Folk & Traditional Music of the Western Continents
The folk & traditional music of Europe, Africa & the Americas explored.
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84 EASTERN EUROPE |
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We should point out, incidentally, that there is a vast body of Christmas carols in the Rumanian folk repertory. Bartok collected several hundred tunes, and they seem to be particularly archaic melodies, being short, with forms that do not correspond to the simple line organization of Western European, Czech, or Hungarian songs, but which are irregular not only in the structure of the measures but also in the number of measures and phrases per song.
One might expect the dances of the Balkan countries to be more prone to simple metric schemes; after all, people have two legs and two arms, which lend themselves well to the movement in duple meter; no one has seven feet. Nevertheless, among the five most important folk dances of the Bulgarians, only one is in duple meter. |
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example 5-5. Rumanian Christmas Carol, from Bela Bart6k, Die Melodien der rumanischen Colinde (Wien: Universal Edition, 1935), p. 43. Reprinted by permission of Boosey and Hawkes, Inc., New York, and Universal Edition, Ltd., London. Copyright 1918 by Universal Edition, renewed 1945. Copyright and renewal assigned to Boosey and Hawkes, Inc., for U.S.A. |
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