- A song belonging to the folk music of a people or area, often existing in several versions or with regional variations.
- A song composed in the style of traditional folk music.
folk song
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Dictionary:
folk song folk·song (fōk'sông', -sŏng') |
| Literary Dictionary: folk song |
folk song, a song of unknown authorship that has been passed on, preserved, and adapted (often in several versions) in an oral tradition before later being written down or recorded. Folk songs usually have an easily remembered melody and a simple poetic form such as the quatrain. The most prominent categories are the narrative ballad and the lyric love‐song, but the term also covers lullabies, carols, and various songs to accompany working (e.g. the sea shanty), dancing, and drinking.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: folk song |
folk song, music of anonymous composition, transmitted orally. The theory that folk songs were originally group compositions has been modified in recent studies. These assume that the germ of a folk melody is produced by an individual and altered in transmission into a group-fashioned expression. National and ethnic individuality can be seen in folk music, even in the case of songs transplanted from one country to another. There is scarcely any people whose folk song is wholly indigenous, and among notable cases of transplanting is the English ballad found in various parts of the United States. Many of these were collected in the late 19th cent. by Francis Child and in the early 20th cent. by Cecil Sharp. In addition, many American folk songs are of other European or African origin. Americans occasionally consider as folk songs certain songs of traceable authorship, e.g., “Dixie.”
Interest in folk music grew during the 19th cent., although there were earlier scholars in the field, such as Thomas Percy whose Reliques, a collection of English ballad texts, appeared in 1765. Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (3 vol., 1803) is a major source on Scottish ballads. Béla Bartók did outstanding work in notating the folk music of central Europe early in the 20th cent., and before him the Russian nationalist composers made use of their country's folk music. Conversely, folk song often shows the influence of formally composed music; this is particularly true of 17th- and 18th-century European folk song.
The collection and transcription of folk music was greatly facilitated by the invention of the phonograph and tape recorder. Using this equipment, John and Alan Lomax gathered many varieties of American folk songs from various cultural traditions throughout much of the 20th cent. Since the early 1950s folk music has become an especially significant influence and source for much popular vocal and instrumental music. Folksingers such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger performed traditional songs and wrote their own songs in the folk idiom, an approach that was later used and modified by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and others.
See also ballad; chantey; spiritual.
Bibliography
See J. A. Lomax and A. Lomax, Folk Songs, U.S.A. (1948); C. Haywood, ed., Folk Songs of the World (1966); W. R. Trask, ed., The Unwritten Song (1966); E. Martinengo-Cesaresco, Essays in the Study of Folksongs (1976); S. L. Forucci, A Folk Song History of America (1984); P. V. Bohlman, The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World (1988); B. Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music (2000).
| WordNet: folk song |
Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.
The noun has one meaning:
Meaning #1:
a song that is traditionally sung by the common people of a region and forms part of their culture
Synonym: folk ballad
| Wikipedia: Folk Songs (Berio) |
Folk Songs is a song cycle by the Italian composer Luciano Berio composed in 1964. It consists of arrangements of folk music from various countries and other songs, forming "a tribute to the extraordinary artistry" of the American singer Cathy Berberian, a specialist in Berio's music.
The first song, "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair" has a discussed origin. Some affirm that along with "I Wonder As I Wander", is not a genuine folk song. In fact, John Jacob Niles, a Kentucky-born singer and scholar, wrote them down in Elizabethan modes and made them famous by singing and recording them; but is also stated that Niles just collected and arranged them, being their origin truly popular. "Black is the color..." is a well known piece in Scottish folk music repertoire.
Berio's suite opens with a viola, free of bar lines and rhythmically independent of the voice, evoking a country fiddler. Harmonics from the viola, cello and harp contribute toward the "hurdy-gurdy sound" Berio wanted to accompany the second song.
Armenia, the country of Berberian's ancestors, provided the third song, "Loosin yelav", which describes the rising of the moon. In the French song "Rossignolet du bois", introduced by antique finger cymbals, the nightingale advises an inquiring lover to sing his serenades two hours after midnight, and identifies the "apples" in his garden as the moon and the sun. A sustained chord colored by the striking of automobile spring coils bridges this song to the next one, the old Sicilian song "A la femminisca", sung by fishermen's wives as they wait at the docks.
Like the first two songs, the sixth, "La Donna Ideale", and the seventh, "Il Bello", come not from anonymous folk bards but from Berio himself, who wrote them in 1949 at the age of 24 for Cathy Berberian who was at the time a Fulbright Fellowship voice student in Italy. The old Genoese dialect folk poem "The Ideal Woman" says that if you find a woman at once well-born, well-mannered, well-formed and with a good dowry, for God's sake don't let her get away. "The Ball", another old Italian poem, says that the wisest of men lose their heads over love, but love resists the sun and ice and all else.
"Motettu de tristura" comes from Sardinia and apostrophizes the nightingale: "How you resemble me as I weep for my lover... When they bury me, sing me this song."
The next two come from Joseph Canteloube's Chants d'Auvergne and are in the Occitan language. "Malurous qu'o uno fenno" poses the eternal marital paradox: he with no spouse seeks one, and he with one wishes he had none. A cello echoing the improvisation at the opening of the suite introduces "Lo Fïolairé", in which a girl at her spinning wheel sings of exchanging kisses with a shepherd.
Berberian discovered the last song, known in the suite as "Azerbaijan Love Song", on a 78 RPM record from the Asian republic of Azerbaijan, sung in the Azerbaijani language except for one verse in Russian, which a Russian-speaking friend told her compared love to a stove. Berberian sung, purely by rote, the sounds she transcribed as best she could from that scratchy old record. She knew not one word of Azerbaijani.
References
- Backsleeve of 1967 RCA record LSC-3189.
External links
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 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Literary Dictionary. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Copyright © Chris Baldick 2001, 2004. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ Read more |
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| WordNet. WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Folk Songs (Berio)". Read more |
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