ABSTRACT
Moscow musicologist Ekaterina Dorokhova recounted the following example of the chasm between how villagers and revivalists understand the idea of folklore:
I once heard even such a story. It happened in a regional center on some folk holiday. And one of those ethnographic groups from Moscow [i.e. a purist group from the youth folklore movement] came and sang very ancient songs from those very villages [where the holiday took place]. And there, no one sings them anymore. They were the most exotic, the most complex [songs from that area]. And there stood two women…middle aged ones. Participants in some local [folk music] collective. And one of them said, ‘Those people are singing ‘folklore’ [fol’klor], but we sing folk songs [narodnye pesni].’ That is, [the villagers] even try to separate [folklore] from themselves. They don’t see those ancient songs as their own, not to mention that they called it ‘fol’klor,’ a foreign word, as if to say, ‘We sing folk [narodnye] songs – ours – but that is ‘fol’klor’.
