Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Jan Smaczny: The stuff of life' - aspects of folksong in the fabric of art music in the British Isles

every American's culture who has any musical culture'.

2 Through the work of Foster, the outlines of Irish, and the closely related melodies of Scotland, had passed into the national consciousness. The pentatonic curves of Foster's melody, made up of an amalgam of primarily Irish, Scottish, and to an extent black American thematic characteristics created a powerful strand in American art and popular music. Antonín Dvorák, writing in New York in the early 1890s with the powerful, if musicologically uninformed, voice of a composer come to initiate a new school of American composition, touched on a certain truth when he stated that: I found that the music of the two races (Indian [native American] and Negro) bore a remarkable similarity to the music of Scotland. In both there is a peculiar scale, caused by the absence of the fourth and seventh, or leading tone.

3 Thomas Moore can hardly have had an inkling of the extent to which his Irish Melodies would affect musical traditions in the English-speaking world nearly a century after their first publication. But his effort at recovery was in many ways the product of the modern age, reflecting new trends in social and political thought where folk art was concerned, much of it provoked by the philosophy of the French Enlightenment. Attitudes towards country life, often defined in terms of elemental crudeness had given way to a romantic image of pastoral tranquillity in which the natural beauty of the country dweller became an important factor. Moore's collections were a celebration of a native art in which the folk singer, and more particularly in the case of Ireland, the harpist as representative of an ancient cultural lineage, was the symbol of righteous political virtue in the face of oppression. A rallying call from his publication is to be found in the Air 'Thamama Halla

1, published both in verse form and with a musical setting. The first stanza gives an idea of the quality of the sentiment in a poem where the upholders of Ireland's native culture are seen very much as victims: 2 See Richard Jackson (ed.), Stephen Foster Song Book, New York: 1974, p. vi. 1 In fact, Dvorák knew virtually nothing of native American (American Indian) music and not a great deal about black American music. The quote is reprinted in John Clapham, Dvorák, London: 1979, pp. 201-2. 30