Folk music in historical context
Since folk music lives in oral tradition, its history can best be understood through a study of its relationship to other musics. Many folk songs collected in oral tradition have been traced to literary sources, often of considerable antiquity. In medieval Europe, under the expansion of Christianity, attempts were made to suppress folk music because of its association with heathen rites and customs; yet some aspects of European folk music became assimilated into medieval Christian liturgical music, and vice versa. Folk music has also been consciously incorporated into European art music compositions throughout history, especially during periods of renewal, beginning with the Renaissance.
During the late 15th and 16th centuries, the literate urban classes responded more favourably to folk music than their predecessors had in the medieval period. The humanistic attitudes of the Renaissance, which brought about the elevation of nature and of antiquity, encouraged the acceptance of folk music as a genre of rustic antique song. Some music in Renaissance manuscripts is presumed to be folk song by virtue of its musical simplicity and the rural and archaic evocations of its texts. Renaissance composers made extensive use of folk and popular music. Typical genres include polyphonic folk song settings and folk song quodlibets, or combinations of familiar songs. Folk tunes were often used as structural and motivic raw material for motets and masses; likewise, the music of the Protestant Reformation borrowed from folk music.
The use of folk music receded in the Baroque period (about 1600–1750), but the relationship of folk music to art music became a topic of interest in the late 18th century, when Western intellectuals began to glorify folk and peasant life. Folk music came to be venerated as a spontaneous creation of peoples unencumbered by artistic self-consciousness and aesthetic theories; it was considered to embody the common experience of inhabitants of the locale. These traits make folk music a fructifying source for art music, particularly when it is intended to evoke a particular nation or ethnic group. The nationalist movements of 19th- and early 20th-century art music drew on folk tunes and their styles, as well as folk dances and themes from folklore and village life, to develop distinctive repertories. Leaders in these movements included Bedrich Smetana and Dvořák for Czech music, Edvard Grieg for Norwegian, Mikhail Glinka and Modest Mussorgsky for Russian, Bartók for Hungarian, Georges Enesco for Romanian, and Aaron Copland and Roy Harris for American cultures.
Folk music is closely related to popular music in several ways. Societies that have developed popular music also have a folk music tradition, or remnants thereof. The partial duplication of repertories and style indicates such cross-fertilization that a given song may sometimes be called both folk and popular. With reference to music, folk and popular are two points on a musical continuum, rather than discrete bodies of music. Popular music, like folk music, has become a significant marker of ethnicity and nation, and folk music has become gradually more like popular music, produced by professionals and disseminated through mass media for consumption by an urban, nonparticipating mass audience.
Church music and folk music have been related at various times. Some church music derives from the application of religious texts to secular folk tunes. This practice may be seen, for example, in the hymns of the Protestant Reformation and in the revival hymns of 19th-century American camp meetings, which were called folk hymns because of their origins and associations with folklike groups.
A very significant way in which folk music is preserved is through its association with folk dance. Throughout European history, dancing by rural folk and village dances in urban and court society provided a major venue for folk music; although most of this music is instrumental, vocal folk dance music, sometimes sung by the dancers themselves, is common. In northern Europe even narrative ballads were used for dancing. There are many types of folk dance, some widespread throughout Europe, others peculiar to nations and regions, each with its typical musical style. Certain musical forms are characteristic of the folk dance music of various parts of Europe. Most prominent is a form type with paired lines, the second a variation of the first (e.g., AA′BB′ and so on). From the 1980s on, it would seem that practices of folk dancing in urban and student society have been responsible for the very preservation of folk music. Folk dance, with its accompanying music, is a staple of entertainment in the international tourist industry; the maintenance of folk dance has therefore become a matter of major concern to the ministries of culture in eastern Europe and in many of the world’s semi-industrialized and developing nations.