IN a remarkable and famous passage in Religio Medici, Sir Thomas Browne says, “ There is a music wherever there is a harmony, order, or proportion ; and thus far we may maintain the ‘music of the ...

Folk Song in England. By Steve Roud. Faber & Faber; 764 pages; £25. To be published in America in September; $29.95. ENGLAND, the Germans used to jeer, was “the land without music”. They were wrong, ...

IT is only in recent years that with the active collection and study of European folk-lore the folksong and folk-dance have begun to receive the attention which they deserve. The collecting of English ...

Japanese folk songs evolved in the same way as English language ones even though they are sung in different tones and scales. Patrick Savage at Keio University in Japan and his colleagues analysed the ...

In a world where some argue that mankind has totally abandoned tradition while others profess that tradition is what is holding us back, Neil Luck and Mimi Doulton demonstrate that it is possible to ...

The songs that Shirley Collins sings are like time capsules, each with vast histories waiting to be uncovered. Some have journeyed across decades, even centuries, shape-shifting and meeting each ...

Offa Rex -- a transatlantic collaboration of the English singer Olivia Chaney and the American indie rock band The Decemberists -- is putting a modern twist on traditional folk songs that were ...

Humans must have learned to sing early in our history because “we can find something we can call music in every society,” says musicologist Yuto Ozaki of Keio University in Tokyo. But did singing ...

The English Folk Dance and Song Society was formed in 1932 by the merger of two organizations, the Folk-Song Society, and the English Folk Dance Society. The Folk-Song Society, founded in 1898, was ...

Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin. You’re probably familiar with the concept of evolution. Living things evolve by accumulating genetic changes, which are ...

"The Wassail Bowl," printed in The Illustrated London News on Dec. 22, 1860. Going door to door and offering a song or performance in exchange for a drink or money is a centuries-old English custom.

THE recent amalgamation of the Folk Song Society with the English Folk Dance Society has been marked by the appearance of a new journal with the title Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song ...