ABSTRACT
When examining issues of nationalism, studies in musicology have tended to oversimplify a complex situation by referring to folk and traditional tunes as signifiers of ethnic or social groups, or even as their key cultural symbols. But a vernacular idiom in music is seldom a static artefact easily available for simple inspection and analysis. Vernacular includes the corpus usually referred to as folk music and folk song, but it also includes all other types of popular music, regardless of their origins. The vernacular covers traditional folk materials that are usually rooted in rural societies and the ways in which they are absorbed in the popular repertoires of urban societies. Phylo-vernacular musical repertoire corresponds with folk materials usually associated with a culture’s most ancient, genuine, and tribal core. Onto-vernacular repertoires characterize mobilized populations that are wider in scope, more open, and usually leaving behind rural life while re-grouping into socio-historical layers of urbanized people.
