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THE GERMANIC PEOPLES 63 |
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such as trills and glides (Example 4-4), puts heavy stress on certain tones and considerable tension on the vocal cords, and tends to deviate from the established rhythmic and metric patterns through the use of rubato. Tempo-giusto singing sticks more closely to meter and tempo and has less ornamentation. Although this distinction was derived for use in describing Hungarian folk music, it applies also to singing in other countries, especially those of Northern and Eastern Europe. Example 4-3 is a sample of tempo giusto singing, while Example 4-4, a variant of the same song, exemplifies the parlando-rubato. Both styles are found in the British ballad tradition. In Hungarian folk music, parlando-rubato is used mainly for ballads and tempo-giusto for dance songs.
The emphasis on pentatonic structure does not seem to be an ingredient of the newer layer of British song. The tunes that were introduced into the folk culture more recently, perhaps since the advent of music printing and the broadside ballad in the sixteenth century, are both more varied in style and more closely related to popular and art music. This is to be expected, of course, with regard to the broadsides, since their writers frequently set them to tunes of any sort that were widely current. Thus the later tunes are more frequently in major or harmonic minor, rarely pentatonic, and they do not deviate—as does Example 4-4—from a standard and consistent metric structure.
At this point we must mention also the Celtic-speaking inhabitants of the British Isles, particularly the Irish and- the Welsh, peoples whose musical culture has played so important a part in their history that the Irish national emblem is the harp. Irish folk song today is almost entirely in the English language, and, indeed, the songs of Irish origin have contributed greatly to the English-language heritage of the United States, Canada, and Australia. On the whole, their musical style does not differ greatly from that of the English folk tunes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century origin.
The Welsh have developed—partly through their folk heritage and partly because of the influence of hymn singing—a tradition of choral singing of folk songs; this is done largely in the style of nineteenth-century hymns, with conventional chord progressions and triadic harmony. The Welsh have, in modern folklore, preserved an instrument that evidently was widespread in medieval art music, the crwth or crowd, a lyre with six strings—four over the finger- |
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