Scholarship

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 1965 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 für Deutsche Volkskunde in Berlin. ¹