In this chapter, I explore three female folk song collectors: Lucy Broadwood, Annes Geddes Gilchrist and Dorothy Marshall, and three women from whom they collected songs – to provide wider commentary on the contributions of women to the first English folk song revival and their marginalization. In doing so, I examine the role of women in the first folk song revival, feminist practices in the archive, and a growing resurgence of interest in women and folk music. By exploring three examples of collecting in the first folk song revival, I illuminate the women who operated in the margins of the folk music movement and have since been marginalized by its history. I contend that by paying closer attention to what is found in the margins of manuscripts and other archival material, it is possible to glean information on the singing tradition, and collection practices, of women in the first folk song revival.

Richard Wagner’s pervasive influence on the French mélodie appears most openly in César Franck and his devoted students. Their chromatic language draws inspiration from the German composer, yet differs in significant ways, including a strong orientation toward subdominant harmony, as in Henri Duparc’s “L’invitation au voyage.” A survey of Franck’s songs leads to an exploration of the song cycles of Ernest Chausson and Guy Ropartz, which extend their teacher’s celebrated method of “cyclic composition.” Wagnerism intertwines with the hothouse aesthetic of Decadence in these fascinating mélodies, in which chromatic extravangance matches the precious refinement of poets like Maurice Maeterlinck and Jean Lahor.

Gabriel Fauré composed over one hundred mélodies across his long career, but a curious change bifurcates his song oeuvre. From 1861 to 1890, he wrote individual mélodies; thereafter, he composed songs almost exclusively in cycles. While this cyclic turn occurs in other composers around 1890, Fauré’s cycles are far more integrated than those of Debussy, Chausson, or Poulenc, with unified narratives, and even networks of recurring leitmotifs. Fauré’s song cycles demonstrate an astute and imaginative response to the changing currents of French poetry, from the impassive formalism of the Parnassians to the critical rethinking of representation and authorship of the Symbolists. His last cycles, written after World War I, even show a clear orientation toward the objectivity of the emerging Neoclassical school of composition. Fauré’s individual songs will also retain their wonder, but it is the cycles that best reveal his thought.

Revival processes appear central to folk musics across different cultural and national traditions. Consequently, this chapter argues that, rather than perceiving revival as the exception, processes of revival and change should thus be perceived as a central feature of tradition. As is outlined here, revival needs to be approached from a much broader perspective. Falling back on case studies from England, Latvia, and Germany, this chapter further analyzes how acts of revival are entangled with themes of authenticity and nostalgia. Utilizing different claims of authenticity as elaborated by Denis Dutton, these waves of revivalism might be described as a defensive mechanism against eras of accelerated global change. Following scholars such as Svetlana Boym and Ross Cole, folk revivalism can thus be understood as an act of imaginative investment in the past and future, a nexus where nostalgia and utopia – as a counterpoint or solution to this sentiment of loss – meet.

In this chapter, violinist Yale Strom offers a uniquely personal perspective on klezmer and Romani music, recounting unexpected moments of connection and cultural exchange across Eastern Europe during his fieldwork in the 1980s. He points out that music was one of the strongest expressions of Jewish identity, but also that Romani musicians who played in klezmer bands were accepted by their fellow Jewish musicians. Ultimately, he argues that as culture (food and language as well as music) changes all the time, to preserve it as a rigid historical document is to deny its ongoing cultivation.

Debussy’s later mélodies present a fascinating variety, bound together by a deep allegiance to the French language and poetic tradition. From the Wagner-drenched Cinq mélodies de Charles Baudelaire, with their refrains and sonnet forms, to the exacting medieval rondels and ballades of his Trois chansons de France and Trois ballades de François Villon, Debussy measured his text-setting against strict forms. In between these cycles, meanwhile, the composer embraced the contemporary prose poem, both in his settings of Pierre Louÿs and his own texts for Proses lyriques and Nuits blanches. A striking feature of these later cycles is the strong preference for three-song sets, a form that resonates with the resurgence of the triptych in French painting. Debussy’s dedications to friends and skilled amateur singers show that he intended these sophisticated musical-poetic works for a close circle of connoisseurs.

This chapter explores the folk and traditional music of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales – the so-called Celtic regions of the British Isles – in terms of the concepts and processes through which such music is made, representing both the everyday and the elite, past and present; modalities, in short, that I feel represent a timeless importance to our aesthetic understanding and a foundation for negotiating traditional music’s social and historical value today. Threading loosely through my exploration of these modalities is what ethnomusicologist Constantin Brăiloiu called ‘the problem of creation’, which serves as a useful lens through which I remark on the making of traditional music as a complex interplay of function, acquisition, structure, symmetry, orality, improvisation, variation, literacy, and memory. I present these modalities chiefly through the prism of Scottish music owing to its significance in the historical discourse surrounding our very concept of the folk.

In this chapter Angeline Morrison offers an exquisitely written account of what mythopoeic singing means to her and why it is central to reimagining the history of British folk music. Drawing on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, she highlights the transformative power of song. Disembodied, imaginal, or non-physical things, she argues, can be sung into being. This process can serve the cause of decolonization by engaging in a form of contemporary mythmaking that re-enchants and re-populates historical landscapes with figures known to have been present, but who may not be identifiable in the body of song that survives.

he route “from Romance to Mélodie” is used to imply a significant development in French “art song”, from simplicity to a sophistication equivalent to the German Lied. There is, however, no simple replacement of one by the other: the genres, in so far as they are distinct at all, actually overlap. Works titled “Romance” by Martini, Niedermeyer, Monpou, and Berlioz could be considered as mélodies avant la lettre. The word appears prominently in Berlioz’s published collection, the Mélodies irlandaises (1830). He had already shown a predisposition for variation in settings that, like Romances, are essentially strophic, and this tendency continued, for instance in “Villanelle”, the first song in Les Nuits d’été. Through-composed compositions appear among his earliest published songs, in the 1830 set, and in Les Nuits d’été which, although composed for voice and piano, has some claim to be considered the first orchestral song-cycle.

This chapter covers fifty-seven mélodies, roughly two-thirds of Debussy’s total output in this genre. It reviews the composer’s initial eclectic poetic choices and reveals the influences that guided his path toward a Symbolist aesthetic. In his quest to formulate musical analogues for Symbolist ideals, by responding to the structures, rhythms, and basic affect of the poems he set, Debussy developed his own unique compositional vocabulary and technique. Analytical investigations of three emblematic songs—“Caprice” (Banville), from 1880; the “Clair de lune” (Verlaine) settings from 1882 and 1891; and “Spleen” (Verlaine), from 1888—demonstrate how Debussy’s approach to text setting evolved and how this process ultimately led to his artistic maturity. Characteristic compositional features observable in these three songs may be extrapolated to many of his other mélodies and even to his instrumental works.

In this chapter, Jon Boden of the band Bellowhead confronts a pervasive element of folk performance that affects reception and yet often escapes notice: spoken introductions. He points out that as a conversational and informal art, folk music shares much with humour. Introductions, he argues, can serve several important purposes, including framing narratives, providing historical context, distancing, and offering a partisan viewpoint. Folk performers often have to balance an audience’s desire for a sense of personal accessibility and communality with the equally necessary demands of entertainment professionalism.

Olivier Messiaen’s vocal music opens a new chapter for the mélodie. Both intimate and expansive, it unites the emotional scope of Wagner with a musical language derived from Debussy, using texts written by Messiaen himself. The present chapter considers the musical, poetic, and personal significance of each work, tracing their rapid evolution through the salon pieces Trois Mélodies (1930), the chamber cantata La Mort du Nombre (1930) and the major song cycles Poèmes pour Mi (1935), Chants de terre et de ciel (1938), and Harawi: Chant d’amour et de mort (1945). Epic in scope, with compelling narrative arcs, each cycle is more ambitious than the last, making exceptional demands of both soloist and pianist. We place each work within the context of Messiaen’s life, and analyse key musical techniques and influences such as plainchant, Indian râgas and Peruvian folksong. We also explore textual and thematic features such as Symbolist and Surrealist imagery, showing how the Catholic mysticism of these mélodies, which intertwine love and death in a yearning for transcendence, allows its cosmic drama to unfold.

Folk music discourses have long held a complex relationship to colonialism. Definitions of colonialism – or the occupation and exploitation of one land by a dominant power – have usually been formulated through the voices of Western colonisers (or those educated within their intellectual traditions). Discourses on folk music have likewise shied away from post-colonial studies, reinforcing Victorian ideas of folk music as a natural art form that somehow exists separately from other, less static or rooted, musical ecosystems. This chapter explores the themes of (1) folk music as a post-colonial alternative to ‘cancel culture’, (2) folk music as a racialised category, and (3) strategies and possibilities for folk music’s decolonial futures. Focusing on British ideologies around the folk, I advocate for placing folk music into a critical dialogue with decolonial and Indigenous systems of knowledge that have the capacity to shift the power dynamics of these discussions away from racialized hierarchies.

This chapter argues that, in order to understand the association between protest song and the modern musical genre known as folk music, we need to contextualize it within a longue durée of protest song and popular politics. It does this by tracing the history of Anglophone and Germanic protest song from the later sixteenth century up to Bob Dylan’s 1965 appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, taking in labourers’ songs, the ballads of seventeenth-century revolutions, the anti-democratic theories of the ancient regime, the emergence of the idealised and self-aware labouring poet in the wake of the French Revolution, and the output of Chartists, Fabians,twentieth-century working-class movements and the Critics Group. These developments are placed within two contexts: the bottom-up struggle for a political voice, and the articulation of an ideology of Volk and folk. The result is to disrupt any implicit affinity between folk as a genre and political protest, introducing instead a more heterodox and responsive understanding of the evolving links between musical style, ideology, and a popular voice.

The composers of the mélodie were often highly literate. They met and befriended contemporary poets and set their work; some wrote verse themselves. This chapter briefly examines the traditional precepts of French versification and how they developed over the 19th and early 20th centuries. The aim is to offer an insight into how composers used their understanding of contemporary poetic practice to read the poems they set and to inform – or not – their musical responses. Topics covered in the chapter include: the differences between French and English versification; counting syllables and scanning the mute ‘e’; common French metres including the alexandrine; stanzaic structures including fixed forms such as the sonnet and rondel; rhyme degree, gender and alternation; the emergence of free verse and the prose poem. The discussion is illustrated by examples taken from song texts by a range of composers.

Folk dance remains a diffuse and contested concept and yet its performances and meanings retain contemporary saliency to many people across the world. This chapter reflects on definitional issues, the relationship of folk dance to ritual and folk dance’s embodied ideology in Europe and beyond. Given that nineteenth-century thinking haunts the later literature and manifestations of folk dance, I re-visit Felix Hoerburger’s concepts of ‘first existence’ and ‘second existence’ folk dance, together with their critique and key modifications by Andriy Nahachewsky and Anthony Shay. I consider contemporary ritual folk dancing that draws upon evolutionist theory for inspiration and discuss examples of folk dance as cultural heritage that bear performative testimony to perceived unbroken connections between land, people, gender, race and nation. I conclude by urging both persistent critical interrogation of folk dance as ideology in a global frame and further investigation of the choreographic and artistic relevance of folk dance to its widespread practitioners and audiences.

The focus is on four important and prolific figures in the mélodie repertoire: Charles Gounod, Camille Saint-Saëns, Georges Bizet, and Jules Massenet.  The mid-nineteenth century mélodie emerged in close association with the romance and in response to the impact of the German Lied on the French scene.  Gounod was a key figure in this development, cultivating a new style through flexible shaping of melodic lines within symmetrical phrases.  Saint-Saëns followed closely in these footsteps, with more elaborate piano writing and looser phrase structure.  Bizet and Massenet did as well, injecting greater theatrical flair and a larger harmonic palette.  That Gounod, Saint-Saëns, and Massenet all began their careers perceived as progressives and ended as musical conservatives accounts in part for their eclipse by the generation of mélodie composers born after 1850, notwithstanding a repertory of over 700 mélodies that contains many pearls.