Stuart Walsh
Sun, 06 Apr 2008 14:25:45 -0700
Doc Rossi wrote:
Related to this topic, there will be an article about the influence of "art" music on "traditional" music in the Summer 2008 issue of Fiddler Magazine [ http://www.fiddle.com/ ], written by Andrew Kuntz, who is responsible for The Fiddler’s Companion website. http://www.ibiblio.org/fiddlers/index.htmlYes, but the fact (if it really is a fact) that certain distinctions weren't made at an earlier time doesn't mean that the distinctions aren't nevertheless worth making. A folk tune collected by C.J Sharpe (or Bartok or whoever) around 1900 is very different from 'On the Banks of Allen Water' or 'Robin Adair' set for banjo or uke (etc) from the same period. The banjo/mando/uke/guitar arrangements of folk tunes (for a middle class audience) sit alongside Reveries, Marches, ballroom dances etc. The songs and tunes collected/documented by socially elevated enthusiasts right back to the early 19th century occupy a very different world.I've read it and it's quite interesting and well researched. Like Frank said in an earlier post, he points out that "the boundaries between classical, popular and traditional music were much more permeable prior to the 20th century, at which time widening gaps between the genres became chasms. Earlier there was much less distinction between what was considered art music and what was popular or even traditional, especially during the 18th and early 19th centuries."
Further back in time there's surely an important distinction between middle/upper class music about trothing shepherds and shepherdesses - courtly or bourgeois songs and dances with pastoral/Arcadian themes on the one hand and whatever it was that 'masses' (including shepherds and shepherdesses) could possibly have sung and danced on the other. The sophisticated variations for lute (or the later, clumsier ones for English guitar) of folk or folk-like tunes are not what the 'masses' could ever have played. (For a start the cost of a lute or cittern or English guitar..., the cost of the music, the ability to read)
Some of the Scottish lute/mandore settings seem to hint at a music that really is not the popular music of the middle/upper class. But that might just be the ineptness of those who wrote the settings.
Stuart
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