ONE HUNDRED ENGLISH FOLKSONGS
THE first serious and sustained attempt to collect the traditional songs of the English peasantry was made by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould some thirty years ago in the West of England. It is true that the Rev. J. Broadwood had made a small collection of Sussex songs and published them privately among his friends as far back as 1843, and that Miss Mason’s Nursery Rhymes and Country Songs (1877) and Northumbrian Minstrelsy (1882) had both previously been given to the public; nevertheless, the issue in 1889 of the First Part of Songs and Ballads of the West marked, I think, the real starting-point of the movement, which has had for its aim the systematic collection and publication of the folk-music of England. Prior to that date the knowledge that folksongs existed in this country was confined to very few, and it was popularly assumed that the English peasant was the only one of his class in Europe who had failed to express himself spontaneously in song and dance. How, in the face of the facts which have since been brought to light, such an amazing misconception could have obtained credence and escaped disproof is an enigma which has never been properly solved. Happily, this grotesque error was exposed before it was too late to make amends for the contemptuous neglect with which our predecessors had treated their national musical heritage. A few years later, with the passing of the last survivors of the peasant class, it would have been quite impossible to have recovered anything of real value, and the products of a great peasant art would have been irrevocably lost. It may be thought that, owing to the late hour at which the interest in our folk-music came ultimately to be aroused, it is but a shrunken harvest that has been garnered. But I do not think this is so. That the postponement has added very materially to the difficulties of the collector—by compelling him, for instance, to take down his songs from aged and quavering throats instead of from young, fresh-voiced singers—is, of course, true enough. Nevertheless, I do not think that this has appreciably affected either the quality or the abundance of the recoveries. Indeed, our belated conversion has even had some actual advantages. For the investigations have thereby come to be made at a period when the scientific spirit is abroad, and consequently the work has been conduced with thoroughness, accuracy, and honesty of purpose. And this is scarcely the way in which it would have been done a century or more ago. For the 18th century musician had other notions, and was little disposed to trouble himself with ethical considerations where the collecting of the people’s music was concerned. Fortunately, the present day collector has set up a very different standard, and has realized that his first and chief obligation is to record just what he hears, no more and no less, and that the aesthetic as well as the scientific value of his work depends wholly upon the truthfulness and accuracy of his transcriptions. And if the investigations have throughout been conducted in this spirit—and it is a claim that may, I think, justly be made—this is owing in no small degree to the influence exercised by the Folk-Song Society (founded in 1898) and the example which, by means of its Journal, it has set to collectors.
The opponents of this school, however, impressed by the fact that the essential characteristics of the folksong—its freshness, spontaneity, naturalness, and unconventionality—are the very qualities which are conspicuously absent from the popular song-music of the past, maintain that folksongs are the products not of the individual, but of a people or community, and that we are indebted to the process of oral tradition not merely for preserving them, but for moulding, developing, and, in a sense, creating them as well.
This is not the occasion to enter into a lengthy discussion upon an abstruse and highly controversial question of this sort. Suffice it to say that the writer is a stout upholder of the communal theory of origin; that he believes that the nature of the folksong and its history can be satisfactorily explained only on that hypothesis; that the most typical qualities of the folksong have been laboriously acquired during its journey down the ages, in the course of which its individual angles and irregularities have been rubbed and smoothed away, just as the pebble on the seashore has been rounded by the action of the waves; that the suggestions, unconsciously made by individual singers, have at every stage of the evolution of the folksong been weighed and tested by the community, and accepted or rejected by their verdict; and that the life history of the folksong has been one of continuous growth and development, always tending to approximate to a form which should be at once congenial to the taste of the community and expressive of its feelings, aspirations, and ideals.
The careful preservation of its folk-music is to a nation a matter of the highest import. Art, like language, is but a method of human expression, due to the development and specialization of qualities that are natural and inborn. If, therefore, it is to folfil this fonction efficiently, it must never be divorced from, but must always faithfully reflect, those qualities which are peculiar to the nation from which it proceeds. A nation’s music, for instance, must, at every stage of its development, be closely related to those spontaneous musical utterances which are the outcome of a purely natural instinct, and which proceed, it will always be found, from those of the community who are least affected by extraneous educational influences—that is, from the folk. The penalty that must inevitably be paid when this principle is ignored is well exemplified by the vicissitudes through which music in England passed after the death of Purcell. Prior to the Restoration, musical England held a proud and foremost position among the nations of Europe, a preëminence, however, which it completely lost in the two following centuries, and has never since regained. This very remarkable change was clearly brought about by, or at any rate synchronized with, the open disparagement—at first by the educated classes, and later on by the musicians themselves—of our native music, and the corresponding exaltation of all that was of foreign manufacture. In other words, music in England, which had hitherto been distinctively and demonstrably English in character, fell from its high pedestal immediately it became divorced from the national tradition.
The collection and preservation of our folk-music, whatever else it has done, has at least restored the Englishman’s confidence in the inherent ability of his nation to produce great music. Adverse conditions, political, economic, sociological, or what not, may for a time prevent him from making the fullest use of his national inheritance, and postpone the establishment of a distinctive school of music worthy of the tradition of his country; yet, sooner or later, given favorable conditions, English music will assuredly be reborn and once again assume that position which it held before the Restoration.
The greatest care has been exercised in the selection of the songs for this volume, in order that the collection may be thoroughly representative of the subject and contain one or more examples of each of the chief types of English folksong. With this end in view, it has been found necessary to limit the selection to folksongs proper, and to exclude carols, sea-chanteys, children’s games, nursery songs, etc. It will be seen that more than half of the tunes here presented are cast in one or other of the ancient diatonic modes (excluding the major, or “Ionian”), the forerunners of our modern scales. Hitherto, musicians have regarded these modes as relics of a bygone era, which were employed in the early days of the history of music in default of something better, but were eventually discarded (circa 1600) in favor of a scale-system better suited to modern requirements. But the diatonic mode is the natural idiom of the English peasant, not one, be it noted, originally acquired from without, but one which he evolved from his own instinct. That the mode has always been, and is still, his natural vehicle of melodic expression, and that it should not, therefore, be regarded in any way as evidence of antiquity, is shown by the manner in which the folksinger will frequently translate into on or other of the modes the “composed” songs which he takes into his repertory. The model character of so many folksongs has no doubt brought this question very prominently before musicians. For here we have scores of melodies which, although cast in scales long since discarded by the art-musician, nevertheless throb with the pulse of life and make a strong appeal to modern musical taste and feeling. Manifestly, such tunes as these cannot be quietly dismissed as mediæval survivals and relegated, as such, to the lumber room. They reveal, rather, a new species of meloldy suggesting many possibilities to the composer of the present day.
The modes commonly used by the English peasant are the Æolian (typified by the white-note scale of A), the Dorian (white-note scale of D), and the Mixolydian (white-note scale of G). The Phrygian (E) and the Lydian (F) he uses but rarely; a dozen tunes in the former mode, and less that half that number in the latter are, perhaps, as many as English collector have as yet unearthed. Of the songs in this collection, twenty-seven are in the Æolian mode, twenty in the Dorian, and nine in the Mixolydian, while four, though modal, are irregular and cannot be concisely classified.
What form the ideal accompaniment to a folksong should take is question upon which many divergent views may legitimately be held. With the purist, a simple solution is to dispense with an accompaniment altogether, on the ground that it is an anachronism. But this is surely to handicap the folksong needlessly and to its detriment. For just as it takes an artist to appraise the value of a picture out of its frame, so its is only the exert who can extract the foll flavor from an unharmonised melody. Musically we live in a harmonic age, where every one, consciously or subconsciously, thinks in chords; when even the man in the street is under the influence—if only he knew it—of the underlying harmonies of the popular air he is whistling. And herein lies one of the fondamental distinctions between folk and art-song. The former, in its purest form, being the product of those in whom the harmonic sense is dormant, is essentially a non-harmonic tune; whereas the the latter, of course, is demonstrably constructed upon a harmonic basis.
If, then, the need of an instrumental setting to the folksong be granted, we have next to consider what is its ideal form; and this, likewise, is largely a matter of individual taste. Sir Charles Stanford, for instance, advocates a frankly modern treatment. “The airs,” he says, “are for all time, their dress must vary with the fashion of a fraction of time.” Personally, I take a different view—and Sir Charles admits that there are two sides to the question. For it seems to me that of the many distinctive characteristics of the folk-air one of the most vital— at any rate, the one I would least willingly sacrifice— is that which makes it impossible to put a date or assign a period to it, which gives to the folk-air the quality of permanence, makes it impervious to the passage of time, and so enables it to satisfy equally the artistic ideal of every age. Now, if we follow Sir Charles Stanford’s advice and frankly decorate our folk-tunes with the fashionable harmonies of the day, we may make very beautiful and attractive music,—as Sir Charles has undoubtedly done,—but we shall effectually rob them of their most characteristic folk-qualities, and thereby convert them into art-songs indistinguishable from the “composed” songs of the day.
Surely, it would be wiser to limit ourselves in our accompaniments to those harmonies which are as independent of “period” as the tunes themselves, for example, those of the diatonic genus, which have formed the basis and been the mainstay of harmonic music throughout its history, and upon which musicians of every age and of every school have, in greater or less degree, depended; and further, seeing that the genuine folk-air never modulates, never wavers from its allegiance to one fixed tonal centre, to avoid modulation, or use it very sparingly. Personally, I have found that it is only by rigidly adhering to these two rules—if I may so call them—that I have been able to preserve the emotional impression which the songs made upon me when sung by the folksingers themselves. This, at any rate, is the theoretic basis upon which the accompaniments in this volume have been constructed.
After what has been said above with regard to the “editing” of folk-music, it is, perhaps, scarcely necessary to remark that the tunes in this volume are presented precisely as they were originally taken down from the lips of the singers, without any alteration whatsoever. Logically, the words should be accorded the same treatment. But this, unhappily, it is not always possible to do. Indeed, it has reluctantly to be confessed that owing to various causes—the doggerel broadside-versions of the songs that have been disseminated throughout the country for the past several centuries; lapse of memory; corruptions arising from the inability of the singer to understand words and phrases which have come to him from other parts of the country; the varying lengths of the corresponding lines of the several stanzas of the same song; the free and unconventional treatment of some of the themes, etc.,—the words of many of the songs are often very corrupt, and sometimes unintelligible. It has therefore been necessary to make alterations in the words of many of the songs in this volume. Although archaic words and expressions have been retained, no attempt has been made to preserve local peculiarities of speech, it being the custom among folksingers to use each his own particular dialect. I have only to add that whenever alterations have been made in the text, the fact is mentioned in the notes.
Before bringing these remarks to a conclusion, it is necessary to say something about the singing of folksongs. Traditionally, folksongs are sung not only without gesture, but with the greatest restraint in the matter of expression; indeed, the folksinger will usually close his eyes and observe an impassive demeanor throughout his performance. All who have heard him sing in this way will, I am confident, bear witness to the extraordinary effectiveness of this unusual mode of execution.
Artistically, then, it will, I think, be found that the most effective treatment to accord to the folksong is to sing it as simply and as straight-forwardly as possible, and, while paying the closest attention to the clear enunciation of the words and the preservation of an even, pleasant tone, to forbear, as far as may be, from actively and deliberately attempting to improve it by the introduction of frequent changes of time, crescendos, diminuendoes, and other devices of a like character.