ABSTRACT
The intellectual history of Central European folk-music scholarship comprises a collective biography that is legible from the top-down or from the bottom-up. Reading this collective biography from the bottom-up, one encounters the collectors and regional folklorists, whose intimate knowledge of an area, its inhabitants, and its musical traditions leads to the publication of editions and to public awareness of dialect and variant. The individuals contributing to this side of the collective appear in other chapters of this book, particularly in those concerning collections, regional folk music, and musicians. In the present chapter, I concern myself primarily with a collective biography of scholars, in fact of theorists. The theorists we encounter here are more often than not polemicists, whose belief in a particular model of folk music leads them to found institutions and to formulate their theories in journals, books, and theoretical schools, that is, colleagues and followers whose approaches to the field undergird and refine a core of basic theories. The historical importance of these theoretical schools cannot, I believe, be underestimated, for they heighten the visibility of folk music and folk-music scholarship in Central Europe and accordingly move the study of folk music into the public sphere, where, in the twentieth century, it has often been inseparable from the politics and ideologies of that sphere and the production of culture that such politics and ideologies often unleash.
