Now that I've calmed down a bit I'll have another go. >I think you are underestimating the cultural sophistication of English >farmworkers by a VERY large margin.
I'm not sure why saying that traditional singers could get all the information they needed from the music without having to read the label on the jar that says "A mixolydian" counts as underestimating their cultural sophistication. I would have thought it was more sophisticated. >Nearly all of them went to church, >and for most of the areas Sharp, Lloyd and Vaughan Williams collected >in, that church was the Church of England. With a tradition of choral >singing going back to Byrd, Tallis and Dunstable. Any really good singer >could expect to be noticed by the church organist and dragooned into the >choir, no matter if he spent Monday to Saturday digging ditches. So the >*practice* of Renaissance modality was general public knowledge. Are you saying that traditional music derives from the ecclesiastical and art music of the Renaissance? Isn't it just as likely to be the other way round? Couldn't it be that Renaissance scholars were doing exactly the same as twentieth century folklorists and saying "How do those ignorant peasants know the classical Greek modes?" then imposing them from the outside (and getting it wrong in the process)? > A good >singer is going to notice when similar phrases recur, even when the >contexts are as different as a doxology and a patriotic naval ballad, and >the recurrence is going to suggest using a similar intonation for both. Yes! They got that from listening to and performing the music. >So even in the absence of a theoretically explicit notion of octave >species, the richer notion of mode as comprising a set of cadential >formulae, and embracing both folk and liturgical music, would been hard >to avoid. The notion of mode may have been there (we do not know how they thought about their music) but if so, it came from within the tune. Bryan Creer To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
