk music. Folk dance, with its accompanying music, is a staple of entertainment in the international tourist industry; the maintenance of folk dance has therefore become a matter of major concern to the ministries of culture in eastern Europe and in many of the world's semi-industrialized and developing nations.

The study of folk music

      The search for origins and processes of development that motivated much 19th- and early 20th-century intellectual activity was reflected in folk music scholarship. Some scholars believed folk music to be a repository of archaisms—a legacy from which the prehistory of music, language, literature, and other cultural traits could be adduced. Although later scholars concede that some traits of folk music may be centuries old, they are less inclined to speculate on the age of archaic elements of folk music or to offer historical reconstructions, other than tracing variants of individual songs or types of songs.

      Musical notations of folk songs and descriptions of folk music culture are occasionally encountered in historical records, but these show not so much the history of folk music as the history of ideas held by the literate classes about folk music. National and social movements in the early 19th century stimulated the search for and collecting of folk songs. The variety of motivations is illustrated by Thomas Percy (Percy, Thomas) (who focused on the great age of certain ballads), Ludvik Rittersberk (who collected Czech folk songs as part of an effort by the Habsburg monarchy to unify the empire through recognizing the folklore of national minorities), and Ludolf Parisius (who collected German folk songs in order to preserve traditional village culture). In the second half of the 19th century, scholarship was motivated by the desire to find materials that could be used by composers of art music and by the ambition of producing comprehensive collections of the songs of a nation. This interest has continued into the 21st century, as attempts to circumscribe entire folk music repertoires in notation have been the intent of major projects, particularly in eastern Europe.

  Since the last decade of the 19th century, folk music has been collected and preserved by mechanical recordings. The application of print and recording technology to folk music has promoted wide interest, making possible the revival of folk music where traditional folklife and folklore are moribund. Folk songs are frequently part of public school music curricula, and groups that focus in one way or another on folk music, often in conjunction with folk dance, have arisen; festivals of folk music and dance are an annual event in many communities throughout the world.

      The literature on folk music consists primarily of songs and their texts—collections of individual countries or regions, even of individual singers. Some works have endeavoured to integrate and compare the various styles of folk music in Western culture, and scholars have begun to produce theoretical works and studies of music in historical and contemporary cultural context. Many researchers have analyzed the use of folk music as material in art music. Major scholars in the history of folk music research include Bartók (who pioneered in making large collections of Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak songs and in transcribing them accurately in musical notation), Cecil Sharp (who recognized the importance of collecting folk songs in diasporic cultures, e.g., Anglo-Americans), Walter Wiora (who showed that some tunes are found throughout Europe), and Samuel P. Bayard (who established the concept of tune family).

      Scholars who specialize in folk music usually have training in ethnomusicology, a discipline concerned with elucidating music in a cross-cultural perspective and analyzing the role of music in society and culture. Studies of the words of folk songs are the province primarily of folklorists and students of language and literature. Musical studies concern folk genres and styles, as well as individual folk songs—how they originated, and whether, how, and why they changed when diffused. Theories of folk music have been beclouded by the difficulties in recognizing, isolating, and defining a phenomenon as elusive and complex as folk music. The forefront of folk music research in the 21st century entails the contemplation of 20th-century revivals of folk music; the application of concepts from postmodern cultural studies, gender studies, and critical theory; the use of folk music in political and national movements; the nature of folk music in the present; and its inseparability from other kinds of music.

      After World War II, the availability of commercial recordings enabled scholars to work with greater sophistication, and archives of field recordings were developed at many institutions throughout the world. In the United States, those of the Library of Congress and Indiana University are the most important. National archives exist in most European countries—the most extensive being in Hungary, Slovakia, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries—providing ample research material for an enormous diversity of projects. Research has usually dealt with “authentic” (i.e., older) material not heavily influenced by urban popular music and the mass media. Several organizations for the study of folk music exist in individual nations; international organizations include the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology, the International Council for Traditional Music, and the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Bruno Nettl

Additional Reading

Among the scholarly periodicals devoted primarily to folk music, the most important are the Yearbook for Traditional Music (annual), formerly the Journal of the International Folk Music Council (1949–68) and the Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council (1971–80); Ethnomusicology (3/yr); and The Journal of American Folklore (quarterly).General works on folk music of Europe and the Americas are The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 3, The United States and Canada, ed. by Ellen Koskoff (2001), and vol. 8, Europe, ed. by Timothy Rice, James Porter, and Chris Goertzen (2000); George Herzog, “Song: Folk Song and the Music of Folk Song,” in Maria Leach and Jerome Fried (eds.), Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, vol. 2, pp. 1032–50 (1950, reissued in 1 vol., 1984); and appropriate articles in Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell (eds.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., 29 vol. (2001), also available online by subscription. Useful books include Bruno Nettl and Gerard Béhague, Folk and Traditional Music of the Western Continents, 3rd ed., rev. and ed. by Valerie Woodring Goertzen (1990); Jan Ling, A History of European Folk Music (1997; originally published in Swedish, 1989); Philip V. Bohlman, The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World (1988); and Kip Lornell and Anne Rasmussen (eds.), Musics of Multicultural America (1997).Béla Bartók, Hungarian Folk Music (1931, reprinted 1981; also reprinted with new prefaces and appendices and with annotations by Zoltán Kodály as The Hungarian Folk Song, ed. by Benjamin Suchoff [1981]; originally published in Hungarian, 1924) is a classic study of one folk music style. Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, 2nd ed., edited by Stephen Mitchell and Gergory Nagy (2000), deals with the epic traditions of eastern Europe. Cecil J. Sharp and Olive Dame Campell (compilers), English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, ed. by Maud Karpeles, 2 vol. (1932, reprinted 1966), is the pioneer collection of Anglo-American song; the total tune repertory of the most important traditional ballads in England and North America is published in Bertrand Harris Bronson, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, 4 vol. (1959–72).An important survey of the world's folk music in relation to certain characteristics of cultures is Alan Lomax, Folk Song Style and Culture, ed. by Edwin E. Erickson (1968, reprinted 1978). Other contextual studies include Mark Slobin (ed.), Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe (1996); Timothy Rice, May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music (1994); Jane C. Sugarman, Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings (1997); Neil V. Rosenberg (ed.), Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined (1993); and Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (1993).The history of folk music research is treated in D.K. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (1959, reprinted 1982); and Bruno Nettl and Phillip V. Bohlman (eds.), Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology (1991).Bruno Nettl

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