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 Scotch and Welsh Tunes

The Scotch and Welsh also have a very rich store of folk song and
ballads. Along with the Irish they are children of the early Celts and
have brought down to us the music of early times. In all this music
we find the pentatonic scale, and a rhythm of this character

a dotted note followed by a note of shorter value,

which gives a real lilt to Irish, Welsh and Scotch music. We told you
about the Welsh bards and their queer violin without a neck, called a
crwth, and their little harp that was handed around their banquet
tables from guest to guest.
The Gaelic music, or that of the Scotch Highlands, dates back to
prehistoric times. You have seen a Scotch Highlander in his plaid and
kilties playing on his bagpipe, and it has a special kind of scale (two
pentatonic scales put together) like this:

G A B D E G
A B C♯ E F♯ A

and a drone bass (one tone that does not change and is played all
through the piece) which makes it hard to get the same effect on the
piano. Scotch bagpipes are heard in districts where the milk-maids
and serving folk get together in the “ingle,” and still “lilt” in the good
old-fashioned way.
The thing that makes us know Scotch music from any other is a
queer little trick of the rhythm called the snap in which a note of
short value is followed by a dotted note of longer value, instead of the
other way around which is more commonly found. Thus:

but the two ways are always combined, thus:

and so on. If you want to make up a real Scotch tune yourself, just
play this rhythm up and down the black keys of the piano from F# to
the next F#!
Many of the lovely poems of Robert Burns have been set to old
Scotch airs. He saved many of the old songs, for he gathered the
remains of unpublished old ballads and songs, and snatches of
popular melodies, and with genius gave life to the fragments he
found. In his own words, “I have collected, begged, borrowed and
stolen all the songs I could meet with.”
 Canadian Folk Songs

Canada has the folk songs of the habitant which are French in
character. They are very beautiful and full of romance and many of
them can be traced back to France. Many, however, were born in
Canada and reveal the hearts of people who lived in the great lonely
spaces of a new country.
 English Folk Songs

Most of the English folk songs are very practical accounts of the
doings of the people. The English seemed more interested in human
beings than in Nature, like the Scotch and Irish, or in romantic love
songs like the Latin races in Spain, France and Italy. The English had
to be practical for they were always leaders and at the head of things,
while the Scots and Irish were further away from the center and rush
of life and so went to Nature for their subjects.
There are about five thousand English folk songs which sing of the
English milk-maid and her work, the carpenter, the hunter and his
hounds, and hunting calls. They have the Morris Dance tunes, the
May-day songs, the sailor’s chanties, they even sing of criminals
famous in history and always very definitely tell the full name and
whereabouts of a character in a song. They also have songs of
poachers (those who hunt on land forbidden them), of murderers
and hangmen as well as shepherds and sailors. But England’s finest
songs are the Christmas carols which sing of the birth of Jesus. So, if
they sang little of Nature they did sing of man and God and have
given us much that is beautiful and worth while.
 OLD ENGLISH CAROL
From the Time of Henry IV, or Earlier

Lullay! lullay! lytel child, myn owyn dere fode,

How xalt thou sufferin be nayled on the rode.
So blyssid be the tyme!

Lullay! lullay! lytel child, myn owyn dere smerte,

How xalt thou sufferin the sharp spere to Thi herte?
So blyssid be the tyme!

Lullay! lullay! lytel child, I synge all for Thi sake,

Many on is the scharpe schour to This body is schape.
So blyssid be the tyme!

Lullay! lullay! lytel child, fayre happis the befalle,

How xalt thou sufferin to drynke ezyl and galle?
So blyssid be the tyme!

Lullay! lullay! lytel child, I synge al beforn,

How xalt thou sufferin the scharp garlong of thorn?
So blyssid be the tyme!

Lullay! lullay! lytel child, gwy wepy Thou so sore,

Thou art bothin God and man, gwat woldyst Thou be more?
So blyssid be the tyme!

(From the Sloane MSS. Quoted from The Study of Folk Songs, by Countess
Martinengo-Cesaresco).

American Folk Music

We come now to a question that has been the subject of many

arguments and debates. Many claim that we have no folk music in
the United States, and others claim that we have. It would take a
whole volume to present both sides and we must reduce it to a sugar-
coated capsule.
Although we know that Stephen Foster wrote Old Folks at Home,
The Old Kentucky Home, Uncle Ned, Massa’s in the Cold, Cold
Ground, and Old Black Joe, they express so perfectly the mood and
spirit of the people that they are true folk songs. Harold Vincent
Milligan in his book on Stephen Foster says: “Every folk-song is first
born in the heart and brain of some one person, whose spirit is so
finely attuned to the voice of that inward struggle which is the history
of the soul of man, that when he seeks for his own self-expression he
at the same time gives a voice to that vast ‘mute multitude who die
and give no sign.’”
And again speaking of Stephen Foster, Mr. Milligan says:
“Although purists may question their right to the title ‘folk songs’ his
melodies are truly the songs of the American people.”
The folk music of which we have told you has been the music
portraits of different peoples such as the Russian, the Polish, the
French, the German, the English, the Irish and so on. If there has
been a mixture of peoples or tribes as in England where there were
Britons, Danes, Angles, Saxons and Normans, it happened so long
ago that they have become molded into one race. We are all
Americans but we are not of one race, and we are still in the process
of being molded into one type.
We unite people of all nations under one flag and one government,
but we have been sung to sleep and amused as children by the folk
songs of the European nations to which our parents and
grandparents belonged! And so we have heard from childhood Sur le
Pont d’Avignon, Schlaf Kindlein Schlaf, Wurmland, The Volga Boat
Song, Sally in our Alley, or The Wearing of the Green, none of which
is American.
In spite of all these obstacles to the growth of a folk music in
America, we have several sources from which they have come.
As our earliest settlers in Virginia and New England were English,
they brought with them many of their folk songs and some of these
have remained unchanged in the districts where people of other
nations have not penetrated. The Lonesome Tunes of the Kentucky
mountains, also of Tennessee, the Carolinas and Vermont are
examples of this kind of English folk song in America.
In Louisiana which was settled by the French, we find a type of folk
song that is very charming. It is a combination of old French folk
song with negro spiritual, and is brought to us by the Creoles.
 In California there is a strong Spanish flavor in some of the old
ballads that date from the time of the Spanish Missions. There are
also mining songs of the “days of ’49,” including Oh Susannah, by
Stephen Foster, and we defy you to get rid of the tune if once it “gets
you!”
Then there are cow-boy songs of the Plains, The Texas Rangers,
The Ship that Never Returned, The Cow-boy’s Lament and Bury Me
Not on the Lone Prairie; the Lumberjack songs of Maine; the well
known air of the Arkansas Traveller, which was a funny little sketch
for theatre of a conversation between the Arkansas traveller and a
squatter which is interrupted by snatches of a tune; and in addition a
whole book full of songs sung in the backwoods settlements, hunting
cabins and lumber camps in northern Pennsylvania.
So if you seek, you can find a large number of folk songs without
going to the Indian or the Negro.
The Civil War brought out a number of new national songs among
them Glory Hallelujah and Dixie. Dixie was written in 1859 as a song
and “walk-around” by the famous minstrel Dan Emmett, and became
a war song by accident. It had dash and a care-free spirit, and the
rollicking way it pictured plantation life attracted the soldiers of the
South when they were in the cold winter camps in the North. Its
rhythm is so irresistible that it makes your hands and feet go in spite
of yourself. Besides these two the soldiers of the Civil War marched
to Rally Round the Flag, Boys, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys are
Marching, Home, Sweet Home, Lily Dale, The Girl I Left Behind Me,
Hail Columbia and The Star Spangled Banner.
We have told you so much about the Indian and his song that it is
unnecessary now to dwell at length on his music. Of course some
American composers have used Indian folk legend and music, but
after all it remains the musical portrait of the Red Man and has not
become the heart language of the white man.
We have, however, a real folk-expression that has had a great deal
of influence on our popular music and will probably help to create a
serious music to which we can attach the label “Made in America,”
and that is the music of the American Negro.
In Chapter II we showed you what the Negro had brought from his
native Africa, and also that he had been influenced by his contact
with the white race. His music is not the result of conscious art and
of study but is a natural outburst in which he expresses his joys and
sorrows, his tragedies and racial oppression. Also we find rhythms,
melody and form that have grown as a wild flower grows, and are
different from any we have met heretofore.
Mr. Krehbiel in his book Afro-American Folksongs says of the
Negro slave songs: “They contain idioms which were transplanted
hither from Africa, but as song they are the product of American
institutions; of the social, political and geographical environment
within which their creators were placed in America, of the influences
to which they were subjected in America, of the joys, sorrows and
experiences which fell to their lot in America.”
The Negro has cultivated, like all races, songs and dances. As we
said of the Russian, his song is sad and full of tragedy, but the dance
is gay, wild and primitive. From the dance of the Negro we borrowed
the rhythm formerly called ragtime, which is now jazz. The principle
of the Negro rhythm is syncopation, that is, the accent is shifted to
the unaccented part of a measure or of a beat, like this,—

, , . All sorts of
combinations are possible in this rhythm, and it is this variety that is
fascinating in a good jazz tune.
The banjo is the instrument of the southern plantation Negro, and
when a crowd gathers for a “sing” or a dance, the hands and feet take
the place of drums and keep time to the syncopated tune and is
called, “patting Juba.”
A curious dance was the “shout” which flourished in slave days. It
took place on Sunday or on prayer meeting nights and was
accompanied by hymn singing and shouting that sounded from a
distance like a melancholy wail. After the meeting the benches were
pushed back, old and young, men and women, stood in the middle of
the floor and when the “sperichel” (or spiritual) was started they
shuffled around in a ring. Sometimes the dancers sang the
“sperichel” or they sang only the chorus, and for a distance of half a
mile from the praise house the endless thud, thud of the feet was
heard.
 In the beautiful Spiritual, the song of the Negro, we see also the
syncopated rhythm. The religious song is practically the only song he
has, and he sings it at work, at play, at prayer, when he is sick and his
friends sing it after he is dead. To our ears the words are crude and
homely, but always reveal a fervent religious nature as well as a
childlike faith.
No doubt you have heard Nobody Knows the Trouble I See, Deep
River, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Go Down Moses, Weeping Mary
and many others.
Such a wealth of feeling and beauty could not fail to leave its mark
in the land where it was born.
Just how it will bear fruit we cannot say, but it is making its appeal
more and more, not only to the American, but to the foreign
composers as well, and they believe that this music,—the syncopated
rhythm that the American is at last developing in his own way—in
spite of its humble origin, is the one new thing that America has
given to the growth of music, and they envy us that wealth of rhythm
that seems to be born in the American.
Music Becomes a Youth
 CHAPTER XI
Makers of Motets and Madrigals—Rise of Schools 15th and 16th
Centuries

Don’t you think it strange that we have not told you of any pieces
written for the lute alone, or for the viol or any other instrument?
The reason is that until 1700, there was little music for a solo
instrument, but only for voices alone or for voice and instrument
together.
The main sport of composers of this time, was to take a popular
tune and write music around it. The popular tune was called the
cantus firmus (subject or fixed song) and the composer who did the
fanciest things with the tune was hailed as great. So instead of
wanting to make up tunes as we do, they were anxious to see what
they could do with old tunes. Times change, don’t they?
“Like children who break their toys to see how they work, they
learned to break up the musical phrases into little bits which they
repeated, which they moved from one part to another; in this way the
dividing of themes (tunes) came, which led them to the use of
imitation and of canon; these early and innocent gardeners finally
learned how to make the trees of the enchanted garden of music bear
fruit. Still timid, they kept the custom for three centuries of making
all their pieces from parts of plain-song or of a popular song, instead
of inventing subjects for themselves; thus, what is prized today above
every thing else—the making of original melodies—was secondary in
the minds of the musicians, so busy were they trying to organize their
art, so earnestly were they trying to learn the use of their tools.”
(Translated from the French from Palestrina, by Michel Brenet).
By spending their time this way, they added much to the science of
music. If it was not pretty, at least it was full of interesting
discoveries which composers used later, as we shall see, in fugues,
canons, suites and many other forms.
The most popular forms of composition during these two centuries
(the 15th and the 16th) were the motet for Church and the madrigal
for outside the Church.
 What a Motet is

The motet probably gets its name from a kind of profane song (not
sacred) that was called in Italian mottetto, and translated into
French bon mot, means a jest. It dates back to the 13th century, and
was disliked by the Church. The first motets used in the Church in
the early 14th century are very crude to our ears, but interesting
historically. The composers of the different schools of this period
wrote many of them. Motets were usually those parts of the church
ritual which depended on the day or season. They were not the
regular unaltered parts like the mass itself.
This motet, or part-song, used as its central theme a tune already
familiar to its hearers; this tune, the cantus firmus was sometimes a
bit from a Gregorian chant or from a mass, but more often it was a
snatch from a dance song or a folk song with very vulgar words, or it
may have been a troubadour love song with anything but the right
kind of words for the Church. The words for one part were often from
the Bible and for other parts very coarse words from popular tunes.
Imagine singing them at the same time! Still funnier, the words of
the sacred song were sung in Latin and the popular song was sung in
whatever language it happened to be written! Can you think of
anything more ridiculous? The masses came to be known by the
names from which the tune was taken and nearly every composer
including the great Palestrina wrote masses on a popular tune of the
day, L’homme armé (The Man in Armor). Yet they were all quite
different, so varied had become the science of writing counterpoint.
Josquin des Près (1450–1521) the Flemish composer wrote a
motet, Victimae Paschali, which is written around an old Gregorian
plainchant, interwoven with two popular rondelli (in French roundel
from which comes our terms roundelay and rondo) and a Stabat
Mater of his. The cantus firmus, or subject of this motet is another
secular or popular air.
The popular composers returned the compliment and took themes
or tunes from church music and put secular words to them. History
repeats itself, for we today take a tune from Handel’s Messiah and
use it in Yes, We Have No Bananas and we jazz the beautiful and
noble music of Chopin, Beethoven, Schubert and many others.
Yet this music,—the child we are watching grow up—because of
mixing up sacred and profane music soon gets a big reprimand.
The northern part of France seems to have been the birthplace of
the motet; a little later it found its way into Italy where some of the
finest music of the period was written, and the Italian influence
reached into Spain in the middle of the 15th century; at the end of
the century the Venetian school had spread its work into Germany.
In the 17th century the name motet was given to a kind of
composition between a cantata and an oratorio, but it had nothing to
do with the famous motet of the 15th and 16th centuries which we
are discussing.
To show you how clever the men were in these days, one composer
wrote a motet in thirty-six parts!
In the Library of the Sistine Chapel in Rome are volumes
containing the motets of the 14th century, copied, of course, by hand
in notes large enough to be seen and read by the whole choir! These
books are beautifully decorated in gold and lovely colors, or
illuminated, and are of great value.
 Madrigals or Popular Motets

All music of this period not composed for the Church had the
general name of Madrigal, but a real madrigal was a vocal
composition for from three to six parts written on a secular subject,
which often gave to the work a grace and lightness not in the motet.
The vocal madrigals were to the music lovers of that day what
chamber music is today, for instruments were not yet used without
singing. Later, the lute played the chief melody with the voice, and it
was only a step to have other instruments play the other parts of the
madrigal. The instruments played a section of the composition alone
while waiting for a solo singer to appear. He sang a part of the
madrigal that was later called the air and the instrumental part was
called the ritournelle, which literally meant that in this section of the
work, the singer returned from “off-stage” where he had awaited his
turn. By the end of the 16th century it had become the custom for
motets as well as madrigals to have a solo air or aria, and an
instrumental ritournelle, and this was the beginning of chamber
music,—a very great oak which grew from a very little acorn.
In the first printed music books are many of the madrigals of the
early period. We will tell you of the composers of this period
separately, but remember that they all wrote practically the same
kind of music,—masses, motets, and madrigals, but all with the
subject borrowed from something they knew and with many parts for
the voices. Often, too, the same tunes were used for Church and
outside the Church. For this reason much music was published
without the words, so that the singers could use sacred or profane
words as they wished.
Strange as it may seem, it was the folk songs and ballads and not
the learned church music, that had originality and came freely and
sincerely from the hearts of the people.
 Songs in Dance Form

Because these contrapuntal writings were heavy (can you imagine

dancing to a canon?) a new kind influenced by folk music grew up
among these people who were naturally gay and jolly and wished to
be entertained. Songs for three and four parts appeared, more
popular in style and simpler in form than the church motet and were
the descendants of the music of the troubadours. These were in
dance form, such as the French chanson, the vilanelle, the Italian
canzona, canzonetta or little canzona, frottola, strambottes and the
German lied. Many of these songs in dance form later inspired
composers to write music for instruments alone, so that people
danced to music without singing. These dance songs were called
branles, pavanes, gaillardes, courantes, forlanes, rigaudons
sarabandes, gigues, gavottes and many other names.
 The Lute

The favorite instrument of the 15th and 16th centuries was the
lute. It fought for first place with the vielle, the viole, the harp, the
psalterion and the portative organ, but won the fight and took its
place beside the most famous singers of the day, sometimes for
accompanying and again reaching the dignity of soloist, as we told
you above. In the 15th century it took the form, which we see most
often represented in pictures and in museums, with its six strings,
graceful round body, and long neck bent back as you can see in plate
opposite page 127 already described. As time went on this lute was
made larger and strings were added until at the beginning of the 17th
century, it was replaced by an instrument called the arch-lute or
theorbo, which had twenty-four strings, a double neck, and two sets
of tuning pins.
The spinets or virginals, the great-aunts of our pianofortes first
came into vogue in the 15th and 16th centuries.
 Tablature

There was a notation called Tablature used in the 16th and 17th
centuries to write down the music for lute and other stringed
instruments such as the viol, cittern, theorbo. You will find, in
pictures of Tablature, lines which look like our staff, but they do not
form a staff, but simply represent the strings of the instrument.
These lines vary according to the number of strings, from four for the
cittern to six for the lute. The notation showed, not the position and
fingering as we write music, but the position and fingering of frets
and strings. Instead of neumes or notes you will find the alphabet up
to the letter j, figures and queer dots and lines and slurs, but each
sign had its own meaning and was important to the lutenist.
 Rise of Schools

As music outgrows childhood, Schools of Music are started. But

these are not like the schools to which we go every day, but are rather
music groups or centers. Suppose you were a composer and lived in
New York and knew a dozen or so musicians who were writing the
same kind of music as you; the music, if good enough to be known
and played, would be called the New York School, or it might be
called the 1925 School! Or, if you were important enough to be
imitated by your followers, it would be called the Smith School, if
that happened to be your name, just as those who imitate Wagner
are said to be the Wagner School, and so it goes. Not a school to go
to, but a school to belong to!
“What makes these schools start?” we can hear you ask. Many
things. Sometimes people are oppressed by their rulers and in trying
to forget their troubles, they naturally want to express themselves in
the art they know, and in this way groups get together and a school
grows. Sometimes the Church is the cause of schools of music,
literature, and art, and we shall see in this chapter how the Church
influenced the schools of music of this time and made it one of the
most important periods in this story. Sometimes, too, the climate has
caused the development of different styles as we told you in the
chapter on folk music. It often happens too, that a great man or a
great school in one country affects other countries.
 Franco-Flemish School

The first real group of composers to be called a “School” lived in

the part of Europe that today covers the north of France, Belgium
and the Netherlands. The composers who were born from 1400 to
about 1530, in the so-called Low Countries belonged to this school.
Some writers claim that there were three schools, and that the
Franco-Flemish (Gallo-Belgic) is a bridge between the Paris school of
the 14th century and the Netherlands school of the 16th. But it would
be impossible to say when one school began and another ended, as
they all wrote the same kind of music. As the older composers were
the teachers of the younger, the interesting thing to know is that
many of these masters of the north of Europe went to Italy, Spain,
France, and to Germany, and spread the knowledge of the “new art”
of counterpoint and vocal poly-melody (many melodies) and filled
positions of importance in the churches. They were considered such
splendid teachers, that many of the young students of other
nationalities went to Holland and Belgium to be taught.
Zeelandia, a Hollander, an important master in this new school,
tried to get rid of the awkward intervals, fourths and fifths, which
were used in organum (see Chapter VII), and was the first composer
to give the subject or cantus firmus to the soprano voice instead of
the tenor. Doesn’t it seem strange that it took so long to let the
soprano have the main tune?
But the most important composer of his period (1400–1474) was
Guillaume Dufay, from Flanders, who was a chorister in the Papal
choir (choir of the Pope) in Rome. He made the rules and imitation
for the canon (a grown up round) and he was the first composer to
use the folk song L’homme armé (The Man in Armor) in a mass.
The next important name is Jan Okeghem (1430–1495), a
Hollander, who improved the science of counterpoint and of fugue
writing. We have already mentioned his canon for thirty-six voices
(page 149), and he wrote some puzzle canons, for use in secret guilds.
No one could solve these without the key and they were much harder
than the world’s best cross-word puzzles. He tried to make music
express the beauty he felt, and not merely be mathematical problems