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Anna Czarnik's dull face lighted up ever so little. "She says the thing she was singing is a Polish folk-song about death and sorrow, and it's called a what was that, Anna?" "Dumka." "It's called a dumka. It's a song of mourning, you see? Of grief. And of bitterness against the invaders who have laid her country bare." "Well, what's the idea!" demanded Geisha McCoy.
This folk-song type of melody was modified during the search after expressive declamation. The ideal was to get tunes which were beautiful as tunes, and at the same time did full justice to the composer's words, to preserve the accent and full meaning of the poetry.
Here, if we cared to enlarge in a political disquisition, we might account for the symphony of Russians and Finns, and of its absence in Scandinavia. The material elements, abundant rhythm, rich color, individual and varied folk-song, are only the means by which the national temper is expressed.
Far away he heard the call of a bird, and out by the fire the weird strains of a monotonous folk-song rose in the air. Job closed his eyes and sent up a morning prayer. In it he tried to pray for Jane, but somehow could not. She was safe, he knew; probably at the fire, too, in the beautiful valley from whence those rushing waters came.
It is a much-discussed question how far Dvôrák's American symphony is based on characteristic folk-song. Here are included other questions: to what extent the themes are based on an African type, and whether negro music is fairly American folk-song. Many, perhaps most people, will answer with a general negative.
The Scotch heart, reader, can be moved to its depths by the sight of a raindrop or the sound of a wet rag. And meantime Hannah, the beautiful Highland girl, was singing. The fresh young voice rose high above the rain. Even the birds seemed to pause to listen, and as they listened to the simple words of the Gaelic folk-song, fell off the bough with a thud on the grass.
Mobilization business everywhere, drilling of the half- equipped, a singing excitement of parting, recruiting no time for the actual misery. They stood in the very frown of the fortress at sunset. A column of raw infantry came swinging out and started the descent. A moment afterward the roar of a folk-song came up in a gust. It was as if the underworld suddenly had been cratered.
But regarded as a whole, one is inclined to doubt its ever becoming a standard work outside its native home. Its true scope and meaning can only be justly estimated by a public acquainted with Russia herself, with her people, her history and her innermost modes of thought. Glinka attached the highest value to the folk-song, of which, as already stated, he found a treasure trove ready to his hand.
The Frenchified lyric poets of the school of Hagedorn and Gleim sing forest-songs, as though they longed after the forest from hearsay. Then, with the resurrected folk-song and the resuscitated Shakespeare, who has poetically explored deeper into the glory of the forest than all others, the English art of gardening, an imitation of the free nature of the forest, reaches Germany.
And if the moonlight fell across the piano, and upon her face as she sang the little Irish folk-song, all in minors, with her high, trembling, half-formed notes in the upper register, and if she flushed and looked up abashed and had to be teased to go on, not teased a great deal, but a little, will you blame the young man if he forgot for a moment that her father was worth such a lot of money, and thought only that she was a beautiful girl, and said so with his eyes and face and hands in the pretty little pause that followed when she ceased singing?
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