Walter Armitage Justice Ford

“ Through the voice, the race of man has fashioned for his use two languages—the one of speech, by which we communicate our needs, our thoughts, our experience to one another, and without which no civilized life in communities is possible; the other, the language of melody, by which we express all those thing. ”

“ The beginnings of melody are older than the beginnings of language, and spring from a different human impulse. But the fact that folk-songs have words as well as melodies easily leads to confusion of thought; for, at the stage of civilization in which we live, it his become, for the majority of people, more natural to talk than to sing. It is obviously more natural to sing than to talk ”

“ Among the song composers who have adopted the modern standpoint, according to which accepted canons of beauty and of form must yield if they interfere with a closer or more vivid realization of dramatic or emotional expression, Wolf holds a place in which he has no rival, not because of the daring originality of his methods and the remarkable idiosyncrasies of his style, but because these are the direct outcome of rare poetical insight and imaginative power. He has that gift of vision which makes the difference between genius and talent. ”

“ Art is the product of the human intellect, which has set itself to train and develop what was originally only a natural instinct. In folk-song we have the results of natural instinct itself unconsciously, unreflectively developed through endless centuries. ”

“ What are folk-songs as we know them to-day? The songs which have been taken down from the lips of the peasantry, mostly in very recent years. They owe their preservation to the tenacious memories of country folk through countless generations. In other words, they are traditional.
They are to be found in all nations, savage or civilized, all over the world. And in civilized nations the melodies of folk-song have been little affected by the musical changes which civilization has brought to the art of music. ”

“ Many of you possess a violin or a piano, or some musical instrument; but there is only one musical instrument which everyone possesses and has always possessed—the voice. Such a gift was not given without the intention that we should all use it, and use it, as the inferior manufactured instruments are used, for music. ”

“ In reality the forms of Wolf's songs vary as widely as those of the poems which he set. No less remarkable is the immense range of style at his command. But with Wolf methods of form and style are so inseparably linked with the poetical conceptions which they embody, that they can hardly be considered apart. ”

“ It is only a living thing, an essential part of human life, now to an aged peasant here and there who cherishes what his father and grandfather sang before him, or in peasant communities, such as that one which Mr. Cecil Sharp visited in the Apalachian Mountains, where civilized music and musical instruments have not yet penetrated, and where men, women and children all sing, and sing the songs brought by their forbears from England 300 years ago. ”

“ From the age of seventeen he had to depend upon himself for his musical training. By giving lessons on the piano and with occasional small help from his father he managed to live for several years in Vienna, but it was a life of extreme hardship and privation, for which his delicate constitution and his proud, sensitive and nervous temperament were particularly ill-suited. ”

“ If, then, with the voice is given also the instinct, to use it, to sing is not an exceptional, but the normal thing to do. Only abnormal or unnatural conditions, such as prevail in what we call civilisation, prevent singing from being a universal habit. ”