ABSTRACT
The integrated and systematic study of Europe's traditional music began only in the nineteenth century, though antiquarians had been collecting specimens of regional forms well before then. The first collections of popular songs as such appeared in the later seventeenth century, as the country dance and traditional forms of song and dance started to catch on in urban fashion. The earliest collections of folklore and folk song in Europe were also inspired, in part, by philosophers such as Montaigne or essayists. The methods for studying traditional music in Europe are still underdeveloped because the rise of ethnomusicology, strongly influenced by North American anthropology, posited the need for musical ethnographies of single cultures before comparative conclusions could be drawn. The use of positivistic methods, whereby scholars distance themselves from musicians and objectify data through a process of descriptive analysis, is no longer possible or acceptable.
