Back in the 1950s the EFDSS in Camden Town settled on music вЂњevolved through oral transmissionвЂќ вЂ“ which meant something could still be вЂњfolkвЂќ if there was an identifiable author, so long as it was then absorbed into an unwritten tradition and refashioned over time. PhotoВ courtesy of The English Folk Dance and Song SocietyДЄs definitions go, this wasnвЂ™t over-helpful and the folk-song industry has struggled ever since to find a form of words that pin-point what itвЂ™s dealing with. But the seriВous business of scholarly pursuit truly began with the 18th-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who coined the term Volkslied (folk song) and attempted to define it as music that summed up the character of a nation or community.ДЇolk collector Cecil Sharp, left, interviewing Edwin Clay at Brailes, Warwickshire, c1900. In the 1600s Samuel Pepys got interested in the oral history of ballads and at much the same time, Jesuit missionaries in China tracked down ancient songs of long-lost provenance. This collecting process actually started long before the early 20th century when Sharp was active. Some of them in fact originate on our own English doorstep, in the form of unnotated songs passed down the line of old, rural communities.ДЄnd theyвЂ™re the musical equivalent of an endangered species вЂ“ which is why people like Sharp have gone out with pen and paper, sometimes with cumbersome recording equipment, to вЂњcollectвЂќ and preserve them. But there are others, maybe less вЂњdevelopedвЂќ but still long-lived. To live in Europe is to be steeped in a musical tradition so pervasive, so apparently complete and all-encompassing, that it can seem to be the only one there is. Photo: Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-107289 Piegan Indian, Mountain Chief, with ethnologist Frances Densmore, listening to a recording for the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1916.

And the clue to what both books are ultimately about is their bold use of a disarming plural. And as such, Sharp plays a starring role among the curious, combative, often quaint and sometimes questionable characters who fill the pages of a new book by the Islington-based ethnomusicologist and critic Michael Church.Д®ntitled Musics Lost and Found: Song Collectors and the Life and Death of Folk Tradition, the book is a successor to his previous trawl through sound worlds that exist outside the standard Western canon: an impressive study called The Other Classical Musics that won him a Royal Philharmonic Society award. ItвЂ™s the headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), otherwise called Cecil Sharp House after one of the most celebrated figures in the modern history of folk song collecting. Russian pioneer folklorist Mitrofan Pyatnitsky and choir he founded in 1910ДЄ CHARMING paradox of life in cool and edgy Camden Town is that a short walk from the tube station is somewhere people go to dance in clogs and sing time-honoured songs about green willows and a harvest rumble in the hayloft.

Alan lomax recordings