Love Songs: The Hidden History by Ted Gioia

Author:Ted Gioia [Gioia, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199357574
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-12-16T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Folk Songs and Love Songs

Humans vent great passions by giving themselves over to song.—Giambattista Vico

Around the time Mozart was composing his first operas, German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder discovered folk music, and liked what he heard. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say he liked the idea of what he heard. Herder was enamored with the concept of the Volk, the common people whose vitality and creative energy offered a much-needed alternative to the cold rationalism brought about by the Enlightenment. Where others saw only an unseemly rabble, crass and uneducated, Herder found ‘authenticity’ and drew on its example to define an aesthetic attitude that today we would call, “return to the roots.”

It’s easy to poke fun at Herr Herder, who made a big commotion about something the Volk had been doing in plain view for many centuries. After all, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote about German folk music before ad 100, and Emperor Julian also tried his hand at Teutonic ethnomusicology. “I have observed that even the barbarians across the Rhine sing savage songs composed in language not unlike the croaking of harsh-voiced birds,” the emperor noted, although he conceded that the noisy vocalizing probably sounded better to the performers themselves than it did to him. Some 1,400 years later Herder, arriving late on the scene, not only noticed the singing, but gave it his fervent blessing, championing the robust Kultur des Volkes (folk culture) over the sterile Kultur der Gelehrten (learned culture). Perhaps in emulation of the Roman emperor, Herder admitted that non-Germans, even “savages,” might have their own glorious folk music. “Europeans have everywhere been keenly touched by the crude sounds of lamentation of the savages,” he wrote with enthusiasm, and even found words of praise for their primitive love songs (or, in Herder’s words, their “heartfelt, inarticulate screams of affection”).

At least as far back as the time of the Shijing, circa the sixth century bc, cultural elites showed an interest in songs of the common people, and took steps to preserve them. If we can believe traditional accounts, Confucius might even deserve our praise as the first ethnomusicologist. Not every ruler or sage was similarly receptive to this music, but even during periods of repression and prohibition, the songs of the folk continued to find an eager audience and attract new generations of performers. Yet, in most times and places, only a tiny portion of this music was preserved, and the scholar who wants to uncover the songs of everyday life in earlier ages must probe deeply and cross conventional boundaries between disciplines to find even scraps of relevant information. This will now change.

The rise of the printing press gave more visibility to the songs of the streets and countryside, and though the earliest publications after Gutenberg’s revolution were religious in nature, popular songs and poetry soon followed—eventually in huge quantities. Published on single sheets as broadsides, or in inexpensive booklets known as chapbooks, these works were sold in the streets or door-to-door and found a ready audience, especially in Britain, well into the nineteenth century.

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