We should be on our guard, then, against assuming that what we know as ‘song literature’--the songs written by composers in their study and printed on paper before being sung--is any very considerable part of the song music of the world. It is merely the music chiefly at the disposal of highly educated people--principally because it is _printed_. And from a certain standpoint--that of the school-trained musician--it is perhaps the ‘greatest’ vocal music. But remember that the standpoint of the school-trained musician is only one standpoint. The conscious composer has chosen to look at his musical materials in a certain way and to judge the result accordingly. But by another test his work is inferior; in its power to move thousands of human hearts no song by Schubert or Schumann or Brahms can begin to equal ‘Auld Lang Syne’ or ‘The Marseillaise.’ Of necessity this book will be chiefly concerned with consciously composed ‘art’ music. But we should always remember that this is only because art music represents the great majority of all the music that has been noted down--and of course in a measure art songs at their best contain in a sublimated form the elements of folk-song. The less civilized and conscious people are, the more readily they do their own singing. There is little spontaneous song among us to-day and yet we can occasionally hear a workman humming an aimless tune under his breath. This was probably the normal state of things when men were less educated. Everybody was a composer, partly because it was easier to make up your own song than to remember somebody else’s. Among the Indians songs were regarded in some tribes as the personal property of the person who invented them and were not to be sung by any one else unless that second person had acquired the rights in it by gift or inheritance. But generally, as people became somewhat more advanced, songs were freely appropriated from one singer to another. And each singer who borrowed generally added something of his own to the song--something to express his sense of beauty or artistic fitness: a more effective phrasing here, or a simpler group of notes there. Sometimes the song was so popular that it passed from tribe to tribe, or from nation to nation. In this case each people gave its individuality to the song, adding perhaps a little ornamentation if its nature was gay and volatile, or making the melody more regular and balanced if its soul was earnest and contemplative. Everywhere the races, the nations, and the tribes have shown their souls to us in their songs.