Baines collected folk melodies from books and journals, noting them down and comparing the melodies. This is the first page of a set of Czech tunes. On the reverse of this page he queries how many of the tunes that start on the beat are versions of tunes that start on the up-beat?
This page shows Baines’s meticulous indexing, with the topic, nation, and region, ‘FOLKSONG Czechoslovakia: Czech’, typed in the top right-hand corner, along with a hand-drawn national flag.
On this page a five-line stave is drawn for every melody, but on other pages it was dispensed with entirely, leaving most of the note pitches ambiguous.
While the index deems these pages to be about folksong, there are many sections within these notes on music played for dance, as well as later pages on related topics including children’s songs and laments. Within each section, in addition to the melodies there are occasional harmony lines, along with notated scales and maps of various regions.
