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

certain cultural markers to compositions frequently destined for bourgeois and upper class audiences. More subtly, and in the twentieth century, perhaps more importantly, the presence of folksong has done much to clarify aspects of musical language at a time of directional uncertainty where style is concerned; a process by which, to quote the title of this paper, folksong does indeed, as far as music is concerned, become the 'stuff of life'. While no-one would argue that the same level of scientific background in the development of methodologies and protocols for the collecting of folksong practised by Bartók and Kodaly in Hungary (or even Bartos and Janácek in Czechoslovakia) existed in England, the efforts of the folklonsts and folksong collectors Cecil Sharp, Maude Karpeles and the composers Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst were of enormous significance. From the late nineteenth well into the twentieth century, figures such as these made a more or less systematic effort to collect and catalogue folksong in England extending their work to survivals of these traditions elsewhere (notably in the Appalachian mountains in the United States of America). Their efforts were primarily born of an enthusiastic desire to capture a fast disappearing wealth of native melody, though they were also based on an expression of frustration with the inadequacies of earlier collectors and their products. Some of the cultural effects of this period of collection will be examined below, but some consideration of what preceded their efforts must be examined since it parallels in many ways the situation on the continent. Collections of folksongs in various forms go back to the beginning of the seventeenth century. Thomas Ravenscroft produced three volumes which included folk and popular song (Pammelia 1609, Deuteromalia 1609 and Melismata 1611). The collecting of folksong continued in a sporadic and largely unsystematic way into the eighteenth century, and towards the turn of the century into the nineteenth began to increase markedly. Much impetus was given to what was fast becoming a profitable publishing venture by the practice of commissioning well-known contemporary composers to make arrangements of folksongs for voice and instrumental combinations then popular among amateur performers. Joseph Haydn along with certain of his pupils made numerous arrangements of, mainly Scottish, folksongs for violin, cello, the popular and readily available piano (called fortepiano; the harpsichord which was still current in many households was offered as an alternative) and voice for the Scottish publisher George Thomson, as did his contemporary, pupil and rival during Haydn's first stay in London in the 1790s, Ignaz Pleyel; early in the nineteenth century another successful contributor to this growing literature was another of Haydn's pupils, Ludwig van Beethoven.