Music, language and style of Maltese folk music

Abstract

A CULTURAL ASPECT that might influence the style of a musical tradition is the language spoken by the same musical culture. The stylistic features of a singing style may partly depend on how speech and music interact and how one mode affects the other. Speech melody, for example, sets up certain patterns of sound which must to a considerable extent be followed by the music, if the music-text fusion (that is, the entire sound of the song) is to be perceived and favourably assimilated by the listener. I shall here try to focus on aspects of the inter-relationship between language and music as manifested in ghana (Malta’s folk music), particularly how this correlation influences, and sometimes even determines, the overall style of this genre of music.