Uccelli [née Pazzini], Carolina Uccellini, Marco

(d) Survival and revival.

Whichever paths of change traditional European American musics may follow, a significant amount of ethnic music has managed to survive the initial immigrant generations. Its diversity is in part a result of the continued pluralism of American ethnic groups: few have entered into a homogeneous relationship with the dominant culture. This pluralism has not, however, prevented change in the musical cultures of ethnic groups, especially by comparison with the repertories of Europe. An ability to adopt a cultural function more appropriate to conditions and circumstances in the USA has often resulted in various forms of preservation. The best example may be the Appalachian traditions, in which songs from the English and Scottish repertory were discovered after they had disappeared from the British Isles; the possible link of Amish traditions to medieval German hymnody may be an even more dramatic case, indeed one of marginal survival (i.e. the preservation in a community detached from its ethnic roots of a repertory or performing tradition that has died out or altered significantly in the parent culture).

The direction of change in the musical culture of most European American groups has been towards the creation and consolidation of new repertories. Since the 1960s increased attention has been focussed on the ethnic backgrounds of American pluralism. Many groups have recognized their music as a valuable symbol of their origins and have provided the impetus for a resurgence of interest. The revival of ethnic music further benefited from the popular folksong revival of the 1950s and 1960s, again reflecting the changing history and culture of the USA.

USA, §II, 1: Traditional music: European American

(ii) Western.

(a) British.

(b) French.

(c) German.

(d) Irish.

(e) Italian.

(f) Scandinavian.

(g) Swiss.

USA, §II, 1(ii): Traditional music: European American: Western

(a) British.

Instrumental. Traditional instrumentalists in the colonies that would become the USA drew on British traditions (initially Scottish and English, later also Irish) for tunes, ways to compose tunes and shape repertories, and playing styles. The young USA then formed its own regional styles: the North drew closely on English models that required musical literacy, while the South used an array of performing styles that were more strongly linked to Scottish repertories, were transmitted both through print and aurally, and had absorbed black American influences. Both imported tunes and those based on imported models but created locally were usually linked with dance genres. Throughout the early 19th century, a fiddler’s repertory probably supplemented these dances with vocal airs, marches and other popular tunes. As decades passed and the solo fiddler, fifer or flautist was replaced in cultivated circles by ensembles or keyboard instruments, fiddle music emerged with a repertory of older rural dance tunes, together with a few descriptive airs and hymn tunes. The British Hornpipe and Reel became the American Hoedown, other duple-time social dance tunes became polkas, and various triple-time dances were reworked as waltzes.

The fiddle (see Violin, §II, 4) was the main instrument used to perform British American folk music from the late 18th century until well into the 20th. Although the instrument, the violin, is the same as that of its art music counterpart, traditional ‘fiddling’ was (and is) quite different. The instrument is held against the chest as well as chin, with short bows, various tunings, little or no vibrato and rarely more than first position used. The music became less British and more American, as different instruments were introduced. The Fife has been closely associated with the fiddle since the Revolutionary War, where it was played by local militia units in fife and drum corps. Many fifers were also fiddlers, and tunes from the military and dance repertories were shared between these instruments. The banjo, a New World conflation of West African survivals, became widespread in the wake of the popularity of blackface minstrelsy from 1843 and significantly more common when late 19th-century mail-order catalogues helped disseminate a wide range of products, including families of instruments that had recently become cheaply available. Although minstrel-style banjo playing included African-derived playing techniques that survive as clawhammer and frailing styles in the upper South, the usual repertory for ensembles (fiddle, banjo and perhaps a few supplementary percussion or string instruments) has always focussed on British American dance tunes.

Other instruments had regional currency. The hammer (hammered) Dulcimer was popular in the North and Midwest (and to a lesser extent the South), and the plucked or strummed dulcimer (unrelated historically to the hammered dulcimer) was a rare but longstanding feature of the music of the central and southern Appalachian region. By the late 19th century, other instruments incorporated in the developing British American dance-music tradition included the organ, piano, guitar, harmonica and mandolin, and wind instruments such as clarinet and trumpet, originally associated with marching and concert bands.

The common-time reel and Breakdown usually consists of two (or, rarely, more) eight-measure strains that contrast in tessitura. A typical performance in older, dance-orientated style follows the structural pattern AABBAABB. While a few Northern contradances preserve a formerly more common connection of specific tunes with specific sets of dance figures, many tunes are used interchangeably for dances. That a considerable number of tunes are irregularly phrased or are otherwise not suitable for dance accompaniment attests the existence of an independent fiddle repertory. Regional styles are characterized by the degree of melodic ornamentation and variation used (Texas style leads in these aspects), affinity with older published models (as in the New England style), and amount of African- and Scottish-derived syncopation (emphasized in the various styles of the South-east), which are in turn differentiated by whether the high or low strain is played first, and other factors.

Although most other dance genres (e.g. quicksteps and quadrilles) have been assimilated into the breakdown, the British hornpipe remains vital in New England, and a few marches, jigs and descriptive pieces have survived. The most widespread alternative to the breakdown remains the waltz, which arrived in the USA during the period 1810–30, received new impetus around the turn of the 20th century from the new pop styles of Tin Pan Alley, and has returned as a standard ingredient in modern fiddle contests in most of the country.

The taste for instrumental folk music continues unabated in the USA. In the South, innovations include the upbeat Bluegrass music of the upper South and the slower, highly ornamented and varied ‘contest’ style, which has spread from Texas throughout the centre of the country. In the North a revival of interest in the country dance in New England has stimulated a parallel revival of instrumental music, and there is pronounced interchange of instrumental folk music along the Canadian border from Maine to Puget Sound. A strong revival of interest in the older repertory of the upper South has spread through both the South and the urban North and West since the 1960s. Among various ethnic groups there appears to be a comparable strength of interest in instrumental traditions, stimulated in part by the general hospitality to instrumental music throughout the USA.

Vocal. American traditional singers, or folk-singers, have inherited from successive waves of Anglo-Celtic immigrants a basic tune stock that has been used almost indiscriminately for secular and sacred, lyric and narrative texts, and is identifiable regardless of style (mode, range, rhythm, phrase order, embellishment and the like). The age of the tune stock is largely unknown. A few tunes can be traced to medieval records, and some have continental analogues, but little is known about this body of music in the British Isles before the 18th century. One cannot judge whether some characteristics of American forms are New World developments or preservations of earlier British forms that have been altered or lost.

Early American traditional vocal forms are monophonic and were performed unaccompanied. The melodies correspond to the strophic (stanzaic) textual form, the melody being repeated (sometimes with variations) for each textual unit. Tunes are composed of strains (usually eight bars long) and phrases usually organized bisymmetrically (A + B). Scales are diatonic and related to the medieval modes. Many tune variants are not in the full heptatonic scales but in ‘gapped’ forms (pentatonic and hexatonic), though more than half the tune variants are in a major tonality. ‘Neutral’ 3rds and 7ths (between tempered major and minor) occur. An apparently older style, which has been termed ‘parlando-rubato’, involves irregular metre, sometimes combined with melodic ornamentation.

The tune stock is composed of a relatively limited number of melodic ideas, called ‘tune families’; a tune family is defined by Bayard (1950) as ‘a group of melodies showing basic interrelation by means of constant melodic correspondence and presumably owing their mutual likeness to a descent from a single air which has assumed multiple forms through processes of variation, imitation, and assimilation’. Members of a family may vary in style – mode, range, rhythm, phrase order – but are related by melodic contour and order of stressed tones within phrases. There are over 40 of these families, seven of which are dominant throughout the older tradition. They have been named somewhat arbitrarily after their textual associations. (Bayard named them for secular texts, e.g. The Bailiff's Daughter (Child 105); G.P. Jackson for religious texts, e.g. I Will Arise.) A musical idea, though associated with a particular family of texts, can furnish the vehicle for a variety of textual groups. Members of the Bailiff's Daughter family are found with such diverse texts as Geordie (Child 299), Amazing Grace, How Firm a Foundation, One More River to Cross, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, The Titanic I (Laws, 1950, D24) and Delta Dawn (a country song). Members of the Todlen Hame family (On Top of Old Smoky) occur with the texts The Cuckoo Bird, Little Mohea (Laws H8), Ten Broeck and Molly (Laws H27), Moonlight and Skies, and many others from different textual groups. On the other hand, members of one textual group may be associated with different melodic families.

The textual traditions inherited by American folk-singers were both narrative and lyric. Most scholarly attention has been devoted to narrative songs or ‘ballads’. The line between ballad and lyric is blurred, since most American traditional songs tend to be story-orientated in that there is at least implicit narrative content. But one can recognize a number of narrative ideas (i.e. ways of telling a story in song) that have been inherited and developed by American singers. Manifestations of these ballad ideas have been in the past too often seen as mutually exclusive, and scholars have established canons devoted to types instead of recognizing that different ideas may inform different members of the same textual family or even a single variant text.

USA, §II, 1(ii): Traditional music: European American: Western