FOREWORD

Within folkloristics, there have traditionally been areas of interest which have appealed to an audience outside the academy. Such areas include myth and folk music. More members of the general public are concerned with folk music than with barn-types, or charms, or proverbs, although these genres may also have their devotees.

Certainly it is fair to say that the study of folk music has been crucial for the development of folkloristics. While it may not be possible to establish an absolute starting point for the discipline of folkloristics, two possible candidates for such an honor would surely include Bishop Thomas Percy’s (1729–1811) Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and Johann Gottfried Herders (1744–1803) two-volume Volkslieder (1778, 1779), later (1807) entitled Stimmen der Völker in Liedern, even though these two pioneers presented the words of folksongs without reference to their music. For this reason, it is essential that any serious scholar of folkloristics be familiar with the concepts and history of folksong within the broader rubric of folk music.

Much of the voluminous writing devoted to the subject of folk music has concentrated upon the traditional musical traditions of rural, illiterate European peasantry. This is in part a reflection and continuation of the excessively narrow definition of “folk” as conceptualized by Herder and those who followed him, e.g., the brothers Grimm. For Herder and the Grimms, the folk was essentially the lower stratum of society, the so-called vulgus in populo, the illiterate in a literate society, rural people as opposed to urban people. This overly restrictive definition of folk-as-peasant has unfortunately continued on into the twentieth century. According to this dictum, the music of so-called “primitive” peoples did not qualify as folk music—such peoples were not illiterate (living in a society with a written language) but rather non-literate. This is why historically folk music scholars tended to neglect the traditional music of American Indians or black Africans, among others, arguing that such musical heritages should be left for the anthropologist or ethnomusicologist to study. This view is intellectually indefensible insofar as it reflects a nineteenth-century ethnocentric, racist evolutionary bias in which “savages” were presumed to evolve through a stage or stages of barbarism ( = peasants) before finally achieving “civilization,” the culture of the scholars doing the classifying!

Because of the tenacious persistence of a nineteenth-century classification of the peoples of the world, one finds to this day that folk art refers to European peasant art while “primitive” or “non-Western” art refers to the art of New Guinea, aboriginal Australia, North and South American indigenous populations, etc. The folk/primitive art distinction is an exact parallel for the folk and primitive music dichotomy.

A much more reasonable approach would define various folk groups: ethnic, tribal, national, occupational, religious, familial. All of these folk groups can and do have their own traditional music. Accordingly, one can speak of Greek-American music, Navaho music, Japanese folk music, cowboy folk music, Jewish folk music, and the musical traditions of an individual family. The concept of folk thus becomes much more flexible and applicable worldwide, thereby avoiding the inevitable pitfalls of nineteenth-century evolutionary theorizing.

The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World is one of the very first attempts to consider the subject of folk music from a truly worldwide perspective, free from previous ethnocentric, racist bias. Moreover, its author also succeeds in illuminating the fascinating relationship between folk music and “art music” in various societies.

The author, Philip Bohlman, Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago, is admirably qualified to have written this important survey of folk music. After earning his B.M. (Piano) in 1975 at the University of Wisconsin, he studied at the University of Illinois with Professor Bruno Nettl, one of the world’s authorities on folk music. Bohlman received his doctorate in ethnomusicology in 1984. He has carried out fieldwork in Israel, Germany, and the United States, and he has been an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pittsburgh (1984-1985) and a Junior Fellow in the Society of the Humanities at Cornell University (1985-1986). Philip Bohlman’s mastery of folk music theory and method is amply demonstrated in this book, which is intended to introduce the subject to a wide audience both within and outside the academy.

Alan Dundes

Berkeley, California