Ballad (music)

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For other uses, see Ballad (disambiguation).

In jazz and popular music, the term ballad denotes a short song in a slow tempo, usually with a romantic or sentimental text, though the term is also used for instrumental pieces.[1] Ballad is also used in modern pop and folk music for a (usually faster) strophic narrative song, analogous to the older poetic term ballad.[2] The latter usage is usually meant when the word ballad appears in the song's title. Ballads are often regarded as the blatant opposite of a true dance track.

Contents

[edit] Jazz and traditional pop music

[edit] Evolution of the term

The common modern usage of ballad may have evolved from usage in 19th-century Britain. Ballads were generally sentimental, narrative, strophic songs published separately or as part of an opera (descendants perhaps of broadside ballads, but with printed music, and usually newly composed; see also ballad opera). These were sometimes called "drawing-room ballads" owing to their popularity with the middle classes. By the Victorian era ballad had come to mean any sentimental popular song, especially so-called "royalty ballads", which publishers would pay popular singers to perform in Britain and the United States on "ballad concerts." Some of Stephen Foster's songs exemplify this genre.[3] By the 1920s, composers of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway used ballad to signify a slow, sentimental tune or love song, often written in a fairly standardized form (see below). Jazz musicians sometimes broaden the term still further to embrace all slow-tempo pieces.[4]

[edit] Form

Most pop standard and jazz ballads are built from the following elements:

  1. A single, introductory verse; usually around 16 bars in length, and ending on the dominant. This is often omitted in performance, especially for an instrumental rendition, and some ballads, especially later ones, lack it altogether.
  2. The chorus or refrain, i.e. the song proper. Usually it is 16 or 32 bars long, and in AABA form, though other forms such as ABAC are not uncommon, and more complex or irregular forms are far from unheard-of. In AABA forms the B section is usually referred to as the bridge.
  3. Optionally, a brief coda, sometimes based on material from the bridge, as in "Over the Rainbow".[5]

[edit] Practice

Ballads form an important part of the jazz repertory especially, and a pop or jazz set or act (period between breaks) will usually contain one or two ballads to provide a relaxed, intimate change of pace from faster material; or to feature a singer or instrumental soloist. As noted above, the introduction or verse is most often omitted, even by singers; though some ballads, for instance "Lush Life" or "'Round Midnight", traditionally retain their introductions. Repetitions of the chorus tend to be relatively few—often only the second half (BA) of the song-form is repeated—and improvisation, beyond ornamentation of the melody, is usually limited, though the singer or soloist often interpolates an improvised cadenza before the final note of the song. Occasionally a ballad will be reinterpreted as an up-tempo number (and vice-versa), especially by instrumentalists. "Autumn Leaves", for instance, will sometimes receive both treatments in a single performance (as well as being sung in two languages). Thus the identification of a particular song as a ballad can be contingent on the performer, and ballad can sometimes refer to the performing style rather than the song itself.

[edit] Examples

Famous traditional pop and jazz standard ballads include:

[edit] Modern pop and folk music

[edit] Folk

Main article: Ballad

Folk musicians usually use ballad to refer to a narrative strophic song, traditional or newly composed, that may be fast or slow. Folk ballads often have several verses, and generally follow either a simple verse form (i.e. Verse 1, Verse 2...) or a verse-chorus form (Verse 1, Chorus, Verse 2, Chorus...). The chorus may consist of nonsense words. Multiple folk ballad texts may share the same melody; conversely the same text may be sung to multiple melodies.[6]

Some exemplars include:

[edit] Pop

In modern popular music (since c. 1955) one encounters both of the above usages for ballad.

  1. When used generically, as in power ballad or rock ballad, it usually refers to a slow love song, in the American popular tradition. Musicologist Richard Middleton offers this broader definition: "[By] the time of the development of the rock ballad the genre can be defined simply as a slowish pop song, with subjectively orientated and often romantic themes and a personal mode of address."[7]
  2. When the word ballad appears in the title of a song, as for example in Barry Sadler's "Ballad of the Green Berets" or Billy Joel's "The Ballad of Billy the Kid", the folk-music sense is generally implied. Ballad is also sometimes applied to strophic story-songs more generally, such as Don McLean's "American Pie". Modern pop ballads of this kind tend towards greater formal complexity than their folk antecedents.[8] Thus for example: while The Beatles' "The Ballad of John and Yoko" and their "Hey Jude" differ greatly from one another in form, lyrical content and musical character, both are commonly referred to as ballads.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Randel 1986, p. 68
  2. ^ Randel 1986, p. 67
  3. ^ Temperley (II,2).
  4. ^ Witmer. See also Middleton (I,4,i).
  5. ^ Randel 1986, p. 68.
  6. ^ Randel p. 67
  7. ^ Middleton (I.4.i)
  8. ^ McLean's song, for instance, is in a fairly intricate compound verse-chorus form where each verse is itself in a modified AABA form, incorporating irregular phrase-lengths and rhyme schemes. Its kinship with the traditional folk ballad is thus basically limited to its narrative character; yet the label is applied, though not consistently.

[edit] References and further reading