No attempt can be made here to indicate the peculiarities of particular national styles, but certain general remarks may be offered. Most characteristics follow from the necessary simplicity of all folk-music, which is the product, not of formal analysis or patient working out on paper, but of instinct and taste operating extempore, and which depends for its success upon the ease with which it can be caught, remembered and repeated by the unstudious mind.
Folk-songs are normally melodies of moderate length, laid out in more or less symmetrical lines and strophes that correspond with the plari of a verse-text. Each line is usually somewhat complete in itself, having a specific figure or pattern that ends with a cadence or 'fall.' The lines usually tend to form couplets or other simple groups that are so similar or contrasted that the mind as easily associates them together as it does rhyming verse-lines. Usually the text is in parallel stanzas, all of which can be sung to a single musical strophe.
Even in the oldest specimens there is a tendency to adhere throughout to a single key or tonality, though often with a clear perception of the value of dominant closes in the middle cadences. The kind of tonality preferred varies considerably in different countries. Keltic and Scandinavian songs, for example, show a predilection for minor scales, sometimes of the pentatonic variety.
The older French and German songs are not seldom based upon the mediaeval church modes, .but as a rule drift toward the minor or major as now recognized. The evident appreciation of the major mode is the more notable because found ata time when scientific music was still unwilling to desert the arbitrary tone-system that it inherited from antiquity. The popular mind seems to have had an instinct for tone-relation as we know if to-day.
Folk-dances as such are properly made up of steps and motions in brief series of equal duration - following the idea, now the basis of musical 'form,' that phrases should be two or four measures long. These figures are sometimes simply repeated over and over, sometimes strung together . in sets, making, a kind of dance-stanza. Each particular sort of dance is characterized by some special step or similar device. The songs or instrumental airs intended to accompany and guide these motions are fitted to them at every point, indicating musically what the dancer executes orchestically.
In both songs and dances the fundamental rhythm is emphatic and regular, either duple or triple, and the phrase-structure is so built upon it that the 'form' is plain and easily kept in memory. All these features are of historic importance, since they are traceable at periods when formal composition was timidly groping its way, and when the supposed value of the old modes and of contrapuntal structure, with its lack of 'form,' was keeping musicians from these more natural methods.
All of them were noted in the Troubadour and Minnesinger periods (sees. 37-40), but their decided influence belongs rather to the 15th and 16th centuries. Even until 1600 some features of folk-music seemed to educated musicians rather vulgar. To-day we can see that there was no more valuable element in the evolution of modern styles than this same despised music of the people's instinct.
Early Modern Musical Activity in Persia: How the New Advances Started to Take Form?
