ABSTRACT
The idea of folk song, a construction of the bourgeois imagination, reveals significant shifts in its conceptualisation and aspirations – from the Enlightenment valorisation of noble simplicity, through romanticism’s nostalgia for the remote, idyllic past and desire to recover primitive origins, to the modernist, positivistic objectives of ethnography. 1 The processes of industrialisation and urban centralisation in Europe and consequent sense of alienation from nature heightened the attraction of, and sense of distance from, an imagined pastoral idyll. In the face of increasing rationalisation and commodification in the modern world, the bourgeoisie viewed peasant rural culture as a so-called ‘natural’ and instinctive remnant of ancient culture, as an enchanting, revitalising refuge from the disenchanting, stifling bureaucracies of civilised existence. Primitivism and decadence – as regeneration and degeneration – were opposing forces in this cultural discourse. Rousseau and Herder became widely influential in the discovery, appropriation and transformation of folk arts into a symbol of the nation. Under the sway of the idea of nationalism, which was based upon the theory that ‘nationality, the collective spirit of a people (the Volksgeist), was the most profound motive in history’, the bourgeoisie invested in their idea of folk music a notion of authentic expression, a conception of it functioning as the root of their national feelings. 2 Romantic nationalists believed that in folk music was to be found the essence of the nation.
