The Folk Song Collection

How field recording and arrangement carried folk song into the concert hall.

Related

RomanticModernViolinMode

Folk song lived in fields, taverns and rituals. Collectors carried it onto paper and into the concert hall.

The question

Who owns a folk song? What do notation, arrangement and copyright do to it? Is the collector a preserver, or someone who turns collective memory into a personal work?

Historical arc

Herder and the Brothers Grimm treated folk song as national memory. Nineteenth-century collectors used notation; twentieth-century recorders put voices into archives. Bartók and Kodály recorded in villages, then turned the material into piano pieces and choruses. Vaughan Williams arranged the English Folk Song Suite, Grieg edited Norwegian tunes, and Grainger made folk ballads into brilliant piano music. China also organised large collecting campaigns.

The turning point

The medium was decisive. Notation fixed a flowing variant into one version, while recording preserved breath and dialect. Copyright and arrangement turned collective inheritance into authored work. Collecting saved and possessed at once.

What to listen for

Hear the beat of Bartók's Romanian dance, Grieg's piano setting of a Norwegian tune, and the folk theme in Vaughan Williams's suite.

Related

The collecting movement belongs to Romantic and Modern; its melodies often pass to the Violin, and its scales are discussed under Mode.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "Folk music" — dates checked, not quoted
• Philip V. Bohlman, The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World (Temple University Press) — background checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.