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Folk music is more to a society than just the music that our grandfather used to listen to. It is a part of our history and our musical heritage that deserves to be preserved for future generations. Thanks to the hard work of many individuals and educational institutions much of this heritage has been saved.
Beginning in the late 19th century composers in Europe began taking
an interest in their own countries native folk music. They realized
that as our world became more industrialized native folk singing was
dying out. Since traditional folk music was passed down verbally from
generation to generation very little of it had been written down. As
people moved into the cities the rural culture died out taking the
traditional folk songs with it. At this same time a new sense of
nationalism was taking root in many countries, fostering interest in
their own national heritage. These two developments led many composers
to take an interest in preserving their countries folk music heritage
before it died out forever.
The First Folk Music Historians
In 1843 an English minister named John Broadwood published a
compilation called Old English Songs, compiled during his travels
around his parish of Lynn in Sussex. His work inspired similar
preservation efforts by such musicologists as Cecil Sharp and Francis
Child. Broadwood later approached Beethoven to use some of his transcriptions
in new compositions to further preserve such "peasant art." In later
years composers such as Edvard Grieg began transcribing the music of
his native Norway and arranging them into works for piano as well as
other ensembles. In Finland the composer Sibelius as well as Falla and
Albeniz in Spain began to do the same.
Modern Folk Music Historians Begin To Use Modern Recording Technologies
It was not until the early 20th century when composers such as
Grainger began to take the next step and actually record the folk music
in its native environment. Using the newly invented wax cylinder
phonograph Grainger and others recorded native folk music in short two
and one half minute segments (two and a half minutes is all that the
machine could record on one cylinder). Many of these and other
recordings, however, can still be heard today as a result of the work
of Alan Lomax and others including the Wax Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
The preservation and recording of native folk songs persevered far into
the twentieth century with other composers such as Kodaly and Bartok
also recording the folk songs of such countries as Romania and Hungary.
It is thanks to the efforts of these dedicated individuals that today
we can still hear many of the traditional folk songs of centuries past.
Tags: folk music preservation recording american folk music historians
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