Folk Music and the Community: Processes of Canon-Formation

The processes of canon-formation result from a community’s transformation of cultural values into aesthetic expression. One might say that the general path of these processes is from social context to aesthetic text; the folk music repertory thus becomes genre for the “inscription” of cultural meaning (Ricoeur 1971). Different communities shape and express folk music canons in various ways. Some canons may be defined by their sameness, which might be evident in stylistic and formal coherence. The community accordingly emphasizes centrality by concentrating in its canon those features that it regards as salient to the core of its musical practices. It is through such processes that the community intentionally traditionalizes its culture (Hymes 1975:353-55). Musical behavior throughout the community might therefore invest special meaning in the types of folk music that are widespread and well known in the community.

In contrast, “otherness” may be a factor in the shaping of a folk music canon. The criteria for defining a group’s repertory may be exclusive, concentrating less on centralizing certain features than on impeding the influence of those regarded as foreign. This is especially true in the case of subcultures or groups that express their culture through forms of resistance. Music has provided one of the most potent means of expressing the subcultural resistance among contemporary youth groups (Hebdige 1979:126-27). Otherness may also be a source of style and the vehicle for new meaning through the reformulation of a particular group’s values by conscious adaptation, rather than encumbrance, of a foreign musical text. The incorporation by Chinese revolutionary groups of Protestant hymn tunes to proclaim resistance to Chinese imperial regimes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is one of the most remarkable examples of this process of canon-formation. So powerful were the values represented by this musical canon, moreover, that they spurred the gradual expansion of the canon until it formed the basis of geming gequ, the “songs for the masses,” in the mid-twentieth-century China of Mao Zedong (Wong 1984). While the canon expanded, musical style itself actually consolidated. Such stylistic change is clearly evident in the melody of a song written for the worker’s recreational center of the Anyuan road mine project in 1922; popularized during a strike in September of that year, it soon became canonized as an anthem for other strikes (ibid.: 118-19). The four-measure and two-measure phrases that frame “Anyuan Lukuang gongren julebu buge” (example 9) clearly give the song a sense of tonality by outlining a dominant to tonic cadence. The second, third, and fourth phrases, however, lack strong tonal implications, and with their use of intervals of an augmented second (transcribed as d-b and a-c) and the further absence of a half step, these phrases employ pentatonic structures characteristic of Chinese melodic styles (ibid.: 119).

Many of the processes that we observe when folk music changes are also notable for their undergirding of folk music’s canons. Institutionalization, for example, tends to situate folk music in specific activities that cultivate and express the canon. Literacy, both musical and otherwise, intensifies a community’s understanding of its canons, effecting new possibilities for centralizing the implicit values. Literacy also makes it possible to establish a more extensive historical continuity and the more formalized tradition that this entails (Kenner 1984:363-64). Patterns of musical specialization result from attitudes toward centrality and musical canon. In this respect, one can make distinctions between active and passive canon-formation, recognizing too the possibility that these may affect textual and contextual realms with slight differences. To be active, canon-formation may require the formulation and acquisition of identifiable skills or musical roles—for example, the ability to play a musical instrument well. In contrast, passive canon-formation may rely more extensively on a community’s acceptance of such social reformulation, as the creation of new contexts for the performance of folk music.

Just as modernization has produced more and varied patterns of canonformation, it has also meant that some of these patterns have become more pervasive as societies develop in certain ways. The emergence of the modern nation-state is one of the primary backdrops for new patterns of canon-formation; so also is the increased cultural heterogeneity that has resulted from the mass movement of population groups. One of the most sweeping responses to these conditions of modernism has been called by Eric Hobsbawm “the invention of tradition” (1983). Hobsbawm uses this concept to account for a specific type of canon-formation—one for which the past is largely fabricated, usually because of the decisions of a few individuals, and continuity with the past has little historical credibility. An invented tradition may centralize an aspect of the past that never really existed, that enjoyed no previous currency whatsoever, much less centrality. Although invented traditions may seem contrived on the surface, they do result from an overt form of canon-formation and the ascription of considerable value to the need to express certain aspects of culture—especially history—in canonical fashion.

Anyuan Lukuang gongren julebu buge
(Anyuan road mine workers’ recreational club song)

Translation

EXAMPLE 9

Addressing more specifically the generation of cultural traits to fit the emergence of modern nations, Benedict Anderson has proposed the concept “imagined community” (1983). Anderson’s study of the canonical foundations of many recent nations is especially instructive because of its attention to the relation of historical time to tradition. To imagine a community requires collapsing the specific consequences of time and place, thereby allowing the appropriation and juxtaposition of previously disparate aspects of culture (ibid.:28-40). Thus, it was necessary for the German Romantics to rely on an imaginary basis for das Volk if they were to anthologize folk music in such a way that it could be called deutsche Volkslieder. For Nikolai Grundtvig (1783-1872) to establish folk schools in Denmark predicated on the communal functions of the arts (and most notable among the arts, folk music) also required actively imagining a certain type of past and instituting it in nineteenth-century Denmark. Similarly, the intellectual scions of Francis James Child proceeded to imagine communities of ballad singers and social contexts for communal musical activities that had little historical validity. The musical symbols of an imagined community are many: an identifiable corpus of folk song, usually printed for wide distribution; national songs and national anthems; folk songs that spell out the history of the nation in overt and subtle forms; and, in general, the equation of folk music with national music.

It would be only too easy to look disparagingly at the invention and imagination of folk music canons; perhaps I, too, am particularly guilty of berating the persistent promulgators of imaginary Anglo-American ballad traditions for what I consider their unwillingness to abandon a restrictive canon. Clearly, however, the invention and imagination of musical tradition retain many of the characteristics of canon-formation that I have regarded here as particularly valuable. To invent a folk music tradition is certainly to engage in a conscious decision-making process; to implant that tradition through settlement schools derived from Danish folk schools and festivals is to restrict the resulting decisions even more forcefully. And, at least at some level, imagined traditions gain supporters, that is, those who are willing to accept such traditions as representative of a community. Finally, even when a tradition is inappropriately invented, the failure to fit properly is evidenced by flawed seams. That the American South was not a sheltered receptacle of Child ballads has been convincingly argued by David E. Whisnant (1983), and the hegemony of certain song canons in the British Isles is undergoing effective repudiation by a new, critical breed of British folk music scholars (Harker 1985). Moreover, the true diversity of musical styles in the American South is receiving its due attention, producing a scholarship that bears witness to the region’s diversity and completing the inchoate canons invented by a previous generation unwilling to accept the change and modernization of the region.

The concept of folk music canon that I introduce in this chapter attempts to interpret the ways in which the community makes its own decisions about musical activity and repertory. Indispensable to this concept is the centrality of the community as a context for musical decisions. This interpretation of canon-formation, however, is only one of several possible approaches. Those theories that are primarily concerned with literary or art history consider canons in a different light, namely by focusing almost exclusively on text. Text-derived canons are notoriously unstable, rising and falling according to the changing contexts of cultural history. Many writers, painters, and composers who enjoyed the highest degree of fame during their lifetimes are now unknown; others, relatively unknown in their day or overshadowed by successors—a Botticelli or a J. S. Bach—experience revival and canonization at the hands of later generations (Kermode 1985:3-31).

How fickle, then, are the processes of canon-formation? Is a canon no more than a flourish of popularity? Or the product of the instincts of those only too well endowed with the ability to second-guess the tastes of their communities? Can texts alone serve as the basis for canons? Or does the isolation of great works actually render canons inchoate, devoid of contextual meaning? The folk music canon clearly exhibits a fundamental difference vis-à-vis the sort of canon forged by scholars for the “fine arts.” Without context the folk music canon can only be incomplete. Any revival will founder for lack of a community that can adequately provide a context for its cultivation. The advocates of a purely Anglo-American ballad tradition in the South could attempt to impose texts on the region through settlement schools and folk festivals, but they could not make the region over into their invented context. In contrast, the deliberate creation of geming gequ in China properly identified the effective context for mass expression of solidarity, whether in the form of resistance or the voicing of ideological unity, and then adapted the musical and poetic texts to enhance that context (Wong 1984). Canons are therefore inchoate if frozen in time or affixed to a particular place. It is not impossible for folk music to ossify in this way. But interpreting the dialectic between text and context as dynamic necessarily formulates processes of canon-formation that fully admit change and the creativity thereby invested in folk music tradition.

Three Types of Folk Music Canon

Folk music canons are remarkably variable. They may distinguish the musical activities of only a few individuals or the musical activities shared by a vast nation. The variability of folk music canons enables one to examine them in many cultural contexts and to apply them to repertories with quite contrasting processes of change. Canons frequently overlap, but they rarely cease to retain distinguishing characteristics—unless they are in the process of reformulation. In this section I shall look at three patterns of canon formation. A number of criteria could have guided the choice of the three types and concomitant case studies that follow, but contrast in size, which is to say the extensiveness of the community, served as the fundamental criterion. Additionally, other factors exhibit substantial mutability: transmission and origin of repertories differ; the characteristic specialization of musicians is very dissimilar; the relation to other genres of music in the community, though always complex, shapes the folk music very differently. Common to these canons, however, is their vitality and their illumination of the significant role folk music plays in modern contexts.

Size of community affects many factors related to canon-formation. For the members of a community whose canon I have labeled “small-group,” it is at least theoretically possible to know each other. Indeed, one of the conscious purposes for forming small-group canons is to create a sense of belonging or to emphasize camaraderie; such camaraderie may be common to a more traditional setting, but it may also provide a social alternative in larger, more urbanized societies. For the members of a community whose canon I have called “mediated,” there is often a historical basis for size—for example, residence in a particular geographic region or a shared experience like immigration. One may say, therefore, that the members of such a community share many aspects of culture, but it is physically and geographically impossible to exchange them without mediation. Maintaining the third type, the “imagined canon,” is a community that is extremely large and whose boundaries are abstractly positioned. By definition, the imagined canon entails a group whose members may have only tenuous historical connections and who cannot know each other because of the sheer vastness of the community. The boundaries of the community whose corpus of folk music is largely imagined are generally political and frequently equivalent to those of a modern nation-state; in this sense, I stick rather closely to Benedict Anderson’s usage of “imagined community” as a paradigm for examining nationalism.

The three types of folk music canon demonstrate three patterns of interrelation of repertory and social structure. For the small group, many pieces in the repertory may articulate specific social activities. This direct interrelation reflects, on one hand, the similarity of the small-group canon to concepts of traditional society, in which folk music is inextricably bound to many cultural activities. On the other hand, establishing a direct interrelation may be a motivation in the formation of small groups in a more urbanized society. Folk music repertory and social structure often have fairly extensive historical connections in the case of mediated canons, although circumstances have intervened to attenuate these connections. Thus, factors like style, rather than specific pieces, may be the most commonly shared aspects of social structure. Because the tradition of an imagined canon may be fabricated, connections between repertory and social structure may be skewed or disjunct. They are not, however, arbitrary, for conscious, carefully calcuated attempts to invent meaningful tradition generated them.

Although the three types can all account for the complex processes of change in modern societies, they do so in somewhat different ways. The small group is relatively independent of modernization. It may be a response to modernization of the larger society, but it may also characterize societies that have undergone rather little modernization themselves. In contrast, a mediated canon depends on modernization to establish its folk music traditions. Modernization provides a means of disseminating folk music, thereby establishing communicative links to different parts of the community. The imagined canon is not so much dependent on modernization as inseparable from it. Insofar as it accompanies broad processes of change such as nationalism, the formation of an imagined canon tends to be a more recent historical phenomenon.

Musical activities, as well as the stress placed on them by the community, differ according to their canonical basis. One might envision these activities heuristically forming a continuum based on the size of the group characterized by a particular folk music. At one end, the small group concentrates on rather specific practices, consolidating and codifying them in a concise repertory. At the other end, an imagined canon may form out of disparate musical practices, drawn from diverse repertories, genres, and social functions. The process of imagining also consolidates these practices, although it is not until folk music traditions are juxtaposed by the same organizations that they crystallize sufficiently to produce a concise repertory. The small-group canon thus has rather specific, contained sources, whereas the imagined canon requires a musical basis that admits diversity.

The small-group canon: Folk music as a basis for German social organization, 1870 to World War I. The small-group canon is found in many social settings. It can be an appropriate description of tribal societies and many forms of traditional society. In the small group, folk music is an element of some shared activities; many members of the group know at least a representative sample of the group’s shared repertory. These are conditions under which oral transmission may predominate and the tradition itself may demonstrate relatively little change. Its more traditional bases notwithstanding, the small-group canon also has modern contexts that enhance its value as a critical category. Ernst Klusen, arguing from similar reasoning, has even gone so far as to insist that the small group is the only truly valid category in which to place modern folk music, or rather what he prefers to call Gruppenlieder, or group songs (1986). In essence, the small group is a buttress of continued differentiation within modernized societies. Thus, its canon may well emerge as a response to modernization and as a means of emphasizing more intimate cultural expression against a backdrop perceived as homogeneous. This form of response makes the small-group canon especially instructive as a model for studying the persistence of folk music in the wake of modernization.

The proliferation of German folk song societies was in many ways coeval with the rise of German nationalism and the industrialization of German society in the first half of the nineteenth century. Just as German nationalism benefited from the centralization of German culture afforded by a standardized literary language and its inculcation through such institutions as the universities, standardized corpora of German Volkslieder gained increasing acceptance. Already at the beginning of the century, choruses, especially men’s choruses whose members came from the rising middle class, had established themselves as bastions of folk song. The collection and publication of folk songs became legitimate professional engagements at the fringes of the music academy, and by mid-century several folk music scholars had acquired considerable renown in Germany and in German-speaking areas elsewhere. The most famous of these folk music professionals was Ludwig Erk (1807-83), who in his lifetime founded and directed several choruses, published 130 editions of folk songs, collected some 20,000 versions of German folk songs, and arranged many of them in versions that have remained standard until the present (Salmen 1954 and Gundlach 1969). Erk’s labors were the culmination of a movement that began with Herder’s pronouncements about the Volk and its music, and the subsequent refocusing of these speculations to apply specifically to the German people. In every way possible, modernization undergirded this movement, whether through the printing of songbooks or the implanting of transportation networks that drew together singing societies from far-flung areas for massive singing festivals. German folk music scholarship also benefited from the broad aims of the movement, so that by the beginning of the twentieth century such archivist-collectors as John Meier (1864-1953), who founded the Deutsches Volksliedarchiv at Freiburg in 1914, were directing their efforts toward the systematic study and analysis of German folk music.

Around 1871, the date of the political unification of Germany, modernization was animating a response that led specifically to the formation of a canon: the adaptation of Volkslieder to suit the needs of small groups. The small groups formed for a variety of reasons, but their names and their repertories generally showed concern for local identification and common occupations. Some of the small groups reflected broader patterns of organization; Turnvereine (sporting organizations) that fostered a singing society, for example, were a common feature of most urban centers, although they were not always formalized as participants in nationwide leagues. Many of these small singing societies had limited scopes, and some of them could hardly have had more than a handful of members (Schwab 1973:892-98). Certain groups—for example, such minorities as Jewish organizations—formed singing societies for the first time during this period (Bohlman 1984a: 111-65).

If there was a unifying aspect to this counter-movement, it was the urge to formulate musical activities on the basis of the small group. The choice of new repertory for the emergent small group further reflected the concern for forming a canon that expressed a desire for differentiation. The point of departure for most small-group songbooks was the more general corpus of German folk song. Well-known songs were extracted from this corpus, usually to create a sense of familiarity; often, the best-known melodies were used but given new texts specific to the group. When songbooks appeared in multiple editions during this period, they usually bore witness to a historical pattern in which sections with songs for the small group expanded, while the general sections (allgemeine Lieder) shrank, eventually serving only ancillary ends.

Aspects of mediation and imagination were present in this counter-movement, but they, too, undergirded the formation of the small-group canon. Mediation appeared as a component of the printing process, which enabled the differentiation of various canons to take place rapidly. To the extent that invention did characterize the formation of some traditions, it seems to have reflected not a yearning for undue historical continuity but rather the immediacy and efficacy of joining together in song. This moment in the history of German folk music was, therefore, one in which das Volk was actualized by the group. This reification had some significant social ramifications, notably the ability of many groups to break down socioeconomic divisions (Schwab 1973:891). Moreover, the reification acquired a very specific aesthetic voice: the folk songs in each group’s songbook. The group, then, had become the canonical vessel—the molding force enclosing the canon—for certain significant subgenres of German folk song, thereby encouraging a process of diversification against the growing nationalism of Wilhelminian Germany.

The mediated canon: Ethnic old-time music in the Upper Midwest. The mediated canon characteristically draws from several social bases and often cuts across several types of community. In short, it often exemplifies pluralism. Youth subcultures, which might well formulate their musical activities as a mediated canon, often exist as regional or socioeconomic amalgams. In modern contexts, mediated canons may reflect specific confrontations with a mainstream culture, whether or not the culture is homogeneous. The term mediated is especially descriptive of this sort of canon because the coherence of musical style it contains inevitably benefits from channels of communication and the distribution of mass-produced forms of music. Without such communication and distribution it would be considerably more difficult to redefine and conflate the diverse musical components of the mediated canon. Mediated canons often characterize groups that are in the process of transition from small to large communities. Thus, a mediated musical style may forge a diverse complement of cultural differences into a normative style that allows a degree of cultural sharing and a more intensive drawing of cultural boundaries. The resulting tradition retains elements of the old while admitting the new in patterns consistent with underlying pluralism.

The folk music of the Upper Midwest has consistently witnessed the formation of mediated canons during the region’s roughly 150 years of cultural pluralism. Radio stations, record shops, dance halls, and taverns throughout the region have failed to relinquish a penchant for ethnic musical styles, even though individual concentrations of immigrant-group settlement long ago yielded to the influx of diverse groups and the inevitable cultural cross-influences that result. Ethnic old-time music bears witness to the confluence of diverse components. Diversity, however, has become a basis for a unity that is distinguished by the contrast of its canon with styles in the mainstream. Ethnicity, while it tempers musical style, does not stultify it. Some musicians may freely tap the styles that constitute the mainstream but then select those elements that enhance the particularity of ethnic musical style.

External and internal aspects of musical style often demonstrate different processes of change. The external aspects, often originating in the changing styles of the mainstream, may have a more ephemeral existence in ethnic old-time music; in the 1930s and 1940s, big-band jazz was relatively important as an external influence but has been almost completely supplanted by country-western music during more recent decades. Some styles, perhaps influenced by a few prominent musicians, have been very selective, even idiosyncratic, in their responses to external styles. James P. Leary has documented the influence of the Hawaiian guitar in several ethnic old-time substyles in northern Wisconsin and traced it to a brief but flourishing trade in the guitars during the 1920s (Leary 1986a and b). LeRoy Larson, probably the most significant force in the revival of Scandinavian old-time music in western Wisconsin and Minnesota, is a masterful banjo player, thus making it natural for him to incorporate the banjo into many Scandinavian folk dances, occasionally with a nostalgic parenthesis from Dixieland (cf. Larson 1974 and Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble 1976). Stylistic elements that more overtly draw attention to ethnicity change more slowly. Dance tunes usually retain a formal integrity; ensemble structures, subject to differing degrees of alteration, rarely abandon all instruments that have particular ethnic symbolism. The visibility and audibility of the boundaries between ethnic and mainstream musical elements are essential for the formation of ethnic old-time style and repertory.

Centrality for ethnic old-time music in the Upper Midwest often rests in questions of style especially insofar as style stems from the organization of musical life. Fundamental parameters of style can be identified in both texts and contexts related to dancing. Contexts for dancing exist in most of the predominant ethnic communities of the region in social and fraternal organizations, ethnic and general holidays and a rather dense concentration of taverns (cf. Leary 1982). The dancing ensemble and its instrumentarium have a framework of standardization, within which variation observes fairly specific ethnic lines—for example, the Slovenian-American predilection for button-box accordions and the prevalence of concertinas in some Polish-and German-American areas (cf. Keil 1982:34-42). Dance styles provide myriad opportunities to vary and differentiate the style and content of old-time repertories. Musicians render well-known tunes, ethnic or from the popular mainstream, with identifiable dialects: Slovenian-American style displays virtuosity; Bohemian-American emphasizes the melody; Polish-American stresses metric contrasts. The identifiability of these dialects notwithstanding, they retain a malleability that lends itself to a pluralistic culture by making it possible for skillful musicians to adapt them to a wide range of repertories.

Mediation of ethnic old-time music has assumed numerous and complex forms. Small and specialized companies currently constitute the core for recorded technology; for the most part, ensembles pay these companies to cut records for them and then assume responsibility for distribution. During the heyday of ethnic recording in the United States (ca. 1920-50), the major recording companies, including Columbia and RCA Victor, issued extensive ethnic lists, and the Upper Midwest provided an important constituency, especially for the recordings of Central and Northern European ethnic music (Gronow 1982). Records produced stars—Frankie Yankovich for Slovenian music, Li’l Wally (Walter Jagiello) for Polish polka style, Hans Wilfahrt (Whoopie John) among German communities—and these stars became models for the consolidation of style. Further refinement of style also followed specific directions as the result of mediation. Concertina players, a subgroup of German-American old-time musicians, now rely on an infrastructure of teaching methods, specialized recordings, concertina clubs, networks for the sale and distribution of instruments, and the symbolic elevation of their art proffered by the Concertina Hall of Fame. The specificity of these mediated components continues to underscore ethnic associations while preventing them from being exclusive. Instead, the stylistic complexity of ethnic old-time music is shared by ethnic groups throughout the Upper Midwest and is a means whereby the canon of folk music continuously serves to nurture an awareness of the cultural processes, both past and present, that shape the region.

The imagined canon: The creation of Israeli national folk music. Necessarily a product of modernism, the imagined canon contains seemingly disparate parts that often form what Lévi-Strauss has called bricolage, an assemblage of parts that only together constitute a whole (Lévi-Strauss 1966:1-33). Bricolage may be carefully contrived, or it may coalesce more or less randomly. Viewed separately, the components of this cultural system do not suggest the particular role they play in relation to other components. Thus, folk songs often have a quite different function before being adapted for purposes of an imagined canon. The hora, which has both official and unofficial sanction as an Israeli national dance, originated in southeastern Europe. Israeli folk dance canonizers co-opted the dance for many reasons, probably least of which was that some early immigrants were acquainted with it. Whether because of its relatively simple structure, which lends itself to quick learning and elaboration, or because of its circular motion and linking of dancers, which evoke the egalitarianism that the early settlers hoped would nourish the new country (Kadman 1968:3), the hora entered the imagined canon of Israeli folk traditions virtually unimpeded. Further historical justification was unnecessary.

The bricolage of the imagined canon is, in fact, quite independent of history; in some cases, it even requires that history be quietly ignored so that continuity with an imagined past appear unchallengeable. In the context of modernism, however, the impetus to challenge the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate parts is considerably less. Modernism in both the sciences and the arts has rendered bricolage normative. Developments in physics in the present century, from quantum physics to proposed new models of multidimensionality in nature, have their parallels in cubism and the collage of narrative references in Ulysses (cf. Kenner 1984:369 and Geertz 1983:21). Nationalism, the expression of which proliferates at an ever-increasing tempo, has benefited from this modernist tendency to create cultural canons by collapsing and then conflating previous traditions (Anderson 1983).

Folk music might at first seem an unlikely candidate for the formation of imagined canons, but the frequency of its employment as a national symbol proves otherwise. Those engaged in the formation of an imagined canon of folk music either overlook the absence of continuous and related traditions or simply invent them and then justify their relatedness on the basis of a history that somehow should have been the case, employing a line of argument like the following proviso for Israeli folk music: “Historical conditions precluded the organic evolution of folk music of a strongly defined, national character” (Boehm 1971:column 669). And so the imagined canon has become one of the most powerful and pervasive contexts for folk music.

Like many aspects of modern Israeli nationalism, Israeli folk music is largely the creation of the twentieth century. Even though much of the language used to celebrate Israeli folk music differs not at all from that identifying other folk musics, the circumstances that brought the folk music repertory into being are well known to the shapers and guardians of this canon. For many Israelis writing about their folk music, it seems not the least bit incongruous to note—even on the same page—that Israeli folk music has “tunes whose words and music are fundamentally connected with the land of Israel and its people” and that “with the exception of a few tunes composed by the earliest settlers . . . the era of Israeli folk music began with the arrival in Israel of Joel Engel in 1924” (Keren 1980:55).

To a large extent, the formation of an imagined canon of Israeli folk music was inevitable. Even when the initial groups of settlers arrived in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century, they represented diverse countries of origin. They shared few aspects of a common folk music heritage; their common national heritage, voiced as diaspora from the ancient land of Israel almost two millennia previous to the modern return, was shaded with obviously romantic hues. At the time of early settlement, there were significant efforts to collect and study Jewish folk music within European communities. The Society for Jewish Folk Song, founded in St. Petersburg in 1908, engaged in major efforts to study the folk music of Eastern European communities (Brod 1976:23); Central European Jews, though less systematic than the St. Petersburg society, began to investigate folk music traditions more rigorously and to publish anthologies from diverse sources (Bohlman 1984a: 111-63).

The creation of an Israeli national folk music was first the prerogative of Russian immigrant musicians, the most important of whom, Joel Engel, had been intimately involved with the St. Petersburg society from its inception. The “composers” of Israeli folk song turned to a variety of source materials that they deemed appropriate to their nationalist and ideological ends. Yiddish folk song was an important model; Abraham Zvi Idelsohn’s ten-volume Hebräischorientalischer Melodienschatz (Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies) gathered traditional folk tunes from Jewish communities in North Africa and the Middle East (1914-32), and German folk song collections became the basis for publications in Palestine subsequent to the transfer of publishing concerns from Germany in the 1930s. More abstract were the qualities of musical repertories practiced by the Arabic communities already resident in Palestine, but nevertheless inseparable from a Levantine soundscape. The new folk songs forged an imaginary unity, intended to draw different immigrant groups together. Many lent themselves to choral arrangement or performance in such new cultural settings of the country as the kibbutzim. The musical structure of the folk music freely combined new and old, real and imagined. Biblical cantillation guided the setting of Hebrew, even though the Hebrew of the folk songs was itself quite modern. Arabic maqāmāt , in contrast, appeared in a variety of forms, albeit far more commonly as quasi-medieval church modes than as a form drawn from Arabic music theory and practice (Cohen and Shiloah 1985:202-3). Other musical activities undergirded and inseminated the new folk music tradition. Many composers of art music, for example, turned toward a style loosely identified as Eastern Mediterraneanism and intentionally imbued this style with traits similar to those in the new folk music; indeed, many composers of art music participated also in the composition of folk music, thereby suggesting that the musical font of emergent nationalism really served all genres of music.

The formation of an imagined canon of folk music continued to provide a model for musical activity through consecutive waves of immigrants. Whereas the canon was of diminished importance to European immigrants after about 1950, immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East turned to it as a means of establishing a foothold in musical nationalism during the 1960s and early 1970s (ibid.:204-5). In this sense, the imagined canon is inseparable from the processes of modern nation-building. Subscribing to the formation of the folk music canon has provided for immigrants to Israel a way of claiming a common cultural core with other immigrants or longtime residents of the country. If, indeed, the canon’s continuity with the past is spurious, the continuity it lends to a national agenda in the present is not. Even more remarkable in the case of Israel (but surely in other nations that I might also have examined) is the exemplary role that folk music played in the consolidation of a larger cultural canon. For a community of immigrants, the imagined canon of folk music was a conduit to a common language and a cultural activity in which all could participate: the new folk music was by definition one aspect of a way of life meant to be shared. Unquestionably, embracing the new folk music canon required a leap of cultural faith, but it was a leap many were motivated to make. Though Israeli folk music is incompletely formed as a canon and fundamentally dependent on a diverse community’s willingness to juxtapose an imagined past and a rapidly changing present, it relies on a centripetalizing attraction of folk music style and repertory toward a common, pluralistic cultural core, however imagined this core may continue to be.

Folk Music, Canon-Formation, and Critical Folkloristics

The three case studies in the previous section represent three different critical frameworks for the study of folk music. The repertories had contrasting functions; folk music style was not only expressed differently, but it exhibited a wide range of meaning and symbolism for the three communities; the social bases ranged from relatively small to rather large; even the ways in which folk music originated varied considerably and reflected different degrees of tolerance for authenticity, the roles of individual musicians, and the relative dissolution of genre stratification. And yet each of the communities in these three case studies was consciously concerned with the potential of folk music to articulate essential aesthetic concepts and cultural values. Their relative degrees of modernization, urbanization, and political or ideological complexity notwithstanding, these three communities consciously identified and fostered folk music as a genre of expressive behavior with expansive, yet luminous, symbolic meaning.

The folk music canons characterizing these three communities were quite different. In no case did the canon depend on a preexisting community with primordial roots or procrustean cultural boundaries; quite the contrary, each of the canons formed during a period of cultural ferment. Change, however, was not incompatible with the consideration of folk music within this framework because the focus was on the dialectic between context and text, which by definition resolves through change. The centrality of certain folk music texts was not a matter of rural or urban contexts; both were complex and both responded to modernization. The choice of repertory—whether centralized by specific polka styles or created to symbolize the rapid ingathering of diverse immigrant groups—clearly differentiated the community and distinguished it from others. The folk music canon, as a measure of these choices to centralize a repertory as a conscious response to the need for cultural identification, is therefore independent of historical patterns in North America or class structure in Europe. Instead, it aims to identify quite different dialectical interactions—constantly changing and changeable—that provide a framework for understanding the virtually infinite range of musical activities that constitute the genre folk music. Examining the ways whereby different canons of folk music form is thus one means of critically situating the genre as text and context in the traditional past, the modern world, and the diverse cultures of non-Western societies.