Folk & Traditional Music of the Western Continents
The folk & traditional music of Europe, Africa & the Americas explored.
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198 WESTERN FOLK MUSIC IN THE AMERICAS t
dance and instrumental groups from Europe who give concerts on American stages. The original functions of the folk songs on the whole have disappeared in the American city, and the music must serve mainly as entertainment, as an expression of sentimental feeling, and as accompaniment to dancing. Occasionally, new songs in Polish, Hungarian, Slovak and other languages are created, though in such cases it is usually the setting of new words, which deal with American life, to an old tune. Example 10-2 illustrates a Polish folk song (possibly unchanged in transit) collected in Detroit. On the whole, the ethnic groups in the United States perform the music of the old
 example 10-2. Polish folk song, "Cztery Mile za Warszawa" ("It was four miles out of Warsaw"), collected in Detroit. Reprinted from Merrily We Sing, 105 Polish Folksongs by Harriet M. Pawlowska by permission of the Wayne State University Press. Copyright 1961.
country, sometimes preserving tunes already forgotten in Europe, but more frequently singing the old tunes in less ornamented, shorter, and frequently impoverished style, often tending to change modal tunes to major or minor, heterometric structure to isometric (but not in Eample 10-2), and unaccompanied tunes to songs with chordal accompaniment or singing in parallel thirds.
To a smaller extent than the non-English-speaking groups, the Anglo-American and Negro communities in the cities also have a folk music tradition, largely because many members of these two groups are recent immigrants from the countryside. This contrasts |
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