Folk & Traditional Music of the Western Continents
The folk & traditional music of Europe, Africa & the Americas explored.
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60 THE GERMANIC PEOPLES |
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ent manner. Example 4-5 is the tune of a broadside ballad, "Girls of Newfoundland," of Irish origin, collected in Labrador. Perhaps we should point out here that much more British folk music has been collected in North America than in Britain, and that, for material collected in England itself, published collections with reliable transcriptions are difficult to come by. Thus we must rely to some extent on American versions for a picture of British folk music. |
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example 4-3. English folk song, "Lord Gregory." Reprinted from The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, vol. 2 by Bertrand Harris Brown by permission of Princeton University Press, Copyright 1962. |
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example 4-4. English folk song, "The Lass of Loch Royal," from Bruno Nettl, "The Musical Style of English Ballads Collected in Indiana," Acta Musicologica 11 (1955), 83.
Examples 4-3 and 4-4 use the so-called "ballad meter," that is, iambic lines alternating in three- and four-foot lengths (-/-/-/-/; -/-/-/; and so forth). This is common—though by no means universal—in British folk song and tends, in music, to be translated into one of two types of rhythm: ff Iff U Iff for f (fTf f Ifff*. Example 4-3 uses the first of these, and Example 4-4, a variant of the second. There is frequently an elongation or a shortening of measures, or even heterometric structure; thus, in Example 4-4 the meas- |
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