Folk & Traditional Music of the Western Continents
The folk & traditional music of Europe, Africa & the Americas explored.
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40 THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF EUROPEAN FOLK MUSIC
modes. But a great many European folk songs do fit into the modal system. See Example 3-4 for the various modes that can be fashioned out of a nucleus of five tones in the diatonic system.
Anhemitonic Pentatonic
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example 3-4. Diatonic modes based on a single group of five tones.
Pentatonic songs make up a large proportion of the European body of folk song; their scales are usually composed of major seconds and minor thirds, as in Example 3-5.
Pentatonic songs cannot, however—even with the special kind of |
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example 3-5. English folk song with a pentatonic scale, from Jan P. Schinhan, ed., The Music of the Ballads (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1957. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, vol. 4), p. 184. |
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