ABSTRACT
European folk and popular music participates in a world of cultural, social, political, and economic forces. Its musical instruments are products of local ecologies and the international economy. When and where music is performed—its contexts—respond to the divisions of social life, work and seasonal cycles, and beliefs about the power of music to enhance the celebration of major events in a person's and a community's life. How and why music is transmitted from generation to generation—and who learns it—depend on culturally shared ideas about gender, genre, and the meaning of music. Centuries-old forms of orally transmitted rural music continue to be performed and valued in Europe's modern, literate, and largely urban societies because musicians continually refresh them and societies give them aesthetic, economic, ideological, political, and practical value. In Europe, folk and popular music is sung and played on many ritual and social occasions and in concerts.
