Traditional music: passed on by ear

For centuries most people never saw a written score. Yet they sang every day: to put a child to sleep, to keep time while working in the fields or on a ship, to dance in the village, to pray, to mourn the dead or celebrate a wedding. This music, called traditional (or folk) music, makes up the greater part of all the music ever played. It is also the spring from which art-music composers, and jazz, blues and rock musicians, have drawn.

Passing music on by ear

Traditional music is learned by ear: you hear your parents or neighbours sing it, you repeat it, and you pass it on in turn. Nobody "owns" it: often we do not know who wrote it. As in the game of telephone, each generation changes it a little, so the same tune exists in several versions, with other words, another rhythm, a different note depending on the region. There is no "correct" version: they are all alive.

Take Au clair de la lune, known in France since at least the 18th century. Its melody uses just a few neighbouring notes, easy to remember and sing:

M:4/4
L:1/4
Q:1/4=96
K:C
C C C D | E2 D2 | C E D D | C4 |]
w: Au clair de la lu-ne, mon a-mi Pier-rot

What is this music for?

• Dancing: bourrées, jigs, polkas, waltzes, branles, round dances… Dance demands a clear rhythm and regular phrases (often 4 or 8 bars long).
• Working: sea shanties helped a crew pull together on a rope; field songs kept the rhythm of the work.
• Telling stories: ballads and laments tell tales of love, war or crime, sometimes over dozens of verses.
• Celebrating: carols, festive songs, lullabies, religious songs.

How to recognise traditional music

• Short, repeated phrases, often with a verse and a chorus that everyone joins in.
• Responsorial singing: a soloist sings a line and the group answers (this is called call and response).
• Simple scales: very often the five-note pentatonic scale, or old modes.
• Easily carried instruments: fiddle, flute, bagpipes, hurdy-gurdy, accordion, guitar, banjo, drum.
• Drones: a note held under the melody, as on the bagpipes or the hurdy-gurdy.

The following melody, that of the hymn Amazing Grace (an anonymous American tune paired in the 19th century with words by John Newton), uses only five notes: G, A, C, D, E. It is a pentatonic scale, as in countless songs from Scotland, West Africa, China or the Andes.

M:3/4
L:1/4
Q:1/4=84
K:C
G, | C2 E/C/ | E2 D | C2 A, | G,2 G, | C2 E/C/ | E2 D/E/ | G3- | G2 |]

The collectors

In the 19th century, as people left the countryside for the factories, many feared these songs would disappear. Enthusiasts set out to write them down: the American Francis James Child gathered the old English and Scottish ballads; the Englishman Cecil Sharp collected songs in England and then in the Appalachians. In the 20th century the phonograph changed everything: Béla Bartók recorded thousands of songs in Central Europe, John and Alan Lomax criss-crossed the United States for the Library of Congress. Thanks to them we can still hear the voices of singers born in the 19th century.

Listening list

• Alan Lomax's field recordings (work songs, Appalachian ballads).
• The harp tunes of Turlough O'Carolan, an 18th-century Irish harper.
• Traditional vocal polyphony: Corsican, Georgian or Bulgarian songs.
• A folk dance near you: still the best way to hear this music alive!