One of the earliest documented Scottish song collectors actually to go 'into the field' to gather his specimens, was the Highlander Joseph Macdonald. Macdonald emigrated in 1760 - contemporaneously ...with the start of James Macpherson's famous but much disputed Ossian project - and it fell to the Revd. Patrick Macdonald to finish and subsequently publish his younger brother's collection. Karen McAulay traces the complex history of Scottish song collecting, and the publication of major Highland and Lowland collections, over the ensuing 130 years. Looking at sources, authenticity, collecting methodology and format, McAulay places these collections in their cultural context and traces links with contemporary attitudes towards such wide-ranging topics as the embryonic tourism and travel industry; cultural nationalism; fakery and forgery; literary and musical creativity; and the move from antiquarianism and dilettantism towards an increasingly scholarly and didactic tone in the mid-to-late Victorian collections. Attention is given to some of the performance issues raised, either in correspondence or in the paratexts of published collections; and the narrative is interlaced with references to contemporary literary, social and even political history as it affected the collectors themselves. Most significantly, this study demonstrates a resurgence of cultural nationalism in the late nineteenth century.
This volume is an interpretive analysis of a collection of 335 song texts treated as primary historical sources. The collection highlights the cultural practices that link music with labor in Sukuma ...communities in northwestern Tanzania.
Bob Dylan's iconic 1962 song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" stands at
the crossroads of musical and literary traditions. A visionary
warning of impending apocalypse, it sets symbolist imagery within a
...structure that recalls a centuries-old form. Written at the height
of the 1960s folk music revival amid the ferment of political
activism, the song strongly resembles-and at the same time
reimagines-a traditional European ballad sung from Scotland to
Italy, known in the English-speaking world as "Lord Randal."
Alessandro Portelli explores the power and resonance of "A Hard
Rain's A-Gonna Fall," considering the meanings of history and
memory in folk cultures and in Dylan's work. He examines how the
ballad tradition to which "Lord Randal" belongs shaped Dylan's song
and how Dylan drew on oral culture to depict the fears and crises
of his own era. Portelli recasts the song as an encounter between
Dylan's despairing vision, which questions the meaning and
direction of history, and the message of resilience and hope for
survival despite history's nightmares found in oral traditions. A
wide-ranging work of oral history, Hard Rain weaves
together interviews from places as varied as Italy, England, and
India with Portelli's autobiographical reflections and critical
analysis, speaking to the enduring appeal of Dylan's music. By
exploring the motley traditions that shaped Dylan's work, this book
casts the distinctiveness and depth of his songwriting in a new
light.
This book documents cross-cultural collaboration between manikay singers from south-east Arnhem Land and the Australian Art Orchestra. The interwoven voices of the project are explored as an example ...of creative intercultural collaboration and a continuation of the manikay tradition.
" Containing ballads of martial heroism, tales of tragic lovers and visions of the nature of the world, Long Narrative Songs from the Mongghul of Northeast Tibet: Texts in Mongghul, Chinese, and ...English is a rich repository of songs collected amongst the Mongghul of the Seven Valleys, on the northeast Tibetan Plateau in western China. These songs represent the apogee of Mongghul oral literature, and they provide valuable insights into the lives of Mongghul people—their hopes, dreams, and worries. They bear testimony to the impressive plurilingual repertoire commanded by some Mongghul singers: the original texts in Tibetan, Mongghul, and Chinese are here presented in Mongghul, Chinese, and English. The kaleidoscope of stories told in these songs include that of Marshall Qi, a chieftain from the Seven Valleys who travels to Luoyang with his Mongghul army to battle rebels; Laarimbu and Qiimunso, a pair of star-crossed lovers who take revenge from beyond the grave on the families that kept them apart; and the Crop-Planting Song and the Sheep Song, which map the physical and spiritual terrain of the Mongghul people, vividly describing the physical and cosmological world in which they exist. This collection of songs is supported by an Introduction by Gerald Roche that provides an understanding of their traditional context, and shows that these works offer insights into the practices of multilingualism in Tibet. Long Narrative Songs from the Mongghul of Northeast Tibet is vital reading for researchers and others working on oral literature, as well as those who study Inner Asia, Tibet, and China’s ethnic minorities. Finally, this book is of interest to linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists, particularly those working on small-scale multilingualism and pre-colonial multilingualism. "
The relationship between language and music has much in common - rhythm, structure, sound, metaphor. Exploring the phenomena of song and performance, this book presents a sociolinguistic model for ...analysing them. Based on ethnomusicologist John Blacking's contention that any song performed communally is a 'folk song' regardless of its generic origins, it argues that folk song to a far greater extent than other song genres displays 'communal' or 'inclusive' types of performance. The defining feature of folk song as a multi-modal instantiation of music and language is its participatory nature, making it ideal for sociolinguistic analysis. In this sense, a folk song is the product of specific types of developing social interaction whose major purpose is the construction of a temporally and locally based community. Through repeated instantiations, this can lead to disparate communities of practice, which, over time, develop sociocultural registers and a communal stance towards aspects of meaningful events in everyday lives that become typical of a discourse community.
Madhu Natisar Nath is a Rajasthani farmer with no formal schooling.
He is also a singer, a musician, and a storyteller. At the center
of A Carnival of Parting are Madhu Nath's oral
performances of ...two linked tales about the legendary Indian kings,
Bharthari of Ujjain and Gopi Chand of Bengal. Both characters,
while still in their prime, leave thrones and families to be
initiated as yogis-a process rich in adventure and melodrama, one
that offers unique insights into popular Hinduism's view of world
renunciation. Ann Grodzins Gold presents these living oral epic
traditions as flowing narratives, transmitting to Western readers
the pleasures, moods, and interactive dimensions of a village
bard's performance. Three introductory chapters and an interpretive
afterword, together with an appendix on the bard's language by
linguist David Magier, supply A Carnival of Parting with a
full range of ethnographic, historical, and cultural backgrounds.
Gold gives a frank and engaging portrayal of the bard Madhu Nath
and her work with him. The tales are most profoundly concerned,
Gold argues, with human rather than divine realities. In a
compelling afterword, she highlights their thematic emphases on
politics, love, and death. Madhu Nath's vital colloquial telling of
Gopi Chand and Bharthari's stories depicts renunciation as
inevitable and interpersonal attachments as doomed, yet celebrates
human existence as a "carnival of parting."
Originating in a homicide in St. Louis in 1899, the ballad of “Frankie and Johnny" became one of America’s most familiar songs during the first half of the twentieth century. It crossed lines of ...race, class, and artistic genres, taking form in such varied expressions as a folk song performed by Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly); a ballet choreographed by Ruth Page and Bentley Stone under New Deal sponsorship; a mural in the Missouri State Capitol by Thomas Hart Benton; a play by John Huston; a motion picture, She Done Him Wrong, that made Mae West a national celebrity; and an anti-lynching poem by Sterling Brown. In this innovative book, Stacy I. Morgan explores why African American folklore—and “Frankie and Johnny" in particular—became prized source material for artists of diverse political and aesthetic sensibilities. He looks at a confluence of factors, including the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and resurgent nationalism, that led those creators to engage with this ubiquitous song. Morgan’s research uncovers the wide range of work that artists called upon African American folklore to perform in the 1930s, as it alternately reinforced and challenged norms of race, gender, and appropriate subjects for artistic expression. He demonstrates that the folklorists and creative artists of that generation forged a new national culture in which African American folk songs featured centrally not only in folk and popular culture but in the fine arts as well.
This study explores the origin, as well as the development and changes that might have occurred in the folk music in the course of time, and to transcribe African music materials into educational ...materials for school use. Significantly, the objective is to document the identified function and the performance practice, which would give insight into the performance of the music. It also documents and archives musical folk songs for educational purposes, in order to reveal its socio-cultural values within the context in which it is performed. The research design used was historical research method, library search to consult relevant scholarly works, newspapers, theses, books and journals, electronic sources such as the video clip, tape recording and internet were examined, and they provided additional information for the study. The study identifies and provides musical notation of Yoruba folk songs materials that can be interpreted globally in the world of music, and also examines the influence and efficacy of Yoruba folk songs in ways of teaching that would be geared towards supporting learning, inculcating moral standards and cultural transmission. The findings revealed that folk songs constitute a dynamic forum through which members of a society respond and adapt to the culture of the society. It therefore recommends that contemporary government should provide better funding to ensure preservation of such cultural institutions and heritage.
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