so. One is reminded of a passage from Epictetus : ‘Were I a nightingale
I should do after the manner of a nightingale. Were I a swan I should
do after the manner of a swan. But now since I am a reasonable being,
I must sing to God.’
One must not, however, think of folk music just as a spontaneous
and formless outpouring of the soul. Folk music has laws and prin-
ciples that are none the less positive although they are unconsciously
obeyed. A folk song or folk dance does not just spring out of the void
in response to some emotion. However much an individual folk singer
or folk dancer may extemporize, he is in the main following certain
patterns which have been established by tradition and which he has
inherited by oral transmission.
A folk song differs from an art song not because it is artless, but
because instead of being the work of one individual, it is the product
of many generations of singers who by trial and error have found the
mode of expression which best suits the genius of the community. So
in talking of folk music we must distinguish between genuine folk
music and popular music. Folk music is music which has come down
to us from the past but which keeps its freshness and vitality by the
constant variations to which it has been subjected during the course
of oral transmission. Popular music, on the other hand, is the com-
position of an individual which hits the popular imagination, but only
superficially, and being without roots it usually withers away soon
after it appears.
Music educators can, I believe, perform a very valuable service to
the culture and well-being of their fellows by recognizing the true
nature of folk music and by presenting it as a thing of intrinsic beauty
which is worth cultivating for its own sake. Unhappily, in most coun-
tries which are in the van of progress (so-called) folk music has been
allowed to go underground and it has been retained only by those
country people who are the least affected by modern civilization; and
as civilization spreads so folk music disappears.
This state of affairs is due, I believe, very largely to the attitude of
the professional musicians who have ignored the folk music of their
own country and have employed a foreign musical idiom. The con-
sequence is that a large proportion of the population (at least in my
country) is untouched by the music of the concert hall and there is a gap
between the music of the ‘highbrow’ and the ‘low-brow’. The masses
of our industrial population know neither the music of the concert
hall nor folk song, but they entertain themselves with jazz, or its latest
equivalent and with cheap sentimental songs of no artistic value.
singke
(singke)
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