ABSTRACT
The first word in folk-music research was Volk, “the people,” the term with which Johann Gottfried Herder determined to delimit the music-making practices he designated as Volkslieder. Herder drew attention to those who produced song, but by no means did he or his immediate successors focus that attention on individual musicians. The Volk remained, in fact, ambiguous, amorphous, far less a collective of musicians than an abstract category of nameless individuals. During the nineteenth century musicians were virtually absent from the study of folk music; instead, it was music as an object that could acquire a life and identity of its own without musicians that became the central focus during the first century of folk-music research. In some ways, the situation has not changed that much even today, with musicians remaining invisible in some of the most visible areas of folk-music research. There are other approaches, of course, several of which have actively attempted to redress the absence of musicians from folk-music research. Studies of musicians, nonetheless, remain relatively scarce, with recent attempts to bring the musician into view more the exception than the rule. Most of the works annotated in the present chapter recognize the need to redress the historical invisibility of the musician as one of those designated by Herder as Volk.
