Folk & Traditional Music of the Western Continents

The folk & traditional music of Europe, Africa & the Americas explored.

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	Il6 FRANCE, ITALY, AND THE IBERIAN PENINSULA is performed by a soloist or a couple, with the audience participating with encouraging shouts of ole. The close relationship between Spain and the folk music of other continents—it received material from Africa which ultimately came from Asia, and in turn it was the agent of diffusion to the Americas—provides a good note for closing a discussion of European folk music. As European culture as a whole received much of its basic materials for forming a tradition of folk music from Asia (and possibly from Africa), it passed on this heritage to the Americas and to other colonized areas, from which it in turn was stimulated. Similarly, Spanish folk music has much in common with that of its European neighbors and something with that of the European Near East. But in spite of the many influences that each national tradition has received from the outside, each one has developed, through its own way of assimilating and combining these influences, a charac­teristic degree of uniqueness. Bibliography and discography An interesting collection of French folk song is fimile Barbillat and Laurian Touraine, Chansons Fopulaires dans le Bas-Berri (Paris: Gargail-lou, 1930-1931, 5 vols.). The best discussion in English of French folk music is in the fifth edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Mu­sicians, under "Folk Music" in the subdivision on France (by C. Marcel-Dubois). Rodney Gallop, "Basque Songs from Soule," Musical Quarterly, XXII (1936), 458-69, and Violet Alford, "Dance and Songs in Two Pyrenean Valleys," Musical Quarterly, XVII (1931), 248-58 are interest­ing readings on the area common to France and Spain. A large and com­prehensive collection of Spanish and Portuguese music is Kurt Schindler, Folk Music and Poetry of Spain and Portugal (New York: Hispanic In­stitute, 1941). The best discussion, in English, of Italian folk music is in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, fifth edition, the supplement volume (1960)-not the section on Italian folk music in the body of the fifth edition. Alberto Favara, Corpus di Musiche Popolari Sicilians (Palermo: Accademia di scienze, lettere e arti, 1957, 2 vols.) is a compre­hensive collection from Sicily. Discussion of one song type appears in Wolfgang Laade, "The Corsican Tribbiera, a Kind of Work Song," Ethnomusicology, VI (1962), 181-85. For selections of French, Hispanic, and Italian folk music, the ap­propriate disks from the Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music are especially useful. Also to be recommended are Folk Music of France, Folkways P 414; Folk Music from Italy, Folkways F 4220; Songs