Reciprocal Controls Exerted by Ballad Texts and Tunes

NOT ENOUGH RESEARCH has been done on the music-poetry relationship in songs. In folksong it is especially close, flexible, and harmonious. The present study, having taken for its materials ballads collected in the southern states, is designed to point the way toward identification of problems in text-tune fit that merit investigation. Southern traditional ballads are of several kinds: the older English and Scottish (Child) pieces; other later imported ballads; and ballads of New World provenience.l It should be emphasized that items admitted to consideration in this study were whole pieces-words and music-of the narrative type of folksong (ballad) collected from oral tradition within the general borders of the American South, available for use either in print or on recordings. More even than in art song, the text and tune of a ballad are aspects of a single phenomenon. For a study of interrelationships, then, no better field exists than folksong, because of its significance to human culture, its freedom from confusing complexities, and the axiomatic cose association of text and tune. For many years the folklore and folk music fields have recognized the need for investigations of the interrelationships of words and melody in folksong, but there has been little evidence of endeavor to fill the need. Scholars have repeatedly called for such work without themselves engaging to produce it. Without doubt there are cogent reasons for the stalemate: dearth of material, lack of joint competence in literature and music, and the unusual difficulty of forging new machinery for the breaking of uncultivated ground, together with the certainty of erring. Within its narrowly stated and implicit limits the present study offers a beginning to this work in combined music-poetic art. First, let us consider the influences of folk music on folk poetry. Melodies are of two kinds: strong and weak. A weak melody, used customarily in only one variant of a ballad, obviously is too subservient to its poem to wield any appreciable controls over it. On the other hand, the larger group of strong tunes, of a definite, clear-cut melodic profile and considerable integrity and longevity, control in a number of ways the poems that are sung to them

Aesthetics · Art · Ballad · Folklore · Literature · Melody · Musical · Narrative · Poetry · Diverse Musicological Studies · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Music History and Culture

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