The Southern workman, Volume 43 1919 By Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (Va.), Hampton Institute
Afro-American Folksongs; A Study in Racial and National Music. By Henry Edward Krehbiel. Published by G. Schirmer, New York. Price, $2.00 net.
THIS attractive and interesting volume has been written with the avowed purpose of "bringing a species of folksong into the field of scientific observation and presenting it as fit material for artistic treatment." Toward this end the author has well done his part, writing with a keenness of appreciation and sympathy which will make his book a welcome addition to musical literature. He has gleaned in many fields and his deductions can hardly fail to convince both the scientific and the lay musician that there is in these wonderful songs a vast reward for careful study.
He speaks of Dvorak's symphony, "From the New World," which includes many characteristic elements of Negro songs, as a great step towards dignifying them in the eyes of the musical world, and perhaps of opening up a new school of composition.
He regrets, as do all who have ever known the genuine oldtime melodies, that their finer qualities are so rapidly passing away, being pushed relentlessly into the past by the conventional music of church and school. Born of sorrow and oppression, they are passing with the condition that called them forth, and recognizing this, one hardly dares express the regret one must feel for their loss to science and to art.
Strangely enough the antithesis of the old spiritual, its "debased offspring," as Dr. Krehbiel calls ragtime and the African tango, is suffering a universal revival. Sloughed off almost entirely by the Negro himself, this remnant of his barbarisms, cultivated as anew feature in musical and terpsichorean art, is swinging round a curiously small circle to its early days in the African jungle.
Hampton recognizes the justice of Mr. Krehbiel's criticism of its book of plantation melodies—that the harmonization of its songs does not give any adequate idea of the Negro's own improvised rendering. The earlier writers, and perhaps the wisest, refused to give more than the air, frankly confessing their inability "to convey any notion of the effect of a number singing together."
Those who have attempted the rather thankless task have done so with many apologies, recognizing their limitations. Miss Hallowell, of the Calhoun School, who has made a more intimate study of the songs than any others appear to have done, confesses that it is "impossible to more than suggest their beauty and charm." Most attempts at harmonizing these songs have been made, not for scientific study, nor to guide the Negro singer, but to make them mean the most to the white amateur, just as Mr. Krehbiel has himself done in availing himself of the work of modern composers in harmonizing the songs given in his book.
The inspired pencil that can take down the best of these melodies with their many subtle peculiarities will find a vast field, not only in the American music of Negro and Indian, but in bird songs, with which they have many qualities in common. So far, no system of notation has been at all adequate to the task, and in the meantime rare things are passing away.
If Dr. Krehbiel, with his evident sympathy and understanding, might add to his scientific knowledge the invention of a new method of recording these elusive songs, he would find himself embarked on no mean enterprise. Going personally into the larger communities of the black folk, or even into the tobacco factories where singing is encouraged, he would find a world of new songs and be surprised to discover how much larger a proportion would be in a minor key than he has been led to suppose from the printed songs that have come to his notice. Instead of a "paucity of secular songs" he would find scores of them in the mines, on the railroads, in the cotton and peanut fields, and wherever a crowd of men or women need the encouragement of music to mark time for their work or to ring the changes on the more frequently used "spirituals." Many interesting game and dance songs are also extant. A collection of all these would make a- very interesting sequel to this new volume of AfroAmerican folksongs and cannot be begun too soon.
C. M. F.