Importance of Song in Human Society

Among primitive peoples two kinds of song exist: the commonest is a chant closely related to speech and using prose rhythms with but few tones and the other is an accented type, inseparable from the dance. The art song appears very early in the history of mankind. A combination of expressive melody and poetry, often accompanied by an instrument, it is composed primarily either to express some personal human emotion such as joy or love and for pure pleasure in song.

Song serves a variety of purposes in human society, used to express religion petition, praise to some great power. In the Feudal period, songs were news-bearing chants, and ballads based on actual events are still composed in many parts of the world, including the mountain regions of North America, where accounts of sinking of the Titanic and of Charles Lindbergh’s flight have had an enduring popularity.

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Certain kinds of songs are used instead of instruments to accompany dancing, as lilting in Ireland, and play-party songs in the United States. Songs are also used to lighten labor by facilitating the rhythmic co-ordination of movements. Usually a song is the musical setting of a poem, either accompanied by a musical instrument or intended for the voice alone.

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In European music the troubadours in the south of France and the trouveres in the north were the aristocrats among professional musicians of this period around A.D. 1100. They were both composers and performers, usually attached to one or another of the great houses of western Europe.

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Meanwhile the movement in Italy which resulted, about 1600, in the first opera, was developing two distinct types of song, the recitative and the aria. These types of song influenced vocal style , and  thus in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Italian singers were famous for a flowing style which emphasized great beauty of tone. In conclusion song serves a variety of purposes to express religious exaltation, to express some personal human emotion or for pure pleasure in song.