ABSTRACT
Field work may broadly be understood as the collecting of empirical sociological or cultural data, generally through participation in a social activity or culture (hence participant observation) or merely through close observation of that culture (‘field observation’), as in the field work associated with cultural anthropology. Le´vi-Strauss likened the cultural anthropologist’s long and intimate association with a particular culture during his or her field work to a would-be psychoanalyst him or herself undergoing analysis. It exposes the takenfor-granted assumptions that one has inherited from one’s own culture, and that might otherwise make you insensitive to other cultures.
The simplest definition of folk music is music that is orally transmitted between generations, within a culturally homogeneous community. It is typically thought to be of unknown origin. The idea of ‘folk’ also suggests a rural community, and thus that folk music represents a survival of pre-industrial culture. This simple definition turns out, however, to be somewhat problematic. The key period in the collecting of folk song is, perhaps, the end
of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (although an interest in folk culture had been a characteristic of European romanticism, with Herder being an early advocate of the study of folk cultures). The exploration of folk song had several motivations. First, there was a concern to preserve what was perceived to be a rapidly vanishing culture (hence, for example, the work of Cecil Sharp in England and in the Appalachian mountains). The collection of folk song rapidly threw into question a number of assumptions about this music. Folk song was discovered not to be a discrete entity, like an art song or a popular song. It will change between performances (even consecutive performances by the same singer). Further, it is not necessarily of anonymous origin. Commercial popular songs were being incorporated in the ‘folk’ tradition even in the nineteenth century. A second motivation for folk-song study was the recognition,
within a number of European societies, that the recovery of a folk
tradition could be important to the articulation of a national identity (hence, for example, the use of folk song material by Czech, Hungarian, Welsh and English composers in the early twentieth century). These two motivations indicate something of the way in which the very idea of ‘folk’ is a construction, owing more to political and social dissatisfactions than to the cultural anthropologist’s concern to understand pre-industrial society. The aspiration to recover a folk community suggests a critical response to the industrial present, or a way of articulating political tensions. The pioneering work by A.L. Lloyd in the mid-twentieth century extended this response by questioning the association of ‘folk’ with a more or less mythical rural past. Lloyd looked at the folk music of urban communities (1967), revealing a rich musical tradition within working-class culture. In certain respects this approach could itself lead to a new myth (of a working-class culture untouched by the corrupting hand of commercial mass culture). A third motivation for the interest in folk music was as a source of
renewal for composers of Western art music. The tonal system of Western music, that had been dominant since the early seventeenth century, was widely seen to be exhausted. While, for most listeners, this system (or musical language) might seem natural, it was in fact very much a product of convention and codification. Much folk music was written in pentatonic or modal scales, and so can sound very different to art and popular music. It usefully served to disrupt taken-for-granted expectations of howmusic should sound. It therefore provided a number of composers (such as Vaughan Williams and Holst in England) with the resources for the revitalisation of their own high art tradition. The concept of ‘folk music’, be it in the original sense of the oral
tradition of the ‘people’ or in the more recent sense of a certain genre of popular music (albeit one grounded in the styles of anonymous folk music, as is manifest in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan), is a complex construction. It must be treated as much as an expression of political aspiration as a description of the way the cultural world really is.
