The traditional tunes of the child ballads: uma análise musical e historiográfica da coletânea de Bertrand Harris Bronson.

Abstract

Ballads were the most celebrated objects of study among Anglophone folklore scholars of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. The 1950s saw important changes take place, especially regarding the musical investigation of traditional productions, which led to impactful ruptures with the views and methods of earlier folklorists. In this sense, the present text casts a critical eye on the important body of work by Bertrand Harris Bronson, which is temporally situated within this rupture, while nevertheless maintaining a methodological foundation essentially grounded in the notions of the earliest British and American folklorists. This work will focus primarily on his collection, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, in which more than 4,000 melodic variants, drawn from different collectors and various collections, are classified and grouped. A brief historiography of English-language folklore studies is necessary, without which the critique of Bronson's work loses substance, since his assertions concerning what he called Anglo-Celtic folklore are embedded within a seminal discourse that portrayed non-literate musical practices along ethnic lines. The present work analyzes, through the substantial gains in tools and analytical approaches from ethnomusicology, the limitations and contributions of the theoretical framework created by Bronson.