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Definition: ballad from Musical Terms, Symbols and Theory: An Illustrated Dictionary

a composition combined with a narrative, originally a dance with a related story line. The term has evolved over time to include music descriptive of adventurous or romantic tales. See also dance; folk music; song.


ballad

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
in literature, short, narrative poem usually relating a single, dramatic event. Two forms of the ballad are often distinguished—the folk ballad, dating from about the 12th cent., and the literary ballad, dating from the late 18th cent. The anonymous folk ballad (or popular ballad), was composed to be sung. It was passed along orally from singer to singer, from generation to generation, and from one region to another. During this progression a particular ballad would undergo many changes in both words and tune. The medieval or Elizabethan ballad that appears in print today is probably only one version of many variant forms. Primarily based on an older legend or romance, this type of ballad is usually a short, simple song that tells a dramatic story through dialogue and action, briefly alluding to what has gone before and devoting little attention to depth of character, setting, or moral commentary. It uses simple language, an economy of words, dramatic contrasts, epithets, set phrases, …
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Full text Article ballad

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
in literature, short, narrative poem usually relating a single, dramatic event. Two forms of the ballad are often distinguished—the folk ballad, dating from about the 12th cent., and the literary ballad, dating from the late 18th cent. The anonymous folk ballad (or popular ballad), was composed to…
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Full text Article BALLAD

From The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms
In scholarly discourse since the 18th c., across the disciplines of lang. and lit., musicology, and folklore, a ballad is a narrative song set to a rounded—i.e., stanzaic—tune or a literary poem modeled on such songs. This stanzaic structure distinguishes the ballad from the sung traditional * epic…
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Full text Article ballad

From Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature
Ballads, specifically folk ballads (also called traditional or popular ballads), are narrative folk songs transmitted orally among the common people in preliterate or partially literate societies. While ballads are known to have existed throughout Europe, the ballads composed in the remote areas…
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Full text Article ballad

From Encyclopedia of American Literature Full text Article Volume 1
A ballad is a song or a poem that presents a dramatic narrative of a heroic character or a significant cultural event, sometimes with musical accompaniment. It may also refer to a light song to accompany a dance. These songs may be further categorized as “folk ballads,” which relate popular tales…
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Full text Article BALLAD

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
I. Regional and Linguistic Variation II. Oral and Written Ballads III. Scholarship and Influence in Literary History In scholarly discourse since the 18th c., across the disciplines of lang. and lit., musicology, and folklore, a ballad is a narrative song set to a rounded—i.e., stanzaic—tune or a…
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Full text Article ballad

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Literary genre of traditional narrative poetry, widespread in Europe and the USA. Ballads are simple in metre , sometimes (as in Russia) without regular lines and rhymes or (as in Denmark) dependent on assonance . Concerned with some strongly emotional event, the ballad is halfway between the lyric…
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Full text Article ballad

From The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature
In present-day use, a term for a narrative song, focusing on a single event or situation, economical in style, and probably orally transmitted at least through part of its history. Repetition, sometimes of a nonsense phrase, is often used, both for effect and apparently also to lighten the load on…
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Full text Article ballad

From The Chambers Dictionary
a slow, sentimental song; a simple narrative poem in short stanzas ( usu of four lines, of eight and six syllables alternately); a popular song, often scurrilous, referring to contemporary persons or events (chiefly hist ); formerly a drawing-room song, usu sentimental, in several verses sung to the…
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Full text Article ballads.

From The Oxford Companion to British History
Defining a ballad is difficult, since it is an adaptable and flexible art-form which has changed with the times. Intended for singing, the metre and language is usually simple and direct, the colours bold, the humour broad, with a chorus to encourage the company to join in. The earliest ballads were…
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Full text Article BALLADS

From The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales
Narrative poems which may be sung, declaimed or read. Ballads in Welsh recounting events from the late 16th and early 17th centuries have survived, such as those telling of the Babington Plot to kill Queen Elizabeth and of the Gunpowder Plot; but it was the arrival of the printing press in…
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