strathspey@strathspey.org:41844

John Chambers

Re: Amazing Grace again

Aug. 1, 2005, 4:23 p.m. (Message 41844, in reply to message 41835)

Anselm commented:
| John Chambers wrote:
|
| > Just thought y'all might like to know a bit more about how  far  this
| > melody  has spread.  Actually, I wouldn't be at all surprised if lots
| > of Koreans think it's one of their folk tunes.
|
| I wouldn't know about Amazing Grace, but I have heard some Japanese claiming
| Auld Lang Syne (the popular version) as a traditional Japanese folk song.
| Which in itself would be somewhat strange since that would make it the only
| existing traditional Japanese folk song in a major mode :^)

I've seen "traditional" defined as "anything that existed when I  was
little".   This is often a better definition than what you'll find in
most dictionaries, i.e., it explains what  people  really  mean  when
they use the word.

Another observation I've seen is that the "folk" tunes  from  the  UK
are  really  only reliably documented for 2 to 3 centuries, while the
British navy has been sailing  around  the  world  for  more  like  5
centuries.   It's  not  really  credible that all those sailors never
heard any music  anywhere  for  all  those  centuries.   Absent  good
evidence  on  each tune's origins, we should assume that some unknown
number of tunes were brought back  from  assorted  remote  ports  and
incorporated   into   the   "traditional"   repertoire.    Finding  a
recognizable tune in some  remote  country  should  not  lead  to  an
assumption that it's a variant of a European tune; it could just have
easily gone the other direction.

If you dig around for the origins of the the popular  tune  to  "Auld
Lang   Syne",   it  seems  at  first  to  be  well-documented  as  an
18th-century  UK  composition  by  William  Shields.    But   further
investigations,  sketched  in  the  Fiddler's Companion entry for the
title, turn up lots of earlier tunes  with  remarkable  similarities,
including  one published by Playford.  Shields "composed" a tune that
was a variant of tunes he had certainly already heard. Ultimately the
origins of that tune family aren't precisely known, so it could be an
import from just about anywhere else.  There are even minor tunes  in
the family, so the major mode doesn't help much.  (But I'd agree that
it probably didn't originate in Japan.)

It's typical fuzzy musical history, I suppose.