ABSTRACT
France, a country of some fifty-six million people living in an area of 547,000 square kilometers, was, from the 1700s to the mid-1900s, one of the most influential cultural centers in Europe and the world. With 37 percent of its land arable and extremely fertile, its economy provided the basis for a rural, traditional music. The tradition, whether or not proper to Basque culture, puts nicely into relief the solidly monophonie tradition of most of Romance-speaking France. Creativity in French traditional music must be looked for mainly in performance and in the processes of variation. Contexts for music, and especially singing, have been greatly formalized by French tradition. The folk-music revival, already familiar in English-speaking countries, began to make an impression in France only in the later 1970s, and some of its eventual consequences began to be felt. Some enunierative songs—a popular category in France—are recapitulative, augmenting the strophe progressively.
