Thursday 28 March 2024

THE BALLAD THROUGH TIME - 3^C LINGUISTICO

Once medieval ballads (=oral compositions passed on from generation to generation) became popular, they began to borrow freely from  the carols (=religious folk songs or popular hymns, especially associated with Christmas), riddle songs, popular stories and romances of the time. Ballads were popular throughout (=in every part of) Europe and the English-language ballad also borrowed from other countries and cultures.  Read here.

There are examples of the ballad form from the Middle Ages right up to the present day.  The 16th century saw the gradual disappearance of the old-style romances, along with the minstrels who used to recite and sing them. 

The ballad form remained popular through the 17th  and the 18th  centuries, which saw a revival especially of magic and supernatural themes. 

In the 19th century the poetry of the Romantics drew widely for inspiration on the materials of folk narrative ballads and lyrical folk songs: Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner  owes  its intense supernaturalism and its archaisms to traditional ballads; Keats's  La Belle Dame Sans Merci is a ballad about an encounter that involves both pleasure and pain. 

In the 20th  century an oral ballad tradition still survived in England and the United States  and the term "ballad" was applied to a short song with a slow rhythm and romantic or sentimental content.

In the 1960s popular music in general became a space for cultural and political conflict and dialogue. Bob Dylan started to use the form of the ballad to protest against the Vietnam War  when, in 1962, he used the mixture of dialogue and narration of Lord Randal in his song A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. Among his most famous anti-war songs are Blowin’ in the Wind and Masters of War.

The ballad is still used in modern pop and folk music. Read here

from Performer Heritage 1,  Zanichelli, p. 63

https://www.mondadorieducation.it/media/contenuti/canali/english/ppt_letteratura_inglese/01_the_ballad.pdf

https://ingleseperitaliani.jimdofree.com/letteratura-3-anno/the-ballad/the-medieval-ballad-commentary-to-lord-randal/






No comments: