ABSTRACT
Volkslied, Volksmusik; folk song, folk music. Throughout the history of folk-music scholarship, these two concepts have distinguished two distinctive domains of folk-music activity and the ways in which these were conceptualized and studied. Fundamental to such distinctions has been the mode of musical production, on one hand the human voice, and on the other musical instruments. For Herder in the late eighteenth century and for subsequent generations during the initial decades of the nineteenth century, instruments played no role in the development of theories and in the classification of song texts and their transmission. Instrumental music was, for all intents and purposes, silent. When folk-music instruments first begin to emerge in the history of the field, it was only as crude versions of art-music instruments. When Ludwig Erk and Friedrich Silcher arranged folk songs for singers and instruments in the mid-nineteenth century, the instrumental sound on which they relied came from Romanticism, the piano and the richly-textured ensemble. In this stage, it was the folk-music instrument, within the privileged folk music of the age, that was silent. The silence of folk-music instruments is perhaps most striking in modern ethnomusicological thought when one examines the systematic studies that Curt Sachs and Erich M. von Hornbostel eventually formulated as the classification system that remains standard until the present: they relied, indeed consciously so, largely on collections of European art-music instruments (see Sachs 1930, below).
