ABSTRACT
The folk music of Central Europe has always existed in a web of historical moments and historical imaginations. A folk song's capacity to record specific events and retain them through the constant narrations of oral tradition has not been lost upon folk-music scholars, who accordingly began to theorize the historical aspects of folk music in the mid-nineteenth century. By the mid-twentieth century the study of folk music's historical basis had led to the formation of a subfield within folk-music scholarship and European ethnomusicology, one that supports its own study group in the International Council for Traditional Music and sponsors numerous publications, some of which appear in the annotations in the present chapter.
