Don – "Now I'm going to ask you to consider an idea that I have never seen explored. I have always assumed that the 'secular' music of those medieval times, the ballads and love songs sung by common people around their hearths at the end of a long day in the fields, followed a musical structure not unlike the one the choirs sung in the cathedrals in their great cities."

I think it's important to consider that plainsong was plain by invention both for purposes of standardizing music across the Roman Catholic Church but also to set it apart, stylistically, from common music. It doesn't get much more aesthetically pure than a slow, unmodulating melody sung in perfect unison. We know that before the implementation of plainsong, music in the early church was all over the map (literally and figuratively), including in the use of musical instruments. Undoubtedly, common people in the medieval period sung ballads and had some form of homegrown music for dancing and likely for coordinated work tasks as well. But the general rule across the globe is heterophony i.e. simultaneous variations on a single melody (for which we can also include things like drones and organum techniques), and the melody must be short and simple enough that it can be quickly recalled without the aid of notation. While it's a romantic idea, I'm skeptical that common folks took much influence from plainsong, same as how they didn't learn Latin from attending mass.

EEB,
Thanks so much for the video. Unbelievable feeling...

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Originally posted by Jack Baker

EEB,
Thanks so much for the video. Unbelievable feeling...

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The two video links were shared by Rick and Don.

Here is another you may like. Psalmody from a congregation on the Isle of Lewis:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nzPyg0uDl

Oops!
Can't seem to open it...JB

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Originally posted by Don Borchelt

  I have always assumed that the "secular" music of those medieval times, the ballads and love songs sung by common people around their hearths at the end of a long day in the fields, followed a musical structure not unlike the one the choirs sung in the cathedrals in their great cities.  When many centuries later those folk left their homes in the Scottish highlands, or rural Germany, and moved across the ocean to settle in the Appalachian highlands, 

The connection you are referring to was studied and notation recorded by hand in the  field by Cecil Sharp and other Edwardian academics before the First World War. 
The modal influence is really no mystery. Sharp traced the versions/adaptations of English ballads he heard sung by elderly members of Appalachian communities. Sharp's core English ballad repertoire was gleaned from a similar field study in my home county of Somerset c. 1900-1905. Many of these English ballads (dating from the late 18th and 19th century) are modal. The idea of a repertoire of 'ancient' ballads defining a transcendental, bucolic 'Englishness' was the product of Victorian nationalism and the wishful thinking of a new, displaced urban generation. Sharp's hand-written transcriptions of both English and American singers are available online in the Vaughan Williams Library collection. Also notebooks and diaries kept during his trips to the Appalachian region.

No doubt a similar connection exists with Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Scandinavian, German, Dutch and French ballads.

I seem to have been misunderstood by one or two of the subsequent posters in this thread. I did not suggest that the common folk learned their musical forms by listening to the chants that were sung in their churches. This is what I actually wrote:

I have always assumed that the "secular" music of those medieval times, the ballads and love songs sung by common people around their hearths at the end of a long day in the fields, followed a musical structure not unlike the one the choirs sung in the cathedrals in their great cities. When many centuries later those folk left their homes in the Scottish highlands, or rural Germany, and moved across the ocean to settle in the Appalachian highlands, I believe they brought those ancient, still preserved musical ways with them, ways that had long been forgotten by much of their own Old World bourgeois society.

All I said was that I thought their old music was "not unlike" the old chant.  In other words, I was essentially pointing out that there is a similarity between the old plainsong chant and the American ballad singing that flourished in the Appalachian mountains before the radio and phonograph.  It also perhaps may have encouraged some of the more crooked fiddling that I think is idiosyncratic of some Appalachian fiddling.

When I read Cecil Sharp's book English Folk Songs in the Southern Appalachians some years ago, I remember him saying in the introduction that he first tried collecting the folksongs of his English heritage in the pubs and other gathering places of his native England, but was disappointed to find that the industrial culture that had taken over much of England had made that almost  impossible.  Then a friend suggested to him that if he wanted to hear people singing the old ballads in their original form, he should travel to America, to the mountains of Appalachia.  Sadly for us, he was only interested in the lyrics of the old songs, not the melodies.  But I would like to reiterate, it is in the Southern Appalachians that you also find preserved songs and tunes with some of the old modal scales that were abandoned by later popular music.

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Originally posted by Don Borchelt

When I read Cecil Sharp's book English Folk Songs in the Southern Appalachians some years ago, I remember him saying in the introduction that he first tried collecting the folksongs of his English heritage in the pubs and other gathering places of his native England, but was disappointed to find that the industrial culture that had taken over much of England had made that almost  impossible.  Then a friend suggested to him that if he wanted to hear people singing the old ballads in their original form, he should travel to America, to the mountains of Appalachia.  Sadly for us, he was only interested in the lyrics of the old songs, not the melodies.  But I would like to reiterate, it is in the Southern Appalachians that you also find preserved songs and tunes with some of the old modal scales that were abandoned by later popular music.

 

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Sharp did find and transcribe the 'old ballads' on his travels through rural Somerset, but he had to intervene and request locals to sing them as the music of local fiddlers and step-dancing that he met was of its Victorian era and did not interest him at all. One such session was at the Castle of Comfort Inn on the Mendip Hills, a pub that is still in business and not far from where I live.

We have on one hand to be very grateful that Sharp (and Karpeles, et al) recorded the old ballads for posterity (and photographed the elderly singers)  But on the other, regretful that he disparaged and disregarded what he considered the common popular music and regional step-dancing. He made no attempt to describe or record the very specific regional steps of the Mendip miners and quarrymen that he saw. Mendip stepping remains largely a lost form to this day. 

Edwardian academics like Sharp had an ideological agenda, and as a result went in search of proof of their fanciful and bogus belief in the 'pure essence' of a mystical 'ancient English repertoire'.

Sharp was also an archetypal upper middle-class Victorian who saw fit to censor and edit the original source material he transcribed before publication.
Entirely due to the bawdiness and thinly-veiled allusions to sex (much of it delighting in extra-marital liaison) in many of the ballads. These ‘old’ ballads had their origins in the 18th and early 19th century - pre-Victorian. The great cultural irony for a Victorian like Sharp was that the English Georgian period was characterised by a wanton bawdiness and licentiousness far-removed from the ‘Improvement’ culture that existed - in part as a reaction - in the Victorian era.

Served him right for asking long-in-the-tooth Somerset rural labourers to 'sing him an old song' !