ABSTRACT
It would be possible to construct the history of Central European folk-music scholarship using only editions and collections. The gathering and anthologizing of folk songs has preoccupied both amateurs and scholars in Central Europe, frequently providing them with common ground and shared goals. The compilation of an edition, moreover, often marks a distinctive moment, in which paradigms shift and the body of gathered pieces represents a recalibration of what folk music means in the past and present of a regional or national music culture. Seminal works in the history of German folk-music scholarship were, in fact, not infrequently editions or collections. Herder's “Stimmen der Völker in Liedern” and Volkslieder (1778–79) were collections of song texts, which in themselves symbolized the creative endeavors of the Volk; the critical preface for these volumes seems almost insignificant when compared to the collections themselves. Similarly, Arnim and Brentano's Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806–08) is almost entirely a collection of folk poetry, with preface material far less critical than directed toward winning readership and patronage for the editors' project. This collection then passed through numerous editions during the course of the nineteenth century, around which various critical responses and a considerable reception history coalesced. Other collections (e.g., the Lagerliederbuch or Wolf Biermann's collections, discussed below) marked crucial moments in the political history of the twentieth century, further suggesting that folk songs, in themselves, possess an enormous power to represent the contexts that spurred collectors and editors to anthologize them.
