We're of course using Ferrier as a shorthand--virtually every major concert
and opera singer in the period recorded folksongs, and this was true in
every European language. Haydn and Beethoven over a century before
published folksong settings for salon and concert hall performance. I once
provoked a fit of apoplexy in a Scottish friend by playing him
Fischer-Dieskau singing Beethoven's "Charlie is my Darling," which is
actually pretty good, if you're not personally involved. There are salon
performances of Irish song in restauration plays. Authenticity, in any of
these cases, was not even a part of the equation--traditional song, when
listeners and performers thought about the issue at all, was being accorded
a value and dignity that it otherwise wouldn't have been felt to possess,
by presentation as art song. Some composers and performers carry the
resulant music off successfully, Ferrier among them.

There are counter-examples. Stephen Foster wrote art songs--not a single
banjo was ever strummed in his arrangements--which have more often than not
been treated as if they were folk songs. In recent years his songs have
reappeared on the concert stage in their original guise.

Probably someone out there could tell us what Burns expected as performance
practice for his appropriated tunes.

Lorca, by the way, performed his canciones populares, which, like Burns'
merry muse, supply new words to folk tunes, as art song.

Myself, I usually prefer my folkmusic badly recorded in a cabin
somewhere--seriously--that satisfies my sense of authenticity. But great
artists render these categories obsolete.

Authenticity is always a troublesome concept. In the music world early
music societies until recently specialized in constipation. In the visual
arts there are two questions. The ritual object of another culture,
stripped of its ritual function and displayed in a museum thousands of
miles away as a purely aesthetic object is one. The other--what happens to
a contemporary piece of naive art when it winds up on the wall of a gallery
or museum or in the home of a collector? What motives of nostalgie du boue
or for the peaceable kingdom are at play?

A last point. Yesterday I heard the new CD of Let it Be, issued with all of
Phil Specter's contributions stripped away. I prefer it to the
"original"--suddenly the Beatles are the best garage band ever. But is it
more authentic?

Mark




At 11:51 PM 12/15/2003 +0000, Dominic Fox wrote:
>I've found opinion to be very divided on the subject of Shirley and Dolly
>Collins. I could listen to both all day long, but others have compared their
>singing voices to the expiring mewls of drowning kittens.
>
>It's a strange thing in a folk club when someone gets up and sings something
>trad in the style of Kathleen Ferrier (this does happen occasionally,
>believe it or not; the people who go to folk clubs tend to be old enough to
>have grown up listening to Ferrier, for one thing). Tastes shift:
>authenticity nowadays sounds like Norma Waterson, who is indeed a tremendous
>singer but also one with her own mannerisms and "date".
>
>I think that authenticity, or some subjective sense of it, is partly the
>issue: sticking with folk for the moment, I get irritated listening to June
>Tabor because she sounds sort of /fake/ to me, and I think the irritation
>stems from my being aware of the mannerisms rather than accepting them as
>part of the grain of the music. If June Tabor is what you think folk singing
>sounds like, then you'll enjoy June Tabor a lot more than I find I can; but
>because I grew up listening to the Watersons and the Young Tradition, I
>think folk singing sounds like that.
>
>Sid Kipper is very good at drawing the mannerisms out of the "grain of the
>music", and making you hear them as mannerisms again...
>
>Dominic