ABSTRACT
The previous chapters explored the historical milieu of England’s Victorian/Edwardian folk revival, challenging the principle of identity in thinking about traditional music at the level of the community and the level of the dividual subject. This chapter addresses the structure of the concept of tradition itself, which was argued, in Chapter 4, to continually reassert the principle of identity, even as social, cultural and political values surrounding traditional music change over time. Cecil Sharp drew on Darwin’s theory of evolution to support the idea that folk music was composed by communities rather than individuals—a necessary foundation for his ultimate goal of establishing English folk music as the natural foundation for a national school of art music. Sharp’s evolutionary theory of folk music is contrasted with an ontology of music formulated by Elizabeth Grosz, in which she synthesizes Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy and Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Grosz’s theory offers some crucial differences to Sharpian thinking about traditional music, but her reliance on Darwinian principles ultimately produces what Deleuze and Guattari would call an arborescent image of evolutionary becoming—an image in which becoming unfolds according to a dichotomous, branching logic. This arborescent evolutionary image, epitomized by Darwin’s metaphor of the ‘tree of life’, is shown to be inadequate for apprehending the dynamics of traditional music’s mode of production, through an analysis of the traditional ballad ‘She Moved through the Fair’.
