Printable Version of Module 3: Folk Music Appreciation
written by Marlon Feld

Musical Works

1. Croatian folk song

Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony #6, 1st Movement (1808)

2. "River"
"Trumpet"
These are traditional wedding songs from southern and western Russia--see Reading 2 for more detail.

Igor Stravinsky, Les Noces (The Wedding), First Tableau (1921)
Pokrovsky Ensemble

Igor Stravinsky, Les Noces (The Wedding), First Tableau (1921)
Conducted by Leonard Bernstein

Text for "River," traditional Russian wedding song

Podruzhki:
It is not our river, our fast river,
Oh, fast river, flowing, but not agitated,
Not agitated, but overflowing the steep bank,
There in the tower, at the window,
Anushen'ka is sitting,
She is sitting alone, sitting and not smiling.

Bride: (lament)
Eh you tables, you oak tables, don't rock
And you tablecloths, you silk tablecloths, don't curl up.
You, my sisters, my friends,
Don't judge my head,
All my guests, all are gathered,
All are seated at the oak table,
Only one of the guests isn't here, my own dear father.
Oh you, my brothers, my darling,
Go outside the new gates,
And strike the big bell harder,
Wake up my father. 

Text for "Trumpet," traditional Russian wedding song

Trumpets were blowing early at dawn,
Pashechka was crying for her light-brown braid,
O Braid, my braid, my light-brown braid,
For more than one day I combed you, my braid,
For more than one week I plaited you, my braid,
I plaited into you silk insets,
I knitted into you blue ribbons.
Vaslechka came ruthless
He brought the merciless svashenka-s,
They began to tear and pinch my braid.
To unplait my silk insets,
To unknit my blue ribbons.

Text from Stravinsky's "The Wedding"

Bride: My braid, my light-brown braid!
Last night, my mother plaited you, my braid,
My mother curled you in a silver ring.
The ruthless svashenka came,
Ruthless and merciless!
She began to tear and pinch the braid.
And tearing and pinching, to braid it in two (braids).

Podrushki: [maiden friends]
I'm combing and combing Nastasia's braid,
I'm combing and combing Timofeyevna's light brown hair.
And again I'll comb it, and I'll plait it in a braid,
With a scarlet ribbon I'll braid it.
I'm combing and combing Nastasia's braid,
I'm combing and combing Timofeyevna's light brown hair.
I'm combing and combing, I'm combing the light brown braid,
I'll part it with a fine-toothed comb.
I'm combing and combing Nastasia's braid,
I'm combing and combing Timofeyevna's light brown hair.
And again I'll comb it and I'll plait in in a braid,
I'll braid it with a scarlet ribbon, and weave it together with a blue one.

Don't honk, don't honk, swan,
Don't honk in the field, white swan.
Don't cry, don't grieve, Nastasyushka,
Don't cry, don't be sad, dear Timofeyevna,
For father, for mother,
For the loud nightingale in the garden.
As a father-in-law, father
Will be kind to you,
As a mother-in-law, mother
Will be kind to you,
Will be sympathetic with you.

Khvetis, sir Pamfilevich
Is your nightingale in the garden,
In the high tower,
In the high, lavishly painted (tower).

During the day he whistles
And all night he sings.
You, you, Nastasyushka,
You, fair one, Timofeyevna,
He amuses, comforts,
Sleep long, he won't disturb you,
He'll wake you for afternoon mass.

Play, play, bold skomoroshek, [travelling actor]
From village to village.
Paradise, paradise, that our Nastasyushka
Should be happy.

From under the stone, from under the white stone a strem rushes.
From under a stone, from under the white stone they're striking cimbaloms.
And they drink and they pour, and strike cymbals.
Well, it seems that Nastyushka,
It seems they're taking our Timofeyevna to the wedding.

Mother of the Bride: Holy Mother,
Come to our house
To help the svakh plait the braid, Nastayushka's braid,
Timofeyevna's light brown hair.

Bride: Plait my light brown braid,
Oh, braid it lightly at the root,
Finely at the middle,
Put a little red ribbon at the end.
Oh, you, my ribbon, little red ribbon.
A scarlet ribbon, a flower bouquet ribbon,
A violet ribbon.

Charles Ives, "In Flanders Fields" (1917)

Text for "In Flanders Fields"

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amidst the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders Fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from falling hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Fields.

(Text by John McCrae appeared in PUNCH, 12/8/15.)

For each of the musical examples:

What relationship do you hear between the folk-music source and the art-music work that appropriates it? (In the case of Bartok's "Stamping Dance," which is not based on a specific folk song, the source is implied.)

Does the art-music work wear its "folksiness" on its sleeve? Does it sound like folk music in fancy dress (or non-fancy dress)? Or is its relationship to folk music more subtle? Would you call the art-music work a "setting" of the folk-music source, or not?

Does the art-music work reproduce the mood and character of the folk-music source? Or does it create a new mood and character?

If the latter, then do folk-music elements play a role in the art-music work's new character? Are they excerpted or transformed in a way that makes it possible for them to do so?

In the case of Les Noces, do the two different recordings spur you to answer the above questions in the same way, or in different ways?

Readings

1. Hector Berlioz on Beethoven's Symphony #6 (trans. Ralph De Sola)

This astonishing landscape appears as if the joint work of Poussin and Michaelangelo. A desire to depict the calm of the countryside and the shepherd's gentle ways now actuates the composer of Fidelio and the Eroica. But let us understand each other; here are no gaily dressed shepherds of de Florian, still less those of Lebrun, author of Rossignol, or those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, author of Devin du Village. The theme is nature in all its simple truth.

The composer titles his first movement: "Awakening of Serene Impressions on Arriving in the Country." [Some translations include "Joyful Feelings" instead of "Serene Impressions."]

Herdsmen begin to appear in the fields. They have their usual careless manner; and the sound of their pipes comes from far and near. Delightful phrases greet you like the perfumed morning breeze; swarms of chattering birds in flight pass rustling overhead. From time to time the air seems charged with mist; great clouds appear and hide the sun; then, all at once, they disappear; and a torrent of sunlight falls upon the trees and the woods. That is the effect, it seems to me, upon hearing this movement; and I believe the vagueness of instrumental expression notwithstanding, many listeners have been impressed the same way.

2. Bartok on Beethoven's Symphony #6 and the Folksong Like It

...The possible theory that this was Beethoven's own theme and penetrated to the Croatian peasantry with the popularization of this symphony is quite untenable. The peasantry is capable of taking up only such melodies as it hears repeated to the point of satiety at village dances or other meetings. Nobody can imagine that Beethoven's symphonies achieved such a widespread popularity in the villages of Eastern Europe. [Certainly not through recordings, which were unavailable to peasants when Bartok wrote this in 1921. Bartok's subjects were often puzzled by or even afraid of his gramophone.] One has only to consider that in the country districts of Eastern Europe the very name of Beethoven is unknown even to the gentry; these circles in fact lack the slightest acquaintance with the higher art music of any period. It is much nearer the truth to say that Beethoven heard this melody from a bagpipe played in West Hungary, where Croats also are settlers and where he often stayed. Before strangers peasants play on an instrument much more naturally than they sing melodies from a text. The tune appealed to Beethoven and as it just seemed to give a picture of rural life he used it in his symphony without acknowledgement--as was in fact usual at the time. Measures 16-25, which constantly repeat the self-same one-measure motive [they start at 0:17] are in fact a very faithful imitation of the bagpipe interlude passages as they can still be heard in our day. Thus for instance the interlude occurs as the eight- or ten-fold repetition of the motives in a melody which I heard played on the bagpipes by a Hungarian peasant.

The Russian wedding ceremony (svadha) is a complicated and often lengthy ritual. The wedding songs on this recording are presented in a sequence typical of a real wedding ritual. Each of the songs has been included because it offers specific similarities or contrasts to the melodies and texts that Stravinsky used in Les Noces. Dmitri Pokrovsky and members of his ensemble learned these songs from village singers and reproduce them here in their traditional performance style. The following wedding description has been compiled from numerous expeditions of Dmitri Pokrovsky and his Ensemble. In Southern and Western Russia the wedding ritual consists of three main sections: matchmaking, the engagement and the wedding ceremony....

On the day of the ceremony, the bride's laments have reached a feverish pitch. According to tradition, the bride will leave her family forever to become a member of the groom's clan. While the bride is lamenting and her friends sing songs like "Trumpet," "Green Forest" or "River," Svashenka, the braid destroyer, unplaits the bride's single braid and removes the scarlet ribbon from her hair. The scarlet ribbon and single braid are symbols of virginity.

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Les Noces opens with the lament of the bride, a hysterical, haunting wailing. Surrounded by her maiden friends (podruzhki) and family, she is ritually prepared for the ceremony. These are the bride's last hours in her house before the groom takes her away, perhaps forever. Her podruzhki offer consolation, praising her future husband and family. At the same time, the svashenka removes the red ribbon from the bride's hair--a symbol of virginity--and plaits her one braid into two. The mother of the bride calls to the Virgin Mary to help the svakha [i.e., the svashenka]. The Tableau closes with the bride crying for her scarlet ribbon and her friends repeating almost mechanically, words of consolation. This mechanical frame provided by the podruzhki highlights the bride's hysteria.

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The mechanical and impersonal element in Les Noces is not only reflected in its modernistic instrumentation [vocalists, four pianos, and percussion]. In an even deeper way, it imbues the design of the vocal parts and illuminates Stravinsky's command of the formal and psychological mechanisms of Russian folk music and ritual. One of these mechanisms concerns the relationship of melody and text.

At the root of Russian folk singing is an archaic spirit of collectivism that represents the wellspring of Russian village culture. In this culture, communal music-making plays a central role, especially at feast times. Singers, however, do not perform "songs" in the sense of setting fixed texts to fixed melodies; rather, short segments of text and melody are spontaneously and variously combined during performance, and may lead towards any one of a number of different subjects or images. In his libretto, Stravinsky did exactly what experienced oral-tradition singers do: he freely combined different text segments while preserving the integrity of the segments themselves. The libretto is thus in certain ways like the text of a traditional song: a patchwork in which sequential action and narrative time are broken up in favor of abrupt, and sometimes bizarre juxtapositions of place, time, and image.

4. Bela Bartok on how peasant music influenced him

When I speak of the influence of peasant music, I do not mean as it were a mere whitewash of it, nor the mere adaptation of peasant melodies or snatches of melodies and their piecemeal incorporation in musical works, but rather the expression of the real spirit of the music of any particular people which is so hard to render in words. The manner in which the spirit is interpreted in the compositions is closely dependent upon the personality and musical talent of the particular composer so that it is of little use for a blockhead or a man with no musical talent to run to `the people' in order to get inspiration for his thin ideas.

Although every comparison between painting and music tends to break down, it is possible to illustrate from the art of painting the relation between peasant music and art music. Peasant music itself plays the part in composition that natural objects play in painting. Real folk music can be regarded as a natural phenomenon from the point of view of higher art music just as well as the properties of bodies as perceived by the eye are so regarded by the painter, or again, in order to illustrate this point from the art of writing, popular music is to the composer what Nature herself is to the writer, but just as the poet cannot come to understand Nature from written descriptions, so the composer cannot hope to learn the nature of peasant music from dead collections of musical preserves. In the process of notation that very essence of peasant music is lost, which enables it to awake the emotions in the soul of the composer. The harsh characters cannot possibly render the subtler shades of rhythm, of intonation, of sound-transition, in a word all the pulsing life of peasant music. The record of peasant music is as it were the picture of its corpse. He who has never heard the actual melodies or similar ones from the mouths of the peasants themselves will never obtain a true idea of them by the mere reading of the score.

It is essential therefore to seek out the peasants and to become acquainted with them, not only for the sake of their music in its truest type. The effect of the experience is incomparably enhanced by the accessory elements such as the surroundings, the ceremonial customs, and so forth, that accompany the music.

The invention of such instruments as the gramophone has fortunately enabled us to preserve peasant music and more or less to dispense with the necessity for those visits to the peasants themselves which would often be difficult and sometimes impossible. It is admitted that individual peculiarities and the spirit of songs or of music are rendered to incomparably greater perfection by means of the most primitive phonograph record than, for instance, the most accurate photograph of the scene. Through listening to phonograph records, we obtain a perfect tone-picture of peasant music. All that is necessary is that musicians or musical investigators who wish to possess this should have access to as large a collection of records as possible.

5. Charles Ives on his use of "street tunes" and hymns

Exception has been taken by some (in other words there have been criticisms, often severe) to my using, as bases for themes, suggestions of old hymns, occasional tunes of past generations, etc. As one routine-minded professor told me, "In music they should have no place. Imagine, in a symphony, hearing suggestions of street tunes like Marching Through Georgia or a Moody and Sankey hymn!"--etc. Well I'll say two things here: 1) That nice professor of music is a musical lily-pad. He never took a chance at himself, or took one coming or going. 2) His opinion is based on something he'd probably never heard, seen, or experienced. He knows little of how these things sounded when they came "blam" off a real man's chest. It was the way this music was sung that made them big or little--and I had the chance of hearing them big. And it wasn't the music that did it, and it wasn't the words that did it, and it wasn't the sounds (whatever they were--transcendent, peculiar, bad, some beautifully unmusical)--but they were sung "like the rocks were grown." The singers weren't singers, but they knew what they were doing--it all came from something felt, way down and way up--a man's experience of men!

Once a nice young man (his musical sense having been limited by three years' intensive study at the Boston Conservatory) said to Father, "How can you stand to hear old John Bell (the best stone-mason in town) sing?" (as he used to at Camp Meetings). Father said, "He is a supreme musician." The young man (nice and educated) was horrified--"Why, he sings off the key, the wrong notes and everything--and that horrible, raucous voice--and he bellows out and hits notes no one else does--it's awful!" Father said, "Watch him closely and reverently, look into his face and hear the music of the ages. Don't pay too much attention to the sounds--for if you do, you may miss the music. You won't get a wild, heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds."

I remember, when I was a boy--at the outdoor Camp Meeting services in Redding, all the farmers, their families and field hands, for miles around, would come afoot or in their farm wagons. I remember how the great waves of sound used to come through the trees--when things like Beulah Land, Woodworth, Nearer My God To Thee, The Shining Shore, Nettleton, In the Sweet Bye and Bye and the like were sung by thousands of "let out" sounds. The music notes and words on paper were about as much like what they "were" (at those moments) as the monogram on a man's necktie may be like his face. Father, who led the singing, sometimes with his cornet or his voice, sometimes with both voice and arms, and sometimes in the quieter hymns with a French horn or violin, would always encourage the people to sing their own way. Most of them knew the words and music (theirs) by heart, and sang it that way. If they threw the poet or the composer around a bit, so much the better for the poetry and the music. There was power and exaltation in these great conclaves of sound from humanity. I've heard the same hymns played by nicely celebrated organists and sung by highly known singers in beautifully upholstered churches, and in the process everything in the music was emasculated--precise (usually too fast) even time--"ta ta" down-left-right-up--pretty voices, etc. They take a mountain and make a sponge cake of it, and sometimes, as a result, one of these commercial travellers gets a nice job at the Metropolitan. Today apparently even the Camp Meetings are getting easy-bodied and commercialized. There are not many more of them here in the east, and what is told of some of those that still survive, such as Amy McPherson & Co., seems but a form of easy entertainment and silk cushions--far different from the days of the "stone-fielders."

Reading 1: Berlioz on Beethoven's Symphony #6, first movement

Does Beethoven's Croatian-folksong source project the "pastoral" qualities that Berlioz ascribes to this movement? Does the movement itself do so?

Reading 3: The Pokrovsky Ensemble on Stravinsky's Les Noces

Does a "mechanical and impersonal element" coexist in Les Noces with Russian folk music and ritual, as the liner notes claim? Does one or the other of these elements dominate the other, in your hearing?

Reading 4: Bartok on Bartok

If folk-music sources can be considered as akin to natural phenomena, and the composer to a careful observer of nature (aided by recordings), then--to continue the analogy--how naturalistic or abstract an artist is Bartok in his Stamping Dance? Which features of Stamping Dance would be "close to nature," and which would be farther abstracted?

Reading 5: Ives

Does Ives bring anything of his "hearing [popular tunes] big" experience to In Flanders Fields?