When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea.
--
The Fiddler Of Dooney, st. 1William Butler Yeats
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The folksong collectors Bartok (Hungary) and Plicka (Czechoslovakia) notated the perceived interval deviations with a plus or minus sign (+,-). Older folksong collectors had notated all the intervals in the system of semitones, not observing the finer modifications of intervals. This first gained currency from the phongraph and tape recordings of folk music from various lands....From folksong I learned to perceive melodic intervals a little smaller or greater than those of the semitone-system....In my youth it often happened that the folk singers, who during the intermissions of dance festivals sang songs of "their kind," deviating from the semitone system, demanded that the first violinist of the Wisowitzer Kapelle play "their" melody just as they sang it. Once a tempermental singer threatened to strike the double-bass player with a beer mug if he didn't "play along" with the song, exactly as he sang it.
Alois Haba
The earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.Edgar Lee Masters
I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism. I can play about thirty Bohemian folk songs ... on my mouth-organ. My oldest friend, who is Czech and a patriot, cannot bear to hear me play them because he says I do it in such a schmalzy way, 'crying into the mouth organ'. I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs, which happen to be my favourite form of music.
Ernest Gellner
Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it, it's multifaceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It's almost always laughter through tears. This quality of Jewish folk music is close to my ideas of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented for so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express despair in dance music.
Dmitri Shostakovich
The whole trouble with a folk song is that once you have played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder. Most Russian music, indeed, consists in ringing changes on this device, skilfully disguised though the fact may be.
Constant Lambert
Yeats, William Butler
Yeltsin, Boris
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