Kevin McDermott
Sun, 06 Apr 2008 20:51:36 -0700
Dear Stuart,What you say is very true: but perhaps the issue is more what people "in period"_made_of the distinction: I freely give that the distinction is there, that they could make it, and that they did make it.
All that follows is under the bright red rubric of "In my Opinion....."The difference between our world and theirs is that the Materia Musica was fairly homogenous throughout a given society (painting with a very, very broad brush, as I'm sure you'll understand); to take an example, the same tune could be heard at the lowest tavern in the west country, the Court of St. James, and almost all locations in between including churches; hearers at all locations considered the tune "theirs." What they did with it was very different, and this fact was not lost on them. But I don't think the courtiers considered themselves slumming when they played a set of variations on Bonny Sweet Robin: they were participating in "The Matter of Britain", to grab a useful phrase from a different world of common culture.
This homogeneity is what has suffered over the past two centuries, and particularly over the last 80 years or so: remember, John McCormack sang to houses packed with paying customers from all ranks of society and made his programs out of folk material, opera, art song, and the lastest fox trots--but he was about the last. Whiteman's Concerts of Modern Music were more of a conscious effort at re-welding the rapidly disintegrating connection between popular and classical--but it was a doomed effort.
In my own opinion, the issues that created the vast divide between popular and classical in our own time are 1) the invention of the microphone (previous to which, all music written for the voice needed to be written in a style which allowed a singer to be heard at the back of the house; a vocal melody is a vocal melody, whether it be for church, operatic stage, or music hall); and 2) the complete victory of Afro-American musical tradition over Anglo-American musical tradition (once the two intertwined in the 1830s, the vibrant African tradition grew and grew and grew, first marginalizing and then chasing from the field the Anglo tradition: Frank Sinatra was about the last exponent of the Anglo culture to be able to make a living at it): the basic building blocks of this tradition are radically different and its almost viral vitality has taken over the entire world. There's no doubt that this is due to more than the massive commercialization possible today. The only surviving element from the once homogenous Anglo (or European, or whatever) musical culture was the rump of "classical music" which became, and remains, largely an animated corpse.
But all of this is centuries away from the cittern's period. Kevin On Apr 6, 2008, at 5:25 PM, Stuart Walsh wrote:
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.StuartTo get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html