Oldest European Folk Song

Subject: RE: Oldest European Folk Song
From: Wilfried Schaum
Date: 04 Dec 02 - 02:59 AM

May I draw your attention to a related thread: Very old music

Wilfried

Subject: RE: Oldest European Folk Song
From: GUEST
Date: 04 Dec 02 - 12:33 PM

johnc, what is it with you and your obsession with posting the link to that lame ass website in all these different threads?

Subject: RE: Oldest European Folk Song
From: greg stephens
Date: 04 Dec 02 - 02:04 PM

Obviously the question is unanswerable, as has been repeatedly pointed out. Dosent mean it's not fun speculating though. Things that are always worth looking at are how widespread a tune is, and into how many variant forms it has mutated. Genetecists do this all the time with mitochondrial DNA/African Eve theories and so on. A quick application of this sort of approach will show that the tune family that includes Dives and Lazarus/Star of the County Down/John Barleycorn etc is probably a great deal older than the "Streets of London". Just where this gets you is open to question, as we don't know how fast tunes change in different social circumstances, but it provides food for thought.

Subject: RE: Oldest European Folk Song
From: Wilfried Schaum
Date: 06 Dec 02 - 04:17 AM

Obviously Greg is utterly right. The question, however, can be specified in
1. the oldest song preserved in writing
2. the oldest song still sung
and so on.
For 2: look for church songs, using such antique browsers as hymnals &c. Gregorian hymns are still in use today, and in my Lutheran songbook there are some tunes slightly changed to the German translations of their old Latin texts, going back to Ambrosius and the like.
The farther some old songs go back the more difficult it is, naturally, to be sure which is the oldest of them.
For questions of this kind the European churches can't be omitted, true to their conservative strains.

Wilfried

Subject: RE: Oldest European Folk Song
From: Wilfried Schaum
Date: 06 Dec 02 - 04:38 AM

Haruo - different kinds of luck:
1. bad: In the old schoolbook I found no picture of this old tombstone.
2. not so bad: Guess where I found a picture? Here!
You can find more looking for Seikilos with Google.
The reference to skolia by the Apostle Paulus is in 1.Cor.15,32.

Wilfried

Subject: RE: Oldest European Folk Song
From: Wilfried Schaum
Date: 06 Dec 02 - 08:32 AM

Haruo - at the bottom of the page I gave in my former mail there is also a link to the original source. Here you can hear a modern performance of the song: click at the link Seikilos-Lied to open a QuickTime file.
Since I have no QuickTime player on my computer I tried the alternative wave file. This link is faulty.
Medicaton: Go to the directory and choose the link to Seikilos without an extension. When saving the file you MUST add the extension *.wav, so naming the file Seikilos.wav. Then it works.

Wilfried

Subject: RE: Oldest European Folk Song
From: GUEST,Q
Date: 06 Dec 02 - 09:55 PM

Greek sound files

"Attempts by modern Greek musicians...to reproduce..." Includes Epitaph of Seikilos. Windows Media Player works. How valid these are, I don't know.

Subject: RE: Oldest European Folk Song
From: vectis
Date: 08 Dec 02 - 07:35 PM

I once saw the Cutty Wren described as "pre-pagan"?????
I dunno but it's got to be a contender

Subject: RE: Oldest European Folk Song
From: Wilfried Schaum
Date: 09 Feb 03 - 07:00 AM

Seikilos again:
Here you can see and hear it played on an classical organ and sung.

Wilfried

Subject: RE: Oldest European Folk Song
From: GUEST,Bobdogstar
Date: 30 Oct 06 - 12:29 PM

Lord Randall in Transylvania (muh ha ha).

This business about saddles - they may be post Roman in Britain, but there is no need to assume that Lord Randall originates in any part of the Roman empire - because it is found so widely.

Many old versions do not mention saddles at all.

A Transylvanian version does not mention saddles, and substitutes '4 legged crabs' for eels - but is clearly the same song, verse for verse, in other respects.

How did it get to Transylvania (where they think it is one of their oldest folk songs)? The Austrian Saxons? The Huns? Goodness me - that may be a very ancient song indeed!

Bobdogstar

Subject: RE: Oldest European Folk Song
From: GUEST,Jack Campin
Date: 30 Oct 06 - 03:30 PM

If A.L. Lloyd's tracing of its origins is right, "The Outlandish Knight" goes back about 2000 years to somewhere near the Gobi Desert. Carlo Ginzburg has more recently traced a bunch of vaguely related folklore along a similar pathway, so he may have been right. But with so many changes of language and musical idiom there is no way the original could have used a recognizably similar tune.

A few points from further back in this thread.

Romany songs can't be among the oldest in Europe since they only arrived in Europe in the late Middle Ages.

The notation of the ancient Greek music, like the Skolion of Seikilos, is pretty good; we do have a reasonable idea what it sounded like. But none of those ancient songs has been collected in current tradition.

Some kinds of Eastern chant are possibilities. There are liturgical tunes of the Syriac church which have cognates in Western traditions from which they have been separated by shoot-on-sight theological schisms for about 1800 years.

One other candidate to speculate on: there is a Greek lament (from one of the Greek-speaking parts of Sicily, I think) which I came across in a collection of flute tunes by Quinto Maganini in the 1960s. It uses the scale the Turks call "zengule" and the Indians "bhairava" - C Db E F G Ab B c - I forget the Greek name for it. Maganini said the metre of the tune fitted a chorus from one of the classical Greek dramatists. If the metre in question was a *very* distinctive one, he may have been on to something. I think I still have the book around somewhere but it's going to take some finding.

That "Syrian Song" from ancient Assyria starts like the "Ode to Joy" and continues like "Merrily We Roll Along" so maybe one of those is a candidate.

Subject: RE: Oldest European Folk Song
From: kendall
Date: 30 Oct 06 - 07:49 PM

I'm not a musicologist, but my vote goes to THE FOX. 11th century.