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E-book Auld Lang Syne : A Song and its Culture

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Penilaian

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The story goes that Irving Berlin, having just penned a song with the title White Christmas, called excitedly to his assistant with the announcement that he had just written his greatest ever song. Indeed, White Christmas was, for a long period, the most commercially successful recorded song of all time, and for many people in the English-speaking world it is now as much a part of Christmas as decorated trees and the man in the red-and-white suit. Given this emotional significance, the idea that Berlin immediately recognized the song’s potential is attractive, suggesting as it does that the song’s success had less to do with the machinations of the music industry, and more to do with the song’s own particular qualities.Compare, then, this story to the quotation above from the Scottish poet and songwriter Robert Burns, talking about this book’s subject. The remark came in a letter to the publisher George Thomson, who, possibly inspired by Burns’s comment, promptly ditched the tune Burns talks of and united the words to another. This new version appeared for the first time after Burns’s death, in 1799, and three years after the verses had originally been published—in a volume edited by James Johnson—with the tune Burns provided.2 The new tune promptly extinguished the old for close on two centuries, despite occasional philological protests to the contrary. The myth about music being a universal language would provide another explanation for the transcultural success of Auld Lang Syne. However, as Johnson’s review of Jimerson’s concert shows, said myth has little or no basis in fact, and does no justice at all to the complexity, multiplicity and variability of musical forms, structures, genres and practices that we humans have come up with. What is certain, however, is that “music” in the broadest sense is a universal human practice, in the sense that it is found in all known societies.5 Singing, whatever form this takes, is one of the most common of all musical activities, and the singing of what may be very simple and repetitive songs—such as lullabies, or counting songs, or hymns—is possibly the most common of all types of singing. In fact, and as Burns scholars are often first to admit, Burns’s enormous fame and popularity is due in no small part to the fact that so much of his output consists of songs. The last half of his active life was dedicated to collecting songs, adapting some of them and creating many new ones by writing a new lyric to accompany an existing instrumental tune. Burns understood very well how powerful song can be, and that old Scots tunes were more likely to survive if accompanied by a memorable set of words. This book will focus on music as social practice in order to explore and explain just how Auld Lang Syne could become so significant, in so many ways, for so many people and communities. In addition to surveying a significant portion of the occurrences of Auld Lang Syne from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth and up to the present day, it will draw on the expertise which musicologists have developed in the field of song research. Since music is fundamental to human life, and since so many people have direct experience of singing, or hearing, or whistling, or trying to drown out the sound of Auld Lang Syne, it seems obvious that this book is not directed only, perhaps not even primarily, at musicologists. Where possible, I have tried to explain any musical terminology used, and to make it possible for those who can’t read modern western music notation to follow the argument wherever the inclusion of a music example was unavoidable, for example by making corresponding sound examples available. I trust that readers who do understand musicological jargon will be patient with the explanations and, sometimes, generalizations this entails. Chapter 1 introduces some key issues and concepts which can help us to understand the different social contexts in which songs are used, and why, and what the effects can be. Chapters 2 and 3 gather together older and newer information on the various elements which lay behind the song as it was published in the late eighteenth century, whilst Chapters 4 to 8 trace the establishment of the song and the traditions associated with it through the nineteenth and into the earlier twentieth century. Chapter 9 uses the reception of the song in Germany as a case study for its adoption into other national cultures, while Chapter 10 surveys some other aspects of its travels round the world and into a whole series of frankly incongruous contexts. Chapter 11 asks what all this information tells us, and Chapter 12 adds a coda bringing the story up to the early twenty-first century, and back to Scotland, by looking at a number of recent versions of the song from its country of origin.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

780.82 GRA a

Penerbit

London : Open Book Publishers., 2021

Deskripsi Fisik

361 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781800640672

Klasifikasi

780.82

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Musicology

Info Detail Spesifik

-

Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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