ABSTRACT
The concept of the ‘museum’ has been employed, famously, by Lydia Goehr in her theory regarding the emergence of the notion of the ‘musical work’ around 1800. It argues that the attitude towards the 36 Greek Dances is closely intertwined, on the one hand, with Nikos Skalkottas’s views on the folk song and the most appropriate way of engaging with the folk musical material as a composer, and, on the other, with contemporaneous developments in folklore studies. Skalkottas’s words also resonate with the folklorists’ anxiety to get hold of and salvage the folk musical material before it became extinct, stressing the need for those who know such folk songs to hand them over to ‘experts’, to ‘serious poets and musicians’. The distinction between the tasks of collecting folk songs and composing music based on the musical material was not always clear, since some collectors felt free to amend the musical material or even develop it in more elaborate compositions.
