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The Neutral Tone as a Function of Folk-song Text
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2019
Extract
One of the most striking and distinctive phenomena in folk singing is the neutral tone, that note which cannot be rendered on a fretted or keyboard instrument, a note that is most at home not in art song but on the lips of an untrained traditional singer. Samuel P. Bayard gave it the place of honor on his list of six “mannerisms of performance that are profoundly instructive as to the past of the folksong art,” especially as regards “the presence of neutral and variable intervals and of quarter-tones in the folk scales.”
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- Copyright © 1971 By the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
References
1 Bayard, Samuel P., “American Folk Songs and Their Music,” Southern Folklore Quarterly, XVII, no. 2 (June, 1953), 124–125.Google Scholar
2 Metfessel, Milton, Phono photography in Folk Music (Chapel Hill, 1928), p. 146.Google Scholar
3 Grainger, Percy, “Collecting with the Phonograph,” Journal of the Folk-Song Society, III (1908–09), 158.Google Scholar
4 Buchanan, Annabel Morris, “A Neutral Mode in Anglo-American Folk Music,” Southern Folklore Quarterly, IV, no. 1 (March, 1940), 81.Google Scholar
5 Ibid.Google Scholar
6 Sharp, Cecil J., English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, I, II, Maud Karpeles, ed. (London, 1932).Google Scholar
7 Sung by Thomas, Howell in Tullahoma, Tennessee, October 2, 1949.Google Scholar
8 “Folksong and the Modes,” Musical Quarterly, XXXII, no. 1 (January, 1946), 39–43.Google Scholar
9 Ibid., pp. 44–47.Google Scholar