ABSTRACT
Two general questions inform the works annotated in the present chapter. First, is folk music a European construct? Second, to what extent does folk music contribute to constructs of Europe, its history, and its interaction with cultures beyond its borders? The concept of folk music, as we have witnessed throughout this book, particularly in those works and sections of the book devoted to intellectual history, crystallized during a specifically European moment in world history, the Enlightenment. Insofar as Herder's theorization of folk song and the growing interest in collecting and anthologizing folk song by Arnim and Brentano, the Brothers Grimm, Ludwig Erk, and others marked a transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, this historical moment also acquired a specifically German character. The European concept of folk music derived, furthermore, from the several centuries leading up to the Enlightenment, a period of intellectual foment unleashed by the Age of Discovery and the confrontation with the culture of “the other.” Whereas the formulation of a concept of folk music depended on this fundamentally European historical framework, it owed much to the cultural contestation that formed at the borders of Europe and at the edges of its historical framework.
