# Romantic Nationalism



## Freischutz (Mar 6, 2014)

One of the interesting features of Romantic music is its use of folk material - often not just emulating it, but transcribing, harmonising and using original folk tunes. But as much as Romanticism's folk roots can give a clear national character to a lot of music, those big orchestras do remove a lot of authenticity. So recently, I've been interested in Grieg and his own Norwegian influences, and YouTube turned out to be a great place for listening to actual folk music. Here's an example of a short melody played on the traditional _bukkehorn_, which I think has a fantastic timbre somewhere in between woodwind and brass. I can easily imagine one of Grieg's elegies played on one of these.






Do you have any interesting ideas/videos/instruments/[anything] about the relationship between folk and classical music?


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## Winterreisender (Jul 13, 2013)

I am often quite suspicious of folk music creeping its way into classical, or at least of classical composers pillaging the countryside and stealing the best tunes. Admittedly, I do rather enjoy some of Vaughan Williams’ folk-inspired pieces, but I sometimes question the motives of Parry, Stanford and the other composers of the “English Musical Renaissance,” some of whom wrote long treatises on ridding English music of Germanic influence. I am suspicious of these middle-class music professors championing folk music, traditionally the music of the peasants, to support their nationalistic, perhaps even xenophobic agenda.


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## Freischutz (Mar 6, 2014)

Winterreisender said:


> I am often quite suspicious of folk music creeping its way into classical, or at least of classical composers pillaging the countryside and stealing the best tunes. Admittedly, I do rather enjoy some of Vaughan Williams' folk-inspired pieces, but I sometimes question the motives of Parry, Stanford and the other composers of the "English Musical Renaissance," some of whom wrote long treatises on ridding English music of Germanic influence. I am suspicious of these middle-class music professors championing folk music, traditionally the music of the peasants, to support their nationalistic, perhaps even xenophobic agenda.


Those are genuine concerns I sometimes worry about myself, but at the other extreme end of the scale, there's a kind of blind internationalism that denies all differences between cultures and their varied heritages. Somewhere in between, there's the potential for us all to appreciate the unique histories, traditions and practices of the different countries of the world without wanting one to be supreme or wanting to blend them all into a colourless mess.


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## Oskaar (Mar 17, 2011)

Freischutz said:


> Do you have any interesting ideas/videos/instruments/[anything] about the relationship between folk and classical music?


Very glad you got interrest in this. Griegs music is naturally art music, but he have masterly captured a vave or string in Norwegian folk culture, via a strong and genuine interrest in peasents life, work and everyday. Another instrument is the harding fiddle. It has two sets of string, making a caracteristic trolly apperance and have ornaments and decorations inspired by folk art. The most famous tune ib norway on this is perhaps Fanitullen. Listen on utube. Link

It was captured into folk rock in the seventies http://www.google.no/url?sa=t&rct=j...pmZfkg0aobDP-VtOuMwrjrg&bvm=bv.62577051,d.bGQ

I know to litle about how the harding fiddle have been used in art music, but I am sure it has.

Another instrument is the moth harp. link

To Winterreisender: It is a fine line beetween positive pride and seelf esteme, and negative factors with protectorisme, exclution, rasism ++ when it comes to nationalism. There was often mentioned in the media that winter olympics in Lillehammer 1994 was to much for Norwegians self-picture...


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

For me, the division of productions (music, dance, whatever) into "folk" and "high art" is one of the most interesting phenomena in human culture. At least sometimes (as Winterreisender points out) the high art side has had ideological reasons to make some gestures toward breaking down the barrier, but the barrier itself exists (where it does) for ideological reasons. It's a great cycle of culture, a much larger thing than nationalism in music: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, anti-synthesis, etc.

I enjoy the jazz / classical syntheses very much. I know it's not properly "serious" but I enjoy some fun now and then. For example, the much-despised Hamelin's _In a State of Jazz_. Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? Well, don't hope for too much and you won't be disappointed.


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## Guest (Mar 7, 2014)

Winterreisender said:


> I am often quite suspicious of folk music creeping its way into classical, or at least of classical composers pillaging the countryside and stealing the best tunes. Admittedly, I do rather enjoy some of Vaughan Williams' folk-inspired pieces, but I sometimes question the motives of Parry, Stanford and the other composers of the "English Musical Renaissance," some of whom wrote long treatises on ridding English music of Germanic influence. I am suspicious of these middle-class music professors championing folk music, traditionally the music of the peasants, to support their nationalistic, perhaps even xenophobic agenda.


On the other hand, wanting to preserve the musical tradition of your home country is not necessarily a xenophobic act.


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

MacLeod said:


> On the other hand, wanting to preserve the musical tradition of your home country is not necessarily a xenophobic act.


It's only considered xenophobic nowadays, when certain nations do it, namely the European ones. When the rest of the world does it, it is praised and celebrated.


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## Winterreisender (Jul 13, 2013)

MacLeod said:


> On the other hand, wanting to preserve the musical tradition of your home country is not necessarily a xenophobic act.


The problem I have is with the sort of contrived nationalism that developed in England in the late 19th century. (I mention England because it is the example I am most familiar with). The sentiment seemed to be: "we have no distinctive nationalist musical voice, so we had better invent one." On the one hand, some of these composers propagated the idea that English folk music had cemented its place in the shared national consciousness and was therefore a reasonable compositional tool for academic composers, but I'm not sure if that is true. The detachment between folk and academic music had become so great that academics had to go out into the countryside with their notepads and ask farmers and peasants to sing for them, so that they could steal the best results.


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## Guest (Mar 7, 2014)

SiegendesLicht said:


> It's only considered xenophobic nowadays, when certain nations do it, namely the European ones. When the rest of the world does it, it is praised and celebrated.


I wasn't praising or celebrating...merely observing.


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

MacLeod said:


> I wasn't praising or celebrating...merely observing.


And I was not talking about you, but about the more or less general consensus.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

oskaar said:


> Very glad you got interrest in this. Griegs music is naturally art music, but he have masterly captured a vave or string in Norwegian folk culture, via a strong and genuine interrest in peasents life, work and everyday. Another instrument is the harding fiddle. It has two sets of string, making a caracteristic trolly apperance and have ornaments and decorations inspired by folk art. The most famous tune ib norway on this is perhaps Fanitullen. Listen on utube. Link
> 
> It was captured into folk rock in the seventies http://www.google.no/url?sa=t&rct=j...pmZfkg0aobDP-VtOuMwrjrg&bvm=bv.62577051,d.bGQ
> 
> I know to litle about how the harding fiddle have been used in art music, but I am sure it has.


We ran across the Hardanger fiddle through Shetland folk music. The main classical composer for it is Geirr Tveitt. His family farmed in the Hardangerfjord area in the summer. Try this:


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## Guest (Mar 7, 2014)

SiegendesLicht said:


> And I was not talking about you, but about the more or less general consensus.


It's always good to be clear who is being talked about! You're right that there is a tradition of objecting to some elements of European music on the grounds that its promotion of one ethnic group was also xenophobic towards another. I'm not clear that there is a _consensus _that says the promotion of one group of "ethnically-based" composition is alright but the promotion of another is unacceptable.


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## MagneticGhost (Apr 7, 2013)

I've never thought of the use of folk tunes and the effort to move away from Germanic influences as xenophobic.
Just an effort to forge an individual voice and a way of expression. There probably didn't seem much to say in the old idiom after Beethoven and Wagner.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

I can't believe there is anything like a consensus against the preservation of European heritage or culture. Almost everyone here listens to several hours of European music every day; I certainly do too, and I've never heard anyone criticize me for it. Nor have I ever heard anyone criticism for listening to the occasional Charlie Patton or Woodie Guthrie or Scott Joplin or Djanjo Reinhardt.

I'm sure there are more performances of German music in Korea than there are of Korean music in Germany. There are valid musical and historical reasons for that kind of thing, but as long as it remains true: we of European heritage may need more reasons to pity ourselves, but we won't find a plausible one in the anti-European-music movement until it gets a _lot_ stronger. Of course I'll be sure to report here when I feel threatened!


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

science said:


> I enjoy the jazz / classical syntheses very much. I know it's not properly "serious" but I enjoy some fun now and then. For example, the much-despised Hamelin's _In a State of Jazz_. Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? Well, don't hope for too much and you won't be disappointed.


Gosh, I had no idea that the delightful _In a State of Jazz_ was much-despised! I wonder does liking it make me despicable too? :lol:
(By the way, "Serious Fun" was the name of an album of comic songs Hamelin recorded some years ago with his then-wife Jody Karin Applebaum)


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## Morimur (Jan 23, 2014)

How silly. The preservation of all great art, European or otherwise, should be championed, not suppressed.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Nereffid said:


> Gosh, I had no idea that the delightful _In a State of Jazz_ was much-despised! I wonder does liking it make me despicable too? :lol:
> (By the way, "Serious Fun" was the name of an album of comic songs Hamelin recorded some years ago with his then-wife Jody Karin Applebaum)


My bad! I wrote ambiguously. Hamelin I meant (rather mockingly, not seriously) is "much despised." The album itself... well, I personally wouldn't dare to advocate it in elite company....


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Winterreisender said:


> The problem I have is with the sort of contrived nationalism that developed in England in the late 19th century. (I mention England because it is the example I am most familiar with). The sentiment seemed to be: "we have no distinctive nationalist musical voice, so we had better invent one." On the one hand, some of these composers propagated the idea that English folk music had cemented its place in the shared national consciousness and was therefore a reasonable compositional tool for academic composers, but I'm not sure if that is true. The detachment between folk and academic music had become so great that academics had to go out into the countryside with their notepads and ask farmers and peasants to sing for them, so that they could steal the best results.


At this point, as someone who wrote my MA thesis on English, Scottish & Irish folksongs & the way they have been transmitted from medieval times to the twentieth century, I just *have to* demur.

_'... we had better invent one'?_ Cecil Sharp heard his gardener singing 'The Seeds of Love' & was intrigued. There were morris dancers, singers in alehouses, children's singing games, gypsy hop-pickers, dirty old men treasuring erotic songs, a full oral tradition hanging on in the Victorian countryside. The music was 'out there' in abundance, but threatened by the rise of education & industrialisation, and the only way to collect it was by notebook, until the advent of wax phonograph cylinders, which were used by, say, Ralph Vaughan Williams. Yes, these collectors were middle-class & arty-crafty, with strange ideas about horned gods & May Day, & romantic too - that was the spirit of the age, as 'debunking' is the spirit of ours.  We should be thanking Victorian ladies like Lucy Broadwood & Anna Gilchrist for saving these treasures for us.

I would also say that you only have to listen to English folksongs to hear that they do have a distinctive musical voice - listen to the Dorset Fourhand Reel & contrast with The Keel Row from the North East - look at the oldest dances in Playford - listen to the folksongs like 'The Corpus Christi Carol' & 'The streams of lovely Nancy' & 'By Bushes & by Briars':






I personally prefer my folk music as folk music, rather than made into classical music - but I don't see the latter as 'contrived nationalism'.


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## Freischutz (Mar 6, 2014)

SiegendesLicht said:


> It's only considered xenophobic nowadays, when certain nations do it, namely the European ones. When the rest of the world does it, it is praised and celebrated.


The difference is that the European continent was home to a number of imperialist empires that set out to colonise the world and literally extinguish native populations and cultures. In that context, the act of championing indigenous culture in Europe and elsewhere is politically very different.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

science said:


> My bad! I wrote ambiguously. Hamelin I meant (rather mockingly, not seriously) is "much despised."


Ah, now I see. I didn't get _that_ memo either!


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Freischutz said:


> The difference is that the European continent was home to a number of imperialist empires that set out to colonise the world and literally extinguish native populations and cultures. In that context, the act of championing indigenous culture in Europe and elsewhere is politically very different.


It is very different to some minority of people; on the whole, as in "except among a certain class of university students," there's not a whole lot of objection even to something like Columbus Day, let alone to folk or classical music, not even in the case of something like _Chants d'Auvergne._

(That was sort of sarcastic. Ol' Canteloube didn't have sterling leftist credentials, but has anyone in the last forty-five years protested a performance of his music for political reasons?)


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Nereffid said:


> Ah, now I see. I didn't [redacted].


If you delete or edit your post immediately, probably no one except the mods and me will know, and I promise not to tell! But if you let it stand, this thread could become _The Return of the Bride of Lang Lang III: Beyond the Ultimate Reckoning_.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

So Ive's music is considered nationalistic because of his incorporation of Yankee Hymns?


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## Winterreisender (Jul 13, 2013)

Ingélou said:


> _'... we had better invent one'?_ Cecil Sharp heard his gardener singing 'The Seeds of Love' & was intrigued. There were morris dancers, singers in alehouses, children's singing games, gypsy hop-pickers, dirty old men treasuring erotic songs, a full oral tradition hanging on in the Victorian countryside. The music was 'out there' in abundance, but threatened by the rise of education & industrialisation, and the only way to collect it was by notebook, until the advent of wax phonograph cylinders, which were used by, say, Ralph Vaughan Williams. Yes, these collectors were middle-class & arty-crafty, with strange ideas about horned gods & May Day, & romantic too - that was the spirit of the age, as 'debunking' is the spirit of ours.  We should be thanking Victorian ladies like Lucy Broadwood & Anna Gilchrist for saving these treasures for us.


I share your enthusiasm for folk music in its natural environment, but I do cringe just a little bit when I hear some of Vaughan Williams' folk song arrangements. It seems to me that such arrangements attempt to freeze in time what should actually be a constantly evolving medium. It also seems to me that there is something rather patronising about cataloging the folk songs and treating them as if they were museum pieces which need to be "preserved."

The suggestion that these songs were bordering on extinction implies that they were never really part of the national consciousness, despite what scholars of the folk song movement might have us believe. If anything, folk music is regional rather than national. The folk music of Somerset has surely a different character to the folk music of Lancashire. So when academic composers attempt to define English nationalism by cherry picking a few nice tunes here and there, it surely does an injustice to the variety of styles in existence.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

@Winterreisender - Fashions fade and the fact that a style is bordering on extinction doesn't imply that it wasn't popular & widespread in the past. The fact that medieval ballads like 'The Holy Well' & 'The Corpus Christi Carol' survived into 19th century oral tradition to me suggests au contraire that they *were* truly once part of the national consciousness.

And yes, in my post I actually point out that England has a number of regional styles & that the variations between North & South are marked - but they are still 'English', just as Spain & Italy have northern & southern styles which are included in 'Spanish' or 'Italian'.

I can't agree that cataloguing & preserving music is patronising - the only option is 'not' cataloguing & preserving it, which would be making a decision that it's not worth bothering with, & far more patronising. 

'When academic composers attempt to define English nationalism by cherry picking a few nice tunes here and there...' - that is your take on the situation & to me it appears slanted. How about, 'when composers decide to add an English flavour to their work by including tunes that they consider particularly beautiful'? Since they cannot pick more than a few tunes, the majority have to be rejected, logically - but that doesn't make it 'an injustice'; and no 'surely' about it.

Ralph Vaughan Williams may have been middle-class but as a young man he spent hours among gypsy agricultural workers transcribing their songs in his barely legible hand & was extremely popular with them. Lucy Broadwood similarly got on very well with her singers, though sometimes they were too polite to sing her the unbowdlerised versions. I don't see why reaching out beyond social class for the sake of recording beauty is to be seen as patronising.

As I say, I am not particularly fond of the way English composers use folk songs in their orchestral pieces - I'd rather have the folk versions; but that's a matter of taste. I just don't see their decision as being patronising, contrived, or unjust.


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## Freischutz (Mar 6, 2014)

Winterreisender said:


> It also seems to me that there is something rather patronising about cataloging the folk songs and treating them as if they were museum pieces which need to be "preserved."
> 
> The suggestion that these songs were bordering on extinction implies that they were never really part of the national consciousness, despite what scholars of the folk song movement might have us believe.


I think it's actually a very real and genuine problem. If you take a look at another example of regional character - language - we find that dialects are literally dying out all the time because they're not being spoken any more by communities that are being assimilated into a national standard. The only reason why we hear it more about language is that languages are better documented and appreciated, but there's every reason to think certain types of music would suffer in the same way.



Winterreisender said:


> If anything, folk music is regional rather than national. The folk music of Somerset has surely a different character to the folk music of Lancashire. So when academic composers attempt to define English nationalism by cherry picking a few nice tunes here and there, it surely does an injustice to the variety of styles in existence.


And here I think you underestimate the motives of various folk-music-loving composers. I think they knew just as well as you that folk music was regional _as much_ as it is national - just because something is from Somerset doesn't mean it isn't or can't be described as English. In fact, one of the reasons why some composers felt compelled to collect folk music was because they were concerned about the effects of mass education and industrialisation on rural traditions, precisely because those influences are forces for homogeneity - they saw the patchwork brilliance of the country and wanted to preserve it because they thought (correctly) that a standardised, popularised and marketised public life would erode all of these cultural eccentricities. Folk music really isn't part of the national consciousness in a way it used to be and, to the extent that it is, it's often an affectation rather than something natural from childhood.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Freischutz said:


> One of the interesting features of Romantic music is its use of folk material - often not just emulating it, but transcribing, harmonising and using original folk tunes. But as much as Romanticism's folk roots can give a clear national character to a lot of music, those big orchestras do remove a lot of authenticity. So recently, I've been interested in Grieg and his own Norwegian influences, and YouTube turned out to be a great place for listening to actual folk music. Here's an example of a short melody played on the traditional bukkehorn, which I think has a fantastic timbre somewhere in between woodwind and brass. I can easily imagine one of Grieg's elegies played on one of these...
> 
> Do you have any interesting ideas/videos/instruments/[anything] about the relationship between folk and classical music?


One I have been listening to recently is Percy Grainger, he was amongst the earliest of composers to go out in the field and record folk songs, principally in the UK but he also did a bit of it elsewhere, for example in Scandinavia. That's where he came across none other than Edvard Grieg. Grainger became the Norwegian composer's pianist of choice, he said that the way he performed his music was a thing of genius.

Regarding the debate about the politicisation of folk music, I think that came later. At the time, this was cutting edge stuff. Grainger, along with Bartok and Kodaly in Hungary, and also Vaughan Williams and Holst in the UK, where in this pioneering movement to retain what was left of folk traditions. They founded the area of ethnomusicology, so for example the books published by Kodaly and Bartok went into detail about not only the music but its whole context - the arts and crafts, folk dancing and dress, from village to village and in different regions. These composers where the first to notate down folk music as they actually heard it, rather than fitting it into the straightjackets of Western classical music (eg. Grainger said that beforehand, what composers had done was just noted the tune, not cared about its relationship to the text, and they just repeated the tune across the whole song as the words changed, he said no folk singer would do something as unimaginative and creatively poverty stricken as that!).

So there was this move towards authenticity, whereas the likes of Grieg most often got their folk songs from existing academic sources, so with them it was second hand knowledge, with Grainger and the others it was directly from the field. This doesn't of course invalidate the contributions of Grieg and the likes of Dvorak, whose aims in any case where different to that of the following generations.

But if you want to hear some real 'poverty stricken' folk song arrangements, go to Beethoven's, who just threw his together for cash and they sound nothing like the real thing (I'm talking of his songs from the British Isles, again he was sent the material by someone in the UK who basically wanted the name 'Beethoven' on the score as arranger, LvB never one to pass up an opportunity to make a bit of cash, was eager to give him what he wanted). Again, its not to invalidate the spirit of German or other 'folkish' music which Beethoven incorporated into his symphonies, nor for that matter Brahms' _Hungarianisms_ which still breathe the spirit if not the letter of music of Central and Eastern Europe. But there we are talking of a different thing entirely to what came to happen in the early 20th century.

You listen to something like what Grainger called his "fripperies," basically folk music reinterpreted with that important element of knowldge from the source, and you get an idea of music that retains some of the spontaneous, vibrant and eternally fresh qualities of folk music. My favourite is his string arrangement of Molly on the Shore.

The other thing is that these composers basically had to fund their own research in the early days. Grainger earnt his money mainly as a concert pianist, and Greig's concerto was his calling card all around the world. Bartok and Kodaly came up for opposition from various governments in Hungary. Ironically one of them was the inter-war Horthy nationalist regime. In the end however they retained their jobs at the academy and where able to fund their work. After WWII, Kodaly oversaw the publication of his and Bartok's ethnographic studies, which I believe is still a core text in the field. He also became the head of the international society for ethnomusicology around this time, in his old age.

Grainger hardly spent time in Australia, but I know that towards the end of his life he was able to set up institutes both at home and abroad in the USA (where he spent most of the last two decades of his career) to preserve his studies. Neither Holst or Vaughan Williams where establishment figures, certainly not in the early folk collecting part of their careers. Holst had to teach to earn a living and while Vaughan Williams did become popular later in this career, he didn't accept a knighthood nor the plum job as Master of the King's Music.

Whatever happened later was a result of agendas coopting this area, for example the various Communist regimes in East Europe promoted folk music as part of a kind of post-WWII national revival. The aims where no doubt to preserve folk music which by then was largely dead, even earlier in the 20th century operetta and popular musics of the time had killed it off. The increased mobility and industrialisation of the UK and Europe was a threat to these regional ways of life that had existed for centuries. Michael Tippett said that when he was a child, he remembered some old people of his village singing folk song, by the time he was a young man it was dead.

Tourism also revived or kept alive folk or folk based cultures in the West, such as flamenco in Spain, and also in South East Asia. The survival of gamelan in Bali for example is largely thanks to tourism and also government promotion of it for that purpose - bring in the WEsterners with thier dollars. Another issue is that flamenco and gamelan are living types of music, just like any type of contemporary music practised today. There are strong traditions behind them for sure, but they are also evolving and developing.

They are not sealed in a glass case in a museum. That's how it always was, but of course without some sort of nourishment or stimulus from the outside 'real' world, things tend to die out. That is what was happening in the early 20th century. If there ever was a piece of music heavily critical of "progress" its Vaughan Williams' _Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis_. In some ways its like William Blake's poem _Tiger Tiger Burning Bright_. Music had to go back to its roots in the real soil - and to ancient traditions - to survive. That was the view not only in heavily industrialised England but elsewhere. There was a move to deal with the alienation and homogenisation of life wrought by "progress" and not doubt today its still a big issue.

I can go on, this is a fascinating area which I am learning more about. Folk music, like jazz, helped in fact to revive classical music. It was a two way street. I think the history of 20th century classical or 'Western' music can't be written without folk and jazz based influences, derivations and crossovers being included as a significant part of it. For that reason I see the likes of Grainger, Bartok, Vaughan Williams and so on to be important innovators and renewers, even if just for their ethnomusicological work, let alone for the way in which it (and also jazz!) enriched their own music.


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## hocket (Feb 21, 2010)

Winterreisender said:


> The problem I have is with the sort of contrived nationalism that developed in England in the late 19th century. (I mention England because it is the example I am most familiar with). The sentiment seemed to be: "we have no distinctive nationalist musical voice, so we had better invent one." On the one hand, some of these composers propagated the idea that English folk music had cemented its place in the shared national consciousness and was therefore a reasonable compositional tool for academic composers, but I'm not sure if that is true. The detachment between folk and academic music had become so great that academics had to go out into the countryside with their notepads and ask farmers and peasants to sing for them, so that they could steal the best results.


Whilst I share your misgivings about suspicions of a patronizing attitude, and with 19th C/Romantic nationalism, it's still worth bearing in mind that coming from the cultures they were grounded in they were actually being very open minded and progressive. Furthermore, even the folk revival of the likes of Ewan McColl had a very archival and academic bent since the folk tradition had barely survived industrialization in England and was much less of a living culture than , for instance, Ireland.

The truth is that English music had lost touch with its history by this time and seeking to find a cultural identity of their own is no crime, and made a lot of sense within the context of Romantic culture. The results are sometimes a bit cringeworthy though.


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## Winterreisender (Jul 13, 2013)

@Ingelou & Freischutz. I don't find it _so_ terrible when English academic composers compose using ideas borrowed from folk music. Vaughan Williams is actually one of my favourite composers. I just don't see what folk music has to do with nationalism. The nationalist slant was surely not intended by the communities in which these tunes originated, so for the composers of the "English Musical Renaissance" to deploy these tunes with nationalist ideas in mind is surely just exploitation.

I disagree with Freischutz's claim that



> just because something is from Somerset doesn't mean it isn't or can't be described as English


I see regionalism and nationalism as opposed. I don't know what the underlying "Englishness" is which stylistically unites the folk music of say Somerset, Lancashire and Norfolk but excludes the various styles of folk music from say Scotland, Ireland and even the USA. If I am a peasant from Lancashire in the 19th century, then I might feel a certain affinity to the music of my county, but the music of Somerset might be totally alien to me. The only thing they have in common is that the two counties somewhat arbitrarily fall within the land boundaries that we call England. So the attempt to amalgamate this regional diversity into a one-size-fits all nationalism seems to do a real disservice to folk music.


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## Freischutz (Mar 6, 2014)

Winterreisender said:


> I just don't see what folk music has to do with nationalism.


Folk music has a lot to do with nationalism, though particularly if you look at it in terms of tribalism. A lot of the folk musics that come down to us originate from periods in history when countries that we know now were once split into various sub-kingdoms - e.g. when England was made up of the kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria etc. before the Normans came along in 1066.

At the time, folk art of all kinds (thinking music, literature, even manuscript illustration) was all part of establishing a tribal identity, and there are various ways of doing that: reflecting on the culture of the tribe now, reflecting on the roots and genealogy of the tribes, and reflecting on its similarities and dissimilarities with other tribes outside. Maybe you're so opposed to the idea of nationalism because since the 19th century it has been so closely tied to fascism, but throughout history it's extremely difficult to dissociate art from politics, and folk music is certainly not an innocent exception that just exists self-contained without reference to nationalist identities. One of the major functions of folk music always has been traditionalism, and what could be more nationalist than that?



Winterreisender said:


> I see regionalism and nationalism as opposed. I don't know what the underlying "Englishness" is which stylistically unites the folk music of say Somerset, Lancashire and Norfolk but excludes the various styles of folk music from say Scotland, Ireland and even the USA.


I think you're starting to shoot yourself in the foot a little because if you're saying that you can't think of ways to exclude Scottish and Irish music from descriptions of types from Somerset and Lancashire, then these regional musics can't really be all that unique after all, and instead of there being regional musics, there must instead be one big international folk character.

But here's where you need to take your thought experiment further. Imagine the folk music of Somerset. Now of Lancashire and Norfolk. Sure, think about Scotland, Ireland and the USA. Now think of the folk music of Indonesia. And China. And all the various traditions around Africa that I'm too culturally ignorant to name. What do you see? Well it's obvious isn't it: the music of Somerset is _closer_ to the music of Lancashire than anywhere else, and both of those are _closer_ to Scotland and Ireland and the USA than the rest, and then that big group is all more closely related than to the folk musics of Indonesia and China and so on.

The point is that, yes, there are regional traditions, but these can _also_ be grouped as national traditions because there definitely is _something_ that characterises _all_ the regional musics of England that does _not_ characterise Gamelan. The reason why you find it hard to think of distinctions between regional English styles and those of Scotland and so on is because they all share a common root in Northern European/Celtic traditions, so of course there are styles that transcend these small regions which connects them. The point is that the lines are hazy and ill-defined, but you can't draw a big, thick line around Somerset or anywhere else so small and say that it doesn't have enough in common with the rest of England for it to be thought of as 'English'.



Winterreisender said:


> If I am a peasant from Lancashire in the 19th century, then I might feel a certain affinity to the music of my county, but the music of Somerset might be totally alien to me. The only thing they have in common is that the two counties somewhat arbitrarily fall within the land boundaries that we call England. So the attempt to amalgamate this regional diversity into a one-size-fits all nationalism seems to do a real disservice to folk music.


And just to drive the point home, if you're a peasant from Lancashire in the 19th century, the music of Somerset is not going to be anywhere as near alien to you as the music from Indonesia. This _has_ to mean that it has something in common which _is_ defined by the English national borders, whether or not you like the political taste of it.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Winterreisender said:


> I see regionalism and nationalism as opposed. I don't know what the underlying "Englishness" is which stylistically unites the folk music of say Somerset, Lancashire and Norfolk but excludes the various styles of folk music from say Scotland, Ireland and even the USA. If I am a peasant from Lancashire in the 19th century, then I might feel a certain affinity to the music of my county, but the music of Somerset might be totally alien to me. The only thing they have in common is that the two counties somewhat arbitrarily fall within the land boundaries that we call England. So the attempt to amalgamate this regional diversity into a one-size-fits all nationalism seems to do a real disservice to folk music.


Okay, let's just agree to differ, then. I simply *can't* interpret nationalism & folk culture in the same way as you. When English composers use folk songs, I just don't hear in-your-face nationalism; and the regions of England are obviously united in their history, language, economic patterns, laws, political campaigns, military efforts, religious denominations, and indeed folk culture. How could they not be?

Different tune styles *are* characteristic of North and South, and Northern songs often include Scottish Border Ballad variants - but the travelling musician & the pedlar & the seasonal fairs & the local broadside printers made sure that variants of the same songs are found all over England, and also Scotland & Ireland to some extent; and North America too. Things have never been *all that* regional. One thing that I discovered when looking at song history is that English ballads & poems found their way into Northern Scotland in medieval times. Variants of medieval songs from Europe also found their way into the English & Scottish repertoire. There was much much more travel & trade than is usually supposed.

Yet England does have a national identity beyond the regions - and I speak as someone who grew up proudly in York & disdained Southerners until I was old enough to have more sense. In the nineteenth century, fashions of song - hymn, folksong, parlour ballad & music hall - united people throughout England, and in Lancashire there couldn't have been many 'peasants' (odd term) who were totally immune from the fashions of the local cities, Leeds, Burnley, Manchester, Liverpool, et al. Nationalism was not a middle-class construct then, either - both rustic and industrial working class Victorians were fiercely patriotic. So there was no need to use folk songs to assert a contrived nationalism, and I just don't believe that that is what happened.


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## Winterreisender (Jul 13, 2013)

The problem with nationalism is that it creates very strict dividing lines. If you live on this side of the border you are English, on the other side and you are not. With music, the lines are far hazier because, as Ingelou points out, great music is able to go beyond the borders in which it originated, such that a single style of music could become the shared cultural property of several communities, regardless of whether these communities happen to be part of the same political unit. 

I have read a few books on English folk music and the authors always seem to stumble at the same moment: defining what stylistic features make up English folk music, as opposed to western folk music more generally. Yes, English folk music uses certain modes and repetitive structures, but these are characteristics hardly unique among folk musics. Usually one must concede that it is just “a certain something that we can’t really put our finger on” that defines English music. I am rarely impressed by these answers and it causes me to question whether this “certain something” actually exists or whether it is just a figment of the nationalist’s imagination. The nationalist composer/collector might claim to celebrate and embrace the wealth of diverse folk styles, but only if these styles fall within the rather arbitrary boundaries of their country.


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## Winterreisender (Jul 13, 2013)

As for Freischutz's thought experiment. I'm not sure if it is true to suggest that Lancashire's music is closer to Somerset's than to Scotland's simply because they belong to the same country. I would have thought that northern England and Scotland often have more in common than northern England and southern England. But regardless of the details, I accept the general point that neighbouring folk musics have a lot in common and probably belong to a single proto-folk-music, if we were to get genealogical about it. The problem is that we are talking about transient and sometimes unclear boundaries. As I mentioned above, this is at odds with the strict dividing tendency of nationalists.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Winterreisender said:


> a single proto-folk-music


It probably involved a lot of drumming and dancing.


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## Serge (Mar 25, 2010)

Re: Romantic Nationalism

I thought you meant something like Wagner... Bad, bad Wagner!

But I do hate Nazis really. Both of my grandfathers died fighting them.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Winterreisender said:


> ... Usually one must concede that it is just "a certain something that we can't really put our finger on" that defines English music. I am rarely impressed by these answers and it causes me to question whether this "certain something" actually exists or whether it is just a figure of the nationalist's imagination. The nationalist composer/collector might claim to celebrate and embrace the wealth of diverse folk styles, but only if these styles fall within the rather arbitrary boundaries of their country.


I am not good enough musically to help you here. So I sympathise with the 'certain something' argument, because I have a vast experience (over 60 years) of listening to, dancing to, and playing tunes from Northern England, Southern England, Scotland, & Ireland, and I usually 'just know' where a tune hails from, something in the note pattern or rhythm. Even in Playford, you can tell the Northern tunes from the Southern, generally speaking.

I would be most surprised if *you* can't do this too, Winterreisender. Tell a Scottish tune from an English, even a Northern English? Tell an Irish jig from an English jig? *I bet you can!* And I bet you know more about music too than me. So I will leave you to put *your* finger on it & report back to me! 

Teach everyone in a class the same style of handwriting, and within a year, everyone has their own style that can be identified by those that know them. To an outsider, the North-Eastern accent sounds like one accent, but an expert or a native can identify a much tighter area, even the very pit village of a speaker. The English-Scottish border is an artificial one, but move ten miles either way, and you'll hear the difference. Listen to a newsreader, even one speaking 'Standard English', and a word will give away where they come from.

Move to Europe. We most of us know when we're listening to 'something Spanish', 'something Slavic', 'something Greek', 'something French', and roughly what century something comes from. What a fabulous varied heritage we all have. I don't know enough about the rest of the world, but no doubt something similar will be found within India - regional styles, but to an outsider, the music will sound 'Indian', though an insider will know where the music comes from. Only an expert will be able to define exactly what the difference is.

People who live together in a place form their own style, which is soon distinguishable because we all have incredibly sensitive ears to nuances. Yes, English folk music has a style that is distinguishable both from European folk music and from the music of Scotland & Ireland. I don't mention Wales because I simply don't know enough about it.

There is nothing wrong with celebrating the 'isness' of a country in music so long as it doesn't start claiming racial superiority or being oppressive to others. I still just cannot see that the English composers are guilty of strident nationalism just because they chose to celebrate their own heritage.


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## hocket (Feb 21, 2010)

Winterreisender said:


> As for Freischutz's thought experiment. I'm not sure if it is true to suggest that Lancashire's music is closer to Somerset's than to Scotland's simply because they belong to the same country. I would have thought that northern England and Scotland often have more in common than northern England and southern England. But regardless of the details, I accept the general point that neighbouring folk musics have a lot in common and probably belong to a single proto-folk-music, if we were to get genealogical about it. The problem is that we are talking about transient and sometimes unclear boundaries. As I mentioned above, this is at odds with the strict dividing tendency of nationalists.


Well, I think that's oversimplifying through extrapolation what he was trying to say. Of course traits can cross national borders. The fact is that traits of Irish music do appear in some kinds of English music (and vice versa too actually). Bert Jansch was Scottish but is usually regarded as playing English Folk. Hamish Imlach, another Scotsman, played a style that's heavily influenced by the Irish. You're just running up against the usual hurdles that you face as soon as you try to define genres rigidly. Never going to work.

That doesn't mean that english folk music doesn't have a distinctive identity (it doesn't necessarily mean that it does have one either).

I suppose that just raises the question whether or not you do believe that it has an identity of its own. So, do you? Or do you think that English folk is the same as Irish or Scottish (or French, or Italian?).


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Franz Liszt was influenced by gypsy music.

In terms of pure musical factors, the pentatonic scale was the first scale created when the stacking of fifths is started: C-G-D-A-E-B, rearranged as C-D-E-G-A-B. Therefore, one can logically deduce that the pentatonic, common to all folk musics, is part of the musical DNA of our 12-divided octave. Whatever nationalistic or xenophobic fodder you want to shovel on top of that is an afterthought, and composers are usually motivated by musical concerns first.


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## Guest (Mar 8, 2014)

millionrainbows said:


> Franz Liszt was influenced by gypsy music.


According to some, Liszt was influenced by _so-called_ 'gypsy' music.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

With the advent of mass communication and travel, music which is "of a place" has become more and more rare. I think we all know now that "people are people," and the things that used to separate us are now seen as colloquial amusements. These cultural trappings have become less important to deeper issues of identity, and have now become cultural stylistic trappings. 

The authentic no longer exists, as the world becomes more homogenized. What's the difference if Liszt's use of "gypsy" music is authentic or not, since he borrowed it for his own use in another context. 

Maybe 'authentic' can be approached, by using original instruments, tunings, and such, but authenticity is just a historical artifact now.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

MacLeod said:


> According to some, Liszt was influenced by _so-called_ 'gypsy' music.


Yes, basically it was tunes written by others played by gypsy string bands during the 19th century. After the failure of the 1848 revolutions in Central-East Europe, this type of music became a sort of popular outlet. They couldn't have independence so they fashioned a kind of national identity - albeit a manufactured one - in music. Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies where based on these types of pseudo-gypsy tunes, so too Brahms' Hungarian Dances. The Rakoczy March - arranged by Berlioz and also Liszt - was basically a song played by a gypsy violinist famous at the time (if my memory serves me right, his name was Bihari) - and they basically grabbed it. Brahms didn't even assign an opus number to his dances, because he saw them more as arrangements rather than original works. In contrast, Dvorak's Slavonic Dances are more or less his own 'imaginings' or copying the mannerisms of Slavonic folk music, rather than arrangements or transcriptions of actual material.

About the debate regarding nationalism versus regionalism on this thread, I think that now we are at a time when everything is being homogenised, we are all under this global kind of McCulture, or basically Americanisation. So things such as this classic quote by Ralph Vaughan Williams still have much relevance today:

_Art for art's sake has never flourished in England. We are often called inartistic because our art is unconscious. Our drama and poetry, like our laws and our constitution, have evolved by accident while we thought we were doing something else, and so it will be with music. The composer must not shut himself up and think about art, he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community - if we seek for art we shall not find it._

You know I kind of decry this whole thing, what started then, this alienation and moving away from any kind of community values and this trend to globalisation, I think its been quite detrimental in many respects. Here I am at my computer and I may well know more of what's going on on the other side of the world rather than on my own street or in my own locale. That's not the case with me as much as maybe some others, but the point is that we have developed this kind of alienation from our culture at ground level as well as from nature. This is what the Romantics and those early Moderns like RVW where largely against, but I don't think that the true meaning of what they and others said was heeded, so now we find ourselves in this mess.

Honestly I am not so worried about co-option of dead classical composers for some negative nationalist agenda. Its a pity if a nation is more interested in things like American movie stars or sports than its own real culture. Its a pity that the high ideals of "progress" and Modernism as it became have been basically co-opted by the big end of town, who foist on the populace every kind of agenda to make a buck. Now that's the ultimate agenda, I think, money. Forget national music, or national culture, "money talks" is the ultimate problem we face, greed.

I must kind of correct myself in that I was collapsing folk music and world music in my earlier post on this thread. Gamelan is not, strictly speaking, folk music. Like Western classical music it has hundreds of years of tradition behind it, a lot of it as I understand taking place in the royal courts of South East Asia. After independence came in places like Indonesia, the government funded gamelan. For example a factory was set up to manufacture the instruments, and money was put in to making the art which was in danger of dying out to survive and develop, the court orchestra at Jogjakarta for example was retained, even though the monarchy was not more than a symbol, it had no political power in post-independence Indonesia.

This has parallels with what happened in East Europe after 1945, the Communist governments there sought to establish folk music as a source of national identity which had been seriously eroded previously. Institutes of folk music where set up for its study and ensembles where funded to perform and record it.

In recent decades, a group was set up called Africa Oye that organises workshops, study and performances of African music and others drawing upon it (eg. from Carribean and South American cultures). They have done things like perform tribal music in the traditional dress and incorporation of dancing in concert halls and at festivals all over the world. So again, this type of folk-based music is a living art, it is being not only preserved but perhaps more importantly developed today. Maybe another panacea to the homogenisation I was talking about?


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Might mention that the characteristic sound of what Liszt considered "gypsy music" was popular long before his day. Listen to the finale of Haydn's "Gypsy Rondo" piano trio (that's #39 Landon) from 1795.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

KenOC said:


> Might mention that the characteristic sound of what Liszt considered "gypsy music" was popular long before his day. Listen to the finale of Haydn's "Gypsy Rondo" piano trio (that's #39 Landon) from 1795.


Yes, and another famous example is found in the finale of his Piano Concerto in D. Also, the finale of Schubert's String Quintet in C. Schubert, like Haydn, spent time in Hungary with the Eszterhazys, albeit only briefly. Haydn's music also contains what are possibly tunes derived from (or similar to) Croatian folk music, the first theme in the finale of Symphony #104 "London" being a famous example. One of the movements, I think the slow movement, of Dvorak's Symphony #7 has a gypsy derived tune as well. He said it came to him when he witnessed a group of Hungarian patriots disembarking a train in Prague for a political meeting.

Brahms was the most prolific though in these Hungarianisms, one I quite like is the finale of his Piano Quartet in G minor, but there are many other examples in his music. This kind of thing was much in vogue in the 19th century, but 'real' gypsy music is sung and not purely instrumental, I think a lot of it is actually unaccompanied but it varies from place to place. Flamenco is gypsy music with a lot of mixings and influences - such as Moroccan and Jewish.

This is really a fascinating area, and I have looked at it beyond the strict confines of the OP, but I hope what I added sheds some extra light on the topic (but I'm no expert in this!).


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

There was after all the Austro-Hungarian Empire back then.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

Sid James said:


> This has parallels with what happened in East Europe after 1945, the Communist governments there sought to establish folk music as a source of national identity which had been seriously eroded previously. Institutes of folk music where set up for its study and ensembles where funded to perform and record it.


The Americans had been more active in the 30's under the Federal Music Project which provided employment for the Lomaxes and the Seegers and a whole raft of local University based folk archives.


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## Winterreisender (Jul 13, 2013)

hocket said:


> I suppose that just raises the question whether or not you do believe that it has an identity of its own. So, do you? Or do you think that English folk is the same as Irish or Scottish (or French, or Italian?).


I will have one more go at answering this, hopefully without repeating myself. I think individual communities developed their own styles of folk music, and that many of the best styles traveled from one community to another, or indeed from one country to another. But the ability of great music (folk or otherwise) to transcend its boundaries is completely at odds with the nationalist tendency of solidifying boundaries. Either celebrate the small communities who created the music, or celebrate music as an international mode of communication, but to celebrate artificial political divisions has little to do with the spirit of folk music, in my opinion.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

There seems to be an emphasis on "authentic" folk music, versus its use in Western music. I think this is greatly exaggerated, because I don't see how "authentic" gypsy music is that great to begin with, in purely musical terms. Upon listening to a Hungaroton disc of "authentic" Hungarian music re-created from recently discovered (1950's) manuscripts, it sounds a lot 'hokier' and corny than I thought it would. Simplistic I-IV-V progressions, less than sublime fiddle technique, droning reed-pipes (I'll take Celtic pipes any day), and that noisy cimbalom sound, the hammered-dulcimer thing that was used to much greater musical effect in Those Were The Days by Apple artist Mary Hopkin.


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## hocket (Feb 21, 2010)

Winterreisender said:


> I will have one more go at answering this, hopefully without repeating myself. I think individual communities developed their own styles of folk music, and that many of the best styles traveled from one community to another, or indeed from one country to another. But the ability of great music (folk or otherwise) to transcend its boundaries is completely at odds with the nationalist tendency of solidifying boundaries. Either celebrate the small communities who created the music, or celebrate music as an international mode of communication, but to celebrate artificial political divisions has little to do with the spirit of folk music, in my opinion.


I can't help but feel that this is ducking the question whilst simultaneously being just as ideologically guilty as the Romantics were through a celebration of either particularism or internationalism (rather than nationalism in their case). Surely the question you raised is whether or not folk music(s) can have an identifiable collection of traits that mark them as having a 'national' character (not necessarily anything to do with political boundaries, probably more to do with notions of ethnicity). Your answer seems to be that they can be anything but -which sounds suspiciously like bloody mindedness to suit an agenda. No one is denying that folk musics can be very particularist or that musics and musical traits can cross national (and indeed ethnic, social, cultural, whatever) boundaries. Nonetheless, if a Scotsman like Jansch can be said to be playing English folk it does suggest that there is a recognizable style or form that people (however inconsistently, contradictorally, and lacking in precision such definitions may be) distinguish as having a 'national' character. If that's the case then it also suggests that the composers you're talking about, however patronizing and lacking in nuance their approach may have been and however objectionable any ideological baggage they may have brought to the party was, may still have had some grounds for seeking a 'pure' home grown ur-music in the various English folk traditions -at least within the context of Romantic culture.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

Winterreisender said:


> I will have one more go at answering this, hopefully without repeating myself. I think individual communities developed their own styles of folk music, and that many of the best styles traveled from one community to another, or indeed from one country to another. But the ability of great music (folk or otherwise) to transcend its boundaries is completely at odds with the nationalist tendency of solidifying boundaries. Either celebrate the small communities who created the music, or celebrate music as an international mode of communication, but to celebrate artificial political divisions has little to do with the spirit of folk music, in my opinion.


Hardangerfjord and Tveitt. The boundaries are there in the scenery. Hardanger's relative isolation allowed for the development of a unique musical culture. Yes it spread, there's even a Hardanger Fiddle Association of America which does celebrate the small community which created the music. But, despite his love for folk music, Tveitt was a committed Norwegian nationalist.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Taggart said:


> The Americans had been more active in the 30's under the Federal Music Project which provided employment for the Lomaxes and the Seegers and a whole raft of local University based folk archives.


Speaking to that whole New Deal type of zeitgeist, I think it also had a lot to do with Copland's moving towards his Americana phase, tapping into folk musics and going though that kind of populist phase? I know that folk tunes, hymns, popular songs and marches found their way into the music of Ives way before that though, so that could have been a factor too (although in the 1930's his music had yet to gain the wider exposure it later got, basically post-1945).



Winterreisender said:


> I will have one more go at answering this, hopefully without repeating myself. I think individual communities developed their own styles of folk music, and that many of the best styles traveled from one community to another, or indeed from one country to another. But the ability of great music (folk or otherwise) to transcend its boundaries is completely at odds with the nationalist tendency of solidifying boundaries. Either celebrate the small communities who created the music, or celebrate music as an international mode of communication, but to celebrate artificial political divisions has little to do with the spirit of folk music, in my opinion.


I think there is much truth in that. Of course music is music, and ideology is ideology. Nationalism in the 19th century did indeed frame the use of folk music as part of an independence struggle. Its significant that the Poles, Czechs, Hungarians all went into this direction around this time, because they where under threat of being Germanised. In terms of Italy, the issue was to form a unified state, but also to get rid of Austrian domination of the North of the country. In the UK I think it was different, in terms of what I talked to before, there the industrial revolution had its origins and had devastating impact on rural communities and cultures.

Beyond music, in the area of language specifically, there is this pull between the unified state and its regions. You look at the Balkanisation of the former Yugoslavia. Also Italy, which during the 1860's following independence and unification endured a two decades long civil war. The South of the country didn't fully accept the terms of independence. There where economic, social and linguistic differences which continue to this day. Same can be said of places like Indonesia that I talked about before, the unity of the Javanese dominated nation state has often been challenged by separatist movements, and as in Italy many speak their local dialect of the language much better than the national language. China is very similar.

What you're saying there in political terms translates into what Gandhi sought to do in India, post-independence. He wanted the country to be constituted of independent regions within the whole, in effect a system of sovereign village republics. This, given the linguistic and cultural diversity of the country. When independence occured the shape of the nation state as it became was very different and Gandhi was disillusioned. Ironically, the "father of the nation" didn't attend the ceremony proclaiming India as a republic. So he would probably agree with the gist of your argument.

But getting back to music, the use of the polonaise by the Poles for example, or the csardas by the Hungarians, or the hora by the Romanians in their classical music, it sought to establish in music a nation that at the time didn't exist in reality. This applies to Poland especially, when Chopin was alive, Poland literally didn't exist, it was gobbled up by Germany and Russia. So I think that as a unifying force folk music did take a role. Unfortunately it, along with other music and high culture, was very badly exploited in the 20th century by various dictatorships which makes it understandable why there are still negative connotations hanging around this movement of enquiry into folk music.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

Sid James said:


> Speaking to that whole New Deal type of zeitgeist, I think it also had a lot to do with Copland's moving towards his Americana phase, tapping into folk musics and going though that kind of populist phase? I know that folk tunes, hymns, popular songs and marches found their way into the music of Ives way before that though, so that could have been a factor too (although in the 1930's his music had yet to gain the wider exposure it later got, basically post-1945).


A lot of it is purely a search for academic funding. There are clear lines from Francis Child through Kitteridge and Robert Winslow Gordon. Child collected ballads, Kitteridge joined in, and Gordon founded the Archive of Folk Culture  at the Library of Congress. All are tied in through Harvard. John Lomax studied at Harvard under Kitteridge and then joined Gordon at the Library of Congress. John's son Alan joined him on recording trips and became a major collector in his own right. A separate strand is Charles Seeger, also educated at Harvard, who was one of the founding fathers of American ethnomusicology. Charles's second marriage to Ruth Crawford linked him to someone who was deeply interested in folk music. Ruth had contributed musical arrangements to Carl Sandburg's extremely influential folk song anthology the American Songbag. Charles's sone by his first marriage, Pete, also (initially) went to Harvard.

According to wiki, during the Depression years, Copland traveled extensively to Europe, Africa, and Mexico, formed an important friendship with Mexican composer Carlos Chávez and began composing his signature works. So he seems to have been in some way cut off from his American roots.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

I think 'music as nationalism' is just a symptom of the democratization of the world and the elevation of the common man. As *Sid* said, _"music is music, and ideology is ideology." _I think it's ridiculous to reject *Wagner's* music on the grounds that it "created" an exclusionary culture. I don't think music is that powerful, or that it even matters that much to the real powers that be. Music can be a catalyst, but other real forces must be in place for it to have that effect, like *The Beatles' *music in the Soviet Union. It's a highly potent symbol, but its symbolic power is something that is thrust upon it by consensus, not by the intent of one composer. "You can fool some of the people some of the time..."


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Ingélou said:


> I personally prefer my folk music as folk music, rather than made into classical music....


Straight, no chaser. I think that is the only way to have it; once used in 'classical' contexts, even simple arrangements, it is no longer folk music


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

millionrainbows said:


> I think 'music as nationalism' is just a symptom of the democratization of the world and the elevation of the common man. As *Sid* said, _"music is music, and ideology is ideology." _I think it's ridiculous to reject *Wagner's* music on the grounds that it "created" an exclusionary culture. I don't think music is that powerful, or that it even matters that much to the real powers that be. Music can be a catalyst, but other real forces must be in place for it to have that effect, like *The Beatles' *music in the Soviet Union. It's a highly potent symbol, but its symbolic power is something that is thrust upon it by consensus, not by the intent of one composer. "You can fool some of the people some of the time..."


Well yes music can be a potent symbol, you look at how Verdi's music was considered subversive during the buildup to Italian unification, and also how _Finlandia_ by Sibelius was banned by the Russians. That's not a good example of folkish classical music, I think its based on an old hymn tune, but the point remains. Of course you change the context and its totally different, music such as Finlandia becomes part of other agendas once independence or unification has been reached.

I also forgot to add that in Russia, which has always been multiethnic, you have this trend of incorporating music of others at the edges of the empire into classical. You look at Rimsky-Korsakov's orientalism in _Scheherazade_, or the Chinese and Arabian dances in Tchaikovsky's _Nutcracker,_ or how Gliere and Khatchaturian (in _The Red Poppy _and _Gayaneh _respectively) incorporated these tableaus of 'exotic' dances, from the republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Now with these there is an agenda of sorts to present the nation as consisting of various identities, distinct but united.

I don't know how I forgot to mention the current events in Ukraine in relation to all this, history is never just a matter of what happened yesterday in these sorts of places with all these layers of history and a sort of collective memory, of borders which are like lines drawn in the sand, and of course everyone has a version of history and it is the correct one to the exclusion of all else. Maybe we can say "music is music, ideology is ideology, history is history?" But no matter how I try separate these, one more often than not merges with another.



millionrainbows said:


> There seems to be an emphasis on "authentic" folk music, versus its use in Western music. I think this is greatly exaggerated, because I don't see how "authentic" gypsy music is that great to begin with, in purely musical terms. Upon listening to a Hungaroton disc of "authentic" Hungarian music re-created from recently discovered (1950's) manuscripts, it sounds a lot 'hokier' and corny than I thought it would. Simplistic I-IV-V progressions, less than sublime fiddle technique, droning reed-pipes (I'll take Celtic pipes any day), and that noisy cimbalom sound, the hammered-dulcimer thing that was used to much greater musical effect in Those Were The Days by Apple artist Mary Hopkin.
> 
> ...


I haven't heard that one however I do have the soundtrack to the film _Latcho Drom_, which features gypsy music from its origins in India through the Middle East to Europe. One of the groups on it is famous, they have toured the world, the Romanian gypsy band called Taraf de Haidocks. It shows how gypsy music is different, depending on the regions where they settled and inhabited.

Gypsy music, like different folk or world musics, hasn't been about sealing it in some vacuum. Its always changed and mixed with other things. It just happens that its mixing with Western classical basically produced a thing that is more classical than gypsy, a kind of commercialised and treacle covered version of the real thing. I actually like that type of music from time to time, I got it in my collection just as I have other more authentic or from the source types. I suppose that the big difference is that the Westernised version largely irons out the idiosyncracies and quirky aspects that make the music unique, and that can be said about what I was talking to earlier.

Before systematic study and documentation was made of other musics, the knowledge of what was their essence was minimal (apart from such knowledge held by the practitioners themselves, of course). The relation of the music to other things like village life, dress, dance, dialect was minimal as well. Years ago, I was listening to a report done by BBC radio that said that languages are being lost at an enormous rate. It is much like degradation of the environment. So the preservation of things like culture is much like that of the environment, there is a sense that diversity is good and too much homogeneity is a threat to it.


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## mtmailey (Oct 21, 2011)

Well the music is freer than the stiff classical music where you know what the movements are.Well i like music in the classical era but it was mostly the same you know 4 movement symphonies,3 movement concertos, string quartets & sonatas.Romantic is better there where string trios,strings sextets,string quintets & one movement works like concert overtures.


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## starry (Jun 2, 2009)

It's interesting that it seems that this short period was the only one within the long era of classical music that had stronger currents of stylistic nationalism. And even then I'm not sure every composer at that time was so caught up in it.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

I'm growing increasingly skeptical of the criticism against* Wagner;* after all, *Mahler* adopted the Wagnerian vision as his own aesthetic, and ran with it (increasing Tristan-like chromaticism, lyrical melody, "opera without sets", huge, sprawling works...


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

Freischutz said:


> One of the interesting features of Romantic music is its use of folk material - often not just emulating it, but transcribing, harmonising and using original folk tunes. But as much as Romanticism's folk roots can give a clear national character to a lot of music, those big orchestras do remove a lot of authenticity. So recently, I've been interested in Grieg and his own Norwegian influences, and YouTube turned out to be a great place for listening to actual folk music. Here's an example of a short melody played on the traditional _bukkehorn_, which I think has a fantastic timbre somewhere in between woodwind and brass. I can easily imagine one of Grieg's elegies played on one of these.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Not one mention of the Chopin Mazurkas in this entire thread, unless I missed it. What could be more of a reflection of Poland and its national traits than that without having to label it is nationalism? His music was incredibly embraced in Poland during the war years. The Mazurkas are a reflection of his love of country but without the label slapped on it. Some composers have so absorbed the influence of the folk culture they were born in that they can be original with it. It seems surprising that there was not one mention of this Polish master.


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