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"Oral traditional literature . . . is . . . a distinct
and very important species of poetry. Its historical and
natural place is anterior to the appearance of the poetry
of art, to which it has formed a step, and by which it has
been regularly displaced, and, in some cases, all but extinguished.
Whenever a people in the course of its development reaches
a certain intellectual and moral stage, it will feel an
impulse to express itself, and the form of expression to
which it is first impelled is, as is well known, not prose,
but verse, and in fact narrative verse. Such poetry...is
in its essence an expression of our common human nature,
and so of universal and indestructible interest."
- Walter MorrisHart. "Professor Child
and the Ballad," quoting Francis James Child in Proceedings
of the Modern Language Association of America, XXI. 1906,
p. 756.
"In primitive times before there were newspapers to
tell us the news, history books to teach us the past, and
novels to excite our imagination, all these things had to
be done by the ballad singer, who naturally had to do it
all from memory.To this end he cast what he had to tell
into a metrical form and thus the ballad stanza arose. As
a further aid to memory and to add to the emotional value
of what he had to say he added musical notes to his words."
- Ralph Vaughan Williams. National Music
and Other Essays. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987
"All products of the primitive mind that are orally
preserved and are not written down are in a perpetual state
of flux. The very conditions of their existence postulate
change and growth."
- Cecil James Sharp. English Folk Song:
Some Conclusions. 4th edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth,
1965. p. 14.
"[Peasant music] is . . . the classical model of how
to express an idea musically in the most concise form, with
the greatest simplicity of means, with freshness and life,
briefly yet completely and properly proportioned."
-
Béla Bartók.
"The Relation of Folk-song to the Development of the
Art Music of our Time," The Sackbut. London:
June 1921. p. 5-11
"Long before the earliest recorded compositions by
professional music-makers, the plain people sang and danced,
chanted lullabies and work songs and prayers to their gods.
All over the world, in ancient times as today, people unable
to read or write a note of music have been and are rich
in their feeling for melody and rhythm. Their music-making
defies the rules of the schools, and in many ways it may
sound rough and crude to the sophisticated ear; but if all
the evidence of history is worth anything, it goes to show
that before there ever was such a thing as a trained musician,
music was an art and a practice well known and deeply loved
by the humble of the earth."
- Elie
Siegmeister. The Music Lover's Handbook. New York:
William Morrow and Co., 1943. p. 17
