Music and Migration
Migrants pack homeland melodies in their luggage, and music becomes the last piece of home.
Related
Question
Why is music the first thing migrants pack? Language changes, work changes, but a melody can find countrymen in a strange city. Music is luggage and address.
Historical background
Steamships and railways made mass migration possible in the nineteenth century; Irish, Italian, Eastern European, and Chinese laborers carried songs and rituals to the Americas, Australia, and Southeast Asia. War and persecution created new diasporas in the twentieth century, and recordings let homeland sound survive across generations. Migrant music often splits: the first generation wants it unchanged, the second wants it mixed.
Key cases
Danny Boy sets words to the old Irish air Londonderry Air; published in 1913, it became a shared song at Irish weddings, funerals, and farewells. Shenandoah began as a boatmen's and settlers' song, tying river, parting, and westward movement together before American choirs adopted it. Fun Tashlach is an Eastern European Jewish wedding tune that migrants made faster in New York and Chicago. All three were reused.
What to listen for
Listen for ornaments and slides, and whether the rhythm is for walking, dancing, or crying. Migrant music often hides home in a semitone or a grace note, and adds the new country's instruments to the accompaniment.
Related
Violin and Accordion are the most common pair at migrant dances; the nationalism of Romantic and the twentieth-century record industry turned local tunes into portable labels.
Listen in the library
All tracks from midicn-lib — inline badge is the license tier (C1 commercial / C2 non-commercial / C3 study only).
Sources
- Grove Music Online 的 Diaspora 与 Irish music in America 条目，用于核对移民音乐的传播与再使用
- Mark Slobin, Fiddler on the Move（Exploring the Klezmer World，Oxford University Press，2000），用于核对克莱兹梅尔在北美的发展
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.