The end of the revival
the folk aesthetic and its ‘mutation’
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v4i3.289Keywords:
aesthetic, folk, performanceAbstract
Do ‘folk musicians’ (whatever they are) think about what they are trying to do when they perform in ways different to those of ‘pop musicians’, ‘rock musicians’ or ‘classical musicians’? In other words, is there such a thing as a ‘folk aesthetic’, and can it be identified through the musical performances they give? (Such an implicit identification is always more satisfactory than any explicit one since it is harder to falsify.) After contextualizing the relationship between English folk and popular musics over the past few decades, this paper will argue that such an aesthetic can be identified, through a judicious combination of the analysis of recordings and written accounts, and it will proceed to do so. It will also argue, and demonstrate, that such an aesthetic has begun to mutate over the most recent decade, and suggest a possible consequence of such a mutation.
References
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Bearman, C. J. 2001. ‘The English Folk Music Movement 1898–1914’. PhD thesis, University of Hull.
Bird, John. 1999. Percy Grainger. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boyes, Georgina. 1993. The Imagined Village. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Broadwood, Lucy. 1907. ‘Songs from Country Waterford, Ireland’. Journal of the Folk-Song Society 3/1: 3–38.
Brocken, Michael. 2003. The British Folk Revival, 1944–2002. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Burns, Robert. 2004. ‘British Folk Songs in Popular Music Settings’. In Folk Song: Tradition, Revival and Re-creation, ed. Ian Russell and David Atkinson, 115–29. Aberdeen: Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen.
Clarke, Eric, and Nicholas Cook, ed. 2004. Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cowdery, John. 1990. The Melodic Tradition of Ireland. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.
Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. Nineteenth-Century Music. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dunn, Ginette. 1980. The Fellowship of Son. London: Croom Helm.
Francmanis, John. 2000. ‘National Music to National Redeemer: The Consolidation of a “Folk-song” Construct in Edwardian England’. Popular Music 21/1: 1–25.
Grainger, Percy. 1908. ‘Collecting with the Phonograph’. Journal of the Folk Song Society no. 12, 3/3: 147–242.
—1915. ‘The Impress of Personality in Unwritten Music’. Musical Quarterly 1/3 (July): 416–35. doi:10.1093/mq/I.3.416
Gregory, E. David. 2006. Victorian Songhunters. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow.
Harker, Dave. 1985. Fakesong. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Hinton, Brian, and Geoff Wall. 2002. The Guv’nor and the Rise of Folk Rock 1945–1973. London: Helter Skelter.
Hodgkinson, Will. 2009. The Ballad of Britain. London: Portico.
Laing, Dave, Karl Dallas, Robin Denselow and Robert Shelton. 1975. Electric Muse: The Story of Folk into Rock. London: Methuen.
Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel. 2009. The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performance. London: CHARM, http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/studies/chapters/intro.html
Lloyd, A. L.. 1951. The Singing Englishman. Workers’ Educational Association.
—1967. Folk Song in England. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
—1975. Folk Song in England. London: Paladin.
MacKinnon, Niall. 1994. The British Folk Scene. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Moore, Allan F. 2005. ‘The Persona-Environment Relation in Recorded Song’. Music Theory Online 11/4 (October), http://www.music-theory.org/mto/issues/mto.05.11.4/ mto.05.11.4.moore_frames.html.
—2007. ‘Authenticity as Authentication’. In Critical Readings in Popular Musicology, ed. Allan F. Moore. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Muir, Willa. 1965. Living with Ballads. London: Hogarth Press.
Nettel, Reginald. 1954. Sing a Song of England. London: Phoenix House.
Palmer, Roy, ed. 1980. Everyman’s Book of British Ballads. London: J. M. Dent and Sons.
Pegg, Bob. 1976. Folk. London: Wildwood House.
Peters, Brian. 2006. ‘Simplicity Man’. fRoots 282 (December): 31–33.
Pickering, Michael. 1982. Village Song and Culture. London: Croom Helm.
Rink, John, ed. 2002. Musical Performance: A Guide to Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sharp, Cecil. 1907. Folksong: Some Conclusions, 2nd edn. Taunton: Barnicott & Pearce, Athenaeum Press.
Shields, Hugh. 1993. Narrative Singing in Ireland. Dublin: Irish Academic Press.
Sweers, Britta. 2005. Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tagg, Philip. n.d. Introductory Notes to the Semiotics of Music, http://www.tagg.org/xpdfs/ semiotug.pdf.
Verrier, Michael. 2004. ‘Folk Club or Epic Theatre: Brecht’s Influence on the Performance Practice of Ewan MacColl’. In Folk Song: Tradition, Revival and Re-creation, ed. Ian Russell and David Atkinson, 108–14. Aberdeen: Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen.
Woods, Fred. 1979. Folk Revival. Poole: Blandford Press.
Published
2011-02-10
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Moore, A. (2011). The end of the revival: the folk aesthetic and its ‘mutation’. Popular Music History, 4(3), 289–307. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v4i3.289
