Russian folk music is the indigenous vocal (accompanied and unaccompanied) and instrumental music of the Russian peasantry, consisting of songs and dances for work, entertainment, and religious and ritual occasions. Its origins lie in customary practice; until the industrial era it was an oral tradition, performed and learned without written notation. Common instruments include the domra (three-or four-stringed round-bodied lute), balalaika (three-stringed triangular-bodied lute), gusli (psaltery), bayan (accordion), svirel (pennywhistle), and zhaleyka (hornpipe).
Russian folk music includes songs marking seasonal and ritual events, and music for figure or circle dances (korovody) and the faster chastye or plyasovye dances. A related form, chastushki (bright tunes accompanying humorous or satirical four-line verses), gained rural and urban popularity during the late nineteenth century. The sung epic bylina declined during the nineteenth century, but protyazhnye - protracted lyric songs, slow in tempo and frequently sorrowful in content and tone - remain popular.
Significant stylistic and repertoire differences exist among various regions of Russia.
Russian educated society's interest in folk music began during the late eighteenth century. Numerous collections of Russian folk songs were published over the next two centuries (notably N.
L. Lvov and J. B.
Prá?, Collection of Russian Folk Songs with Their Tunes, St. Petersburg, 1790).
From the nineteenth century onward, Russian composers used these as an important source of musical material.
During the nineteenth century, German philosopher Johann Herder's ideas of romantic nationalism and the importance of the folk in determining national culture inspired interest in and appreciation of native Russian musical sources, especially as they reflected notions of national pride. Mikhail Glinka, for his purposeful use of Russian folk themes in his 1836 opera A Life for the Tsar, is considered the founder of the "national" school of Russian music composition, most famously embraced by Mili Balakirev, Alexander Borodin, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
This designation had more political than musical significance, as composers not associated with the national school, such as Peter Tchaikovsky and Igor Stravinsky, also made use of folk music in their compositions.
Russian ethnographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made efforts to record native folk music in the face of increasing urbanization. In 1896 Vasily Andreyev (1861 - 1918) organized an orchestra of folk instruments, and in 1911 Mitrofan Piatnitsky (1864 - 1927) founded a Russian folk choir.
Originally consisting of peasant and amateur performers, both became well-known professional ensembles, providing folk music as entertainment for urban audiences.
During the Soviet era folk music had important symbolic importance as a form genuinely "of the people." During the 1930s, state support for socialist realism encouraged study and performance of folk music.
Composers and amateur performers developed a new "Soviet folk song" that wedded traditional forms and styles with lyrics praising socialism and the Soviet state. Official support was demonstrated in the establishment of the Pyatnitsky choir and the Russian folk orchestra directed by Nikolai Osipov (1901 - 1945) as State ensembles. Russian folk music became a state-sanctioned performance genre characterized by organized amateur activities, notated music, academic study, and large professional performing ensembles that toured internationally.
During the 1970s, Dmitry Pokrovsky(d. 1996) began a new effort to collect and perform Russian folk songs and tunes in authentic peasant village style, with local variations. This revival of Russian folk music received international attention as part of the world music movement.
Brown, Malcolm Hamrick. (1983). "Native Song and National Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music.
" In Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia, ed. Theofanis George Stavrou. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Miller, Frank J. (1990). Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore in the Stalin Era.
Armonk, NY:M.E. Sharpe.
Rothstein, Robert A. (1994). "Death of the Folk Song?
" In Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Stephen P. Frank and Mark D.
Steinberg. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Taruskin, Richard.
(1997). Defining Russia Musically. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Folk music arose, and best survives, in societies not yet affected by mass communication and the commercialization of culture.
It normally was shared by the entire community (and its performance not strictly limited to a special class of expert performers), and was transmitted by word of mouth.
During the 20th and 21st centuries, folk music took on a second meaning: it describes a particular kind of folk music. Like other popular music, this kind of folk music is most often performed by experts and is transmitted in organized performances and commercially distributed recordings.
However, popular music has filled some of the roles and purposes of the folk music it has replaced.
amongst the general population; however, some musical communities that actively play living folkloric musics (see the popular music called "folk music," especially the post-1960s " " genre. See also: .
expression of a way of life now, past or about to disappear (or in some cases, to be preserved or somehow revived). Unfortunately, despite the assembly of an enormous body of work over some two centuries, there is still no unanimity on what folk music (or folklore, or the folk) 'is'" (p.127).
"In the strictest sense, it's music that is rarely written for . It's music that has don't have to be a great musician to be a folk singer. [.
..] And finally, it brings a sense of community.
It's the people's music."
The English term folk, which gained usage in the 18th century (during the Romantic period) to refer to peasants or non-literate peoples, is related to the word Volk (meaning people communities of ordinary people. "As the complexity of social stratification and interaction became clearer and increased, various conditioning criteria, such as 'continuity', 'tradition', 'oral transmission', 'anonymity' and uncommercial origins, became more important than simple social categories themselves.
"
Charles Seeger (1980) describes three contemporary defining criteria of folk music (Middleton 1990, p.127-8):
..folk music is associated with a lower class in societies which are culturally and socially stratified, that is, which have developed an elite, and possibly also a popular, musical culture.
" Cecil Sharp (1972), A.L. Lloyd ().
continuity and oral transmission...
seen as characterizing one side of a cultural dichotomy, the other side of which is found not only in the lower layers of feudal,
I ain't never heard a horse sing a song."
Apart from that forms a part of folk music, especially traditions, much folk music is , since the instrument that makes such music is usually handy. As such, most folk music has , and is about something.
looms large in the folk music of many cultures. This encompasses performance, sometimes accompanied by instruments. Many epic poems of various cultures were pieced together from shorter pieces of traditional narrative verse, which explains their episodic structure and often their plot developments.
Other forms of traditional narrative verse relate the outcomes of and other tragedies or natural disasters. Sometimes, as in the triumphant found in the , these songs celebrate victory. Laments for lost battles and wars, and the lives lost in them, are equally prominent in many folk traditions; these laments keep alive the cause for which the battle was fought.
The events or mysterious deaths.
traditional and unknown origin. Western was originally created to tradition in communities.
Folk songs such as present religious lore in a mnemonic form. In the Western world, and other traditional songs preserve religious lore in song form.
Other sorts of folk songs are less exalted.
are composed; they frequently feature structures, and are designed to enable the labourers who sing them to coordinate their efforts in accordance with the rhythms of the songs. In the American , a lively tradition of ("Duckworth chants") are sung while soldiers are on the march. Professional sailors made use of a large body of .
, often of a tragic or regretful nature, prominently figures in many folk traditions. and also are frequent subjects of folk songs.
Music transmitted by word of mouth though a community will, in time, develop many variants, because this kind of transmission cannot produce word-for-word and note-for-note accuracy.
Indeed, many traditional folk singers are quite creative and deliberately modify the material they learn.
Because variants proliferate naturally, it is naïve to believe that there is such a thing as the single "authentic" version of folk song (see below) have encountered countless versions of this ballad throughout the English-speaking world, and these versions often differ greatly from each other. None can reliably claim to be the original, and it is quite possible that whatever the "original" was, it ceased to be sung centuries ago.
Any version can lay an equal claim to authenticity, so long as it is truly from a traditional folksinging community and not the work of an outside editor.
transmitted onward in time. Thus, over time we would expect each folksong to become esthetically ever more appealing — it would be collectively composed to perfection, as it were, by the community.
On the other hand, there is also evidence to support the view that transmission of folk songs can be rather sloppy. Occasionally, collected folk song versions include material or verses incorporated from different songs that makes little sense in its context.
Folk music seems to reflect a universal impulse of humanity.
No fieldwork expedition by has yet discovered a preindustrial people that did not have its own folk music. It seems safe to infer that folk music was a property of all people starting from the dawn of the species.
However, the development of modern society--first literacy, then the conversion of culture into a salable commodity--created a new form of transmission of music that first influenced, then in some societies essentially eliminated the original folk tradition.
The decline of folk music in a culture can be followed through three stages.
One of the first folk traditions impacted by modern society was the folksong of rural England. Starting in times, urban poets wrote that (thanks to printing) could be sold widely.
The ballads probably didn't need musical notation, since they would have been sung to tunes that everybody knew, the folk tradition being very much alive at the time. These ballads heavily influenced the folk tradition, but did not override it. In fact, the folk tradition showed great resilience.
Through the process of folk transmission, the urban ballads were modified, keeping the more vivid content and ironing out the less "citified" material. The resulting body of folk lyrics is widely considered to be a very appealing blend. Thus, the printing press and widespread literacy did not suffice to destroy the English folk tradition, but in some ways enriched it.
The English folk song legacy was probably affected by urban melodies as well as words. The clue here is that folk music in remote rural areas of the English-speaking world, such as or the , abounds in tunes that However, pentatonic music was rare among the rural English villagers who first volunteered their tunes to researchers in the late 19th century. A plausible explanation is that life in rural England was far more closely affected by the proximity to the urban centers.
Music in the standard major and minor scales evidently penetrated to the nearby rural areas, where it was converted to folk idiom, but nevertheless succeeded in displacing the old pentatonic music.
purpose of earning a profit--in other words, when was born. It was around mass commodity, for example, in the phenomenon of .
people, notably the migration of the old agrarian communities to the new industrial ones. It is likely that the resulting social disruption helped cut people's emotional bonds to their old folk music, and thereby helped the shift in taste toward popular music.
As technology advanced, succeeding generations became enticed with popular music in ever more accessible and desirable forms.
. With the ever-increasing success of popular music, the musical life of many individuals eventually ceased to include any folk music at all. Moreover, since popular music for most people is passive music (that is, listened to, but not created or performed), the overwhelming success of popular music also entailed a sharp decline of music as an active, participatory activity.
The terminal state of the loss of folk music can be seen in the United States, as well as across the globe thanks to the where even in "isolated" communities traditional folk music is now threatened. Inability to sing is . Among the Urarina, one notes that the customary practice of singing folk songs, and begins in early childhood .
This in turn democratizes musical expression, and as such everyone gets the practice needed to be able to sing at least reasonably well. In the absence of traditional or folk music, many indigenous individuals do not In some instances, it is possible that non-singers feel intimidated by their widespread exposure to recordings and broadcasting of singing by skilled experts. Another possibility is that they simply cannot sing, because they did not learn to sing when they were small children, the time that learning of cultral orality takes place most effectively.
As recently as the 1960s audiences at U.S. sporting events collectively sang the before a game; the anthem is now typically performed by a recording or a soloist.
The loss of folk music is occurring at different rates in different regions of the world. Naturally, where industrialization and commercialization of culture are most advanced, so tends to be the loss of folk music. Yet in nations or regions where folk music is a badge of cultural or national identity, the loss of folk music can be slowed; this is held to be true, for instance in and all of which retain their traditional music to some degree, in some such areas Starting in the 19th century, interested people - academics and amateur scholars - started to take note of what was being lost, and there grew various efforts aimed at preserving the music of the people.
One such effort was the collection by body of English rural folk song, music and dance, under the aegis of what became and remains the (EFDSS). Sharp also worked in America, recording Around this time, composers of developed a strong interest in folk song collecting, and a number of outstanding composers carried out their own field work on folk song. These included in England and in Hungary.
These composers, like many of their predecessors, incorporated folk material into their classical compositions.
In America, during the 1930s and 1940s, the worked through as possible.
People who studied folk song sometimes hoped that their work would restore folk music to the people.
For instance, campaigned, with some success, to have English folk songs (in his own heavily edited and expurgated versions) to be taught to schoolchildren.
"folk", who were supposed to be the object of study, to become scholars and advocates themselves. For example, was the youngest child of a large family from Viper, Kentucky that had preserved many of the old Appalachian folk songs.
Ritchie, living in a time when the Appalachians had opened up to outside influence, was university educated and ultimately moved to New York City, where she made a number of classic recordings of the family repertoire and published an important compilation of these songs. (See also .)
As folk traditions decline, there is often a conscious effort to resuscitate them.
Such efforts are often exerted by bridge figures such as Jean Ritchie, described above. Folk revivals also involve collaboration between traditional folk musicians and other participants (often of urban background) who come to the tradition as adults.
The folk revival of the 1950s in Britain and America had something of this character.
In 1950 Alan Lomax came to Law he met two other seminal figures: and , who were performing folk music to the locals there. Lloyd was a colourful figure who had on a whaling ship. MacColl, born in Salford of Scottish parents, was a brilliant playwright and songwriter who had been strongly politicised by his earlier life.
MacColl had also learned a large body of Scottish traditional songs from his mother. The meeting of MacColl and Lloyd with Lomax is credited with being the point at which the British began. The two colleagues went back to London where they formed Club and was the first, as well as the most enduring, of what became known as .
As the 1950s progressed into the 1960s, the folk revival movement built up in both Britain and America.
to world fame through 's work since the mid-1960s.
Another example is the Hungarian model, the movement.
This model involves strong cooperation between musicology experts and enthusiastic amateurs, resulting in a strong vocational foundation and a very high professional level. They also had the advantage that rich, living traditions of Hungarian folk music and folk culture still survived in rural areas, especially in . The involvement of experts meant an effort to understand and revive folk traditions in their full complexity.
Music, dance, and costumes remained together as they once had been in the rural communities: rather than merely reviving folk music, the movement revived broader folk traditions. Started in the 1970s, tanchaz soon became a massive movement creating an alternative leisure activity for youths apart from discos and music clubs—or one could say that it created a new kind of music club. The tanchaz movement spread to ethnic Hungarian communities around the world.
Today, almost every major city in the U.S. and Australia has its own Hungarian folk music and folk dance group; there are also groups in Japan, Hong Kong, Argentina and Western Europe.
During the twentieth century, a crucial change in the history of folk music began. Folk material came to be adopted by talented performers, performed by them in concerts, and disseminated by recordings and broadcasting. In other words, a new genre of had arisen.
This genre was linked by nostalgia and imitation to the original traditions of folk music as it was sung by ordinary people. However, as a popular genre it quickly evolved to be quite different from its original roots.
Thus, for example, began by singing songs he remembered his mother singing to him as a child.
Later, in the 1930s and 1940s, Guthrie collected folk music and also composed his own songs, as did , who was the son of a professional . Through dissemination on commercial recordings, this vein of music became popular in the United States during the 1950s, through singers like (Seeger's group), , , and the , who tried to reproduce and honor the work that had been collected in preceding decades. The commercial popularity of such performers probably peaked in the U.
S. with the television series in 1963, which was cancelled after the arrival of the Beatles, the locate scholarly work in libraries and revive the songs in their recordings, for example, in 's rendition of "Henry Martin," which adds a accompaniment to a version collected and edited by Cecil Sharp. Publications like magazine helped spread both traditional and composed songs, as did Many of this group of popular folk singers maintained an idealistic, leftist/progressive political orientation.
This is perhaps not surprising. Folk music is easily identified with the ordinary working people who created it, and preserving treasured politically progressive people. Thus, in the 1960s such singers as , and followed in footsteps and to begin writing " " and singer-songwriter, , may also be mentioned as a similar example operating in a different cultural context.
Some critics, especially proponents of the ethnocentric genre, claim that this type of American 'progressive' folk is not folk music at all, but 'antifolk'. This is based on the idea that as liberal politics supposedly eschews the importance of ethnicity, it is incompatible with all traditions. Proponents of this view often cite as the only political tradition that 'fits' with folk music.
In , (although the members were all Irish born, the group became famous while based in New York's Greenwich Village, it and a variety of other folk bands have done much over recent years to revitalise and repopularise . These bands were rooted, to a greater or lesser extent, in a living tradition of Irish music, and they benefitted from collection efforts on the part of the likes of and , among others.
but it helped raise the profile of the music, and folk clubs sprang up all over, a boon to young artists like and who emerged.
It also inspired a generation of singer-songwriters, such as (whose “Streets Of London” would came to London to check out the growing folk scene of the early 1960s, and Carthy’s take on the song.
old songs and mixed their tunes with rock. Both bands had and albums that sold well, bringing a new audience to traditional music.
However, it wasn’t until the second half of the 1990s that folk music began to make even a small impact on mainstream music. A new generation had emerged, in some cases children of revival-inspired artists ( , for example, is the daughter of Martin Carthy and ). This time, notably, the instrumentation was largely acoustic, rather than electric, and the skill level of players and singers extremely high.
As the number of summer folk festivals increased, so more talented performers have come in, and folk music has found at least a toehold in the mainstream with artists like and featured in the press.
Sebestyén's work with the band.
The experience of the last century suggests that as soon as a folk tradition comes to be marketed as popular music, its musical content will quickly be modified to become more like popular music.
Such modified folk music often incorporates that are characteristic of popular music but were absent in the original.
a rural American folk tradition, but has evolved to become vastly different from its original model. music evolved from an African-American inner-city folk tradition, but is likewise very different nowadays from its folk original.
A third example is contemporary , which is a As less traditional forms of folk music gain popularity, one often observes tension between so-called "purists" or "traditionalists" and the innovators. For example, traditionalists were indignant when began to use an electric guitar. His electrified performance at the 1965 was to prove to be an early focal point for this controversy.
Sometimes, however, the exponents of amplified music were bands such as , , and a far wider audience, and their efforts have been largely recognised for what they were by even some of the most die-hard of purists. Traditional folk music forms also merged with to form the hybrid Outside the English-speaking world, the artist (a , multi-instrumentist and singer) has also fused folk music with rock and other influences. His tours and records since the mid-1960s have also influenced the work of many musicians everywhere.
Since the 1970s a genre of "contemporary folk", fuelled by new singer-songwriters, has continued to make the coffee-house circuit and keep the tradition of acoustic non-classical music alive in the United States. Such artists include , , , , and . Lavin in particular has become prominent as a leading promoter of this musical genre in recent years.
Some, such as Lavin and Wheeler, inject a great deal of humor in their songs and performances, although much of their music is also deeply personal and sometimes satirical. While from Ireland and brought traditional tunes back into the charts.
, and .
At the same time, a material.
from a wide variety of traditions, including in many cases traditional instruments such as , and as an element of their sound. Unlike other folk-related genres, shies away from monotheistic religion in favour of more ancient inspired themes.
A similar stylistic shift, without using the "folk music" name, has occurred with the phenomenon of , which in many cases is based on an amalgamation of , , and other traditional musics research showing that the musics have any genuine genetic relationship is still to be done - at this point, only a book in French music is a modern form of music that began in the 1980s. Fusing traditional European commentary, traditional songs and , the genre is largely European. Although it is not uncommon for neofolk artists to be entirely acoustic, playing with entirely traditional instruments.
Another trend is "antifolk," begun in New York City in the 1980s by in response to the confines traditional folk music. It now has a home at the Antihootenany in the East Village, where artists like Beck, the Moldy Peaches and Nellie McKay got their starts, and artists such as Robin Aigner 's, , Matt Singer , Phoebe Kreutz and Curtis Eller continue to push the envelope of "folk."
Folk music is still extremely popular among some audiences today, with folk music clubs meeting to share traditional-style songs, and there are major folk music festivals in many countries, eg the Port Fairy Folk Indeed, even for those who consider themselves hip, the arrival of and the music of has shown that Folk Music can still be cutting edge.
is always sold out within days, and is noted for having a very wide definition of who can be invited as folk musicians. The "club tents" allow attendees to discover large numbers of unknown artists, who, for ten or 15 minutes each, present their work to the festival audience.
music for its own ends.
One famous example is the pseudo-ballad sung about brave Sir Robin in the film . Enthusiasts for folk music might properly consider this song to be pastiche and not , because the tune is pleasant and far from inept, and the topic being lampooned is not balladry but the medieval heroic tradition. The arch-shaped melodic form of this song (first and last lines low in pitch, middle lines high) is characteristic of traditional English folk music.
A more recent similarly incisive send-up of folk music, this time American in origin, is the film by ). This tune is also folk-like in character, and in fact is written in a traditional folk (modes are a type of ); the mode of "Gilligan's Island" is ambiguous between Dorian and Aeolian. The lyrics begin with the traditional folk device in which the singer invites his hearers to listen to the tale that follows.
Moreover, two of the stanzas repeat the final short line, a common device in English folk stanzas. However, the raising of the key by a semitone with each new verse is tradition.
Folk music is easy to because it is, at present, a genre that relies on a traditional music genre.
As such, it is likely to lack the sophistication and glamour that attach to other forms of popular music. Folk music satire ranges from the worst excesses of to time, for example devastating rendition of "All the Hard Cheese of Old 's "Lack of Jolly Ploughboy," and more recently "I'm Sending an E-mail to Other musicians have been known to take the tune of a traditional folk song and add their own words, often humorous, or on a is a closely related musical genre which originated as parodies of folk songs, and parody remains a dominant theme of the style. It is evolving into a true folk tradition, however, with songs learned orally that are undergoing the "folk process" of change in melody and text.
Folkies is the popular term for folk music enthusiasts. While the term itself is neutral and is used by some folk music enthusiasts in an informal and friendly manner, it has at times been used by the at least since the late 1950s, as part of a light-hearted stereotype.
"brokenlink">Digital Tradition (DIGITRAD) folksong database.
The latest (2002) edition of DIGITRAD contains lyrics, and in some cases tunes or chords, for around 9000 folk rock, folk revival, and authentic American, English, and Irish folk songs, as well as some parodies. The database may be searched online, or downloaded as a standalone application. Another portal to DIGITRAD with file formats converted to emerging standards (e.
g. ) is available at .
Provides bibliographic information and some theoretical genealogical information for many ballads in recordings made by Max Hunter between 1956 and 1976 in the Ozark Mountain region of Missouri. The music of Northumbria in North-East England.
The recordings are downloadable.
The Wisconsin Folksong Collection, 1937-1946 contains Wisconsin field recordings, notes, and photographs made by UW-Madison faculty member Helene Stratman-Thomas as part of the Wisconsin Folk Music Recording Project, co-sponsored by the University of Wisconsin and the Library of Congress during the summers of 1940, 1941, and of the Resettlement Administration.
University Press of Florida.
“Digital vibes and radio waves in indigenous Peru.” In Indigenous Intellectual Property Rights: Legal Obstacles and Innovative Solutions. (ed.
) M. Riley.
Fakesong: The Manufacture of British 'Folksong', 1700 to the Present Day. Cited in van der Merwe
Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0-335-15275-9.
Cited in Middleton (2002)
Collected by Cecil J. Sharp. Ed.
Maud Karpeles. 1932. London.
Oxford. Oxford University Press.
Folk Song: Some Conclusions. 1907.
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