The very fact of its communal origin -- its being
passed from mouth to mouth among the people, who
have no professional training and only modest skill
-- saves it from the arterio-sclerosis of professional-
ism from which most of our so-called "art-music"
dies prematurely. Again, even the limitations of
folksong may prove helpful to the would-be appreci.
ator who is approaching music without much pre-
vious experience. Fortunate is it for him that
folk-music is primitive, that though it pursues the
same kinds of beauty and expressiveness as the
opera, the sonata, the string quartet, and the sym-
phony, it pursues them under simpler conditions and
on a smaller scale. As the lover of poetry may
comprehend a song of Burns before he is ready for
a tragedy of Shakespeare, so the music-lover may
prepare himself for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by
studying in the German folksongs the acorns, so to
speak, of which it is the oak. Folksongs, then, are
fitted to strengthen our musical feeling because they
are spontaneous rather than sophisticated; to raise
and universalize it because they are communal rather
than individual, amateur rather than professional;
and to develop it because, since they are primitive,
they afford the natural beginning for a study which
can lead only gradually to the more complex types
of musical art.

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