ABSTRACT
The reader who has persevered so far will have realized that though folk music is an enclave of limited significance in the total art of music, like plainsong or Passion music or pedagogy, it spills over to involve other branches of knowledge sufficiently to have acquired a scholarship of its own. The emergence of the kindred subject of ethnomusicology has extended the field and called for new disciplines. Yet this vast field is cultivated only by individual students without any academic base from which to work. The English faculties of American universities have been active in balladry and an institute has been established in California to promote the study of ethnomusicology. Books have been written in the U.S.A. on negro and white spirituals. Archives of sound recordings were established in Berlin and Budapest before the wars, and we have now started to do the same thing in this country at Cecil Sharp House, the B.B.C. and the Institute of Recorded Sound. The University of London has since 1 g65 admitted folk music as an optional special subject for degrees in music and some theses have been presented for post-graduate degrees. The University of Leeds is extending its department of local studies in dialect and folklore to include folk music. But the School of Scottish Studies is the only institution to take the subject seriously, as it is at the Institut fur Deutsche Volkskunde in Berlin. 1
which is the foundation of existing and any future studies in this country, have appeared constantly in these pages, and there are others who have done field work abroad, like the Rev. A. M. Jones in Mrica and Mr Peter Crossley-Hoiland in Tibet. But what is needed here in Britain, I venture to think, is an academic home to be found for the purpose of mapping the vast territory already explored, evolving methods of dealing with the material comparatively, co-ordinating individual research, and turning it into an academic discipline, which means how to teach it-for that would in itself put order into the study. It would discover techniques of organizing and marshalling the knowledge we already possess, techniques like graphs, statistics and percentages, diagrams, tables and systems of symbols, which I personally, who was brought up on words and who think in concepts, confess to find confusing, even unintelligible and certainly repellent, but which are now widely used in all the humanistic sciences like psychology, economics and sociology.
