Folk Music Traditions: Stories from Around the World takes readers on a captivating journey through the rich and diverse world of folk music. This comprehensive guide explores the origins, evolution, and cultural significance of folk music across continents, from the ancient melodies of Europe to the vibrant rhythms of Africa and beyond. Each chapter delves into regional traditions, the instruments that define them, and the stories that have been passed down through generations. Discover how folk music has shaped social movements, influenced modern genres, and continues to thrive in the digital age. With detailed insights into the preservation and promotion of folk traditions, this book is an essential resource for music enthusiasts, scholars, and anyone interested in the powerful role of music in human history. Dive into the heart of folk music and uncover the stories behind the songs that connect us all.
"[This book] is a contribution of considerable substance because it takes a holistic view of the field of folk music and the scholarship that has dealt with it." -- Bruno Nettl "... a praiseworthy combination of solid scholarship, penetrating discussion, and global relevance." -- Asian Folklore Studies "... successfully ties the history and development of folk music scholarship with contemporary concepts, issues, and shifts, and which treats varied folk musics of the world cultures within the rubric of folklore and ethnomusicology with subtle generalizations making sense to serious minds... " -- Folklore Forum "... [this book] challenges many carefully-nurtured sacred cows. Bohlman has executed an intellectual challenge of major significance by successfully organizing a welter of unruly data and ideas into a single, appropriately complex but coherent, system." -- Folk Music Journal Bohlman examines folk music as a genre of folklore from a broadly cross-cultural perspective and espouses a more expansive view of folk music, stressing its vitality in non-Western cultures as well as Western, in the present as well as the past.
New edition of the text first published in 1965 (revised by Valerie Woodring Goertzeu). Presents the general characteristics of traditional music and its cultural context along with some of the methods used to study folk music. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
"Who were 'the folk'? This question has haunted generations of radicals and reactionaries alike. The Folk traces the musical culture of these elusive figures in Britain and the US during a crucial period from 1870 to 1930, and beyond to the contemporary alt-right. It follows an insistent set of disputes surrounding the practice of collecting, ideas of racial belonging, the poetics of nostalgia, and the pre-history of European fascism. It is the biography of a people who exist only as a symptom of the modern imagination and the archaeology of a landscape directing the flow of global politics today"--
A wonderful collection of 20 popular, beautiful and fun-to-play songs for beginning to intermediate guitar students. The melody, an easy strumming pattern, chord diagrams and complete lyrics are provided with each song, so students can choose to either play the melody or strum to accompany themselves as they sing. Large-sized music, TAB and diagrams make the songs easy to read, even for beginners. The 48-page book also contains a review of music reading, tablature and chord diagrams. This handy songbook is the perfect tool for guitar teachers seeking fun musical activities to keep their students happy and involved with music making.
In Victorian times, England was famously dubbed the land without music - but one of the great musical discoveries of the early twentieth century was that England had a vital heritage of folk song and music which was easily good enough to stand comparison with those of other parts of Britain and overseas. Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger, and a number of other enthusiasts gathered a huge harvest of songs and tunes which we can study and enjoy at our leisure. But after over a century of collection and discussion, publication and performance, there are still many things we don't know about traditional song - Where did the songs come from? Who sang them, where, when and why? What part did singing play in the lives of the communities in which the songs thrived? More importantly, have the pioneer collectors' restricted definitions and narrow focus hindered or helped our understanding? This is the first book for many years to investigate the wider social history of traditional song in England, and draws on a wide range of sources to answer these questions and many more.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of British musicians rediscovered traditional folk ballads, fusing the old melodies with rock, jazz, and blues styles to create a new genre dubbed "electric folk" or "British folk rock." This revival featured groups such as Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, and Pentangle and individual performers like Shirley & Dolly Collins, and Richard Thompson. While making music in multiple styles, they had one thing in common: they were all based on traditional English song and dance material. These new arrangements of an old repertoire created a unique musical voice within the popular mainstream. After reasonable commercial success, peaking with Steeleye Span's Top 10 album All Around My Hat, Electric Folk disappeared from mainstream notice in the late 1970s, yet performers continue to create today. In Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music, Britta Sweers provides an illuminating history and fascinating analysis of the unique features of the electric folk scene, exploring its musical styles and cultural implications. Drawing on rare historical sources, contemporary music journalism, and first-hand interviews with several of electric folk's most prominent artists, Sweers argues that electric folk is both a result of the American folk revival of the early 1960s and a reaction against the dominance of American pop music abroad. Young British "folk-rockers," such as Richard Thompson and Maddy Prior, turned to traditional musical material as a means of asserting their British cultural identity. Yet, unlike many American and British folk revivalists, they were not as interested in the "purity" of folk ballads as in the music's potential for lively interaction with modern styles, instruments, and media. The book also delves into the impact of the British folk rock movement on mainstream pop, American rock music, and neighboring European countries. Ultimately, Sweers creates a richly detailed portrait of the electric folk scene--as cultural phenomenon, commercial entity, and performance style.
This book reviews the current practices of traditional musics in various cultures of all continents, and examines the impact and significance of traditional musics in the modern world. A diverse group of experts of musicology and music education collaborate to expose the current practices and challenges of transmission and evolution of traditional musics in order to seek sustainable development, so that traditional musics can take the place they deserve in the modern world and continue to contribute to human civilization. This volume contains three main sections that include transmission of traditional musics, authenticity and evolution, as well as challenges in future. Based on the chapters, the editor proposes four major trends of transmission of traditional musics, namely, formalization, politicization, Westernization and modernization in transforming contexts.
Song and dance style--viewed as nonverbal communications about culture--are here related to social structure and cultural history. Patterns of performance, theme, text and movement are analyzed in large samples of films an recordings from the whole range of human culture, according to the methods explained in this volume. Cantometrics, which means song as a measure of man, finds that traditions of singing trace the main historic distributions of human culture and that specific traits of performance are communications about identifiable aspects of society. The predictable and universal relations between expressive communication and social organization, here established for the first time, open up the possibility of a scientific aesthetics, useful to planners.
