Composition - Ballad - Britannica

Music

A ballad is not technically a ballad unless it is sung; but though tunes and texts are dynamically interdependent, it is not unusual to find the same version of a ballad being sung to a variety of tunes of suitable rhythm and metre or to find the same tune being used for several different ballads. And just as there are clusters of versions for most ballads, so a given ballad may have associated with it a family of tunes whose members appear to be versions of a single prototypical form.

Ballad tunes are based on the modes rather than on the diatonic and chromatic scales that are used in modern music. Where chromaticism is detected in American folk music, the inflected tones are derived from black folk practice or from learned music. Of the six modes, the preponderance of folk tunes are Ionian, Dorian, or Mixolydian; Lydian and Phrygian tunes are rare. The folk music least affected by sophisticated conditioning does not avail itself of the full seven tones that compose each of the modal scales. Instead, it exhibits gapped scales, omitting either one of the tones (hexatonic) or two of them (pentatonic). Modulation sometimes occurs in a ballad from one mode to an adjacent mode.

Most tunes consist of 16 bars with duple rhythm, or two beats per measure, prevailing slightly over triple rhythm. The tune, commensurate with the ballad stanza, is repeated as many times as there are stanzas. Unlike the “through-composed” art song, where the music is given nuances to correspond to the varying emotional colour of the content, the folk song affords little opportunity to inflect the contours of the melody. This limitation partly explains the impassive style of folk singing, Musical variation, however, is hardly less frequent than textual variation; indeed, it is almost impossible for a singer to perform a ballad exactly the same way twice. The stablest part of the tune occurs at the mid-cadence (the end of the second text line) and the final cadence (the end of the fourth line). The third phrase of the tune, corresponding to the third line of the stanza, proves statistically the most variable. Significantly, these notes happen to coincide with the rhyming words. The last note of the tune, the point of resolution and final repose, usually falls on the fundamental tone (i.e., keynote) of the scale; the mid-cadence falling normally a perfect fifth above the tonic or a perfect fourth below it. To make for singability, the intervals in the melodic progression seldom involve more than three degrees. And since the singer performs solo or plays the accompanying instrument himself, he need not keep rigidly to set duration or stress but may introduce grace notes to accommodate hypermetric syllables and lengthen notes for emphasis.