Page:Pratt - The history of music (1907).djvu/110

 permanent shape, they can seldom be traced to an individual author, and their preservation does not depend upon any process of transcription. They seem to spring up by common consent, to be perfected by common effort, and to persist by mere tradition.

49. Its Technical Features.—No attempt can be made here to indicate the peculiarities of particular national styles, but certain general remarks may be offered. Most characteristics follow from the necessary simplicity of all folk-music, which is the product, not of formal analysis or patient working out on paper, but of instinct and taste operating extempore, and which depends for its success upon the ease with which it can be caught, remembered and repeated by the unstudious mind.

Folk-songs are normally melodies of moderate length, laid out in more or less symmetrical lines and strophes that correspond with the plan of a verse-text. Each line is usually somewhat complete in itself, having a specific figure or pattern that ends with a cadence or 'fall.' The lines usually tend to form couplets or other simple groups that are so similar or contrasted that the mind as easily associates them together as it does rhyming verse-lines. Usually the text is in parallel stanzas, all of which can be sung to a single musical strophe. Even in the oldest specimens there is a tendency to adhere throughout to a single key or tonality, though often with a clear perception of the value of dominant closes in the middle cadences. The kind of tonality preferred varies considerably in different countries. Keltic and Scandinavian songs, for example, show a predilection for minor scales, sometimes of the pentatonic variety. The older French and German songs are not seldom based upon the mediæval church modes, but as a rule drift toward the minor or major as now recognized. The evident appreciation of the major mode is the more notable because found at a time when scientific music was still unwilling to desert the arbitrary tone-system that it inherited from antiquity. The popular mind seems to have had an instinct for tone-relation as we know it to-day.

Folk-dances as such are properly made up of steps and motions in brief series of equal duration—following the idea, now the basis of musical 'form,' that phrases should be two or four measures long. These figures are sometimes simply repeated over and over, sometimes strung together in sets, making a kind of dance-stanza. Each particular sort of dance is characterized by some special step or similar device. The songs or instrumental airs intended to accompany and guide these motions are fitted to them at every point, indicating musically what the dancer executes orchestically.

In both songs and dances the fundamental rhythm is emphatic and regular, either duple or triple, and the phrase-structure is so built upon it that the 'form' is plain and easily kept in memory.