folk music

Transmission and variation

Because a folk song lives largely through oral transmission, it ordinarily does not exist in a standard form. In each region of a country, community, village, or family, and even in the repertory of each singer over time, it may have significant differences. Each performance of a song may be unique. In colloquial discussions of folk songs (or tales), the terms variant and version are used to highlight the differences in ways of singing the same song (or telling the same story). In the technical literature about folklore, the terms version, variant, and form may be used to express degrees of relationship. Thus, for example, several quite similar performances by one singer might constitute a version of a song. Several versions, not so similar to each other, would constitute a variant. Several variants, comprising a body of performances of the song that are clearly related but not homogeneous, might be designated as a form. Groups of songs (words or music) that appear, on the basis of analysis, to be related are called tune families or text types. Text types, such as narratives that form the basis of ballads, may have numerous variants and versions. The ballad usually known as “Lady Isabel and the False Knight,” studied by Iivar Kemppinen, has about 1,800 renditions, collected in nations throughout Europe and the Americas. Bertrand H. Bronson, assembling all available versions of the English ballad “Barbara Allen,” found 198 versions of the story sung in the English-speaking world, accompanied by tunes belonging to three tune families.

In the development of variants, for example, a song with four musical lines (e.g., ABCD) may lose two of these lines and take on the form ABAB. In turn, two new lines may be substituted for the initial two, giving it a form EFAB. Folk tunes also change when they cross ethnic or cultural boundaries. A German variant, for example, may exhibit characteristics of German folk music, while its variant in the Czech Republic, although recognizably related, will assume the stylistic traits of Czech folk music.

Folk cultures seem to vary greatly in the internal relationships of their repertoires. English folk music, for example, is believed to consist largely of about 40 tune families, each of which descends from a single song. And the majority of English folk songs appear to be members of only seven such tune families. Hungarian folk music, on the other hand, contains some 200 units that could be described as the equivalent of tune families. In the folk music of eastern Iran, some types of poetry—e.g., the widely loved quatrain type chahār-baytī—are all sung to versions of a single tune.