Any good books on the subject?
I recently saw some Van Gogh paintings and people really love/talk a lot about them, but it seems to me to be a bunch of white people just doing white people stuff.
Look at the wikipedia page for The Starry Night
Lots of words about what he meant and his mental state at the time, even tho he himself didn't talk much about it and sent it off with 9 other paintings.
Was it common for painters to support themselves with their art at the time? Is it common in history to have such a class of people? What sort of people brought the paintings? What did they think of them? What were the paintings made from? Where were those materials from and how where they made? Were painters considered "Artist" at the time, or more of a technical crafts man, like a black smith. How much money did they make? When did people decorating themselves and their environments turn in to "Art" for white people? Etc etc.
Those sorts of questions and answers are much, much more interesting to me than the mental state of some dude.
Maybe I'm just discribing an Art History book, but don't know enough to know what I don't know.
edit: also, dude cuts off his ear and then stays in a two story hospital room for a year that catered to the rich? I thought the dude was poor?
There were, during the classical era at least. We actually have a lot of folk pieces from the last 1000 years.
Allan Ramsey, for instance, collected Scottish Lowland music of the late 1600s, even weaving them into a ballad opera. And of course, Gay's Beggar's Opera of the 1720s carries most of the hits of the day and previous eras. The opening song is "Sumer is icumin in" a popular Anglo-Norman folk song of around 1200. A dance tune (more of a chord progression really before the 1600s) "La Follie" from the 1400s is still sung today by second rate classical crossover artists ("Say another prayer in the night" is the most well known modern version, I think.) Germany had a real hardon for adapting folk songs for reformation hymns, as did non-conformists.
In the renaissance court composers started to steal folk tunes as part of their push for "Greek Simplicity" and composers have continued ever since or adapted folk methods in their compositions. Flotow uses "The Last Rose of Summer" as his key leitmotif in "Martha" and he isn't the only one.
Also, with many many people getting musical training of some kind singing styles were more...classical (well, baroque) in western Europe than you might think, even for "low" music. (EDIT: here's one of Ramsey's, not for the faint of heart to sing, gonna be using all the octaves you've got.)
Of course, sometimes it goes the other way. Compare the French 18th century court ballad "Plasir d'Amour" to Elvis' "just can't stop falling in love with you".