WRITINGS, LECTURES

by Zoltn Kodly

THE ROLE OF AUTHENTIC FOLKSONG IN MUSIC EDUCATION, LECTURE

(lnterlochen.1966)

Ladies and Gentlemen, Collectors of folk song have often been asked, What do you do it for? What do you collect songs for, old songs out of fashion, confined to peasant villages, rooted in a long-time passed social and cultural soil? Is it for fun or a scientific, historical interest? What can you answer? First of all, a good folk song is a masterpiece and often proof of amazing creative genius in itself and appreciated and enjoyed even by sophisticated people. As they enjoy and pay high prices for a bit of Oriental rag, handiwork of very simple, primitive people, but a precious work of art. Or, indeed, as Negro and Eskimo sculptures are appreciated. But secondly, the folk song besides being a masterpiece of art, is the remembrance of the childhood of the peoples. And happy is a nation who has not forgotten his childhood. And woe to the nation who has forgotten it. It is a fact that the folk song is the musical mothertongue of us all. And music instruction must begin with the folk song with which we have been brought up from birth and learnt from our mother. To use folk song in pedagogy, our people gave us the best example: the natural life of village people while it was still blooming up to the World War No I., was accompanied by music and dance all the time. Little children as soon as they began to speak, or even before, warbled their ditties learned or distorted from their seniors. As they were growing up they acquired gradually all songs suitable to their age. In church they joined the community, learned the hymns by ear and by adulthood they had collected a nice repertory of songs. Every child practised dancing, their games were connected with roundelays, body movements. Especially in dance-loving areas like Transylvania, you would often observe adult people teaching these secrets of mens dancing to five year old boys. Town children were deprived of this spontaneous musical life. The kindergarten, not obligatory, could hardly replace the natural village life saturated with music. Schools and kindergarten have to supply the lost natural evolution. Obviously, our reasonable pedagogy has to set out from the first spontaneous utterances of the child, rhythmical, melodical plays with many repeated simple phrases, slowly going over to different ones. A child between 3 and 6 years old learns everything much easier than after. The lucky child who could take part in singing games has a great advantage over those who never had occasion to do so, whether in kindergarten or as free play in other childrens company. The primary school should carefully examine whether this indispensable layer is already present in the child. If not, the school has the duty to implant it. Without this foundation no further progress is possible. Thus the primary school first has to recapitulate the material of the kindergarten, that is to say: singing games, rhythmical plays connected with bodily movements best in close cooperation with physical training. This foundation may be different with different people, although if you run over any volume of folk song collections, you find many international motifs proving the 15

unity of mankind at least during childhood. This s-1-s-m-motif is to be found with nearly every people. But other motifs too. We have to search for the international children-motifs which link people together in spite of many great differences. Because this may be the oldest kind of music of man in general. Recently I found a collection of Ainu songs. Ainu is a people in the North of Japan, and some of their short, very short songs have striking similarity to Hungarian and so I shall take them and give them to Hungarian children. Yesterday we heard a lecture about aboriginal music, adapted to Californian children. Now, I think any primitive music is good for a child, because the child has, that is a commonplace, to pass over all the stages of mans evolution, but we should always make sure that it should develop forward and not backward. I think a Californian child fed with aboriginal music is guided backwards because the Californian child is much more developed even at 10 years age than an adult aboriginal. Now, the question is, what is authentic folk song? That is a difficult question, I confess that even with us in Hungary, in the years around the turn of the century it was not at all clarified. Hungary was resounding with hundreds of popular songs known by everybody, regarded generally as folk songs. It is mostly this material which in foreign countries was regarded as Hungarian folk music. But closer research turned out that many of those songs were relatively very new, composed by still living or recently dead composers. Some decades of field-work were necessary to prove that there is another folk song the authors of which will never be found. And this is the layer of the old tradition and it has taken much time to understand the difference. Bartk himself published in 1906 his first publication of folk song setting, the following melody: l,-d-l,-d-l,-d-l,-d-r-r-m-m-l,-l,-1, m-s-m-s-m-s-m-s-1-1-t-t-m-m-m l-l-l-s-s-r-m-f-m l,-d-l,-d-l,-d-l,-d-r-r-m-m-l,-l,-1, It seemed to us like a folk song but a few years later we detected that this was composed by a composer, Nmeth-Szentirmai, he is a world-known composer not with this song but with another, a unique melody which everybody knows, I suppose you also: m-m-m-l-m-r-d-t,-l,-t, m-t-d-l-s-r-m-f-m :|| l-f-m-r-d-r-d-t,-1, Is anybody here who has never heard it? It has been published in every country in hundreds and hundreds of editions, it became most popular through Sarasates Zigeunerweisen. Sarasate took it, because he heard it from Gypsy bands, because they played it often, and thinking that it is a folk song or a domain publique, he did not care to search for an author and he published it several times. Now, the author he was then living wrote to him and announced to him his authorship. And Sarasate in a response from St. Petersburg in the year 1883 answered him and promised to correct the title. But he or the publisher Simrock never did it, although in 1900 the author wrote him again a new letter saying: Everybody knows that the song is not Gypsy-born but tune and words are indisputably my work. At those times authors rights were not so protected by law, especially in Eastern Europe, as they are today. This is not the only case. Brahms in his Hungarian Dances also used several melodies which he found in print partly or learned from his friend Remnyi, the violinist with whom he played very many concerts. And he was, too, summoned by some authors of some of his Hungarian dances. He was as innocent in plagiarism as Sarasate. He put on his first publication: Gesetzt von Johannes Brahms Setting by Johannes Brahms. But later the publisher left out this word setting and so it became Hungarian Dances by Brahms.

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We Hungarians are glad that the publisher could pay from the income of those dances because they became bestsellers, very high salary to Brahms for his symphonies which were not bestsellers. Now, with folk song setting it happens several times that they become bestsellers for the setter and not for the author, because the author is almost always unknown. The English composer Arnold Bax said once to Vaughan Williams, who did also a lot of masterly settings of English folk song: You know, Ralph, your most popular works are not really yours. And I could say the same, because my bestseller from the Hry Jnos Suite, Intermezzo is not by me, either! Now, 70 years of experience enable us, I feel, to recognize a genuine folk song, to distinguish it from sham or well-known semi-popular songs. Just like money changers in past times, who had so much to do with coin, that they could recognize from the chink made by a coin, how much copper had been mingled in the gold. As to this Szentirmai song published first by Bartk, years later we detected a Cheremiss childrens song which goes: l,-d-l,-d-l,-d-l,-d-r-m-r-d-d-l,-l, l,-d-l,-d-l,-d-l,-d-r-m-r-d-l,-s,-s, Now, its nearly the same melody. The Cheremiss people live 3000 miles far from us and surely they had never heard the song of Szentirmai. It is a traditional childrens song with them, and this curious feature, the repeated small third was a favourite of Bartks. He uses it very much in his second pianoconcerto, you find it about 200 times. And it seems there is some ancient quality in it because todays Cheremiss children also like this song and as we know, the ancestors of the Cheremiss people lived some 1500 years ago together with the ancestors of Hungarians and they have, to this day several songs in common. If we try to examine the difference between the two, what is copper and what is gold in these songs, I think this part is gold: l,-d-l,-d-l,-d-l,-d-r-r-m-m-l,-l,-l, and this part is copper: m-t-d-l-s-r-m-f-m That is Szentirmais own, and this little difference separates it from the traditional folk song and hundreds of similar stylistic comparisons enable us to distinguish authentic folk song from imitation and from false folk songs. To show you a bit of pure gold song, we play you a bit of...: Replj, pva, replj... (Peacock melody) I suppose somebody has recognized this song because you heard it the other evening, I have made variations on this one. That is one of the songs which have survived exactly in the same way with the Cheremiss people. When I conducted this work some years ago in Moscow, an old Cheremiss was present and he shouted: That is our song! It proves that this song must be at least 1500 years old, because since this time there has been no communication between the two peoples whatsoever and it has come down to us here as well as there. It proves that it cannot be more recent than 1500 years. Now, this old peasant who is still alive, proves that this melody is still living although in a very small territory. But even if he dies, the song will not be lost because thousands and hundred-thousands of children know it and sing it every day in schools. Well, that was a little excursion to clarity what an authentic folk song is. After these primary childrens songs, the next step would be naturally the folk songs in schools in pedagogy. Each nation has a rich variety of folk songs, very suitable for teaching purposes. Selected gradually, they furnish the best material to introduce musical elements and make the children conscious of them. Singing first by ear, then writing, dictation, all methods combined make surprisingly quick results. It is essential that the material used should be musically attractive. In some countries the outdated

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system is still in use which employs dry lifeless exercises for children which the children hate and very often together with them they also hate the music lesson, and finally, music. If children dont look forward with thrilled expectation to the music lesson, no result is to hope for, if they dont feel refreshed and enjoyed, all labour is lost. With us in Hungary, singing in primary school has been obligatory since 1868, but many people finish school with a hatred of music as a consequence of bad teaching. Only the last few decades could improve the teachers training so that tolerable results can be obtained even with the obligatory two lessons per week. But after 1945 we could initiate experimental schools with daily singing lessons. The results are very surprising and convincing. The surplus of four hours, because two hours in the ordinary schools, means no overburdening at all, quite the contrary: the progress in every other subject becomes easier and quicker. I daresay we may attribute these results mostly to the folk song. This is the chief material. Even town-children who never heard folk song before regain the lost Paradise of childhood and with extasy sing these songs which they never did before, they are reborn, are delighted and forget the dreary years passed between the walls of tenement-houses devoid of poetry, because each child longs for poetry in every form. The beginning, just as in the case of teaching languages must be unilingual. Afterwards it should be enlarged first by neighbouring or relative, later by more distant peoples music. We are by no means limited chauvinistically to Hungarian folk song. But to become international, first we have to be national. We must belong to one distinct people and speak its language properly not gibberish. To understand other people, we must first understand ourselves. Nothing is better for that than folk song, as to know other peoples, their folk song is the best means as well. The final purpose of all this must be to introduce pupils to the understanding and love of great classics of past, present and future. Who are much nearer to folk song than it is generally supposed. For instance Haydn, the best to begin with, has manifest connection with folk song, but even in many works of Mozart it is easy to recognize the sublimated Austrian folk song. Beethovens many themes are also folk-song-like. And all the national schools originated already in 19th century, are based on the foundations of their own folk music. Beginning with Liszt and with the Hungarian style. But before Liszt there was also Denmark, then Norway with Grieg and Russia with Glinka and the Big Five, and there were also the Czechs. Every nation tried to build a new style based on its folk songs. Now, I know, for Americans it is a difficult question, what is American folk song? I have just read some reflections about it by Bernstein. Bernstein talking about the multifarious ancestry of Americans asks, what is it that we have in common, what we could call our folk music? That is a tough question. After discussing the various attempts to create American style in music, beginning from very early times, from McDowell and the others, he divided this material into kindergarten, then highschool, then college, making a very fine distinction between using syncopation on purpose and just by accident, by habit. He declares: It is like the English language spoken with American accent. The jazz influence, he says, changed the whole sound of our music. He points out that America is a very young country, has not had very much time to develop a folk music, and since the Americans are descendants of all nations on the Earth, its folk music is probably the richest in the world. And he discerns the beginning of an American style in the latest, newest works. Its interesting to read this book. I think, since America is such a very big country, uniform American music will hardly ever exist. If little Hungary produced as many Hungarian styles as there are composers, that may apply all the more to America. And I share the opinion of Bruno Nettl in his nice little book about American folk songs. He is not confined to jazz, he thinks it likely that other impressions could also contribute to forming a definite American style. We cannot but wish to American composers to

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find this style as early as possible. Thank you.

(IKS Bulletin, Vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 15-19, 1985)

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