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Folk music in the traditional sense-music played or sung around the village green, music used to accompany ceremonials like harvesting—belongs to the small communities exemplified in the English village of pre-industrial times. The art music of the written tradition is too the music of the community, hut of very different kind. It stems from a leisured class or group that has time and learning to write down its music and to rehearse complex and difficult works. Originally this was pre-eminently done in the church; after the Middle Age it became more and more popular in the courts of the secular nobility of Europe. As recently as the late eighteenth century Haydn and Mozart wrote most of their music for performances in private orchestras and theatres, and hence the classical composers developed their orchestral symphonies, their chamber music and operas.

During the great nineteenth century transition from an aristocratic and mainly agricultural society to the industrial age in which we live now, men and women were herded into the factories and slums; and the indigenous popular music and dancing began to die out At the other end of the scale the music of the art musicians began to be enjoyed by a wider social class, and composers such as Mendelssohn wrote for the middle-class Victorian drawing-room.

In the barren and bleak environment of the nineteenth century industrial town, however, something very notable in the way of a new people’s music flourished. There were the music-hall songs, and this was indeed a popular music in a limited way; but it was not until the growth of jazz and of the dance music developed from it that the urban masses began to find something which had a special appeal.

And so it was at this point that everything came together. The new kind of music; the means of disseminating it widely through the gramophone and, later, the radio; the commercial world of mass production for profit; and the new twentieth century folk-people with little experience cither in self-expression in music or in the arts of any sort of cultural background, but people with a steadily increasing amount of money and leisure. Some form of release through music they sought, as every human community has sought it, and some form they were given.

So developed the new industry, an industry for the provision of popular music. As Christian Damton has said, folk music（as commonly understood） is “music which comes from the people”, whereas popular music（ again as commonly understood） is, “music written for the people”; and the achievement of the business interests in Tm Pan Alley and the recording companies has been to manufacture a music for the people on the largest possible scale. They have done this, as such things must be done, by process of standardization, by providing an article which will be accepted by most of the people of the time.