Topic: Folk Music Revival
The American folk-song revival began, in part, as a reaction against the migration of people from southern and eastern Europe that began in the 1880s after technological improvements in steamships made voyages by the poor economically viable. [1]
In 1913, Peter Dykema headed a committee within the Music Supervisors National Conference tasked with identifying songs that should be sung in every public school. [2] Most of the eighteen were nineteenth-century sentimental songs, with two by Stephen Foster. [3] There also were three Scots [4] and one Irish song. [5] The implicit message was people from the British Isles could revive or perpetuate their musical traditions, but everyone else needed to abandon their’s.
A different edition was published in 1914. [6] Five songs were eliminated: one shanty and one religious song were replaced with others of the same type. [7] The post-Civil War popular songs disappeared, and songs from England and Wales took their place. [8]
German content was disguised. One of the rounds was "Oh, How Lovely Is the Evening." [9] Friedrich Wilhelm Kücken’s 1827 setting for a romantic poem by Helmina von Chézy, [10] was identified as a Thuringian folk-song in 1913. "How Can I Leave Thee" was little different from Foster’s lyrics. Michael Mark said the 1914 edition included a translation of "O, Tannenbaum," but didn’t indicate if it was the Christmas song or the tune for some other words. [11]
General teachers, not trained musicians, were the ones who led singing in most schools, and publishers were eager to accommodate their needs. [12] Norman Hall provided them with a larger collection in 1915. [13] He said his purpose was to offer "not the popular song of the day but the songs that have stood the test of time: the songs of true sentiment, of school days, and early childhood, folk songs and national songs." [14] During World War I, he said his goal was "to amalgamate our people" with "our home and folk songs." [15]
Of the 166 items in The Golden Book of Favorite Songs, the nine labeled as Scots and the six identified as Irish were clearly identifiable as national songs, while the three Italian and eighteen German ones only were identified as tunes. Several were classic pieces, [16] but some were by Abt, Kücken, Nägeli, and Silcher. [17] "O Tannenbaum was not identified as the melody for "Michigan, My Michigan." [18]
Folklorists would deny lyrics by Robert Burns and Thomas Moore were authentic folk texts, but that missed the point. Dykema and Hall were seeking to define a common American song repertoire, and, to them, there was no difference between people who lived in towns where Dykema taught [19] and those living in the country where Hall advertized his wares. [20]
End Notes
1. The problem for steamships crossing the Atlantic was the need to carry enough coal to make the trip. After Alfred Holt solved this problem in 1865, other inventions in the 1870s made long-range shipping economically possible. [21] The final step was the organization of corporations that shipped from Liverpool, [22] Hamburg, [23] Genoa, and Naples. [24]
2. James A. Keene. "Peter Dykema." 100–119 in Giants of Music Education. Centennial, Colorado: Glenbridge Publishing, 2010. 113. The Music Supervisors National Conference collection was Standard Songs: Eighteen Songs for Community Singing. Boston: C. C. Birchard, 1913. I couldn’t locate a copy of the songbook; contents are from WorldCat entry.
3. "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Old Folks at Home"
4. "Annie Laurie," "Auld Lang Syne," and "Flow, Gently Sweet Afton." The lyrics of the last two were by Robert Burns.
5. "The Minstrel Boy." The lyrics were by Thomas Moore.
6. Music Supervisors National Conference. Eighteen Songs for Community Singing. Boston: C. C. Birchard, 1914.
7. "Bow, Ye Winds, Heigh Ho" was replaced with "A Capital Ship." "Come, Thou Almighty King" replaced "Sweet and Low."
8. I couldn’t locate a copy of the songbook; contents are from Michael L. Mark. A Concise History of American Music Education. London: Rowman and Littlefield Education, 2008. 94. The Welsh song was "Ash Grove."
9. According to Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, the melody was written in 1826 by Christian Johann Philipp Schulz. (Letter to author, 20 December 1976.)
10. German Wikipedia. "Friedrich Wilhelm Kücken." The German title was "Ach, wie ist’s möglich dann."
11. Mark. 94. James Fuld discovered the melody first appeared in 1799 with the words "Es lebe hoch" in a collection produced by a German nationalist and youth leader, Rudolf Zacharias Becker. The "Tannenbaum" text was published in 1820. [25]
12. Clarence C. Birchard published the collections. He had been involved with public school music publishers since the 1890s when his employer, Ginn and Company, organized summer training schools for which it supplied the materials. [26] He founded his own company in 1901. [27] He later was quoted as saying: "We are teaching music not to make musicians but to make Americans" [28]
13. N. H. Aitch. The Golden Book of Favorite Songs. Chicago: Hall and McCreary, 1915. Aitch was a pseudonym for Hall. He used edition numbers for print runs. In 1923, the book was revised by a team of music educators led by John Beattie.
14. Aitch. 3. Apart from questions of taste, the primary reason Hall and other textbook publishers were not interested in "the popular song of the day" was the copyright law of 1909 that required publishers to pay royalties to reprint pieces. The cost became more onerous in 1917 when Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., ruled anyone playing a piece in public had to pay for the privilege. [29]
15. Norman H. Hall. Quoted by "‘National Week of Song Will Amalgamate American People.’" Musical America 29:42:26 April 1919. 42.
16. It included Georg Friedrich Händel’s "Hallelujah Chorus" and "Largo." The first was from the Messiah, a 1741 oratorio. [30] The second was from "Ombra mai fu," an aria in the 1738 opera Serse or Xerxes. [31]
17. Nägeli was discussed in the post for 14 April 2019. Abt and Silcher were mentioned in the post for 21 April 2019.
18. The rest of the songs were, like Hall said, sentimental, religious, Civil War, and patriotic songs, or songs specific to the classroom. Five were by Foster.
19. By 1913, Dykema had taught in Aurora, Illinois, and New York City. [32]
20. Hall began as a textbook seller in Chicago in the 1890s. [33] He had established Hall and McCreary in the city by 1905. [34] Nothing more is known about him, and I found nothing on McCreary. His partner in publishing the first Golden Book was Frederick A. Owen of Danville, New York. He offered a correspondence school for teachers in 1889, and began publishing the Normal Instructor in 1891 to provide teachers with materials and ideas. [35]
21. Wikipedia. "Steamship."
22. "The Departure Gates: How Your Ancestors Came to America." Ancestry website. 5 July 2016.
23. "Hamburg-Amerika Line." Immigration to the United States website.
24. "Departure Gates.
25. James J. Fuld. The Book of World-Famous Music. New York: Dover Publications, 2000 edition. 355–356.
26. Edward Bailey Birge. History of Public School Music in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Music Educators National Conference, 1966.
27. "Birchard." International Music Score Library Project website.
28. Brian Cardany. "Clarence C. Birchard." Arizona State University website.
29. Wikipedia. "Copyright Act of 1909."
30. Wikipedia. "Messiah (Handel)."
31. Wikipedia. "Ombra mai fu."
32. Wikipedia. "Peter W. Dykema."
33. Advertisement following page 247. Western Teacher 2:247+:March 1894.
34. Advertisement. Publishers Weekly 66:1904:28 January 1905.
35. "Frederick A. Owen (1867 – 1935)." Danville Area Historical Society blog.
Sunday, April 28, 2019
Sunday, April 21, 2019
Folk Revival - German Americans
Topic: Folk Music Revival
The failure of the Revolution of 1848 in German-speaking central Europe sent refugees to the United States. Historians tend to emphasize the intellectuals who immigrated, but many more came for economic reasons.
By 1900, before the influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, 54% of Cincinnati’s population was German. Migrants sailing on the Hamburg America line debarked at Hoboken, New Jersey (58% German), and headed up the Hudson for the Erie Canal. At the transfer point to Lake Erie, Buffalo, New York, was 43% German. Detroit, Michigan, on the narrows between Lakes Erie and Huron, was 41% German. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Lake Michigan was 70%. Along the Mississippi where the Rock Island railroad crossed the river, Davenport, Iowa, was 62% German. Saint Louis, Missouri, may have been slave country, but it sat on the Mississippi river where the Missouri branched north to good farmlands in the interior. Its population was 45% German. [1] These are the blue areas on the map near the bottom of the rightmost column.
The most important of these locations for camp songs was Ohio where Lynn Rohrbough established his cooperative publishing house in 1929. [2] His immigrant ancestor, John Conrad Rohrbough, had moved from Bavaria in the middle 1700s, and settled in what became Hampshire County, West Virginia. [3] His father, George Elmore Rohrbough, relocated to the Aspen area in Colorado. [4]
In Upper Sandusky, forty-some miles northwest of Rohrbough’s Delaware, Ohio, [5] Germans trickled west from Pennsylvania as soon as the prairie land was opened for settlement. Then came farmers and small tradesmen from every part of the old Holy Roman Empire. The English-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church organized in 1849; the Church of God in 1851; Trinity Reformed Church of the Synod of the Reformed Church that offered German and English Sabbath schools in 1852; the Roman Catholics, with a few Irish among the Germans, in 1857; the United Brethren Church in 1858; Trinity Church of the Evangelical Association, with German and English Sunday schools, in 1860; and the German-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1868. [6]
The German speakers brought their singing traditions with them. The first singing society in Cincinnati, Ohio, met in a tavern on Thursdays in 1838. It must have been a liedertafel because "The singers seated themselves around a table, and alongside the music book of each stood the quart of beer." [7]
Male choruses from Louisville, Kentucky, and Madison, Indiana, both located on the Ohio river, joined a Cincinnati sängerfest in 1849 with delegations that arrived from Columbus, Saint Louis, and Milwaukee. [8] Its unaccompanied vocal music was a combination of familiar German composers, like Mozart, and ones who wrote for four-part male choruses like Franz Abt [9] and Friedrich Silcher. [10]
Wyandot County organized its first sängerbund, the Upper Sandusky Maennerchor, in 1858. They attended the Buffalo sängerfest in 1860. It lost some younger members during the Civil War, but continued to send groups to sängerfests. By 1884 there was less support for preserving the traditions of their "German-born fathers," but it still met every Sunday and Thursday. [11]
Of the five founding members profiled in the 1884 county history, two were members of the German Lutheran Church. Two emigrated from Saxony in the east, one from Westphalia in the north, one from Württemberg in the southwest, and one from Switzerland. In Europe, one was a physician, one a goldsmith, one a wagon maker, one a mechanic, and one a student. The first to arrive came with his brother in 1849; the rest immigrated between 1850 and 1858. Ewald Brauns organized the "fine instrumental bands which have been the pride of their city so many years." [12]
While individuals who joined German-speaking churches and musical organizations may have maintained old world traditions, others spread their singing traditions when they joined local community institutions like the Masons and Odd Fellows. [13]
Charlotte Vetter’s family moved from Kassel in Hesse to Oberlin, Ohio, [14] where she was born toward the end of the Civil War in 1865. [15] She married Luther Halsey Gulick, whose father and grandfather had been Presbyterian missionaries in Hawaii. [16]
She remembered, for twenty years beginning sometime around 1890, she, her husband, and children "camped on the Thames River" in Connecticut. They were in their mid-twenties when they embarked on their lonely errands into the wilderness. The Gulicks soon "invited friends and relatives to camp nearby. One summer there were seventy-five people about us in family groups." To fill time between meals, they fell back on habits acquired in religious meetings:
"Every morning we all met to sing. Sometimes we gathered around a fire, according to the weather; but unless it rained we met out under the sky, and sang sometimes for hours at a time. Our favorites were some of the immortal old hymns. If I could ask those who made that group what they now remember of those summers with the greatest pleasure, I believe that most would speak of the singing together." [17]
She and several of her in-laws founded private girls’ camps that became models for others. Gulick’s brother, Edward Leeds Gulick, established Aloha Hive in Vermont in 1905. [18] He was a Congregational minister in Groton, Connecticut. [19]
Edward’s wife, the former Harriet Marie Farnsworth, was the sister of the Charles Hubert Farnsworth who founded Hanoum in Vermont in 1909. [20] He collaborated with Cecil Sharp on the collection that introduced "The Keeper" to America, [21] and taught public-school music methods at Teacher’s College, Columbia. [22]
Most important, Vetter Gulick and her husband established Sebago in Maine in 1907 where they experimented with what became the Camp Fire Girls. In 1915, a publicist for the camp told would-be imitators:
"After breakfast in the bungalow all went to the craft house, where every morning they met to sing. The girls sat Turk-fashion on the floor facing Hiiteni [Vetter Gulick] and Alaska [Edith Kempthorne], who had taken her place at the piano. Two carefully selected hymns were
sung, then everyone stood and repeated the Lord’s prayer, after which they sang more hymns and camp songs to their heart’s content. It was difficult to stop singing. Often Hiiteni allowed the singing hour to encroach upon craft-work time." [23]
For them, as for their German ancestors, it was the singing that mattered, not the songs.
End Notes
Some of this material appeared in a different form in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.
1. Albert Bernhardt Faust. The German Element in the United States. Boston: Mifflin, volume 1, 1909. 580.
2. Larry Nial Holcomb. "A History of the Cooperative Recreation Service." PhD diss. University of Michigan, 1972. 63.
3. "John Conrad Rohrbough." Ancestry website. His father was Johann Reinhart Rohrbach who lived in Höchstadt. [24] His wife’s parents moved from Basel to Philadelphia to Virginia. [25]
4. "Elmore George Rohrbough." Progressive Men of Western Colorado. Chicago: A. W. Bowen and Company, 1905. 85–86.
5. I lived near Upper Sandusky in the early 1970s and visited the Wyandot County 4-H day camp in 1974.
6. The History of Wyandot County Ohio. Chicago: Leggett, Conaway and Company, 1884. 538–542.
7. Charles Frederic Goss. Cincinnati, the Queen City, 1788-1912. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1912. 465. Liedertafil were discussed in the post for 14 April 2019.
8. Goss. 466. Sängerfest were discussed in the post for 14 April 2019. The significance of the Cincinnati festival was discussed by Barbara Lorenzkowski in Sounds of Ethnicity. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010. 110.
9. Abt moved from Saxony to Zürich where he wrote volkstümliches lied that were "easily mistaken for genuine folksong." [26] The "Foot Traveler" was included in an 1885 school music-book, School Bells. [27] Osbourne McConathy added it to the 1922 revision of the third volume of the Progressive Music Series. [28]
10. Silcher became a musician after meeting Carl Maria von Weber, mentioned in the post for 14 April 2019. Silcher was famous for opposing Wilhelm I of Württemberg in 1824, but today is known for his arrangements of German folk songs. [29]
11. Wyandot County. 548, 551.
12. Wyandot County. John Agerter, 555; Adolphus Billhardt, 570; Ewald Brauns, 572; John K. Engel, 588; John Seider, 647.
13. In Upper Sandusky, Billhardt, Engel, and Seiler were members of the Free and Accepted Masons. Agerter and Engel were members of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.
14. Katherine Gulick Fricker . "John Vetter." Geni website. 17 April 2016.
15. "Charlotte ‘Lottie’ Emily Gulick (Vetter)." Geni website. 4 December 2016.
16. The immigrant Hendrick van Gulick left Amsterdam for New York in the 1600s. [30] His father, Jan Schalcken van Gulick, was born in Jülich. [31] The duchy of Gülich was an early battleground in the Counter Reformation. The Dutch Republic took control, then the Spanish in 1622. [32]
17. Mrs. Luther Halsey Gulick. "Introduction." In Ethel Rogers. Sebago-Wohelo Camp Fire Girls. Battle Creek, Michigan: Good Health Publishing Company, 1915. 14.
18. Wayne Henry Friedman. "Edward Leeds Gulick, Sr." Geni website. Last updated: 1 December 2016.
19. Frances Gulick Jewett. Luther Halsey Gulick: Missionary in Hawaii, Micronesia, Japan, and China. London: Elliott Stock. Copyrighted by Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society of Boston in 1895. 308.
20. Martha H. Wiencke. "Charles Hubert Farnsworth." Thetford Historical Society website. March 2006. The siblings were born in Turkey to Congregational missionaries.
21. Cecil J. Sharp and Charles H. Farnsworth. Folk-songs, Chanteys, and Singing Games. New York: H. W. Gray, 1909.
22. Wiencke. One of his students was Charles Leonhard, [33] mentioned in the post for 8 July 2018.
23. Rogers. 48. She was using their camp names. Kempthorne was from Australia.
24. "Antoni Reger." Ancestry website.
25. "Catherine Shook." Ancestry website.
26. Edward F. Kravitt. "Franz Abt." Grove Music Online. Edited by L. Macy. Quoted by Wikipedia. "Franz Abt."
27. James Cartwright Macy and L. O. Emerson. School Bells. Cleveland: S. Brainard’s Sons, 1884.
28. Horatio Parker, Osbourne McConathy, Edward Bailey Birge, and W. Otto Miessner. Progressive Music Series. Boston: Silver, Burdett and Company, 1922 edition. Book 3.
29. Wikipedia. "Friedrich Silcher."
30. Gene Daniell. "Hendrick Gulick." Geni website. 16 October 2018.
31. "Jan Schalcken van Gulick." Geni website. 27 October 2017.
32. Wikipedia. "Jülich."
33. George N. Heller. Charles Leonhard. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1995. 40.
The failure of the Revolution of 1848 in German-speaking central Europe sent refugees to the United States. Historians tend to emphasize the intellectuals who immigrated, but many more came for economic reasons.
By 1900, before the influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, 54% of Cincinnati’s population was German. Migrants sailing on the Hamburg America line debarked at Hoboken, New Jersey (58% German), and headed up the Hudson for the Erie Canal. At the transfer point to Lake Erie, Buffalo, New York, was 43% German. Detroit, Michigan, on the narrows between Lakes Erie and Huron, was 41% German. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Lake Michigan was 70%. Along the Mississippi where the Rock Island railroad crossed the river, Davenport, Iowa, was 62% German. Saint Louis, Missouri, may have been slave country, but it sat on the Mississippi river where the Missouri branched north to good farmlands in the interior. Its population was 45% German. [1] These are the blue areas on the map near the bottom of the rightmost column.
The most important of these locations for camp songs was Ohio where Lynn Rohrbough established his cooperative publishing house in 1929. [2] His immigrant ancestor, John Conrad Rohrbough, had moved from Bavaria in the middle 1700s, and settled in what became Hampshire County, West Virginia. [3] His father, George Elmore Rohrbough, relocated to the Aspen area in Colorado. [4]
In Upper Sandusky, forty-some miles northwest of Rohrbough’s Delaware, Ohio, [5] Germans trickled west from Pennsylvania as soon as the prairie land was opened for settlement. Then came farmers and small tradesmen from every part of the old Holy Roman Empire. The English-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church organized in 1849; the Church of God in 1851; Trinity Reformed Church of the Synod of the Reformed Church that offered German and English Sabbath schools in 1852; the Roman Catholics, with a few Irish among the Germans, in 1857; the United Brethren Church in 1858; Trinity Church of the Evangelical Association, with German and English Sunday schools, in 1860; and the German-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1868. [6]
The German speakers brought their singing traditions with them. The first singing society in Cincinnati, Ohio, met in a tavern on Thursdays in 1838. It must have been a liedertafel because "The singers seated themselves around a table, and alongside the music book of each stood the quart of beer." [7]
Male choruses from Louisville, Kentucky, and Madison, Indiana, both located on the Ohio river, joined a Cincinnati sängerfest in 1849 with delegations that arrived from Columbus, Saint Louis, and Milwaukee. [8] Its unaccompanied vocal music was a combination of familiar German composers, like Mozart, and ones who wrote for four-part male choruses like Franz Abt [9] and Friedrich Silcher. [10]
Wyandot County organized its first sängerbund, the Upper Sandusky Maennerchor, in 1858. They attended the Buffalo sängerfest in 1860. It lost some younger members during the Civil War, but continued to send groups to sängerfests. By 1884 there was less support for preserving the traditions of their "German-born fathers," but it still met every Sunday and Thursday. [11]
Of the five founding members profiled in the 1884 county history, two were members of the German Lutheran Church. Two emigrated from Saxony in the east, one from Westphalia in the north, one from Württemberg in the southwest, and one from Switzerland. In Europe, one was a physician, one a goldsmith, one a wagon maker, one a mechanic, and one a student. The first to arrive came with his brother in 1849; the rest immigrated between 1850 and 1858. Ewald Brauns organized the "fine instrumental bands which have been the pride of their city so many years." [12]
While individuals who joined German-speaking churches and musical organizations may have maintained old world traditions, others spread their singing traditions when they joined local community institutions like the Masons and Odd Fellows. [13]
Charlotte Vetter’s family moved from Kassel in Hesse to Oberlin, Ohio, [14] where she was born toward the end of the Civil War in 1865. [15] She married Luther Halsey Gulick, whose father and grandfather had been Presbyterian missionaries in Hawaii. [16]
She remembered, for twenty years beginning sometime around 1890, she, her husband, and children "camped on the Thames River" in Connecticut. They were in their mid-twenties when they embarked on their lonely errands into the wilderness. The Gulicks soon "invited friends and relatives to camp nearby. One summer there were seventy-five people about us in family groups." To fill time between meals, they fell back on habits acquired in religious meetings:
"Every morning we all met to sing. Sometimes we gathered around a fire, according to the weather; but unless it rained we met out under the sky, and sang sometimes for hours at a time. Our favorites were some of the immortal old hymns. If I could ask those who made that group what they now remember of those summers with the greatest pleasure, I believe that most would speak of the singing together." [17]
She and several of her in-laws founded private girls’ camps that became models for others. Gulick’s brother, Edward Leeds Gulick, established Aloha Hive in Vermont in 1905. [18] He was a Congregational minister in Groton, Connecticut. [19]
Edward’s wife, the former Harriet Marie Farnsworth, was the sister of the Charles Hubert Farnsworth who founded Hanoum in Vermont in 1909. [20] He collaborated with Cecil Sharp on the collection that introduced "The Keeper" to America, [21] and taught public-school music methods at Teacher’s College, Columbia. [22]
Most important, Vetter Gulick and her husband established Sebago in Maine in 1907 where they experimented with what became the Camp Fire Girls. In 1915, a publicist for the camp told would-be imitators:
"After breakfast in the bungalow all went to the craft house, where every morning they met to sing. The girls sat Turk-fashion on the floor facing Hiiteni [Vetter Gulick] and Alaska [Edith Kempthorne], who had taken her place at the piano. Two carefully selected hymns were
sung, then everyone stood and repeated the Lord’s prayer, after which they sang more hymns and camp songs to their heart’s content. It was difficult to stop singing. Often Hiiteni allowed the singing hour to encroach upon craft-work time." [23]
For them, as for their German ancestors, it was the singing that mattered, not the songs.
End Notes
Some of this material appeared in a different form in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.
1. Albert Bernhardt Faust. The German Element in the United States. Boston: Mifflin, volume 1, 1909. 580.
2. Larry Nial Holcomb. "A History of the Cooperative Recreation Service." PhD diss. University of Michigan, 1972. 63.
3. "John Conrad Rohrbough." Ancestry website. His father was Johann Reinhart Rohrbach who lived in Höchstadt. [24] His wife’s parents moved from Basel to Philadelphia to Virginia. [25]
4. "Elmore George Rohrbough." Progressive Men of Western Colorado. Chicago: A. W. Bowen and Company, 1905. 85–86.
5. I lived near Upper Sandusky in the early 1970s and visited the Wyandot County 4-H day camp in 1974.
6. The History of Wyandot County Ohio. Chicago: Leggett, Conaway and Company, 1884. 538–542.
7. Charles Frederic Goss. Cincinnati, the Queen City, 1788-1912. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1912. 465. Liedertafil were discussed in the post for 14 April 2019.
8. Goss. 466. Sängerfest were discussed in the post for 14 April 2019. The significance of the Cincinnati festival was discussed by Barbara Lorenzkowski in Sounds of Ethnicity. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010. 110.
9. Abt moved from Saxony to Zürich where he wrote volkstümliches lied that were "easily mistaken for genuine folksong." [26] The "Foot Traveler" was included in an 1885 school music-book, School Bells. [27] Osbourne McConathy added it to the 1922 revision of the third volume of the Progressive Music Series. [28]
10. Silcher became a musician after meeting Carl Maria von Weber, mentioned in the post for 14 April 2019. Silcher was famous for opposing Wilhelm I of Württemberg in 1824, but today is known for his arrangements of German folk songs. [29]
11. Wyandot County. 548, 551.
12. Wyandot County. John Agerter, 555; Adolphus Billhardt, 570; Ewald Brauns, 572; John K. Engel, 588; John Seider, 647.
13. In Upper Sandusky, Billhardt, Engel, and Seiler were members of the Free and Accepted Masons. Agerter and Engel were members of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.
14. Katherine Gulick Fricker . "John Vetter." Geni website. 17 April 2016.
15. "Charlotte ‘Lottie’ Emily Gulick (Vetter)." Geni website. 4 December 2016.
16. The immigrant Hendrick van Gulick left Amsterdam for New York in the 1600s. [30] His father, Jan Schalcken van Gulick, was born in Jülich. [31] The duchy of Gülich was an early battleground in the Counter Reformation. The Dutch Republic took control, then the Spanish in 1622. [32]
17. Mrs. Luther Halsey Gulick. "Introduction." In Ethel Rogers. Sebago-Wohelo Camp Fire Girls. Battle Creek, Michigan: Good Health Publishing Company, 1915. 14.
18. Wayne Henry Friedman. "Edward Leeds Gulick, Sr." Geni website. Last updated: 1 December 2016.
19. Frances Gulick Jewett. Luther Halsey Gulick: Missionary in Hawaii, Micronesia, Japan, and China. London: Elliott Stock. Copyrighted by Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society of Boston in 1895. 308.
20. Martha H. Wiencke. "Charles Hubert Farnsworth." Thetford Historical Society website. March 2006. The siblings were born in Turkey to Congregational missionaries.
21. Cecil J. Sharp and Charles H. Farnsworth. Folk-songs, Chanteys, and Singing Games. New York: H. W. Gray, 1909.
22. Wiencke. One of his students was Charles Leonhard, [33] mentioned in the post for 8 July 2018.
23. Rogers. 48. She was using their camp names. Kempthorne was from Australia.
24. "Antoni Reger." Ancestry website.
25. "Catherine Shook." Ancestry website.
26. Edward F. Kravitt. "Franz Abt." Grove Music Online. Edited by L. Macy. Quoted by Wikipedia. "Franz Abt."
27. James Cartwright Macy and L. O. Emerson. School Bells. Cleveland: S. Brainard’s Sons, 1884.
28. Horatio Parker, Osbourne McConathy, Edward Bailey Birge, and W. Otto Miessner. Progressive Music Series. Boston: Silver, Burdett and Company, 1922 edition. Book 3.
29. Wikipedia. "Friedrich Silcher."
30. Gene Daniell. "Hendrick Gulick." Geni website. 16 October 2018.
31. "Jan Schalcken van Gulick." Geni website. 27 October 2017.
32. Wikipedia. "Jülich."
33. George N. Heller. Charles Leonhard. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1995. 40.
Sunday, April 14, 2019
Folk Revival - Germany
Topic: Folk Music Revival
The English folk revival, as mentioned in the post for 7 April 2019, was partly a reaction against events precipitated by the 1707 Act of Union that ended conflicts with Scots, and partly an outgrowth of the rise of a middle class in an economy dependent more on trade and textiles than agriculture.
The religious wars in Hapsburg-controlled lands did not end until Josef II issued the Patent of Toleration in 1781 that allowed Protestants to exist so long as they did not erect churches. [1] In other parts of the Holy Roman Empire, which he headed, religion was dictated by the beliefs of hereditary leaders.
The Empire finally died when Napoléon defeated the Hapsburgs at Austerlitz in 1804. [2] By then, many parts of the German-speaking states and Switzerland had been invaded. Interest in the rights of man promoted by the French Revolution mingled with the realities of military defeat and economic chaos.
A number of intellectuals, including university students, wanted a state larger than a duchy that was capable of defending its people. [3] Since it couldn’t be based on heredity or religion, they sought some other criteria to define themselves.
Johann Gottfried Herder had suggested in 1766 that nations were composed of individuals who shared a language that socialized them into a common culture. [4] This implied a criticism of his native Prussia where Friedrich Wilhelm III spoke French better than German. [5]
He refined his view of history after reading Michael Denis’ translation of James MacPherson’s Ossian collection mentioned in the post for 7 April 2019. [6] Herder implied German-speakers could recover the cultural integrity they lost in the Renaissance by reading poetry written in the Middle Ages. [7] He published his first collection of folk songs in the 1778 Volkslieder. [8]
In his preface to the Volkslieder, Herder emphasized folk songs must be heard to be appreciated. [9] Even though the "verse, form and contents be bad, the song will live and will be sung. It will be improved upon by people, but the soul of the song, the poetic tone, and melody will remain." [10]
The Lutheran’s [11] emphasis on the ballad as something sung set his interests apart from those of the English who stressed the words. The act of singing, rather than the antiquity of the texts, became the way middling volk asserted their importance [12] in a society still marked by rigid class lines.
In 1809, while Napoléon still controlled large parts of the former Holy Roman Empire, Carl Friedrich Zelter organized a liedertafel in Berlin where twenty-four men met to sing around a table in imitation of King Arthur. The repertoire was innocuous songs about nature, [13] but everything the group did dramatized Herder’s view that a language was shaped by the environment where people lived, "their own earth and sky." [14] Within a few years new groups were organized along the Rhine. [15]
The same year, in Zürich, [16] Hans Georg Nägeli suggested "if people started singing together with hundreds of thousands, from any background whatsoever, they would feel more closely related to one another to such an extent that it would mean a decisive step towards a more complete humanity." [17] The son of a Swiss-Reformed rector [18] organized a male liederkranz to sing four-part music.
In 1823, Nägeli was considering moving to Frankfort-am-Main and scheduled a series of lectures on music for the commoner. He followed with a lecture tour the next year in the southwest. His lectures were published in Stuttgart in 1823. [19] James Garratt said, "by 1830, male-voice choirs on the Stuttgart model had sprung up in around two dozen towns in Württemberg, Baden and Bavaria." [20]
Würzburg invited several liederkranz to come together in 1828. [21] John Tibbetts said "the participants loved it so much that two years later that had a huge Sängerfest in Franfurt-am-Maim." [22] He noted it was a free city, "a neutral ground where Protestants and Catholics together could sing." [23]
The repertoire became more political in the 1830s and 1840s, when songs from the 1813 uprising against Napoléon were sung. Especially popular were poems by Theodor Körner. [24] He had written some to German folk melodies and sung them to a guitar or recited them in camp before he died at Gadebusch in 1813. [25]
Some Körner poems were set to music by Carl Maria von Weber in 1815. [26] This excited the jealousies of professional musicians who believed amateur groups should limit themselves to the hunting and drinking songs [27] of elite student clubs, [28] and pay to hear trained musicians, like themselves, perform more complex music.
Many of these vocal groups did not survive the repression that followed the failure of the 1848 revolution. Barbara Lorenzkowski remarked, singers turned to folk music [29] in groups renamed sängerbunds. Such local texts overtly denied support for a supra-state identity associated with the early liedertafel, but they also may have been protests against the hegemony being imposed by Prussia.
End Notes
1. Wikipedia. "Patent of Toleration."
2. Wikipedia. "Holy Roman Empire."
3. Many proposed "a modern German nation-state based upon liberal democracy, constitutionalism, representation, and popular sovereignty." [30] The dream animated the Revolutions of 1848, which were snuffed by conflicts between Prussia and the Hapsburgs who wanted to control the German-speaking state. [31] Their term, "pan German," was used for different ends by the Nazis, and fell into disfavor. Wikipedia had entries instead on "Romantic Nationalism," "German Nationalism," and "Civic Nationalism."
4. Michael Forster. "Johann Gottfried von Herder." Standford University Plato website. 23 October 2001; last updated 25 August 2017. He cited Herder’s On the Change of Taste from 1766, This Too a Philosophy of History, and On the Cognition and Sensation.
5. Rulemann Friedrich Eylert. Characteristic Traits and Domestic Life of Frederick William III, King of Prussia. Translated by Jonathan Birch. London: George Bell, 1845. 140–141. The emphasis on French culture was mentioned by Wilson [6] and by Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh. [32]
6. William A. Wilson. "Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism." Journal of Popular Culture 6:819–835:1978. 821. Wilson stressed Herder was influenced by the notes that drew on ideas developed in 1725 by Giambattista Vico in Scienza Nuova.
7. Wilson. 824. One could point to 1232 when Frederick II granted princes territorial autonomy within the Holy Roman Empire as the time when the idea of a shared culture began to disintegrate. [33]
8. Wilson said it was retitled Stimmen der Volker in Liedern after Herder’s death (page 828). "Lieder" is the German word for song.
9. Louise Kathryn Goebel. "Herder’s Conception of Popular Poetry." BA thesis in German. University of Illinois, June 1912. 12.
10. Herder. Preface to Volkslieder. Translated by Goebel. 13.
11. Andrew Hamilton. "Herder’s Theory of the Volksgeist." Counter-Currents website. 20 May 2011. "Ordained in 1765, Herder became assistant master (teacher) at the Lutheran cathedral school in Riga."
12. Herder wrote: "there is only one class in the state, the Volk (not the rabble) and the king belongs to this class as well as the peasant." Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität. Translated by Robert Reinhold Ergang. Herder and the Foundations of German Nationalism. New York: Octagon Books, 1966 edition. 206.
13. John C. Tibbetts. Schumann: A Chorus of Voices. Milwaukee: Amadeus Press, 2010. 59–60.
14. Quotation from Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Translated as Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind by T. Churchill. New York: Bergman Publishers, 1966 edition. 197. Cited by Alan Patten. "‘The Most Natural State’: Herder and Nationalism." Princeton University website. June 2010.
Elsewhere Patten said "Herder also associated nations and peoples with a particular territory, marked by a certain climate and topography." William Wilson observed: "From the writings of Charles de Montesquieu, Herder received further support for his concept of independent culture types. From them he also received a new idea-that these culture types are to a large degree determined by the physical environment in which nations are located." [23]
15. Tibbetts. 60.
16. Zürich had been a battlefield in 1799. [35]
17. Quoted by Kristinz Lajosi and Andreas Stynen. "Introduction." 1–13 in Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe. Edited by Lajosi and Stynen. Leiden: Brill, 2005. 3.
18. "Hans Georg Nägeli." Wetzipedia website.
19. Celia Applegate. Bach in Berlin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Publication information and page number not provided in on-line version.
20. James Garratt. Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 117.
21. Tibbetts. 60. Garratt said the first regional festival was held in Plochingen, Würtemburg, in June 1827. [36] Charles Frederic Goss thought the Würzburg festival occurred in 1845. [37]
22. Tibbetts. 60. Sängerfests were festivals that brought together musical groups from several areas; some were small, and others drew from large geographic areas.
23. Tibbetts. 60.
24. Garratt. 188.
25. Wikipedia. "Lyre and Sword." The collection was published in 1814 as Leyer und Schwerdt. [38]
26. Carl Maria von Weber and Theodor Körner. Leyer und Schwerdt, opus 41. Berlin: A. M. Schlesinger, 1815. It was republished in 1830 and 1848.
27. Garratt. 120.
28. The student drinking tradition grew out of the kneipe held by the studentenverbindungen, who were members of the still-strong aristocracy. The also were known for their dueling traditions and promotion of military values. [39]
29. Barbara Lorenzkowski. Sounds of Ethnicity. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010. 107. While her book focuses on Buffalo, New York, it is the best book in English on choral singing traditions in Germany.
30. Dirk Verheyen. The German Question: A Cultural, Historical, and Geopolitical Exploration. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999. 7. Cited by Wikipedia, German Nationalism.
31. Verheyen. 7–8.
32. Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh. "Herder and the Idea of a Nation." Human Figurations. May 2018.
33. Wikipedia. "Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor."
34. Wilson. 821.
35. Wikipedia. "Switzerland in the Napoleonic Era."
36. Garratt. 117.
37. Charles Frederic Goss. Cincinnati, the Queen City, 1788-1912. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1912.
38. Theodor Körner. Leyer und Schwerdt. Berlin: Nicolai Universitäs- und Landesbibliothek, 1814.
39. German Wikipedia. "Studentenverbindung."
The English folk revival, as mentioned in the post for 7 April 2019, was partly a reaction against events precipitated by the 1707 Act of Union that ended conflicts with Scots, and partly an outgrowth of the rise of a middle class in an economy dependent more on trade and textiles than agriculture.
The religious wars in Hapsburg-controlled lands did not end until Josef II issued the Patent of Toleration in 1781 that allowed Protestants to exist so long as they did not erect churches. [1] In other parts of the Holy Roman Empire, which he headed, religion was dictated by the beliefs of hereditary leaders.
The Empire finally died when Napoléon defeated the Hapsburgs at Austerlitz in 1804. [2] By then, many parts of the German-speaking states and Switzerland had been invaded. Interest in the rights of man promoted by the French Revolution mingled with the realities of military defeat and economic chaos.
A number of intellectuals, including university students, wanted a state larger than a duchy that was capable of defending its people. [3] Since it couldn’t be based on heredity or religion, they sought some other criteria to define themselves.
Johann Gottfried Herder had suggested in 1766 that nations were composed of individuals who shared a language that socialized them into a common culture. [4] This implied a criticism of his native Prussia where Friedrich Wilhelm III spoke French better than German. [5]
He refined his view of history after reading Michael Denis’ translation of James MacPherson’s Ossian collection mentioned in the post for 7 April 2019. [6] Herder implied German-speakers could recover the cultural integrity they lost in the Renaissance by reading poetry written in the Middle Ages. [7] He published his first collection of folk songs in the 1778 Volkslieder. [8]
In his preface to the Volkslieder, Herder emphasized folk songs must be heard to be appreciated. [9] Even though the "verse, form and contents be bad, the song will live and will be sung. It will be improved upon by people, but the soul of the song, the poetic tone, and melody will remain." [10]
The Lutheran’s [11] emphasis on the ballad as something sung set his interests apart from those of the English who stressed the words. The act of singing, rather than the antiquity of the texts, became the way middling volk asserted their importance [12] in a society still marked by rigid class lines.
In 1809, while Napoléon still controlled large parts of the former Holy Roman Empire, Carl Friedrich Zelter organized a liedertafel in Berlin where twenty-four men met to sing around a table in imitation of King Arthur. The repertoire was innocuous songs about nature, [13] but everything the group did dramatized Herder’s view that a language was shaped by the environment where people lived, "their own earth and sky." [14] Within a few years new groups were organized along the Rhine. [15]
The same year, in Zürich, [16] Hans Georg Nägeli suggested "if people started singing together with hundreds of thousands, from any background whatsoever, they would feel more closely related to one another to such an extent that it would mean a decisive step towards a more complete humanity." [17] The son of a Swiss-Reformed rector [18] organized a male liederkranz to sing four-part music.
In 1823, Nägeli was considering moving to Frankfort-am-Main and scheduled a series of lectures on music for the commoner. He followed with a lecture tour the next year in the southwest. His lectures were published in Stuttgart in 1823. [19] James Garratt said, "by 1830, male-voice choirs on the Stuttgart model had sprung up in around two dozen towns in Württemberg, Baden and Bavaria." [20]
Würzburg invited several liederkranz to come together in 1828. [21] John Tibbetts said "the participants loved it so much that two years later that had a huge Sängerfest in Franfurt-am-Maim." [22] He noted it was a free city, "a neutral ground where Protestants and Catholics together could sing." [23]
The repertoire became more political in the 1830s and 1840s, when songs from the 1813 uprising against Napoléon were sung. Especially popular were poems by Theodor Körner. [24] He had written some to German folk melodies and sung them to a guitar or recited them in camp before he died at Gadebusch in 1813. [25]
Some Körner poems were set to music by Carl Maria von Weber in 1815. [26] This excited the jealousies of professional musicians who believed amateur groups should limit themselves to the hunting and drinking songs [27] of elite student clubs, [28] and pay to hear trained musicians, like themselves, perform more complex music.
Many of these vocal groups did not survive the repression that followed the failure of the 1848 revolution. Barbara Lorenzkowski remarked, singers turned to folk music [29] in groups renamed sängerbunds. Such local texts overtly denied support for a supra-state identity associated with the early liedertafel, but they also may have been protests against the hegemony being imposed by Prussia.
End Notes
1. Wikipedia. "Patent of Toleration."
2. Wikipedia. "Holy Roman Empire."
3. Many proposed "a modern German nation-state based upon liberal democracy, constitutionalism, representation, and popular sovereignty." [30] The dream animated the Revolutions of 1848, which were snuffed by conflicts between Prussia and the Hapsburgs who wanted to control the German-speaking state. [31] Their term, "pan German," was used for different ends by the Nazis, and fell into disfavor. Wikipedia had entries instead on "Romantic Nationalism," "German Nationalism," and "Civic Nationalism."
4. Michael Forster. "Johann Gottfried von Herder." Standford University Plato website. 23 October 2001; last updated 25 August 2017. He cited Herder’s On the Change of Taste from 1766, This Too a Philosophy of History, and On the Cognition and Sensation.
5. Rulemann Friedrich Eylert. Characteristic Traits and Domestic Life of Frederick William III, King of Prussia. Translated by Jonathan Birch. London: George Bell, 1845. 140–141. The emphasis on French culture was mentioned by Wilson [6] and by Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh. [32]
6. William A. Wilson. "Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism." Journal of Popular Culture 6:819–835:1978. 821. Wilson stressed Herder was influenced by the notes that drew on ideas developed in 1725 by Giambattista Vico in Scienza Nuova.
7. Wilson. 824. One could point to 1232 when Frederick II granted princes territorial autonomy within the Holy Roman Empire as the time when the idea of a shared culture began to disintegrate. [33]
8. Wilson said it was retitled Stimmen der Volker in Liedern after Herder’s death (page 828). "Lieder" is the German word for song.
9. Louise Kathryn Goebel. "Herder’s Conception of Popular Poetry." BA thesis in German. University of Illinois, June 1912. 12.
10. Herder. Preface to Volkslieder. Translated by Goebel. 13.
11. Andrew Hamilton. "Herder’s Theory of the Volksgeist." Counter-Currents website. 20 May 2011. "Ordained in 1765, Herder became assistant master (teacher) at the Lutheran cathedral school in Riga."
12. Herder wrote: "there is only one class in the state, the Volk (not the rabble) and the king belongs to this class as well as the peasant." Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität. Translated by Robert Reinhold Ergang. Herder and the Foundations of German Nationalism. New York: Octagon Books, 1966 edition. 206.
13. John C. Tibbetts. Schumann: A Chorus of Voices. Milwaukee: Amadeus Press, 2010. 59–60.
14. Quotation from Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Translated as Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind by T. Churchill. New York: Bergman Publishers, 1966 edition. 197. Cited by Alan Patten. "‘The Most Natural State’: Herder and Nationalism." Princeton University website. June 2010.
Elsewhere Patten said "Herder also associated nations and peoples with a particular territory, marked by a certain climate and topography." William Wilson observed: "From the writings of Charles de Montesquieu, Herder received further support for his concept of independent culture types. From them he also received a new idea-that these culture types are to a large degree determined by the physical environment in which nations are located." [23]
15. Tibbetts. 60.
16. Zürich had been a battlefield in 1799. [35]
17. Quoted by Kristinz Lajosi and Andreas Stynen. "Introduction." 1–13 in Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe. Edited by Lajosi and Stynen. Leiden: Brill, 2005. 3.
18. "Hans Georg Nägeli." Wetzipedia website.
19. Celia Applegate. Bach in Berlin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Publication information and page number not provided in on-line version.
20. James Garratt. Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 117.
21. Tibbetts. 60. Garratt said the first regional festival was held in Plochingen, Würtemburg, in June 1827. [36] Charles Frederic Goss thought the Würzburg festival occurred in 1845. [37]
22. Tibbetts. 60. Sängerfests were festivals that brought together musical groups from several areas; some were small, and others drew from large geographic areas.
23. Tibbetts. 60.
24. Garratt. 188.
25. Wikipedia. "Lyre and Sword." The collection was published in 1814 as Leyer und Schwerdt. [38]
26. Carl Maria von Weber and Theodor Körner. Leyer und Schwerdt, opus 41. Berlin: A. M. Schlesinger, 1815. It was republished in 1830 and 1848.
27. Garratt. 120.
28. The student drinking tradition grew out of the kneipe held by the studentenverbindungen, who were members of the still-strong aristocracy. The also were known for their dueling traditions and promotion of military values. [39]
29. Barbara Lorenzkowski. Sounds of Ethnicity. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010. 107. While her book focuses on Buffalo, New York, it is the best book in English on choral singing traditions in Germany.
30. Dirk Verheyen. The German Question: A Cultural, Historical, and Geopolitical Exploration. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999. 7. Cited by Wikipedia, German Nationalism.
31. Verheyen. 7–8.
32. Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh. "Herder and the Idea of a Nation." Human Figurations. May 2018.
33. Wikipedia. "Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor."
34. Wilson. 821.
35. Wikipedia. "Switzerland in the Napoleonic Era."
36. Garratt. 117.
37. Charles Frederic Goss. Cincinnati, the Queen City, 1788-1912. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1912.
38. Theodor Körner. Leyer und Schwerdt. Berlin: Nicolai Universitäs- und Landesbibliothek, 1814.
39. German Wikipedia. "Studentenverbindung."
Sunday, April 7, 2019
Folk Music Revival - England
Topic: Folk-Music Revival
"Kumbaya" became well known through the commercial folk-music revival in the 1960s. Fans of the popular music style have an agreed upon history that it began with Pete Seeger [1] in the 1940s and spread through popular groups like The Weavers [2] and Kingston Trio in the 1950s. It flourished in the 1960s with soloists like Joan Baez [3] and Bob Dylan only to die from a combination of political fatigue and changes in adolescent taste marked by the appearance of The Beatles. [4]
That chronology is accurate in that it highlights the artists who were most popular. What it fails to do is explain why the movement arose in the first place because it only documents the contributions of Seeger. In fact, the commercial folk music revival drew together many musical currents that each was the product of an earlier folk revival.
They all were political, since the mere acknowledgment society is stratified is controversial. Historians of medieval Europe used "folk" and "popular" as interchangeable labels for the arts of commoners in a two-tiered, agrarian society dominated by courts, manors, and churches. When urban areas emerged, the word "popular" was reallocated to merchants and skilled tradesmen. Folklore remained the domain of rural peoples. [5] Perhaps populaire or vernacular [6] would be a better term today since popular has become synonymous with mass media sales.
The beatification of the folk occurred in the nineteenth century with modernization that took the form of industrialism in England and political unification in central and eastern Europe. Some intellectuals reacted by positing an idyllic past that could be used as a paradigm for addressing then contemporary conditions.
Thomas Percy published the defining English collection in 1765 during the reign of George III. People still were coming to terms with the 1707 Act of Union that eliminated the Scots parliament. [7] Then, when Anne died in 1714, the last of the Stuarts was replaced with the German-speaking Hanovers.
James MacPherson had threatened to reignite the Jacobite conflicts in 1760 when he published Fragments of Ancient Poetry. [8] He claimed he had collected Gaelic ballads in the Scots highlands [9] written by Ossian, a third-century poet. [10] This implied Celts were the first great artists of the United Kingdom. Most important, they thrived before the Romans conquered the island. [11]
Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry [12] included both Scots and English ballads, but emphasized their age. They came from the period when Henry VII established the Tudors in 1485. [13] Popular knowledge of the middle ages was scant in the mid-1700s, and the term Gothic was used. Kenneth Clark noted the term implied both the flowering of medieval arts and the Goths [14] who sacked Rome in 410. [15]
Neither MacPherson nor Percy were purists; each revised their ballads for publication, and MacPherson probably created much of his material. As Danni Glover noted, both were writing for a newly emerging upper middle class market with readers who wanted "romantic wildness" presented in "a smooth, elegant style." [16]
Both excited the imagination of other writers. Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder were influenced by MacPherson. [17] Walter Scott published his The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border after reading Percy. [18]
At the time the two men were writing, the idea of an imagined story like a novel had not yet emerged. Each gave their works the illusion of history by claiming they were based on old manuscripts. [19] Percy made his available. MacPherson did not. [20]
Demands for textual purity came in the nineteenth century when scholars began collecting what they assumed were relics of the past. They began defining the traits that made the texts and tunes unique to the United Kingdom. Not surprisingly, they exhumed musical forms like pentatonic scales that existed before post-Bachian musical styles were introduced by Händel in the court of George I and by Haydn during the reign of George III. [21]
Francis James Child went farther. The Harvard professor set out to publish "every valuable copy of every known ballad" from English and Scots tradition, including manuscript versions, and variants from Germany and Scandinavia. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads [22] became the new master corpus.
As mentioned in the post for 6 February 2019, Child’s major impact in this country began in 1917 when Cecil Sharp found versions of old ballads still being sung in the Southern Appalachians. [23] That stimulated collectors to begin searching for what they still believed were survivals of some defunct tradition.
When Baez recorded "Kumbaya" on her first album in 1962, [24] she also performed three Child ballads: "Matty Groves" (Child 81), "Geordie" (209), and the "House Carpenter" (243). Percy noted the first was "ancient, and has been popular; we find it quoted in many old plays." [25] He did not mention the other two, though both were reported from Scotland and England according to Child. [26]
End Notes
1. Seeger will be discussed in a future post.
2. The Weavers were discussed in the post for 3 October 2017.
3. Baez was discussed in the post for 9 October 2017.
4. Wikipedia. "American Folk-Music Revival." This is as good a quick summary as exists online.
5. Modern folklorists have changed their focus from traditional art forms and anthropology to the study of communication and sociology, and changed the name of their field to folkloristics.
6. This term was used by Marina Ritzarev. "‘A Singing Peasant’: An Historical Look at National Identity in Russian Music." Le Web Pédagogique website. 2014.
7. Steve Newman. Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 44.
8. James Macpherson. Fragments of Ancient Poetry. Edinburgh: G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1760.
9. Wikipedia. "Ossian" and "James Macpherson."
10. "Fragments of Ossian, an Invented Early Scots Epic Poem." British Museum website.
11. Danni Glover. "Studies in Language Change in Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. MPhil thesis. University of Glasgow, 2014. 15.
12. Thomas Percy. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. London: J. Dodsley, 1765.
13. Stephanie Barczewski. Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 100.
14. Kenneth Clark. The Gothic Revival. London: Constable and Company, 1928; 1964 Penguin edition. 24–25. "in 1750 the middle age was still one dark welter from which the Goths alone emerged with a convenient name" (page 24.)
15. Wikipedia. "Goths."
16. Glover. 17.
17. Wikipedia, Ossian.
18. Ray M. Lawless. Folksingers and Folksongs in America. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1965 edition. 271.
19. Glover. 38. She was discussing the work of Ian Watts. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkley: University of California Press, 1957.
20. MacPherson’s use of verisimilitude led to charges that his work was a forgery, rather than a piece of creative writing like what is now called historical fiction.
21. This was discussed in more detail in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.
22. Francis James Child. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882-1898. Quotation from "Advertisement to Part I," 1:vii (five volume edition).
23. Cecil James Sharp and Olive Dame Campbell. English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917.
24. Joan Baez. Joan Baez in Concert. Vanguard VRS9112. 1962.
25. Thomas Percy. Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript. Edited by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall. London: Trübner, 1867–1868. Quotation from Child 2:243 (five volume edition).
26. Both appeared in volume four of the five volume edition of Child.
"Kumbaya" became well known through the commercial folk-music revival in the 1960s. Fans of the popular music style have an agreed upon history that it began with Pete Seeger [1] in the 1940s and spread through popular groups like The Weavers [2] and Kingston Trio in the 1950s. It flourished in the 1960s with soloists like Joan Baez [3] and Bob Dylan only to die from a combination of political fatigue and changes in adolescent taste marked by the appearance of The Beatles. [4]
That chronology is accurate in that it highlights the artists who were most popular. What it fails to do is explain why the movement arose in the first place because it only documents the contributions of Seeger. In fact, the commercial folk music revival drew together many musical currents that each was the product of an earlier folk revival.
They all were political, since the mere acknowledgment society is stratified is controversial. Historians of medieval Europe used "folk" and "popular" as interchangeable labels for the arts of commoners in a two-tiered, agrarian society dominated by courts, manors, and churches. When urban areas emerged, the word "popular" was reallocated to merchants and skilled tradesmen. Folklore remained the domain of rural peoples. [5] Perhaps populaire or vernacular [6] would be a better term today since popular has become synonymous with mass media sales.
The beatification of the folk occurred in the nineteenth century with modernization that took the form of industrialism in England and political unification in central and eastern Europe. Some intellectuals reacted by positing an idyllic past that could be used as a paradigm for addressing then contemporary conditions.
Thomas Percy published the defining English collection in 1765 during the reign of George III. People still were coming to terms with the 1707 Act of Union that eliminated the Scots parliament. [7] Then, when Anne died in 1714, the last of the Stuarts was replaced with the German-speaking Hanovers.
James MacPherson had threatened to reignite the Jacobite conflicts in 1760 when he published Fragments of Ancient Poetry. [8] He claimed he had collected Gaelic ballads in the Scots highlands [9] written by Ossian, a third-century poet. [10] This implied Celts were the first great artists of the United Kingdom. Most important, they thrived before the Romans conquered the island. [11]
Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry [12] included both Scots and English ballads, but emphasized their age. They came from the period when Henry VII established the Tudors in 1485. [13] Popular knowledge of the middle ages was scant in the mid-1700s, and the term Gothic was used. Kenneth Clark noted the term implied both the flowering of medieval arts and the Goths [14] who sacked Rome in 410. [15]
Neither MacPherson nor Percy were purists; each revised their ballads for publication, and MacPherson probably created much of his material. As Danni Glover noted, both were writing for a newly emerging upper middle class market with readers who wanted "romantic wildness" presented in "a smooth, elegant style." [16]
Both excited the imagination of other writers. Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder were influenced by MacPherson. [17] Walter Scott published his The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border after reading Percy. [18]
At the time the two men were writing, the idea of an imagined story like a novel had not yet emerged. Each gave their works the illusion of history by claiming they were based on old manuscripts. [19] Percy made his available. MacPherson did not. [20]
Demands for textual purity came in the nineteenth century when scholars began collecting what they assumed were relics of the past. They began defining the traits that made the texts and tunes unique to the United Kingdom. Not surprisingly, they exhumed musical forms like pentatonic scales that existed before post-Bachian musical styles were introduced by Händel in the court of George I and by Haydn during the reign of George III. [21]
Francis James Child went farther. The Harvard professor set out to publish "every valuable copy of every known ballad" from English and Scots tradition, including manuscript versions, and variants from Germany and Scandinavia. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads [22] became the new master corpus.
As mentioned in the post for 6 February 2019, Child’s major impact in this country began in 1917 when Cecil Sharp found versions of old ballads still being sung in the Southern Appalachians. [23] That stimulated collectors to begin searching for what they still believed were survivals of some defunct tradition.
When Baez recorded "Kumbaya" on her first album in 1962, [24] she also performed three Child ballads: "Matty Groves" (Child 81), "Geordie" (209), and the "House Carpenter" (243). Percy noted the first was "ancient, and has been popular; we find it quoted in many old plays." [25] He did not mention the other two, though both were reported from Scotland and England according to Child. [26]
End Notes
1. Seeger will be discussed in a future post.
2. The Weavers were discussed in the post for 3 October 2017.
3. Baez was discussed in the post for 9 October 2017.
4. Wikipedia. "American Folk-Music Revival." This is as good a quick summary as exists online.
5. Modern folklorists have changed their focus from traditional art forms and anthropology to the study of communication and sociology, and changed the name of their field to folkloristics.
6. This term was used by Marina Ritzarev. "‘A Singing Peasant’: An Historical Look at National Identity in Russian Music." Le Web Pédagogique website. 2014.
7. Steve Newman. Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 44.
8. James Macpherson. Fragments of Ancient Poetry. Edinburgh: G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1760.
9. Wikipedia. "Ossian" and "James Macpherson."
10. "Fragments of Ossian, an Invented Early Scots Epic Poem." British Museum website.
11. Danni Glover. "Studies in Language Change in Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. MPhil thesis. University of Glasgow, 2014. 15.
12. Thomas Percy. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. London: J. Dodsley, 1765.
13. Stephanie Barczewski. Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 100.
14. Kenneth Clark. The Gothic Revival. London: Constable and Company, 1928; 1964 Penguin edition. 24–25. "in 1750 the middle age was still one dark welter from which the Goths alone emerged with a convenient name" (page 24.)
15. Wikipedia. "Goths."
16. Glover. 17.
17. Wikipedia, Ossian.
18. Ray M. Lawless. Folksingers and Folksongs in America. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1965 edition. 271.
19. Glover. 38. She was discussing the work of Ian Watts. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkley: University of California Press, 1957.
20. MacPherson’s use of verisimilitude led to charges that his work was a forgery, rather than a piece of creative writing like what is now called historical fiction.
21. This was discussed in more detail in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.
22. Francis James Child. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882-1898. Quotation from "Advertisement to Part I," 1:vii (five volume edition).
23. Cecil James Sharp and Olive Dame Campbell. English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917.
24. Joan Baez. Joan Baez in Concert. Vanguard VRS9112. 1962.
25. Thomas Percy. Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript. Edited by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall. London: Trübner, 1867–1868. Quotation from Child 2:243 (five volume edition).
26. Both appeared in volume four of the five volume edition of Child.
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