ABSTRACT
The works annotated in this chapter raise the questions (1) why are order and classification necessary; and (2) why do the approaches to the analysis of melody fail to yield any consensus? These are serious queries, which preoccupy one of the most persistent domains of folk-music scholarship. The questions have become serious because they touch on some of the most contested issues in the study of folk music, indeed on the very capacity of folk music to possess and then ascribe identity. These are the questions, moreover, of the musicological and music-theoretical approaches to folk music, approaches that were seldom posed during the nineteenth century, when the study of folk song meant the study of texts, not melodies. In the earliest anthologies of folk song (e.g., Des Knaben Wunderhorn [1806/1808]), melodies were not included. The practice of including texts only (e.g., in the collections of Ludwig Uhland) continued throughout the nineteenth century and has not, indeed, completely disappeared at the end of the twentieth century. For philologists, and to some extent also for folklorists, the identity of a folk song lies in its text and its narrative. Melody, it would follow, tells a different story.
