Excerpt from Scots Folk Song On the interpretative side the ancient song and ballad indeed presuppose a traditional culture, a culture which, as Yeats has pointed out in his essay on Popular Poetry, cannot be taken for granted in these days, and much study and imagination, therefore, may have to be brought to bear on the subject before it will yield its full message. Such is one of the peculiar difficulties on the interpretative side. On the technical side there is much to accomplish, for it is a great mistake to imagine ...
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Excerpt from Scots Folk Song On the interpretative side the ancient song and ballad indeed presuppose a traditional culture, a culture which, as Yeats has pointed out in his essay on Popular Poetry, cannot be taken for granted in these days, and much study and imagination, therefore, may have to be brought to bear on the subject before it will yield its full message. Such is one of the peculiar difficulties on the interpretative side. On the technical side there is much to accomplish, for it is a great mistake to imagine that simple Scots songs are simple in performance. The voice must be cultured and controlled. But after studies in voice-production have been made, we are only at the beginning of things. Although a fine cantabile type thereis in Scots Song, but few of the best of our songs can be regarded as mere opportunities for vocal display. Indeed in some of the character songs and lilts (in which we are very rich) you must put your voice in your pocket, so to speak, and bring out only so much as is required at the moment to supply the necessary lilt and colour. On the purely musical side it cannot be too much insisted upon with young singers - and some not so very young either - that accent and shape, beauty of form, intelligibility of phrase, and the hypnotism of rhythm which plays such an all-important part in all art - can be attained only by carefully worked out gradations and that such gradations can be achieved only by fierce economy, by cutting away as well as by adding on, by lessening the tone-quantity in one place that it may stand out in relief in another. If, indeed, you begin a tone-curving phrase with one shadow of a shade too much tone, you may from the first have made your' intended crescendo curve impossible. And if - after a point, an accent arrived at, worked up to - you lean with the faintest too much stress or too long duration on a weak following beat - a common rhythmical feature in Scots music - you have wiped out again your climax, your point, you have destroyed your lilt, blurred your melodic shape. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at ... This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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