ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a brief historical contextualisation of the first stirrings of cultural-cum-musical revivalism of the twentieth century. The motivations of the early revivalists can be very revealing, for they involved reconsiderations of cultural practices in terms of a relationship between the aesthetic and the political. It is from the historical subsoil of folk music revivalism that so much twentieth-century music thought grew. One might describe the constant referral to that which was no longer present as musicology's ethnocentric phase. Richard Sykes has correctly suggested that the word 'Teutonic' remains enticing here. Vaughan Williams propounded that far too much had been made of the associations of progress and genius with an Anglo-Saxon and, ultimately, 'Teutonic' heritage. So, the idea of a folk revival at this early stage could be viewed as existing within a greater fashionable middle/upper-class group of concepts, part of a restoration of ideas concerning bohemian, organic intellectual communities, drawing upon the spirit of 'Merrye England'.
