Traditional Music: The Four Styles You Must Recognise

What “Traditional Music” Means in This Exam

Traditional music covers two things on this specification. The first is music that takes its influences from traditional sources — folk music, for example — and reworks them in a modern style. The second is traditional music from its own culture, performed as it was meant to be performed. Both count, and both turn up in the listening paper.

You will meet four styles, and you are expected to recognise each one from a short extract you have never heard before: blues from 1920 to 1950, fusion music drawing on African and/or Caribbean music, contemporary Latin music, and contemporary folk music of the British Isles.

Reading about these styles is not enough. Each section below gives you the features to listen for, and then an extract so you can hear the feature straight away. Play every extract. The point is to attach a word to a sound, so that when the sound turns up in the exam the word comes back to you.

Blues, 1920–1950

Blues is built on repetition. Most blues songs follow the twelve-bar blues — a twelve-bar chord pattern using chords I, IV and V that repeats for the whole song. Once you hear the pattern come round again, you have found it.

Three other features give blues away. The rhythm is usually swung, so the beat divides unevenly into a long-short lilt rather than straight halves. The singer is answered by an instrument in call and response. And the melody bends certain notes flat — the blue notes — which is where the style gets its characteristic sound.

Listen for: the guitar answering each sung line, and the uneven long-short swing in the beat.

StudyVault study extract — written to demonstrate the style.

Listen for: Ma Rainey’s phrases answered by Louis Armstrong’s cornet — call and response on an original 1924 disc, blue notes on the held syllables.

Ma Rainey, ‘See See Rider Blues’ (Paramount, 1924). Public domain.

Fusion with African and Caribbean Music

Fusion means two traditions meeting. In this strand, African or Caribbean musical thinking meets a contemporary style, and the result usually shows it in the rhythm section rather than the tune.

Listen for guitars playing short repeated patterns that lock together rather than strumming as one, and for percussion layered so that different parts pull against each other. That pull is cross-rhythm, and it is the single most reliable sign of this strand. In Caribbean styles you will often hear the chords land on the offbeat, which is what gives reggae and ska their lift.

Listen for: two guitars playing interlocking repeated patterns, and percussion layered into cross-rhythms.

StudyVault study extract — written to demonstrate the style.

Contemporary Latin Music

Latin music is percussion-led. Congas, bongos and timbales layer up under a piano riff called the montuno, and brass adds short punched chords on top. Underneath it all sits the clave, a five-note rhythmic pattern that the whole band organises itself around.

Listen for: layered hand percussion, and the repeated piano riff driving the whole band.

StudyVault study extract — written to demonstrate the style.

Latin songs also have a distinctive structure. A lead singer improvises a line and the group answers with a fixed repeated phrase — the coro. It is call and response again, but arranged differently from blues: the group answer stays the same while the lead line changes.

Listen for: the group answering the lead singer with the same fixed phrase each time.

StudyVault study extract — written to demonstrate the style.

Contemporary Folk of the British Isles

British and Irish folk melodies often sit in a mode rather than a straightforward major or minor key, which is why they can sound neither happy nor sad but somewhere else entirely. Underneath the tune you will often hear a drone, a held note that never moves.

Listen for: the sustained drone underneath, and the voice joining to double the melody.

StudyVault study extract — written to demonstrate the style.

The other giveaway is decoration. A folk player rarely repeats a tune identically. On the repeat they add ornamentation — quick grace notes and rolls threaded through the melody. Dance tunes such as jigs also move in compound time, with the beat dividing into three rather than two, which produces their characteristic bounce.

Listen for: the fiddle leading, and the extra ornaments it adds when the tune comes round again.

StudyVault study extract — written to demonstrate the style.

Writing About What You Hear

Recognising a style earns you nothing unless you can say why. What counts is the technical word, not an impression. “It sounds happy and bouncy” scores nothing; “the melody is decorated with grace notes over a drone, in compound time” scores.

Use this three-step habit for any listening answer. Name the element the question asks about. Give the technical term for what that element is doing. Say where in the extract you heard it. For example: “The texture is call and response — the guitar answers each sung phrase throughout the extract.”