ABSTRACT
Bertrand Bronson published widely on literary topics as well as balladry and folklore, focusing on English literature of the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century. In this essay, he finds tunes indispensable to an understanding of ballad tradition and argues to redress scholarly inattention to the music. Bronson’s analysis of variant texts and tunes is a model of the comparative approach to “traditionary” ballads, which began with Motherwell and underlay Child’s editing. Adopting a model akin to Barry’s of the “life” of a ballad, Bronson seeks “lineal connection” among tunes, emphasizing the orality of “many generations of traditional transmission.” In later work on ballad tunes, he extended the link between medieval modes and ballads, tracing musical continuity among ballad variants in terms of “tune families.” Learned and discriminating, Bronson continued the retrospection of ballad scholarship with his interest in a “conservative,” “ancient,” and “re-creative” tradition whose purity and authenticity are “corrupted” by literacy. The essay here appears in Bronson’s collection of essays on ballad music, The Ballad as Song (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969). His compendium of tunes to the ballads in Child’s collection is The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, 4 Vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959–72).
D.D.
