a dawning recognition of the principles of instrumental
form, _i.e._, the need of balanced phrases, caused in the songs by the
metrical structure of the words, and in the dances by the symmetrical
movements of the body; a recognition above all, of the application of
a definite system of tonal-centres, and of repetition after contrast.
In fact, as we look back it is evident that the outlines of our most
important design, that known as the Sonata Form are--in a rudimentary
state--found in folk-music. Folk-melodies and rhythms play a large
part in the music of Haydn, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Grieg,
Tchaikowsky and Dvo[vr]ak. It seems as if modern composers were doing
for music what Luther Burbank has done for plant life; for by grafting
modern thought and feeling on to the parent stock of popular music,
they have secured a vigor attainable in no other way. Thus some of the
noblest melodies of Brahms, Grieg, and Tchaikowsky are actual
folk-tunes with slight variation or original melodies conceived in a
folk-song spirit.[22]

[Footnote 21: For an eloquent presentation of the significance of
Folk-music see the article by Henry F. Gilbert in the _Musical
Quarterly_ for October, 1917.]

[Footnote 22: For an able account of the important role that
folk-melodies are taking in modern music see Chapter V of _La Chanson
Populaire en France_ by Julian Tiersot.]

As music, unlike the other arts, lacks any model in the realm of
nature, it has had to work out its own laws, and its spontaneity and
directness are the result. It has not become imitative, utilitarian or
bound by arbitrary conventions. As Berlioz says in the _Grotesques de
la Musique_: "Music exists by itself; it has no need of poetry, and if
every human language were to perish, it would be none the less the
most poetic, the grandest and the freest of all the arts." When we
reach the centuries in which definite records are available, we find a
wealth of folk-songs from the Continental nations: Irish, Scotch,
English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, etc.[23] In these
we can trace the transition from the old modes to our modern major and
minor scales; the principles of tonality and of rudimentary
modulation, the dividing of the musical thought into periodic lengths
by means of cadential endings, the instinct for contrast and for the
unity gained by restatement. No better definition of Folk-songs can be
given than that of Parry in his _Evolution of the Ar