The Montgomery advertiser., 1902-12-04
ORIGIN OF POPULAR SONGS.
Where the First Germs for the Tunes

Where the First Germs for the Tunes
 of the Street are to Be Found.
 Julia R Tutwiler, in New York Evening
 Post.
 If A Confederate soldier had been told during the war that Dixie" was writ ten for walk around" by an eha man. born in Maine, his answer would probably have been a word ana oloW' Today he would either listen in courteous incredulous silence. or prove. to his own satisfaction, that the spirit of the melody is inherently Southern. Indeed. 1t has not been very long since a white-halred Confederate honored me with long ana logical account of the real origin. or this one of our popular songs-as origin as far from the truth as the puhlic's im- pression of where many, if not most, or our popular songs come from.
 The audiences who delight in them. the boys who whistle them, and the street musicians who play these melodies are as unconscious of their significance as the average churchgoer and church singer are of the racial characteristics. the re- ligious and sociological history. the deh- nite period of secular artistic development and the individual creative activity em- bodied in the Gregorian. chants. AS Tar apart as these two branches of music stand they are not dissimilar in the man ner of their composition. Many of the Gregorian chants are interpretations or aGaptations of the old-foik sOnSs: many of our popular sonSi are adaptations or the whole melody is taken, as in The Seven Joys of Mary" familiar to us as 'The Man Who Hath Good Peanuts and Giveth His Brother None;" here the only change made Is in the chorus of the na ,I1 L. A.,,itf phrase of the hymn. Sometimes half a dozen tunes are worked into a motive as in 'The Holy City" different parts of which are incorporated into as many different songs and hymns. Sometimes the only change made is that of time and key and set to rag-time; or Annie Rooney" which was originally Baptist hymn.
 Subconscious Reminiscence.
 TO cal this trapso Dsltt5n of melodies plagarisms would scarcely be fair. When we remember that the musical composer has at his command but seven primary tunes, that these can be stretched into only twelve, and that subconscious rem inisesnee is one of the most ingenlously constrUcted pitfalls in the way Of all original compositions it is not easy to say as to what point unconscious rehec- ton, or assimilation slips into careless imitation or deliberate plagiarism. D'Al- bert's "Gismonda" Is so dominated by Wagnerian ideals that the listener is tessed by an intellectual effort to remem- Der when and where he has heard 1t all before until the act in which he ex- claims, "Segfrieds bird song stolen bod ily!" and is ready to assert that he has been listening to Wagner paraphrased and diluted. But D'Alherts opera Is not Wagner|t is Wagnerian principles and ideals passed through creative medium in which the reminiscent faculty is so strong that it has colored the original melodic idea.
 This insolube subconsoious reminis- cence is the cause effect and explana- tion of those infant prodigies who never reach musical maturity, and it also an element in the pleasure with which we hear the popular music of the day. We often sing or play these melodies after once hearing because they are largely made up of musical motives or ideas that we are already vaguely familiar with. This familiarity is a composite thing, just as the germ of the popular song is often an unconscious process of selection and rejection from half a dog en-perhaps an even greater number of vagrant tunes harvested from fields as far apart as the old English melo- dies and the Bach figures. and as invol- untary in their appropriation as the creating impulse of the genius that makes Schubert the writer of immortal songs. or the instinct that eliminates the obvious and the commonplace from MacDowelIs compositions. i,
 The Composer at Work
 It was wholly by chance. while wait ing in the dark passa geway of pri- vate house which had been converted into cheap flats and lodging rooms. that stumbled upon two ways of earning living which in their combination are one of the most faithful sources of our popular songs., The sound of appar- ently intermittent whlstling and dis cordant banging on a piano.-not more than one chord and combination out of six harm0nized-irst confused and finally fixed in my consciousness a musical phrase that puzzles me by its familiarity later in a music nall until I suddenly remembered where had first heard it. and traced back to the dark passa geway and discordant whstUng and banging what may be termed the see ond period" of the popular song,