An Aesthetic Basis Called Underlies All Indian Art Music

3

Nomenclature: The Discursive
Boundaries of Folk Music

I believe that in that location are . . . collections with similar overall characters from different countries and eras, so that the question of the most appropriate classification systems for folk melodies will remain, in spite of everything, ane of the most important that musical scholars contend and discuss together.

Ilmari Krohn (1907:74)

Whatever system of classification, however, is merely a ways. The written report of a melody begins after information technology has been placed in some system or alphabetize; it does not finish in that location.

George Herzog (1937:55)

Folk music has often demonstrated a peculiar resistance to systematic classification—or, stated more than accurately, to classification systems. Despite the plethora of efforts to discern, depict, and ascribe club in folk music, nomenclature has often been a culture-specific or repertory-specific endeavour. The systematic description of one repertory, no thing how much tolerance for variation it permits, rarely extends to other repertories. Even when classification systems are modified to account for some aspects of universality, it is usually the accuracy of the specific that suffers, while merely a few more repertories yield themselves to the revised descriptive schemes. The history of nomenclature therefore challenges many of the claims to the universality of folk music. At the same time, this history consistently validates and reexamines the boundaries that regional, local, or modest-group cultures fashion for folk music. Thus, the resistance of folk music to classification is not necessarily symptomatic of an absence of order or unsystematic musical behavior; rather, it may better serve to illumine those levels at which interrelated repertories and social structures prevail. When directed toward such goals, nomenclature stands to establish and articulate the discursive boundaries of folk music.

Classification is a metaphor for our attempts to understand and describe folk music in an orderly manner. Equally an abstraction of our concepts of folk music, classification ideally should provide the infrastructure for a systematic soapbox most folk music. 2 problems, appearing in ii general approaches to nomenclature, often prevent this ideal from beingness the instance, thereby limiting also the effectiveness of the systematic soapbox. Many inductive approaches begin by describing the specific and and then base their theoretical models on that. Whether the specific is musical, cultural, or ideological in nature, its limits become the limitations of the theoretical model. Deductive approaches, in contrast, begin by prescribing a model and and so determining which aspects from unlike repertories fit the model. Both of these approaches frequently effect in a fixing and ossification of the canon, which leads to a seductiveness that may underlie nomenclature. We observe this seductiveness when field-workers return from a collecting trip ready to brand claims for the persistence of this or that canon, even while a sturdy defense force against encroachment from other, normally more modern or popular, repertories shows signs of weakening.

Attempts to allocate folk music confront some confounding paradoxes. Even though classification is well-nigh unequivocal when it takes on specific parameters of folk music, information technology is express unless information technology also examines the interrelations of all parameters, some of which are only vaguely understood. Similarly, there are the occurrences of variations and exceptions; to what extent can we recognize and account for them earlier they undermine even the broadest classification system? Hardly surprising, then, is the frequency with which classification systems have concentrated on only one aspect of folk music—tune or text separately, say, or music devoid of social and historical context. How can one instead business relationship for questions of transmission, origins, musical structure and form, text and melody interaction, and the formation of repertories? These issues are, of grade, broadly representative of folk music study in general. Past looking more closely at classification, both historically and analytically, we concentrate these issues, providing them with a forum so that they might shed light on each other. That, too, is what the best classification systems accomplish.

Genres of and Approaches to Classification

Scholars engaged in classification have devoted primary attention to the products of folk music, relegating processes to a position of secondary importance. Virtually systems take therefore arranged and ordered the individual pieces constituting a large, presumably coherent repertory. Because the primeval classifiers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worked from collections and were themselves oftentimes non collectors, they had trivial bear witness at their disposal concerning processes of change or social function. Through classification they hoped to achieve two ends. First, they hoped to devise a way of gaining easy access to and identifying the individual pieces in large collections. 2d, they sought means to define the interrelation of items in large collections, ordinarily motivated by historical and nationalistic considerations. The nature of these goals necessitated an approach that concentrated initially on specific items and then expanded to broader levels of comparability. Accordingly, the early classifiers concerned themselves more with the establishment of repertory boundaries than with analytical approaches that would allow for exploration across such boundaries.

The beginning attempts to classify relied on song texts; tune received relatively little attention until the twentieth century (Herzog 1937:49, Mosely 1964:9, and Sorce Keller 1984:100). As a benchmark of classification, song texts permitted a fair caste of specific identification: dialect could locate the text geographically and subject thing presumably established part. Many of the early on classifiers were linguists whose primary concerns lay with the explication of textual matters. Many early on collections of English folk song reflected this textual impetus. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads by Francis James Child (1882-98) contained texts only. Not only were melodies lacking, but the nomenclature system that later became formalized as the "Child ballads" was arrived at completely on the footing of textual subject matter. So entrenched was this early on method of classification co-ordinate to text that subsequent attempts to classify Anglo-American ballads accept simply accepted it, in essence working around it when ascribing tune types to the narrative structure of the ballads (cf. Seeger 1966 and Kolinski 1968 and 1969). German anthologies employed a somewhat different arroyo to classification by text, incorporating aspects of social function together with more standard literary typologies. Thus, the genres identified in the three-volume Deutscher Liederhort (Erk 1893-94) included such categories equally "songs of divergence and wandering" and "historical-political songs" as well as "ballads" and the "songs of legends." This mixture of literary, functional, and contemporary genres has persisted in German classification systems and is basic to the broad conceptualization of genre that characterizes German folk music scholarship today (cf. Brednich, et al. 1973 and 1975 and Bausinger 1980:263-94).

Melodic classification began in earnest somewhat afterward than textual approaches for both practical and intellectual reasons. Even in collections that included musical aspects, notation was indefinite or was modified past antholo-gizers to suit practical ends, every bit in arrangements in harmonized versions for choral performance. Many collectors, moreover, possessed only a modicum of musical skills, which prevented them from transcribing musical aspects during fieldwork—a difficult enough task for anyone before the advent of sound-recording devices, when transcriptions frequently required repeated performances or reliance on the collector's retentiveness.

As collections grew larger, the need for musical classification became more pressing. The early architects of classification responded to two primary motivations. The first resulted from the need for like shooting fish in a barrel admission to large collections. The second sought to interpret the ways in which the melodies of large collections were related to each other. The start comprehensive effort to comprise these two methods appeared in articles by Oswald Koller (1902-3) and Ilmari Krohn (1902-three; cf. also Nettl 1983:120). Koller proposed a means of locating a tune among many others when—and merely when—one knows the exact pitch complement. Krohn devised a means of abstracting tunes so that many tunes might be compared to discover patterns of relationship. Koller's approach was primarily lexicographic: one could easily find the tune in a melodic dictionary if one had an idea of the correct spelling; the relatedness of tunes was a question of objective components. The tunes examined by Krohn, in dissimilarity, exhibited a relatedness based on structural similarities, which suggested similar patterns of evolution and alter. Such patterns were further interpreted in the light of genetic relatedness, and scholars shortly labeled them with the appropriate term tune families. Krohn himself and his many successors refined and modified the genetic-historic approach to classification, and its underlying principles remain a part of many gimmicky classificatory methodologies.

A third realm of classification has too been important to folk music study during the past century. This 1 has every bit its subject musical instruments. Unlike other areas of folk music nomenclature, studies of instruments have frequently emphasized the comparative and universal more than the specific and the regional. Non surprisingly, the resulting methods reflect the disciplinary concerns of anthropology and systematic musicology (cf. Sachs 1929 and Schaeffner 1936). Even though prove from specific cultures illustrates many organological theories, information technology also serves to justify claims for the universality of many instruments. Organologists have often aimed to conquer rather expansive theoretical turf, such as the evolution of instrument types throughout history (Sachs 1940). In full general, approaches to the classification of instruments have been more than lexicographic, although family-similar groupings consequence also from the underlying evolutionary impetus.

The most widely accepted theory of instrumental ordering, published past Curt Sachs and Erich von Hornbostel in 1914, established four large groups of instruments on the basis of construction cloth and sounding mechanism: idiophones are "self-sounding" instruments (e.thousand., bells or xylophones); sound emanates from a stretched skin or other membrane in membranophones; strings are plucked, bowed, or struck to produce the sound from chordophones; and setting a column of air in vibration distinguishes aerophones (Hornbostel and Sachs 1961). The Sachs-Hornbostel method has encountered some criticism considering of its imposition of hierarchical order (Lysloff and Matson 1985) and because nonacoustical (largely electronic) instruments do not lend themselves to classification in this manner, only the method remains the standard reference for virtually discussions of folk music instruments (e.thousand., the Diagram Grouping 1978).

While classification systems have focused primarily on the products of folk music, they have not completely ignored the processes, regarding them every bit links among the various products. Processes appear under three full general categories: tune histories, tune families, and melodic change. Tune histories found the broadest category, but specific theories to describe the history of melodies are relatively undeveloped. The distinguishing feature of tune history equally a category is what 1 might call the objective behavior of musical materials. Acceptance of such behavior is axiomatic in studies of tunes that are diffused over vast cultural areas (due east.k., Wiora 1953), sometimes with the implication that melodies or parts of tunes travel almost more or less randomly and on their own volition (Tappert 1890). Such objectivity is relatively absent and unimportant in concepts of the tune family unit, and instead ane finds explanations of how melody evolution takes identify and why some versions announced and others exercise non. The genetic basis of the metaphorical family unit predetermines the extent and shape of representative melodic repertories. Melodic change, often a greater concern to ethnomusi-cologists studying folk music, may exist less the product of an internal genetic cohesion than of contact with external musical and social forces. In general, however, many types of externally instigated alter have not been primary interests in the development of classification systems. Some classifiers run across radical alter of this sort as a component of urban and mod influences, and therefore not related to the germination of folk music repertories; others regard external influences equally disruptive of the order necessary for nomenclature and therefore tantamount to a disintegration of the discursive boundaries of folk music (cf. Bartók 1931:53-80).

Classification: Concepts and Vocabulary

The initial stride in most attempts to devise a classification organization is determining which elements lend themselves to meaningful comparability and therefore place the means in which relatedness exists in the collections or repertories nether examination. These elements range from very small units, some course of melodic morpheme, to big and abstruse units, perhaps some blazon of tune gestalt (Suppan 1973 and Kuckertz 1963). The elements may be intrinsic to the structure of each piece or extrinsic to the slice and broadly characteristic of the larger repertory; an instance of this sort of extrinsic element is mode or social role. Even these extrinsic factors tend to be measured by their influences on smaller elements, as in the complement and weighting of pitches in a item piece that establish a relation with the modal possibilities of an entire repertory.

Smaller elements can exist ordered in very precise ways, and for this reason lexicographic systems often concentrate initially on the smallest elements. The opening and final pitches of a piece, the initial interval, the relation between ambitus (the altitude separating the highest and everyman notes) and central pitch all can be quantified, numerically or otherwise. Quantification allows one to plant an order, to spell out each melody and identify it in a melodic lexicon near those melodies that have a like spelling. The greater the number of minor units that one quantifies, the more extensively the lexicographic organisation determines a place specific to individual melodies.

The next level frequently assumed past classification comprises the grammar and syntax of melody. This level moves from the strictly quantifiable and objective to the empirical and subjective. Thus, one non but identifies the elemental units but also formulates the bones patterns in which these units regularly occur. It is theoretically possible to interpret the patterns formed at this level for lexicographic purposes, but most classifiers concerned with aspects of grammatical and syntactical patterns also investigate them to determine the bases for tune families or histories. Genre is kickoff axiomatic at this level, in some cases in only general characteristics but in others through fairly specific structures and processes of change. Whereas ballad and epic require more than extensive narrative structures, lyric folk songs and the dejection may allow essential flexibility at this level. In studies of lyric folk song, Judith McCulloh has suggested that examining the function of the "smallest rearrangeable unit of measurement of text" provides the key to establishing the level at which understanding and exploration of the genre can take place (1970:vii). These units appear throughout repertories of lyric song and in essence define the repertories past the item clusters that they form (McCulloh 1983:42).

The establishment of criteria for using melodic contour for classification has been i of the more persistent ways of de-emphasizing the function of smaller elements while bringing low-cal to bear upon the overall class of melody. The primeval abet of classifying primarily on the basis of contour was Sirvart Poladian, who aimed to find some means of extending methods that worked well for specific repertories to a larger, more comparative framework. The salient features of contour were those that had widespread distribution in a large number of very different repertories—for example, descent to the terminal note, which Poladian held to be "i musical characteristic [that] seems common to most folk songs" (1942:207). Perhaps most important to Poladian was his conventionalities that contour was 1 of the few melodic factors that song variants did not alter, thus making it an extremely stable representation of any repertory or mode (ibid. :210-eleven). More than recently, George Listing has made similar claims for the salience of melodic aspects bathetic by contour, again noting that melodic contour may provide one of the about constructive keys for determining the existence and limits of universality in folk music (List 1978 and 1985; see besides Mosely 1964:11-12).

Few areas of classification accept weathered the storms of criticism as indomitably as modes. The application of modal theories often takes the course of esoteric studies directed to a small fraternity of cognoscenti. That may be the stimulus of or response to the polemical debate that modal theories sometimes spur, simply rarely do modal theories seem designed for broader appeal or the methodological corollary that lexicographic ordering permits. In several cases, debates over the office of modes in folk music accept on a life of their own, abandoning empirical studies of standard collections and the new prove that fieldwork would impart (cf. Cazden 1971 and Bronson 1972). In Anglo-American ballad scholarship, polemic was a office of modal research from almost the moment it appeared. In the first edition of his English Folk Song: Some Conclusions in 1907, Cecil Abrupt included a chapter on modes (pages 36-53), in which he claimed that the melodic material of English folk song was essentially related to the diatonic modes of the medieval Latin church. His aim was twofold. On one hand, this connection with an earlier stratum of European musical life overlaid folk song with the patina of age, concomitantly distancing it from popular, urban music employing major and minor modality. On the other mitt, Sharp hoped that folk song would exist a new font for the English composer, hardly an unusual desire in an age of nationalism but ane that would benefit markedly from a demonstration of the theoretically audio structure of folk music. Precipitous'southward rather prescribed goals all the same, many successors took up the modal banner, insisting that Anglo-American folk songs were rooted in intricate and occasionally fantastic designs for the interrelation of the church modes. Bertrand H. Bronson conceived of this pattern as a seven-pointed star, with each manner forming ane point and mixed modes located elsewhere well-nigh the star (1969:85).

The persistence of modal debates has washed trivial to clarify problems of classification and has instead occluded the potential for establishing more accessible criteria for relatedness. That this persistence continues to petrify some of the almost sacred of canonic formulae, including those encasing the Kid ballads, cannot be denied. But way has not always worked to the detriment of classification. Its function in many non-Western musical systems is undeniable, and we base our systematic agreement of such musical cultures as those of Iran, the Arabic Middle E, and the Indian subcontinent on elaborate modal frameworks. Several European scholars were more judicious in their claims for modes; Bartók, for example, used manner as 1 criterion for the age of a folk song, thus employing mode to approve, rather than set, the discursive boundaries of Hungarian folk music.

For a system of classification to offer meaning insight into the organization of folk music repertories and mode it must ideally combine the various levels and foci that this section has surveyed. One of the most masterful syntheses of diverse approaches is that which Béla Bartók, in collaboration with Zoltán Kodály, applied to Eastern European folk music, with especially valuable results in the exam of Hungarian collections (Bartók 1931, Kodály 1960, Erdely 1965:43-73, and Herzog 1937:54). Bartók combined lexicographic methods developed by Finnish scholars with classificatory criteria that would identify both genetic and historical patterns. He began past simply counting the number of lines in a melody. Side by side, the intervallic distance of the last note of each line from the finalis of the song was measured. The number of syllables in each line was and then represented, and finally the ambitus of the vocal was stated equally two numerals, one the everyman note of the tune and the other the highest. A string of numbers, and then, appeared equally an abstruse lexicographic representation of the melody. Bartók'southward method may be illustrated with the folk song "Mikor a nagy erdön kimész" (instance iii). The figures Bartók used to designate this song are , 8, i-8. These figures mean that the song is a four-line tune whose first and second lines end on and whose third line ends on . All lines consist of eight syllables, the lowest note being , and the highest (Bartók 1931:7).

Mikor a nagy erdön kimész

Parlando		1907
♩ = 144 mm		Collected past B. Bartók

Translation

Would y'all become out of the large forest,

Look not behind you,

Lest your middle be heavy

When you ready human foot in a foreign country.

Eastward XAMPLE 3
(cf. Bartók 1931:7, 107, and Section Al, P. 6)

Bartók'south classification system offers other descriptive insights, most importantly those linking mode to age (cf. Kodály 1960:23-68). When a piece has a restricted ambitus or lines with a small number of syllables, information technology comes from an older stratum of the repertory (Bartók 1931:8-ix). Rhythmic and metric considerations are also meaning determinants of historic period and manner. The Old Style Hungarian melodies had a costless, speech-like rhythm that Bartók calls parlando rubato. In contrast, a tempo giusto mode, characterized past a more regularized, dance-derived rhythm, predominates in the New Mode (ibid.:9). Bartók's method is remarkably thorough, and it elucidates many intricacies of style and structure in Hungarian folk music. It is less successful in its explanation of non-Hungarian repertories, where, for example, syllable count in each line plays a less pregnant role than in Hungarian folk music. The system founders when applied to non-Western music. The criteria of his system required that Bartók claim Arabic folk music to be at an incipient evolutionary stage because of the prevalence of short lines and single melodic motifs (Bartók 1920:489), whereas variable line lengths and the advent of elementary and circuitous melodic motifs together are widespread in all genres of Standard arabic music. Bartók's approach to classification was, therefore, about effective when applied to the repertories that he knew best, whose idiosyncracies he understood nigh intimately; that the approach did not succeed in becoming universal is hardly exceptional in the history of folk music classification.

A wide range of regional and ethnic criteria has produced many approaches to classification. The boundaries that such criteria demarcate are, of class, geographic and social, and therefore one recognizes the considerable potential for determining some aspects of universal ordering. A frequent qualification of ethnic classification is the association of sure pieces with the place in which ane lives and the understanding that certain other pieces come from elsewhere. The venue for the pieces from elsewhere may vary; information technology may be another region or some other social setting—an urban heart, for example, in contradistinction to a rural area. Folk taxonomies in northeastern Iran and Afghanistan near e'er stress this contrast between rural and urban, even when the real sources of the folk music repertories are more complex and mixed (cf. Blum 1974:86 and Sakata 1983:53-63). Folk musicians who perform throughout an ethnically pluralistic expanse often rely on a complex ethnic classification system to indicate which repertories are appropriate for the audiences in different parts of the area (cf. Blum 1972 and Bohlman 1980). Regional and ethnic criteria ofttimes classify repertories in a adequately loose fashion. The criteria with which Vance Randolph ordered his large collections of Ozark folk songs exercise not transfer equally a cohesive group to other repertories, for despite his use of some full general categories (e.grand., "British ballads and songs," in Randolph 1980, vol. 1) he too uses more than specific regional categories (e.thousand., "Songs of the South and West," in ibid., vol. 2). The larger classification organization itself only applies to the Ozarks, whereas the individual parts might describe other areas of the United States.

The most ambitious attempt to forge a classification organization past combining regional and ethnic criteria with social and functional aspects of music has been Alan Lomax'south cantometrics project (Lomax 1968 and 1976). Cantometrics posits that social structure is the model for musical performance and sound and that repertories form on the basis of unified expression of social structure. In a sense, this idea is an extension of the civilization-area ( Kulturkreis ) concept and then important to comparative musicology. But in this concept, history and diffusion of cultural traits determine big areas, whereas in cantometrics cultural boundaries grade from within the culture—they are buttressed by the uses and functions of culture. Most important to the classificatory potential of cantometrics is the assertion by its advocates that the relation between social structure and musical expression is quantifiable: thirty-seven criteria of musical production tin be measured easily and compared accurately using computers ( figure 2 ). In addition, a detailed map reveals nomenclature co-ordinate to half dozen world regions, fifty-six culture areas, and 233 specific cultures. The difficulties of precise comparability notwithstanding, cantometrics is non different many other classification systems in that it begins by attempting to identify the appropriate levels of comparison and then examines them in various settings to found criteria that universalize the structure of music's discursive boundaries. And, like other systems with an calendar of universality, cantometrics has encountered the persistence of differentiation within those boundaries, thus limiting comparability to the specific and requiring modification of the classificatory criteria when cantometrics approaches the universal.

The Dialectical Concerns of Classification

Accessibility to the general and differentiation of the specific: ideally, all classification systems must achieve both. The classifier must discern how each piece is like the others in a given repertory while maintaining the integrity of the slice by recognizing its differences. Classification is, at its best, a dynamic procedure that allows for the changeability of folk music and its repertories and for influences from diverse sources. On the surface, classification may seem to seek ways of closing a repertory, only underneath it must exist flexible enough to respond to the dynamic forces that constantly reshape folk music aesthetically and functionally. Classification must confront and explicate both the products and the processes of folk music in a dialectical way if information technology is to exist as broadly effective and meaningful as possible.

F IGURE 2. Cantometrics profile for Europe. The solid line traces the class of the main type of European vocal—solo, unaccompanied performance of foursquare strophes in simple meter. The dashed line shows a 2nd type—unproblematic group arrangement in polyphony with expert tonal blend. This profile about strongly resembles Old Loftier Civilisation. (Source: Lomax 1968:100. Reprinted by permission of the author.)

Description and prescription. Descriptive approaches seek to ascertain repertories in relation to elements that are stable and structurally cardinal over time. Clarification is inductive in the sense that information technology observes the specific outset and so devises the appropriate classification system on that basis. Theoretically, the potential for true universality is greater with descriptive approaches, just practically, the census of characteristics consistently observed over sufficiently long periods can never exist quite consummate enough. Prescription, in contrast, allows the making of choices on the basis of limited examples that permit the extrapolation of an idealized repertory and the classification thereof. The classifier may prescribe those levels that he or she believes salient to comparability and and then ascertain the catechism accordingly. The expansion of field collections may or may not justify the canon, but this may not be important to the relevance of classification, for prescription accepts that certain patterns of relatedness are ideals, or abstractions of a demography likewise unwieldy to represent in all its details. The combination of description and prescription depends on the repertory or drove that the scholar aims to classify and on the part fieldwork will play in standing to expand the collection; it also depends on the relative needs for lexicographic access or stylistic analysis.

Emic and etic. By referring to emic and etic approaches as dialectics I do non mean to pair folk with outsider nomenclature. Rather, I wish to suggest two philosophical goals that underlie many approaches to classification. One farthermost argues that true nomenclature of a repertory lies in the collective unconscious of the community sharing that repertory; the other extreme believes that in that location are objective rules of structure and form over which the folk exert no control. Those approaches that attempt to reflect emic classification demonstrate great variety. Some aim to elucidate an all-encompassing epistemological understanding of the way music is expressive in different cultures; Steven Feld's studies of the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, for example, have revealed a complex representation of the culture's avian-derived mythological concepts in its attitudes toward and functioning of music (1982). Other emic approaches rely on a deeper historical understanding of a gild'south nomenclature of folk music; Stephen Blum, for example, has shown that the attitudes toward folk music in northeastern Iran (Khorasan) are related in circuitous ways to the long interaction of oral and written genres of music and poesy (1974). To some extent, all classification systems reflect the etic motivations of their designers. When etic motivations bear petty or no resemblance to emic concepts, a classification system may result that has picayune historical validity. The efforts of Cecil Precipitous, Olive Dame Campbell, and others to impose on many Appalachian communities folk music repertories replete with Child ballads and morris dances is one of the most glaring examples of the disjunction between emic and etic concepts of classification (cf. Whisnant 1983, esp. 105-79).

Aesthetic-formal and cultural-functional. Aesthetic and formal criteria have been key to nearly genetic-historical classificatory schemes. Form and construction provide the basic vocabulary for lexicographic ordering and for the relatedness of pieces and genres ane to another. In some cases, such approaches but prescribe the aesthetic realm of a single repertory; they may also elucidate the structural elements that brand the formation of repertories possible, thereby extending their application to a more general level. Reliance on the role of social function in shaping repertories oft produces a somewhat different mode of ordering. In extreme cases, functional criteria completely supplant formal relatedness. Many of the almost effective approaches, including the approach developed by Bartók and Kodály, combine aesthetic and formal considerations with the cultural and functional, thus explaining a vast array of differentiated elements with a single classification arrangement.

Similarity and departure. The measurement of similarity and divergence is central to many approaches to nomenclature (Nettl 1983:118-19). Does one allocate on the ground of similarity? Or are differences more than relevant to the boundaries that a particular repertory exhibits? These questions raise even larger ones. Is a classification arrangement determined by internal coherence? Or, rather, does order accrue every bit a outcome of contrast with external genres and repertories? Clearly, the answers to these questions differ from repertory to repertory. In some cases, similarity may be and then widespread that it loses all meaning as a benchmark for classification, and the classifier must plough to the means in which differences appear. Extreme difference, in dissimilarity, might belie the true sense of coherence that determines a repertory, possibly considering of fifty-fifty greater difference when compared to other repertories. Choices to emphasize the office of similarity or difference frequently reflect the residuum betwixt descriptive and prescriptive approaches that a classification system illustrates.

Diachronic and synchronic. When musical change serves equally a measurement of the differentiation that folk music repertories showroom, classification necessarily includes many diachronic considerations. The historical component of genetic-historical approaches is substantially diachronic. In the methods of Bartók and Kodály, diachronic show and results predominate; Nettl, too, has argued persuasively for the historical motive that pervades many approaches to understanding folk music (eastward.g., 1973:10-eleven). When stylistic and structural reasons seem to underlie the variation that appears in folk music repertories, synchronic assay may prove more useful. We may observe, for example, that in that location is a wide and relatively sparse distribution of tune or text types, regardless of the general patterns of diachronic modify. Modal nomenclature, also, relies relatively little on diachronic alter, though the work of Harold Powers is an important exception (eastward.m., 1970). The more than internal melodic elements are denominated as abstract entities, the more synchronic differences play a part in classification.

The specific and the universal. This dialectic is one of the well-nigh problematic in all nomenclature endeavors. The classifier faces the paradox of refining the system for 1 repertory and so precisely that it no longer has general applications or of accounting for the full general characteristics of many repertories so broadly that no unmarried repertory really fits very well. This paradox is seldom lost upon scholars who devote themselves to classification, for most demonstrate an sensation of the need to arrive at a synthesis of the two extremes (east.g., Poladian 1942 and Väisänen 1949). The about successful syntheses occur at a more moderate level, when i generally acceptable arrangement is adjusted to several other repertories. Bartók, for case, refined the Finnish genetic-historical method so that information technology would classify Hungarian folk music and other regional repertories of Eastern Europe. In most cases, his refinements offered new insight into the structure and history of Eastern European repertories. The same methods applied to such non-Western repertories as Turkish and Arabic rural musical styles produced spurious results. In short, Bartók significantly expanded the specificity of the Finnish method but was unable to render the method universal. The classificatory dialectic of detail versus universal underscores a fundamental question in folk music scholarship: is folk music actually a universal genre of expressive behavior? If and so, must its particular manifestations—its local and regional repertories and forms of musical behavior—exist comparable on a universal scale? Fifty-fifty the most effective classification systems neglect to provide firm answers to such questions, but they do serve to remind us that every repertory of folk music contains elements of both the detail and the universal.

Folk Music and Fine art Music:
Nomenclature and the Composer

Although many of the classificatory concepts devised past folk music scholarship are primarily concerned with the interrelations of diverse folk music repertories, the urge to understand through classification has as well guided much of the thinking about the ways in which folk music interacts with other genres, especially with "composed" art music. I emphasize the activity of composing art music because this action identifies a significant aspect of this type of classification, whose stop result is normally less a matter of inventory or schematic representation than of utilize; it is thus a restating of perceived meaning in folk music within a new musical context. Composers in many musical cultures turn to folk music in search of new meanings—or, more than precisely, special meanings—and thereby abet a personal understanding of the broader cultural office folk music stands to play: crystallizing nationalism, encapsulating the essence of musical style and structure, or serving as a font for expanding the musical vocabulary. The composer oftentimes bases his or her apply of folk music in an fine art music context on classificatory decisions, and it is not uncommon to find the composer engaged in other aspects of classification in relation to or in preparation for the resituating of folk music in the art music context. Bartók and Vaughan Williams are but two of the twentieth-century composers whose collection and investigation of folk music were inseparable from their creative philosophy. In the history of Western fine art music, the motivations for using folk music accept been many, simply they take rarely been completely absent-minded during the germination and change of a musical style (Wiora 1957).

Folk music appears in fine art music in ii ways, each demonstrating many variations. In the get-go of these, the integrity of the piece of folk music remains. Ane tin can easily recognize the tune or another musical parameter that the composer attempts to correspond with some degree of literalness. For Bartók the folk melody used in this way was "like a precious stone in its setting" (1972b: 169). In dissimilarity, the composer may seek non to maintain the external integrity of a piece of folk music only rather to penetrate to the essence of folk song style and to appropriate this essence for the composition of art music. The composer may accept very specific designs for folk music used in this way. Bartók, for instance, wrote works in Bulgarian rhythms that did not contain direct settings of Bulgarian folk dances. Other composers may think of folk-like styles with more than stereotypical goals in mind, as in writing in the style of a musette with a sustained drone and narrow melodic ambitus standing in for a more thorough consideration of the complexities of bagpipe playing.

To portray the history of the interrelation of folk and art music as a commonplace activity of composers can easily oversimplify the more pervasive relationship between dissimilar genres of music that characterizes almost musical cultures. 1 must exercise considerable caution when discussing the composer equally the primary creative agent in the processes of substitution and cross-influence. The folk music specialist is often neither less good nor less willing to practice creativity by turning to numerous musical repertories for new sources. And unquestionably, religious and popular music genres draw from folk music, which in turn accepts influences from those genres. In short, the relationship between folk music and art music is not an isolated phenomenon based merely on the decisions of a few musicians but is one expression of the complex patterns of change that continually shape different genres in all musical cultures (Ward 1986). Information technology is an interrelation marked by dynamism and multidimensionality, which are amid the well-nigh of import markers of folk music in the modern globe.

Folk music scholarship has not ever accepted the multidimensionality of this interrelation. The theory of gesunkenes Kulturgut established primacy for fine art music, which yielded pieces to folk repertories through a process of "sinking" or deteriorating to run into the prerequisites of survival in oral tradition (Naumann 1922). The get-go joint of theories accounting for individual cosmos of folk music also saw as fairly unidirectional the motility from folk music. John Meier's motto for folk music resulting from this process was Kunstlieder im Volksmund (art songs in the voice of the folk). Equally far-reaching as Meier'southward claims were in the showtime decades of the twentieth century, they recognized creativity in only 1 of the musical genres he sought to pair. Hungarian concepts of classification discern historical patterns within the movement among genres, portraying the interrelation of folk and art music as different potential lineages. 1 lineage yielded the folk-like art songs ( volkstümliche Kunstlieder ) of nineteenth-century Hungarian urban genres, which benefited from the influx to the city of rural Hungarians—the practitioners of folk music (Bartók 1972b: 164). A rather different and more than direct history is possible when composers of art music penetrate folk music to make up one's mind its essence and then to utilise this essence in art music. Just certain results are possible from this process, giving it a somewhat express dimensionality. Bartók, for case, could have the possibility of molding only a tonal musical style on folk music. "Folk music [is] e'er tonal, and an atonal folk music [is] totally unimaginable. 1 could therefore non base of operations an atonal twelve-tone music on tonal folk music" (ibid.: 174).

If we place the composer of art music in the part of classifier, information technology is inappreciably surprising that each has specific goals for his treatment of folk music. Again, the classifier has fewer universal than particular criteria for interpreting folk music. The ultimate issue of using folk music for item ends is stabilizing an individual style and sustaining its mediation of a catechism. The abundance of literature devoted to Beethoven'south use of folk music, for example, largely shows how folk music came to shape his style. Folk music did not leave a deep impression of an especially Austrian folk melos, and in fact Beethoven ranged throughout the folk repertories of Europe in search of sources for the more than than two hundred examples of folk melodies that scholars accept identified in Beethoven'south oeuvre (Braun 1982-83:287). Bartók, too, did non limit himself to Hungarian folk music of the Sometime Style when composing. Despite the remarkable diversity in his personal style, it is very singled-out from the many folk music styles that inspired him.

What are some of the qualities composers identify in folk music when drawing upon it as a source? Ane of the most common is the symbolism of the rural, as in the designation of a symphony movement every bit "pastorale." Evoking this symbolism can involve explicit or implicit musical references; one may utilize folk music itself as a source or create a style that is folk-like. For some composers and scholars, the meaning of folk music for classical styles is much more than profound than an evocative symbolism. Walter Wiora argues for a stylistic unity that pervades all German language song merely begins, nonetheless, with folk song. The nationalistic overtones and linguistic biases of such an argument are, of course, obvious, yet at that place can be no doubt that Wiora's scheme for classifying the forms and history of German song are predicated on a sound understanding of the genre and a vast pool of examples (Wiora 1971b). The search for Ur -forms in folk music further identifies quite precisely the musical traits that distinguish the genre. Vaughan Williams, for example, transferred his conventionalities in the modal moorings of English folk song to his ain compositional style. Whereas many composers concerned themselves primarily with the melodic purity of some folk music, Bartók saw information technology as the basis for harmonic complexity, speculating that the simpler a tune was, the more individual its harmonization could be (Bartók 1972b: 170). Every bit much every bit we might feel that Bartók is demonstrating homage to folk music, we must also wonder to what degree he is compelled to transpose the belief in vertical complexity so characteristic of Western art music to folk music. When he states that the simplicity of "Arabic peasant music" lends itself to many harmonic possibilities (ibid.), it seems probable that his concept of classification derives more than from art music than from the folk music it seeks to interpret.

The interrelation of folk and fine art music forms even so some other classificatory dialectic, one that by and large has slightly discomfiting ramifications because of the implicitly negative value judgments that too often appear in contrastive phrases similar "high versus low culture." Just the dialectic also bears witness to some positive conclusions that contribute considerably to the study of folk music. First, the composer turns to folk music considering of its creative potential; in the composer's treatment the folk melody is non a frozen artifact whose survival in oral tradition depends on immutably simple structures. Second, the engagement of art musicians with folk music reveals fifty-fifty more clearly the fallacy of amalgam whatsoever nomenclature system based on stratified models of noninteracting genres; folk and art music are rarely not influencing each other in some way. Finally, the dialectical interrelation of folk and art music is remarkably dynamic and multidimensional, revealing complex processes of change that occur every bit much in folk music as they practise in art music. It is hardly surprising, then, that this dialectic, too, has failed to produce a single, universal method of classification.

Classification and Defining (Defending) the Catechism

Few successful classification schemes tin avert paring abroad some extraneous textile from the repertories they social club. If nothing else, classification must be manageable; information technology must excerpt from the amorphous whole some bones musical structures, whether these are abstract melodic types or but common and persistent tunes. But the procedure of paring away is fraught with problems. The distinction between decisions that include or exclude is often difficult to make. A reductionist momentum may besides build up, resulting in eventual claims that only a few tunes or texts truly represent a repertory; some of the otherwise fine attempts to classify the Anglo-American folk music repertory have suffered this fate (cf. Bayard 1950, esp. three-4). Bartók, likewise, was far more comfortable with the exclusiveness of the Old Fashion and New Style, which were relatively purged of strange, urban, and popular influences, than with the Mixed Style, which bore witness to the changes through which modernistic Hungarian folk music had passed.

The extreme class of the penetration of classification to the specific is the gradual replacement of observed and collected tradition with the system that has purported to define it. In other words, the nomenclature organisation becomes the surrogate for the tradition itself. The emergence of a surrogate tradition is the well-nigh extreme and insidious product of canon-germination. The initial assertions that English ballads and trip the light fantastic toe genres were the archetypes of folk music in the Appalachians quickly became a surrogate tradition, spurring collectors to discover songs that would justify the appropriate classification systems, especially the arrangement devised by Child. As a result, many of the same collectors ignored the more pop black-influenced styles that were flourishing in the aforementioned region. Under Nazism in Germany during the 1930s and early 1940s, folk music classification alleged a sort of independence from ethnography, thus allowing the establishment of claims that Germanic and Nordic folk music was somehow central to European folk music in general (cf. Danckert 1987:21-26).

Classification is almost never the product of strictly objective goals. Whatever the claims for discerning a repertory's "internal lodge" may be, value judgments inevitably attend the selection of criteria for comparability and, more than significant as a force molding the ordering decisions, those pieces that actually constitute the repertory abstracted by classification. More often than not, those who most effectively utilise nomenclature in this fashion are no longer aware of their redefinition of tradition. "The master danger in classification," warned George Herzog, "is that it leads to assuming that objects in a storeroom were originally created and deposited in that social club" (1937:51). The value judgments of classifiers may initially exist very personal and idiosyncratic, merely the discursive boundaries they set may assume a rigidity that renders them a surrogate of the tradition itself. Once a means of defining the canon, these discursive boundaries serve but to defend it.

Classification constantly concerns itself with the discursive boundaries—internal and external—of folk music. Whenever one talks most folk music in a systematic way, one engages in some grade of nomenclature. Our theoretical vocabulary is full of designations that take or pass up, acknowledge or ignore sure approaches to classification. Performers engage in a course of classification when they choose a particular ways of interacting with different communities. The mass mediation of folk music, besides, relies on widespread understanding of sure levels of classification. These various ways of discussing and portraying the interrelatedness of folk music may define it equally a genre in restrictive or expansive terms. At some levels, the discourse of classification therefore serves only to perpetuate one-time canons; at others, information technology forges new canons.

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Source: https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/the-study-of-folk-music-in-the-modern-world/section/6298a19e-7b4f-4f85-9218-bda6e1e17099

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