Folk & Traditional Music of the Western Continents
The folk & traditional music of Europe, Africa & the Americas explored.
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STUDYING THE STRUCTURE OF FOLK MUSIC 17 |
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Simultaneously, we should watch for the arrangement of the performance, and this is especially important in studying music from a recording. We want to know whether the piece is performed by a single performer or a group, or whether there is alternation. Do several performers sing or play in unison, or does each have his own part? And so on.
Having identified the several sections of a piece, let us try to establish the relationship among them. One way to do this to give each of them a letter, and to repeat the letter when the section is repeated. When a section is a variation of a previous one, we would give it a superscript number: thus, A1 is a variation of A. When a |
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example 2-1. German folk song, "O du lieber Augustin," learned by the author from oral tradition.
section is new but seems somewhat reminiscent of a previous one, we could indicate this by a superscript letter so that Ba is a section reminiscent of A. For example, the song in Example 2-1 could be |
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example 2-2. Hungarian folk song, from Zoltan Kodaly, Folk Music of Hungary (London: Barrie and RocklifT, 1960), pp. 61-62. |
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