Folk Song Style and Culture

Alan Lomax, Alan Lomax

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351519663
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Folk Music

Song and dance style--viewed as nonverbal communications about culture--are here related to social structure and cultural history. Patterns of performance, theme, text and movement are analyzed in large samples of films an recordings from the whole range of human culture, according to the methods explained in this volume. Cantometrics, which means song as a measure of man, finds that traditions of singing trace the main historic distributions of human culture and that specific traits of performance are communications about identifiable aspects of society. The predictable and universal relations between expressive communication and social organization, here established for the first time, open up the possibility of a scientific aesthetics, useful to planners.

PART I
Folk Song Style and Culture

Alan Lomax

1
The Stylistic Method

Alan Lomax

A SONG style, like other human things, is a pattern of learned behavior, common to the people of a culture. Singing is a specialized act of communication, akin to speech, but far more formally organized and redundant. Because of its heightened redundancy, singing attracts and holds the attention of groups; indeed, as in most primitive societies, it invites group participation. Whether chorally performed or not, however, the chief function of song is to express the shared feelings and mold the joint activities of some human community. It is to be expected, therefore, that the content of the sung communication should be social rather than individual, normative rather than particular. The cantometric experiment has, in fact, shown that song style is an excellent indicator of cultural pattern.

So far as we know, every branch of the human species has its songs. Indeed, singing is a universal human trait found in all known cultures as a specialized and easily identifiable kind of vocal behavior. During this century, especially in the past twenty years, recordings of song have been made in every quarter of the globe in all sorts of cultural settings. Probably singing is the only human behavior which has been documented so generally and in a form so adaptable for laboratory research. A recording can be played again and again for judges, and their observations can be compared to those obtained from repeated auditions of other recordings. Thus a modern library of musical tapes provides ideal material for a comparative study of social communication. The cantometric system sets up a behavioral grid upon which all song styles can be ranged and compared. This grid was not designed to replicate the music, already accurately recorded on tape, but to rate it on a series of rating scales (loud to soft, tense to lax, etc.) taxonomically applicable to song performance in all cultures. Thus song can be compared to song, song to speech, and hopefully to other aspects of behavior.

The main findings of this study are two. First, the geography of song styles traces the main paths of human migration and maps the known historical distributions of culture. Second, some traits of song performance show a powerful relationship to features of social structure that regulate interaction in all cultures. Neither of these ideas is new to the thoughtful humanist. However, the statistical confirmation is so strong as to indicate that expressive behavior may be one of the most sensitive and reliable indicators of culture pattern and social structure. Apparently, as people live so do they sing.

The Cultural Grey-Out

The work was filled with a sense of urgency. To a folklorist the uprooting and destruction of traditional cultures and the consequent grey-out or disappearance of the human variety presents as serious a threat to the future happiness of mankind as poverty, overpopulation, and even war. Soon there will be nowhere to go and nothing worth staying at home for. War is wasteful of lives, but only rarely and at its most dreadful does it eradicate a whole way of life. On the other hand, big government, national education, information networks, and a worldwide marketing system kill off cultures whose ways do not conform to those of the power center. Our western mass-production and communication systems are inadvertently destroying the languages, traditions, cuisines, and creative styles that once gave every people and every locality a distinctive character—indeed their principal reason for living. Tribes in New Guinea, dreaming that they will possess the endless wealth of the European, literally throw their culture into the sea and sit waiting for a new cargo to come in by ship or plane. Everywhere the pitchmen and the preachers persuade the innocent of the earth to laugh at or to forget the unified folkways of their forefathers, in exchange for broken speech, plastic saints, and novel vices. Meantime Telstar rises balefully on the western horizon.

The folk, the primitive, the nonindustrial societies account for most of the cultural variety of the planet. Though rich in the expressive and communicative arts, these folk communities seldom have the means to record, evaluate, or transmit their songs and tales except by word of mouth; and the noise of our hard-sell society is drowning out the quieter communications of these word-of-mouth traditions. Indeed, the bookish and literate West labels all expressive output not enshrined in print as inferior per se. Certainly any people without some technique for institutionalizing and fostering its traditions is at the mercy of societies with printing presses, schools, and broadcasting systems. Such a lack of knowledge-saving devices and educational institutions, however, has little or nothing to do with the universal or local value of a style of communication. Each style is a way of experiencing, transforming, knowing, and expressing life, sharpened by the genius of a people through many centuries, as it adapted itself to some special environment.

When a civilized European or Oriental celebrates the virtues of his heritage, he mentions its music, literature, art, science, and history. The education he bestows on his children consists largely of a grounding in these humane traditions, for with such reinforcements young people gain a sense of full-blown identity. In the end, a person’s emotional stability is a function of his command of a communication style that binds him to a human community with a history. As our aggressive and economically motivated communication system smashes the tribal, local, and neighborhood communication worlds, whole generations are left with a sense of belonging nowhere and we, ourselves, losing our local roots, become daily more alienated.

The loss in communicative potential for the whole human race is very grave, for these threatened communication systems represent much of what the human race has created in its thousands of years of wandering across the earth. In them lies a treasure, a human resource, whose worth is incalculable, and which can never be replaced when it has been wasted and lost. Enumeration of some of the new expressive directions that have (without our understanding how) recently emerged from the cross-fertilization of styles, gives one a sense of the potency of tradition:

1. The effect of African sculpture on modern painting.
2. The bloom of jazz out of Europe and Africa in New Orleans.
3. The flowering of popular dance in South America from a cross of Latin, African, and Indian influences.
4. The birth of Israeli music from Arab and Central European streams.

The health and life-giving delight of each of these cultural hybrids stems from the merging of vigorous and independent parent styles. The geneticist tells us that a healthy genetic future depends upon the survival of the present gene pool with its variety of strains. So, too, healthy cultural development depends upon the survival of the world pool of cultural styles in all their variety. Folk and primitive arts, their flinty structure tested at the fireside across the centuries, have always strengthened ...