ABSTRACT
The intellectual history of folk-music research is in many ways inseparable from the history of Central Europe itself during the past two centuries. Beginning with the Enlightenment theories of Herder and intersecting today with the cultural conflicts of German reunification and the growing presence of ethnic groups in Central Europe, the intellectual history of folk-music research provides a rich historical text that makes the past two centuries legible. From a disciplinary standpoint, this intellectual history is one of the most complex areas explored in the chapters of the present book, for it is virtually impossible to separate it from the strands of numerous other intellectual histories. Interwoven into the history of folk-music scholarship are conflicts about nationalism and regionalism, the nature of language, and the relation between art music and popular music. It is in this intellectual history that related disciplines—folkloristics, ethnomusicology, philology, linguistics, historical musicology—converge, sometimes with fruitful results, sometimes only complicating the existing approaches to folk music. A full intellectual history of Central European folk-music research has yet to be written, not least because of the complex fabric it has formed. I intend the works annotated in the present chapter to suggest a broad approach to sketching the outline of such an intellectual history.
