Traditional music is the term used increasingly (eg the Grammy Awards) for folk music, folk music, not contemporary. More information can be found in the Terminology Section of products of world music. Other organizations have made similar changes, although it has been customary, traditional music remains as "folk" to refer.

Before the twentieth century, ordinary workers and factory workers were illiterate. They acquired their songs by heart. First, it was not through books, recorded or transferred the media convey. Singers may extend their repertoire with pamphlets, hymn books or CDs, but they are secondary expansions experienced by the same character as the primary songs in the flesh.

It was determined by culture - a region or a particular culture. As part of a group of immigrants who acquires an extra dimension to folk music for social cohesion. It is particularly striking in the United States, where Poland and the Americans, Irish-Americans and Asian Americans are trying to highlight deviations from the general public. They learn songs and dances that originated in the country where their grandparents came from.

On certain days of the year, like Easter, Christmas, May and a hoe, especially the songs celebrate the yearly cycle. Weddings, birthdays and funerals can also be observed with songs, dances and special costumes. Religious holidays are often a component of folk music. Choral music at these events brings children and non-professional singers to participate in a public space, so the emotional connection that is not related to the qualities aethetic music.

In the same way that people have a mixed origin, with parents from different continents, including music can be a mixture of influences. A particular model or a rhythm instrument is distinctive enough to give a more traditional atmosphere of music, even when taken recently. It is easy to detect the presence of a bagpipe or a tabla in a musical. Boys are generally much less shocked by the dilution or adjustment of the songs on this path. Similarly, an electric guitar can be added to an old song. It is a matter of personal taste whether this is an extension of the music, or a cheap gimmick. Relevant factors may instrumentation, mood, voicings, phrasing, and even the subject of production methods.

Apart from instrumental music, this part of the traditional form of dance music is mainly traditional music, vocal music, traditional music, as the instrument that makes such music is almost a rule. As such, the most significant music of the traditional texts.

Verse narrative plays an important role in traditional music of many cultures. This includes such forms as traditional epic poetry, many of which were originally intended for oral performance, sometimes accompanied by instruments. Many epic poems of different cultures from short pieces to traditional narrative, which merged its episodic structure, and explains their often intriguing developments in media res. Other forms of traditional narrative poetry affect the outcome of battles and other tragedies or natural disasters. Sometimes, as in the Song of Deborah triumphant in the biblical book of Judges, these songs celebrate victory. Sue for lost battles and wars, and the lives lost in them, are also important in many traditions, the complaints keep alive the cause for which the battle was fought. The narratives of folk songs often remind them, as folk hero John Henry to Robin Hood. Some traditional song narratives recall events supernatural or mysterious death.

Hymns and other forms of music are often of unknown origin and traditional. Western musical notation was originally created by the lines of Gregorian chant, which was taught before their invention as an oral tradition in monastic communities receive. Traditional songs such as Green Grow the rushes, O present religious customs in a mnemonic form. To preserve in the western world, Christmas carols and other traditional songs in the form of religious traditions song.

Work songs frequently feature call and response structures to coordinate and serve the workers, they sing, their efforts in accordance with the rhythms of the songs. They are often but not always together. In the U.S. military are a living tradition calls Jody ("Songs Duckworth") sung while soldiers are on the rise. Professional sailors used a lot of sea shanties. Love poetry, often of a tragic or regret, figures prominently in many traditions. Nursery rhymes and nonsense verse are also frequent subjects of folk songs.

While the loss of traditional music in the face of the rise of popular music is a global phenomenon, it is not occurring uniformly throughout the world. While even many tribal cultures lose their traditional music and popular culture, the process is more advanced, "where industrialization and commercialization of the most advanced culture." [2] However, in countries or regions where Traditional music is an expression of cultural or national identity, the loss of traditional music can be slowed, which is held true, for example in the case of Bangladesh, Hungary, India, Ireland, Latvia, Turkey, Portugal , Brittany and Galicia, Greece and Crete, which retain their traditional music to some extent in some regions the decline of traditional music and the loss of traditions has been reversed. This is most obvious when the mark of travel agencies in some areas with the word "Celtic". Find guides and posters of Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, Brittany and Nova Scotia to live music. The local government often sponsors and promotes performances during the holiday season, and lost traditions alive.

Since 19 century, those interested - began to notice that we take to lose, and he grew various efforts aimed at preserving the music of people - academics and amateur researchers. One such attempt was the collection of Francis James Child in the late 19th century by the texts of over 300 English and Scottish ballads in the tradition (the so-called Child Ballads). In the 1960's and early 1970's, American scientists published Bertrand Harris Bronson exhaustive four-volume collection known variations of the words and melodies with what happened when the child joined Canon announced. He suggested some theories about how important oral tradition and hearing.

Coinciding with the child came from the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould and Cecil Sharp and clear later in the early 20th century century worked for a large body of English rural song, traditional music and dance, under the aegis of what became and remains the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). Sharp has also worked in America, recording traditional songs of the Appalachian Mountains in 1916-1918 in collaboration with Maud Karpeles and Olive Dame Campbell. Campbell and Sharp, among others, the names of the actors in the film "Songcatcher" modern representation.

Similar activity was also underway in other countries. One of the most extensive work was perhaps Krisjanis Barons Riga is among the years 1894-1915 has published six volumes containing the texts of folk songs dainas 217 996 Latvian Latvju.

About this time, composers of classical music developed a keen interest in collecting folk songs, and a number of notable composers conducted their own field work on the traditional song. For Percy Grainger and Ralph Vaughan Williams was in England and Béla Bartók in Hungary. These composers, like many of his predecessors, incorporates traditional materials into their classical compositions. The ladies Latviju are detailed in the choral classics by Andrejs Juran, Janis Cimze Emilis Melngailis and used.

In North America, during the years 1930 and 1940, the Library of Congress has worked in the offices of traditional music collector Robert Winslow Gordon, Alan Lomax and others, so much material to cover the area in North America as possible .

People who studied classical singing, sometimes hoped that their work would restore the traditional music to the public. Sun Cecil Sharp campaigned, with some success, in English traditional songs (in his own heavily edited and expurgated version) must be taught to schoolchildren.

A theme that runs through the heyday of traditional scientific Song Collection is the tendency of some members of the "folk", supposed to be the object of study for scientists and sits down. For example, Jean Ritchie was the youngest child of a large family in Viper, Kentucky that had preserved many old traditional Appalachian songs. Ritchie, live in a time when the Appalachians were open to outside influences, was a university education, and finally to New York where she moved a number of classical recordings of the repertoire of the family, and published an important compilation of songs. (See also Hedy West)