Folk Melodies Research Articles

Bunting’s Messiah. By Roy Johnston. pp. xii + 143. (Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society, Belfast, 2003, £10. ISBN 0-9539604-6–3.)

The three-volume publication Ancient Music of Ireland has ensured that the name of Edward Bunting (1773–1843) will for ever be associated with Irish traditional music. This ground-breaking collection, whose volumes appeared in 1796, 1809 and 1840, is dominated by folk melodies collected during Bunting’s tours of Ireland; but it originated in his work at the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792, when he was just 19. It says much about Bunting that the festival’s organizers should have entrusted this apprentice to William Ware, the organist of St Anne’s parish church, Belfast, as ‘a skilful Musician’ whose job was ‘to transcribe and arrange’ the music played by the harpers. Bunting was therefore a central figure in one of the festival’s most important tasks: ‘attempting to revive and perpetuate—The Ancient Music and Poetry of Ireland’ (p. 40). Thanks to the power of publication, his is the name by which the festival is remembered, even above those of the harpers.

Stylistic directions in Stevan Hristic’s oratorio Vaskrsenje, Resurrection: The question of crossroads-traditions in Serbian music at the beginning of the twentieth century

Vaskrsenje (Resurrection) which was composed by Stevan Hristic (libretto Dragutin Ilic) was a first oratorio in Serbian music. The libretto was published in a journal Odjek (Echo) in 1909, with the first performance in 1912 at the Belgrade National Theatre. During the period 1909-1912, the young composer studied church music in Moscow and Rome. He studied with Dom Lorenzo Perosi in Rome, who was a director of the Sistine Chapel at the time, and a leading composer of church music. Perosi also composed two oratorios with the Resurrection as a subject-matter. His stay in Rome, as well as the encounter with the contemporary Italian style of church music left a strong impression on Hristic and his later opus. The oratorio Resurrection is freely permeated with both romantic and impressionist elements, hence the impression of the typically Western fin-de-si?cle style. Compared to Serbian performances until that time, Hristic?s work represented a complete novelty in its style and genre; it was considered as one of the first works of Serbian musical Modernism. Despite the audience?s positive reception, the oratorio was faced with a highly negative criticism of Jovan Zorko and Miloje Milojevic. Both of them criticized Hristic for not having composed the work in the spirit of "national music". Hristic defended his poetics claiming that the idea of composing a national music did not comprise the use of folk melodies, but rather composing according to the highest professional and aesthetic criteria. A debate which was anticipated concerning the meaning and the importance of "national" poetics arose as a reaction to Resurrection. This debate remained important in two ways: 1) it remained a "typical" debate for the dynamic development of Serbian music following the World War I and 2) it became the central characteristic of the overall artistic development in Serbia during the interwar period, which was "coming close" and eventually became the part of Europe.

Toward a developmental psychology of music.

Research on music perception has revealed numerous parallels between infants and adults, but these findings have had little influence on adult research. Studies of pitch memory in infants, children, and adults are presented to illustrate potential gains from a developmental approach. Although the prevailing wisdom is that absolute pitch processing dominates in early life until it is supplanted by relative pitch processing, recent research offers no support for that view. After a week of exposure to English folk melodies, infants remember the melodies, but they do not distinguish the original versions from transposed versions. Relative pitch processing dominates later on, but it does not occur at the expense of absolute pitch processing. For example, adults can identify the pitch level of familiar musical recordings in the context of foils that are pitch shifted by one or two semitones. Children 5-9 years of age can identify the pitch level of familiar recordings when the foils are pitch shifted by two semitones but not by one semitone. By contrast, Japanese children are successful in the context of one-semitone shifts. In short, a developmental approach can provide insights of comparable importance on many issues in music cognition.

"Cobras e Son." Papers on the Text, Music, and Manuscripts of the 'Cantigas de Santa Maria'

Cobras e Son. Papers on the Text, Music, and Manuscripts of the 'Cantigas de Santa Maria.' Ed. Stephen Parkinson. Oxford, England: European Humanities Research Centre, 2000. 246 pages. This handsome set of essays sprang from a Colloquium held at Oxford in 1994 and contains papers and discussions from that productive gathering. The authors revised and expanded their studies in the intervening years, producing one of the most thoughtful and studious anthologies of work on the four extant Cantigas manuscripts to date. A persistent thread of Cantigas research over the years is their assessment within diverse critical contexts and historical camps. Does the music represent true Spanish folk melodies that grew up with romance vernacular songs, are they commingled with Hispanoarabic rhythmic patterns, or do they perhaps anticipate aspects of French troubadour music? Does the participation of Moorish and Jewish musicians among the European performers shown in the illustrations and documented for at least post-- Alfonsine times, support those theses? Does the use of Galician-Portuguese hint at any sort of detachment from content, an artificiality that makes the lyrics ring true only for aesthetes and prevents their penetration into the common culture of the masses? On the flip side of the coin, did the Cantigas' perceived popular style (use of refrains, folk melodies, links to dance, etc.) lower their potential prestige among Europeans outside of Iberia? Although the physical books themselves were manufactured and illustrated by Christian artisans, do their realistic depictions hint at native Iberian experiences at odds with the formalisms of the lyrics or music? How much are the miniatures influenced by foreign models, how much originality do they display, and to what extent is that inventiveness an accidental byproduct of the absence of formal precedents for illustrating these story poems? The essays in this anthology probe these and many other questions, and even entertain the possibility that all the extent copies of the Cantigas were produced after Alfonso's death, perhaps well into the fourteenth century. Manuel Pedro Ferreira, Music and the Cantigas de Santa Maria, returns to the polarized debate about Arabic features using recently published hispanoarabic songs that survive with their musical notion to argue that an independent Andalusian stamp cannot be dismissed. Mary O'Neill, in Problems of Genre Definition: the Cantigas de Santa Maria in the Context of the Romance Lyric Tradition, points out how the very multi-culturalism inherent within these lyrics and the internationalism of their settings may have militated against earning them the stature they deserve vis-d-vis songs linked to modern nation states, specifically the troubadour lyrics of France. …

The Structure of an Oral Tradition – Mapping of Hungarian Folk Music to a Metric Space

To find the essential musical relations characterising 2323 typical Hungarian folk melodies as a musical system, we developed a method relating melodies to points of a multidimensional Euclidean melody space. The study of the resulting point systems is based on the method of principal component analysis, and shows the inherent relations of a rich oral musical tradition as a very regular, unbroken clustered structure. The majority of the points are grouped in parallel as well as perpendicular clusters. The musical interpretation of parallelism and orthogonality highlights certain basic construction and variation principles in Hungarian folk music.

Statistical Features and Perceived Similarity of Folk Melodies

Listeners are sensitive to pitch distributional information in music (N. Oram & L. L. Cuddy, 1995; C. L. Krumhansl, J. Louhivuori, P.Toiviainen, T. Järvinen, & T. Eerola, 1999). However, it is uncertain whether frequency-based musical features are sufficient to explain the similarity judgments that underlie listeners' classification processes. A similarity rating experiment was designed to determine the effectiveness of these features in predicting listeners' similarity ratings. The material consisted of 15 melodies representing five folk music styles. A multiple regression analysis showed that the similarity of frequency-based musical properties could account for a moderate amount (40%) of listeners' similarity ratings. A slightly better predictive rate (55%) was achieved by using descriptive variables such as number of tones, rhythmic variability, and melodic predictability. The results suggest that both measures were able to capture some aspects of the structures that portray common salient dimensions to which listeners pay attention while categorizing melodies.Aikaisemmissa tutkimuksissa on osoitettu, että musiikin tilastollisilla tapahtumilla, kuten sävelten määrillä ja tyypillisillä intervalleilla, on merkitystä, kun kuulijat muodostavat käsityksiään musiikin rakenteesta (N. Oram & L. L. Cuddy, 1995; C. L. Krumhansl, J. Louhivuori, P. Toiviainen, T. Järvinen, & T. Eerola, 1999). Näiden piirteiden voidaan olettaa olevan tärkeitä myös musiikin luokittelussa. Toistaiseksi ei kuitenkaan tiedetä, miten hyvin tilastollisilla piirteillä voitaisiin musiikin luokittelua selittää. Tätä testattiin kuulijoille järjestetyn samanlaisuusarviointitehtävän avulla. Tutkimuksen materiaali koostui 15 melodiasta, jotka edustivat viittä eri kansanmusiikkityyliä. Regressioanalyysi paljasti, että musiikin tilastollisten piirteiden samanlaisuus pystyi selittämään kohtuullisen määrän (40%) kuulijoiden antamista samanlaisuusarvioista. Hieman parempi selitysaste (55%) saavutettiin kuvaavilla muuttujilla, joita olivat melodian laajuus ja ennakoitavuus sekä rytmin vaihtelevuus. Näin ollen tulokset antavat aiheen olettaa, että musiikin tilastolliset piirteet ja kuvailevat muuttujat vaikuttavat kuulijoiden luokittelupäätöksiin.

Hymntune Index and Related Hymn Materials

Hymns are a vital part of worship in most denominations. Congregational song has developed through the ages to include plainsong melodies, psalm settings, folk melodies, composed hymn tunes, gospel songs, sacred choruses, spirituals, and canons. All of these categories are included in this work. Wasson's index, by focusing itself exclusively upon hymntunes, is the most comprehensive collection of hymns and hymn materials that has been created to date. It also provides new information about the many hymns that have been written during the hymnal explosion of the last twenty-five years. Hymntune Index and Related Hymn Materials is an extraordinary resource for organists, church musicians, and librarians. Cataloging over 33,000 melodies sung by congregations world-wide, it provides the source of each and lists related materials. Included are incipits of the hymntune in the Tonic Sol-fa system, alternate titles for the same tune, hymnals by code and hymn numbers where the tune may be found, catalog reference numbers to the index key which lists material on the hymn tune, other references (such as sheet music), and Concertatos on the hymntune. Hymn materials include composer or arranger, publisher and publisher's catalog number, and the title. The index is helpful when looking for tunes by a particular composer or arranger, and also for noting the variations of a particular tune. It provides a broad range of hymntune based music, and allows the reader to compare tunes of similar melodic contours. An essential work for organists, pastors, and libraries with music collections.

Transethnicism and the American Experimental Tradition

We live in multicultural times. Whether we are listening to Kronos Quartet or reviewing activities of Institute for Studies in American Music, it is clear that what used to be cozily referred to as and traditional (or worse) has become part of artmusic mainstream. One small but significant example can demonstrate how far processes of cultural integration have come: I.S.A.M.'s second annual Composer Award went to Ye Sook Lee, graduate student in composition at Brooklyn College and native of Seoul, Korea, whose winning piece, As Thread of Tao, subtly incorporates a Korean scale within Western scoring for chamber ensemble.' Of course, it is possible to view present-day multiculturalism as only most recent of many instances in history when art music has fruitfully interacted with other forms of musical discourse. In America, there have been no typical examples of this phenomenon, though three cases could be cited as symptomatic: use of African American and other folk melodies in music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk; complex interweaving of sacred and secular popular melodies in works of Charles Ives; and attempted synthesis of art music and popular music in many of works of George Gershwin. Gottschalk is particularly interesting in having presaged by several decades Antonin Dvo-ik's 1893 admonition to American composers that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called Negro melodies. This must be real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in United States.2 Subsequently, as is well known, Dvofik qualified his view and suggested that not just African American but also Native American and other folk or ethnic musics might equally serve as basis of an American national music; examples of such usages are found in works of many composers. However, in vast majority of these cases (and despite undoubted good intentions of

The time course of recognition of novel melodies.

Seven experiments explored the time course of recognition of brief novel melodies. In a continuous-running-memory task, subjects recognized melodic transpositions following delays up to 2.0 min. The delays were either empty or filled with other melodies. Test items included exact transpositions (T), same-contour lures (SC) with altered pitch intervals, and different-contour lures (DC); DCs differed from Ts in the pattern of ups and downs of pitch. With this design, we assessed subjects' discrimination of detailed changes in pitch intervals (T/SC discrimination) as well as their discrimination of contour changes (T/DC). We used both artificial and "real" melodies. Artificial melodies differed in conformity to a musical key, being tonal or atonal. After empty delays, T/DC discrimination was superior to T/SC discrimination. Surprisingly, after filled delays, T/SC discrimination was superior to T/DC. When only filled delays were tested, T/SC discrimination did not decline over the longest delays. T/DC performance declined more than did T/SC performance across both empty and filled delays. Tonality was an important factor only for T/SC discrimination after filled delays. T/DC performance was better with rhythmically intact folk melodies than with artificial isochronous melodies. Although T/SC performance improved over filled delays, it did not overtake T/DC performance. These results suggest that (1) contour and pitch-interval information make different contributions to recognition, with contour dominating performance after brief empty delays and pitch intervals dominating after longer filled delays; (2) a coherent tonality facilitates the encoding of pitch-interval patterns of melodies; and (3) the rich melodic-rhythmic contours of real melodies facilitate T/DC discrimination. These results are discussed in terms of automatic and controlled processing of melodic information.

Neural Network Music Composition by Prediction: Exploring the Benefits of Psychoacoustic Constraints and Multi-scale Processing

Abstract In algorithmic music composition, a simple technique involves selecting notes sequentially according to a transition table that specifies the probability of the next note as a function of the previous context. An extension of this transition-table approach is described, using a recurrent autopredictive connectionist network called CONCERT. CONCERT is trained on a set of pieces with the aim of extracting stylistic regularities. CONCERT can then be used to compose new pieces. A central ingredient of CONCERT is the incorporation of psychologically grounded representations of pitch, duration and harmonic structure. CONCERT was tested on sets of examples artificially generated according to simple rules and was shown to learn the underlying structure, even where other approaches failed. In larger experiments, CONCERT was trained on sets of J. S. Bach pieces and traditional European folk melodies and was then allowed to compose novel melodies. Although the compositions are occasionally pleasant, and are preferred over compositions generated by a third-order transition table, the compositions suffer from a lack of global coherence. To overcome this limitation, several methods are explored to permit CONCERT to induce structure at both fine and coarse scales. In experiments with a training set of waltzes, these methods yielded limited success, but the overall results cast doubt on the promise of note-by-note prediction for composition.

The British folk scene: Musical performance and social identity

Abstract The Popular Music in Britain series published by Open University Press has provided studies into diverse aspects of musical culture ranging from phenomena such as the music hall, drawing-room ballads, and the brass band movement, to rock music in its various manifestations. This most recent addition to the series from Niall Mackinnon considers the emergence and evolution of the folk club and folk festival movement in Britain from the late 1950s to the present, closely examining its operational features, underlying philosophy and the social and interaetional profile of its audience and performers. Mackinnon's stated aim is to gain a sociological understanding of the folk scene, focussing on “the interpretation of musical performance as social action” (p. 1) analysing not the sound of the music but the behaviour surrounding its performance. Consequently, discussion in the text of actual music, the repertory of authentic folk melodies and those newly-composed in folk style used in the folk clubs, is...

TÜRKİYE TÜRKLERİ HALK MÜZİĞİNİN SINIFLANDIRILMASI

Bela Bartok had some compilations of folk music in Turkey in 1936 and discovered a class of Turkish melody which showed similarities with a class of Hungarian folk music. Some classes of melodies consist of just a few melodies because Bartok deducted the attained results from very little material. In this paper, a great number of Turkish folk melodies were investigated and the criteria of classification were reviewed.

Research Note. Adult Non-Singers: The Beginning Stages of Learning to Sing

Three adult poor pitch singers were tested for their ability to hear relatively subtle variations from familiar folk melodies. Their vocal abilities were also assessed and then each singer participated individually in weekly training sessions in which they practised pitch-matching and singing a simple song. All three subjects performed at ceiling on the listening comprehension test. After 8 to 12 weeks, two of the subjects were near mastery on vocal matching of a sustained keyboard tune; none showed significant improvement in free singing. The discrepancy between comprehension and production abilities is noted and an error-analysis of the pitch-matching trials is used to shed some light on the learning process.

Perceiving the end: Effects of tonal relationships on melodic completion.

Two experiments examined listeners' sensitivity to the structural markers of melodic completion. In Experiment 1, both musicians and nonmusicians were asked to rate the ending of folk melodies for their degree of "completeness" and "tonal appropriateness." Results showed that melodies ending with the conventional leading tone-to-tonic progression were rated the most complete and tonally appropriate to the underlying key, more so than melodies ending with the submediant-to-tonic or the tonic-to-dominant progressions. Conversely, melodies ending on the leading tone seemed the most incomplete and tonally inappropriate. In Experiment 2, the perceptual salience of certain pitch functions was enhanced significantly by the pattern of rhythmic accentuation within a melody's context and the presence of the rare tritone interval. The results illustrate an interactive influence of pitch and temporal variables on musical perception and thereby highlight the need to incorporate dynamic pattern factors into internal representations of tonality.

The abstraction of musical ideas.

Music presents information both sequentially, in the form of musical phrases, and simultaneously, in the form of chord structure. The ability to abstract musical structure presented sequentially and simultaneously was investigated using modified versions of the Bransford and Franks’ (1971) paradigm. Listeners heard subsets of musical ideas. The abstraction hypothesis predicted (1) false recognition of novel instances of the abstracted musical idea, (2) confidence of “recognition” should increase as recognition items approximate the complete musical idea, (3) correct rejection of “noncases,” which deviate from the acquired musical structure. Experiment 1 investigated sequential abstraction by using four-phrase folk melodies as musical ideas. Predictions 1 and 3 were confirmed, but the false recognition rate decreased as the number of phrases increased. Listeners were sensitive to improper combinations of phrases and to novel melodies different from melodies presented during acquisition. Experiment 2 investigated simultaneous abstraction using four-voice Bach chorales as musical ideas. Listeners spontaneously integrated choral subsets into holistic musical ideas. Musically trained listeners were better than naive listeners at identifying noncases.

Bartok's Choice of Theme for Folksong Arrangement: Some Lessons of the Folk-Music Sources of Bartok's Works

Five years ago, when I decided to compile the sources of those folk melodies which Bart6k used for his compositions, my intention was to provide a tool for the analysis of the individual works. However the catalogue containing my research,' can reveal numerous lessons by itself, if we analyse, compare and summarize its data. In this presentation I attempt to answer some questions that fall into three categories. The first one analyses the characteristics of Bart6k's choice of theme, that is, why Bart6k chose exactly those 313 melodies for arrangement out of the several thousand melodies at his disposal.2 The second category investigates whether Bart6k's choice of theme changed during his career. Finally, I shall examine Bart6k's method of using folk-music sources in his arrangements. In 1906, in their first series of folksong arrangements, Bart6k and Kodaly defined the aim of the genre: folksong arrangements should select from the best pieces in the treasury of folk music for the purpose of acquainting and endearing folk music to the public.3 This early for-

Russian Folk Melodies in The Rite of Spring

Russian Folk Melodies in The Rite of Spring

Russian Folk Melodies in "The Rite of Spring"

Russian Folk Melodies in "The Rite of Spring"

Two versions ofBarabau

Since its first performance by the Diaghilev Ballets Russes in 1925, Vittorio Rieti's witty score for Barabau has inspired a number of versions of this comic ballet. But the two most important ones were both presented in London: the original production by George Balanchine and one eleven years later choreographed by Ninette da Valois. Diaghilev introduced Balanchine to Rieti in 1925. Over the years, the choreographer was eventually to use six of the musician's scores, for Barabau, 1925; Le Bal, 1929; Waltz Academy, 1944; Night Shadow, 1946; The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne, 1948; and Native Dancers, 1959. Of these productions, the first two were created under the auspices of Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. Barabau was Balanchine's first ballet to an original dance score for that company. However, the music was not commissioned by the impresario but was conceived by the composer prior to any contact with the Ballets Russes.1 Rieti based the original version of the composition, a short a capplla choral number, on a Tuscan folk melody, using an Italian nursery rhyme as its text: 2

On the Theory and Definition of Melodic Type

In my studies of Slavic folk melodies I have adopted the following definition of ‘type': “…a body of material is said to be typical when there is a common, or nearly common set of features in terms of which the material can be characterized…” From the mathematical point of view it can be defined as a state of relative equilibrium. From a statistical point of view the term ‘typical’ can be used particularly when a large part of the analysed material is represented by a certain type.