Folk Song Style and Culture

386 Pages·1968·58.271 MB·English

by  Alan Lomax

Folk
Song
Style and
Culture
WORLD MAP OF CULTURE
REGIONS AND AREAS
(odopttd from Murdock)
Alan
Lomax
Folk
Song
Style and
Culture
¡1 Routledge
¡¡¡^^ Taylor & Francis Croup
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First published 1968 by Transaction Publishers
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Copyright © 1968 by the American Association for the Advancement of Sci­
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 77-80865
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Lomax, Alan, 1915-2002
Folk song style and culture.
Reprint of the 1968 ed. published by American Association for the
Advancement of Science. II. Title. III. Series: American Association for
th Advancement of Science. Series Publication; no. 88.
[ML3545.L63 1978] 784.4'9
ISBN: 0-87855-640-0 (pbk.) 77-80865
ISBN 13: 978-0-87855-640-3 (pbk)
A Staff Report on Cantometrics
Presented at the Washington Meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement
of Science, December, 1966.
ALAN LOMAX, Project Director
CONRAD ARENSBERG, Co-Director
EDWIN E. ERICKSON, Ethnologist
VICTOR GRAUER, Musicologist
NORMAN BERKOWITZ, Programmer
IRMGARD BARTENIEFF, Director of Dance Research
FORRESTINE PAULAY, Dance Specialist
JOAN HALIFAX, Research Assistant
BARBARA AYRES, Ethnologist
NORMAN N. MARKEL, Consulting Linguist
ROSWELL RUDD, Music Analyst
MONIKA VIZEDOM, Ethnologist
FRED PENG, Linguist
ROGER WESCOTT, Consulting Linguist
DAVID BROWN, Consulting Statistician
The Cantometrics Project is administered by the Bureau of
Applied Social Research of Columbia University.

Foreword
MANY of the chapters in this volume were first presented orally at the An­
nual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
in Washington on December 27, 1966, when the staff of the Cantometrics
Project of Columbia University gave a day-long report to the Anthropology
Section (H), entitled Frontiers of Anthropology: Cantometrics and Culture.
The length of this symposium was, perhaps, warranted by the novelty of the
method discussed, the applications and the tests to which it had been sub­
jected during a four-year period, and the importance for social science of its
principal finding—that song style symbolizes and reinforces certain impor­
tant aspects of social structure in all cultures. For the first time, predictable
and universal relationships have been established between the expressive and
communication processes, on the one hand, and social structure and culture
pattern, on the other. A science of social aesthetics which looks at all social
process in terms of stylistic continuity and change may now be envisaged.
We wish to thank both the Association and its officers for making this distin­
guished platform available for a report on a scientific enterprise in its early
stages of development.
A word or two about the history of this research may be of interest. Such a
broad, comparative study of singing qualities was not possible until the
1940's when large numbers of good recordings of folk songs from all over the
world became available, and one could hear and compare the music of the
world's peoples for the first time. In reviewing this material I saw that char­
acteristics of sung performance, such as voice quality and mode of presenta­
tion, seemed to define large musical regions even without considering mel­
ody and rhythm. For example, the singing styles of the African Pygmies and
Bushmen apparently belonged to the same musical family, in spite of the fact
that the two peoples w?ere racially different, had lived in contrasting envi­
ronments, and had no known cultural connection for many centuries (p.
91). Islands of this African Hunter music are surrounded by a sea of
Negro song that covers the whole of the continent south of the Sahara (p.
91). In the same sense one could perceive a high degree of continuity in
the music of the Australian Aborigines from all quarters of that continent
(p. 100), while the chants of the Indian tribes of North America, at least
as far South as the Yaqui, have a family resemblance to one another in spite
of local singularities (p. 85) . Yet no empirical method existed for describ­
ing and assessing these grand stylistic continuities.
The first step toward this goal came in the course of two field trips in the
vii
viii FOREWORD
Mediterranean. In 1953, while making high-fidelity recordings of folk sing­
ing in every province of Spain, I observed that Spanish performance style
varied in terms of the severity of prohibitions against feminine premarital
intercourse. In southern Spain, where sexual sanctions were Oriental in their
stringency, a piercing, high-pitched, squeezed, narrow vocal delivery was cul­
tivated which made choral performance all but impossible. North of the Pyr­
enees, among the Basques, Gallegos, and Asturians, where sexual sanctions
were mild and contact between the sexes was easy and relaxed, there was a
strong preference for well-blended choirs singing in open and low-pitched
voices.
In 1955 a more extensive field survey of Italian folk singing established a
similar north-south correlation between sexual mores and vocal tension.
Moving south from central Italy the severity of sexual mores and the inten­
sity of masculine jealousy increases until a condition of virtual purdah is
reached in the rural villages of Sicily and southern Calabria. The star sing­
ers of southern Italy use a tense, sometimes even strangulated, vocal attack
much like that of North Africa, and group singing is both rare and diffusely
organized. Crossing the Apennines into the Po Valley and mounting the foot­
hills of the Alps, one finds an easy camaraderie between young people and,
at the same time, mixed choirs of blending, bell-like, dewy voices.
In an article written for an Italian journal, Nuovi Argomenti (Lomax,
1955-1956), I argued that vocal stance varies with the strictness of sexual
sanctions, not only in Mediterranean Europe, but in the rest of the world as
well, citing as evidence recordings from every continent. This correlation
has since been firmly established in the present study (p. 194). The sub­
stance of this idea, with a particular emphasis on Italian ethnography, was
presented at the 1958 meeting of the American Anthropological Associa­
tion under the aegis of Margaret Mead. Walter Goldschmidt, then editor of
The American Anthropologist, asked for an article on song style for the jour­
nal. In this piece, there appears a preliminary regional classification of world
singing styles, based on three criteria—degree of vocal tension, the domi­
nance of solo or choral organization or performance, and the level of tonal
unity in choral singing (Lomax, 1959). This layout of song styles has been
largely confirmed by the present research (Chapter 4).
Work on the Cantometrics Project began in the summer of 1961 with the
help of a pilot grant, sponsored by Jack Harrison of the Humanities Division
of the Rockefeller Foundation. The proposal was to develop ways of describ­
ing recorded folk song performances in empirical terms so that songs could
be compared and clustered from culture to culture. The first invention of
that summer was phonotactics, by means of which the assonance pattern in
sung verse can be diagrammed. When Edith Trager applied this system of
analysis to a sample of songs from a cross-section of European cultures, it
FOREWORD IX
was found that each areal folk song style had a distinctive model of vowel
color which held the frequencies of the vowels in its songs to a certain pro­
portion. The most typical songs conformed closely to this model, a rudimen­
tary form of which was exhibited in the popular lullabies of the region.
These vowel diagrams, each with its distinctive patterns of vowel frequency,
appeared to be an efficient means of classifying regional song styles. So far as
Indo-European languages were concerned, a marked preference for high
front (tense) vowels appeared in languages spoken in Mediterranean lands,
where feminine premarital sexual intercourse was forbidden. On the other
hand, low back vowels, together with oscillations toward back enunciation,
characterized the song styles of areas with more permissive sexual standards,
such as in northern Italy, northern Spain and central and eastern Europe.
Thus the vocal style regions established in Spain and Italy by the earlier
study were reflected in systems of assonance (Lomax and Trager, 1964).
Later that summer, Victor Grauer, composer and musicologist, collabo­
rated with me on the development of a holistic descriptive system, later
named Cantometrics, for evoking performance style from sound recordings.
The structure of this empirical rating scheme is set forth fully in Chapter 2.
That first summer Grauer and I tested it on a sample of more than 700 songs,
taken from the world range of singing styles. Margaret Mead suggested that
we create profiles of our song ratings, which could be arranged in groups by
visual inspection. We quickly discovered clusters of profiles from which con-
trastive original master profiles could be assembled that made very good eth­
nographic and musical sense.
Hypotheses about the social function of song style structure were then de­
veloped in consultation with Conrad Arensberg of Columbia University:
1. Solo song characterized highly centralized societies, and leaderless
performances were most common in societies with simple political
structure.
2. Unified choirs occurred in highly cohesive societies and diffuse cho­
ruses in individualized cultures.
The confirmation of these early hypotheses appears in Chapters 6 and 7 of
this volume. In general, a culture's song performance style seemed to repre­
sent generalized aspects of its social and communications systems.
These findings were presented in a paper to a joint meeting of the Ethno-
musicological Society and the American Association of Anthropology in the
winter of 1961. In their preliminary statement, they formed the basis of an
application for a four-year grant from the National Institute of Mental
Health, jointly sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Bu­
reau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, The proposal,