In the Beginning . . .

Logic would seem to dictate placing a chapter on origins at the beginning of this book. Caution, however, suggests otherwise. Formerly a subject for considerable debate and theoretical machination of fantastic proportions, the search for origins has more recently subsided quietly, earning only a few footnotes that relegate it to a more innocent age of folk music scholarship. The apologia for this retreat is simple: “We can’t really know anything definite about origins.” It is not easy to offer a rejoinder to such a caveat because one confronts the need to make some rather hefty claims for new discoveries or previously unknown evidence. Or does one? Discoveries, evidence: that is the stuff of a primordial past, of the origins. Yes, many of our scholarly forebears were in search of just such origins. But theirs was a restricted view of origins, predicated by a primary concern for data, facts, and material products: the first scale, the first form of bone flute or slit drum, the link between speech and song. There is also a broader context for origins, one that concerns itself not so much with products but with the processes of coming into being. How does a society create new songs? Whence arises musical change? When and how do new canons of folk music form? These questions, too, require speculation and often yield only tentative answers. I hesitate to claim that they are more germane to the study of folk music than were earlier explorations for ancient origins. If they are more fashionable, they too leave one wondering at times whether it is really possible to “know anything definite about origins.” Caution makes its case even stronger.

If theoretical concern for the origins of folk music has, at least on the surface, waned, the legacy of theories accounting for origins lingers and continues to underlie many contemporary conceptions and misconceptions about folk music. I choose not to bow to caution’s warnings, then, not because I would posit a new theory but because I prefer to counter with an observation that necessitates abandonment of more circumspect approaches: the need to relate folk music to its beginnings persists as an essential and pervasive component of folk music theory. Aesthetic and textual concerns, for example, often presume an understanding of origins. An authentic version of a folk song is one that has demonstrable links to an Urtext, however abstractly or factitiously it has been formulated. Oral tradition, however dynamically it is portrayed, reflects various theories pro and contra different types of origin. The narrative of an epic in oral tradition may speak to real events in the life of a historical figure, or it may be an allegory more generally representative of the human condition. Accordingly, the origins are local or universal or some combination thereof. The social constructs of folk music, too, originate in different ways, as do different repertories and styles of performance practice. The persistent pursuit of origins belies the inability to “know anything definite.”

The search for the sources of folk music has produced anything but unequivocal results. One can safely say that there are as many concepts of the origins of folk music as there are theories of folk music; few of the field’s basic issues remain untouched. A survey of these concepts, therefore, is a historiographic approximation of the entire field. Logic, so it seems, was not wrong to suggest starting in this way. The effect of surveying concepts of origin has the further result of revealing a vast range of musical activities acknowledged as folk music, and that, of course, fits well with my intent to cast off many of the restrictive shackles clamped on folk music. Concomitantly, this survey aims to illustrate the need to expand the theoretical tolerance for folk music in the modern world. To effect such an expansion, I shall urge two basic temporal frameworks for the discussion of origins: a relatively remote past, about which we indeed can only theorize; and the more recent past, especially as it is in the process of becoming the present. A rejuvenated quarrel of Ancients and Moderns? Not quite, for I do not pit past and present against each other. Instead, I would superimpose the present and the past, suggesting that basic claims for nebulous and idealized origins continue. All too often, this persistence further entrenches beliefs that folk music should play an archetypal social role and embody an unrealizable aesthetic purity. It does not play such a role and never did. The folk music of the past was not substantially different—functionally or aesthetically—from the folk music of today. Folk songs no more composed themselves in a bygone golden age than in a modern, industrialized world. The origins of folk music in the present are just like those of the past.

Of Gods, Birds, and the Music of the Spheres

The panoply of origin theories reflects a remarkable range of concepts about folk music. Some of these concepts stress musical elements; others stress cultural roots. Some shroud folk music in numinous mists; others specify every milestone along the path of development. Most attempts to locate the sources of music do not take on the whole of creation. There have been theories, of course, that have extended speculation about the parts to the whole, thereby attracting the cynicism and criticism of a later generation. This relative specificity may well result from the use of the past to explain the present, even the idealized present; scholars concentrated on finding explanations for those aspects that concerned them the most. At the end of the nineteenth century, for example, the evolution from simple to complex forms was of paramount importance to folk music scholars, inspiring them to generate a multitude of models that would explain music’s many positions on an evolutionary ladder. The more reactionary mode of scholarship, insisting that folk music could only endure in rural settings, quite appropriately divined ways of situating folk music’s origins in venues completely untouched by urbanization or modernization. One might say, therefore, that the origins of folk music often proved a point; they explained folk music as it was, or as it ought to be.

The origin of music per se. The broadest conceptualization of origins attempts to explain the very existence of music. Myth, for example, often contains a variety of explanations of music, often as a salient component of creation itself. Occasionally, music is the invention of an individual god, such as Apollo, or of a figure presumed to be mortal and real, such as the biblical Yuval. Myth, which uses natural phenomena to explain the material world of society, offers similar explanations for music. Myth may regard music as a link to a supernatural world or mimesis of the sounds of this world. Music may come into being in very specific ways, exhibiting a high degree of differentiation, or as a general, undefined realm of sounds.

Mythological explanations of the origins of music may be on the whole more general, but they are not the only explanations that cast their theoretical nets around all musical phenomena. Psychological approaches, like those guiding early comparativists Richard Wallaschek and Carl Stumpf, plumbed the beginnings of music to ascertain the motivation of music-making (Wallaschek 1893 and Stumpf 1911). A concern for the human impulse to music-making has also consistently guided the work of John Blacking, who focuses this concern on psychophysiological questions (cf. 1973 and elsewhere). Psychological and biological investigations accept a sort of universality related to evolution—that it is fundamental to the human species to express oneself with music. “All members of the species are basically as capable of dancing, singing and making music, as they are of speaking a natural language. There is even evidence that early human species were able to dance and sing several thousand years before homo sapiens sapiens emerged with the capacity for speech as we now know it” (Blacking 1981:9). In essence, music’s origins were coeval with the beginning of culture.

The origin of social and musical functions. Somewhat more specific than the origins of music per se is the equation of express social functions with the development of music. Music therefore articulates the organization of society. It may do so by dint of its role in ritual or by transforming labor into a communal, rather than individual, activity. The early Romantics even went so far as to assert that folk music provided an infrastructure to a stratum, the Mutterschicht (mother level), that had achieved an idealized social harmony (Danckert 1966:22-27).

Particularity characterizes in still other ways the search for origins in musical functions. Generative theories of musical grammar, for example, posit the preexistence (or inevitability) of certain patterns and structures (e.g., Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983). One of the most persistent paths to particularity has resulted in the distinction between theories that anchor music in either speech or movement. The speech theories concentrate more on song, the movement theories more on dance and instrumental music. A lasting result of these approaches to origin has been the somewhat disparate directions pursued by scholars studying folk song and those describing their field as folk music.

The origin of musical style. Musical style is an aspect of the sharing of repertories by groups of individuals formed on the basis of social cohesion. The origin of musical style, therefore, is removed completely from the indistinguishable past. In some theories the point of removal from the ancient past—from what was once called “primitive music”—is specified; Hubert Parry (and several notable successors, including Cecil Sharp) believed that this point occurred when two phrases took the place of a single, formless melodic line (Parry 1910:47-61 and Sharp 1965:42-43). Just as style changes, so too do musical repertories admit the possibility of new origins, which may be either internal or external to the group. Depending on the style and structure of repertory, the innovation permitted by renewed origins may occur frequently or extend over long periods. A particular style of oral-formulaic epic composition may stabilize the tradition for centuries; small, volatile political groups may assemble an ad hoc style from a pastiche of preexistent repertories. Stylistic origins often constitute a specific chronology and historical development.

The origin of a piece. The identification of certain discrete entities such as pieces exists in almost all folk music traditions. Most traditions, moreover, distinguish several ways of determining how pieces originate. These ways may be specific—recognition of a composer or the narrative description of a real event—or general, like the dream sources of most songs among the North American Flathead (Merriam 1967:3-24). Internal and external systems of classification often depend on the ways in which new pieces originate. Advocates of monogenesis or polygenesis—the single or multiple birth of similar pieces—often disagree sharply on how to define the relation between one piece and others that sound very much like it (cf. List 1978). Some of the most common forms of aesthetic judgment also require a concept of origins. Claiming that true folk music is ageless requires the presumption of great but indefinite periods of time between the inception of tradition and the contemporary performance of it. Judgments of this sort may even place quite strict limits on what is and is not admissible to the folk music canon.

The elements smaller than the piece. In practice this category often overlaps with the preceding ones; in principle it serves as the antipode to accounts of theories concerned primarily with the origins of music in general. Musical change often rests on the ability of a tradition to tolerate new elements entering individual pieces. Change in many European traditions originates at the sub-piece level, often appearing first in variant performances. Elements of stylistic change, too, often enter the tradition in the form of small motifs or the alteration of a single phrase. As one tradition comes in contact with others, individual elements lend themselves to acculturation, thereafter functioning as new points of origin for certain aspects. This may occur in relatively random fashion, or it may parallel the broader social and historical changes through which a culture passes. In the case of Shawnee musical style, for example, Bruno Nettl has distinguished four historical moments that admitted new possibilities of stylistic genesis, each moment related directly to migration or relocation of Shawnee communities (1956:138-39).

As these theories concentrate on increasingly limited concepts and structures, they become more concerned with origins in the recent past or present. Discussion of the origin of music itself resorts to consideration of the prehistoric past, whether couched in the language of myth or the empirical constructs of natural science. Theories that attempt to cover all music rarely break down their evidence to explain the origin of individual pieces, which anyway can scarcely be discerned in a primordial era. Speculation about how individual elements enter a tradition hardly affords the opportunity to extrapolate from a time for which there is no knowledge of the specific contemporary traditions. Common to these diverse approaches, however, is the desire to explain musical tradition by understanding how its historical antecedents came about. Again we see that the search for origins reflects the urge to know both the past and the present.

Origins: From Metaphysical to Human Determination

Whether mythological or biological, ageless or explicitly functional, the origins of folk music exhibit two causational extremes, with a third position characterizing various compromises between these extremes. At one extreme, causation assumes multifarious ontological forms, most often without any historical specificity. At the other, folk music originates because of the acts of a single creator or composer, for whom there is at least speculation regarding identity and historical position. Compromises between these extremes often interpret the causation of folk music as a process of constantly coming into being; history, cultural factors, and personality are assumed to be of importance, but they are sometimes accorded an almost agnostic anonymity or irrelevance. All three of these positions survive in contemporary folk music theory.

Metaphysical origins of folk music. Theories of folk music that regard it as coming into existence by itself often stress communality and collectivity, even when these forces are occasionally disguised as natural phenomena. The Volksgeist, or folk spirit, was explicable only insofar as it was an expression of nature and retained intangible roots in nature. The earliest theories to concern themselves with folk music itself—those of Johann Gottfried Herder and Jacob Grimm, for example—fused nature and folk society. When Herder did specify the characteristics of “the folk,” he preferred to see them as “wild” and “lacking social organization” (unpolizirt), that is, closer to nature so that they could be more responsive to “nature’s poesy” (Naturpoesie) (Herder 1779 and Danckert 1966:5-8). Denying that a folk song could have a composer, Grimm announced that “a folk song composes and transmits itself” (Danckert ibid.:9).

We may wonder if these formulations were not fanciful even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but we should not ignore the aspects of innovation that made them attractive to subsequent generations. Folk music was essentially secular, the product of natural rather than divine inspiration. Nature came to play a central role in the shaping of folk music theory, just as it was important in other aesthetic formulations from the mid-eighteenth century to the present (cf. Kivy 1984, esp. 7-9; see also Sebeok 1979:39-40). The manifestation of nature in folk music, however, became gradually less mimetic, achieving instead the status of immanence: folk music, if not a reflection of nature, is at least “natural.” Accordingly, theorists came to observe the laws of natural science in folk music, which conveniently provided the opportunity to employ evolutionary interpretations. So profound was the influence of Darwinian theory on folk music scholars that it was not unusual when Cecil Sharp stated baldly that “the life history of a folk song . . . is clearly a case of evolution” (1965:21).

How nature succored folk music was a more controversial question. Two general theories have been at odds from Herder’s day until the present: origins in speech versus origins in movement. Disputants have at times bitterly contested these two theories, which persist in such bifurcation as the one between theory that concerns itself largely with the texts of folk song and theory whose focus is the contextual functions of instrumental folk music. It is not surprising that the argument in favor of speech as origin had the earliest supporters. Herder was a literary historian; the Grimms were linguists; Arnim and Brentano, the compilers of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806/1808), were poets. Folk music was a vehicle for words, for poetry.

The speech theory has four main variants. First, folk music was an artistic form that united speech and music. Second, speech and music had their origins in similar expressive functions, whether in forms of protospeech and protomusic (cf. Nettl 1956:136) or in genres of folklore such as the cante-fable (Wiora 1965:40). Third, speech gradually became music after passing through the intermediate stage of “impassioned speech” (Nettl 1956:135). The final variant has resulted from a somewhat unrelated linguistic formulation, one proffered by semiotics, which asserts that speech and music (and movement, for that matter) communicate abstractly as signs and that they may enhance their functions as agents of communication when combined (Sebeok 1979:39-40 and Hanna 1979:221-23).

The search for music’s origins in movement owed a great debt to evolutionary theory. Movement theories often turned to evolution for data and models of explanation, benefiting greatly from the growth of comparative approaches to natural science in the late nineteenth century. The earliest movement theories drew more directly from Herbert Spencer than from Darwin (e.g., Wallaschek 1893:235). The essence of almost all movement theories is the equation of movement with rhythm. Several types of aesthetic activity arise directly from rhythm, the most obvious being music and dance and their interrelation (Kealiinohomoku 1972:387). Rendered in more social scientific terms, movement organizes social functions, involving groups of people in individual activities. The movement theories plotted specific paths for the evolution of music (see Sachs 1962). Rhythm yielded melodic intervals; intervals strung together became melodies; contrast in melodic fragments established rudimentary form (Wallaschek 1893:233). Musical instruments, too, developed as means of articulating rhythm, thereby reinforcing movement’s essentially musical impetus (Sachs 1940:25-26). Whereas speech theories stressed music’s communicative potential in society, movement theories often concentrated on social function, the role of movement in the aesthetic organization of ritual, play, and social coherence. Not surprisingly, the scholars most concerned with the origin of music in movement were anthropologists and other social scientists, and vehement debates arose between them and the scholars who turned to speech in search of musical origins.

Composition as genesis. At a superficial level the notion of creator is not absent from some of the earliest theories claiming a natural origin for folk music. Mythological origins, for example, might well claim a supernatural creator, specifying the way in which music or a specific instrument appeared among mortals. More empirically, individuals became associated with the creation of folk music, in part because they were observed in the act of composition but also as a radical redress of those theories that were reconnoitering the gray fogs of primordial eras for origins. Such beliefs were simply held to be untenable and impractical in their explanations of contemporary change. It is arguable that even the earliest folk music theorists did not completely eschew the contribution of individuals (Wiora 1971a). Attacks against the idealized concepts of the nineteenth century were often polemical on exactly the question of composition. Most notable among the polemicists was Phillips Barry (1961), who insisted that individual musicians created individual songs. Barry won followers in Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, who, like Barry, regarded communal influence as a process of creating variations; what Barry called “communal re-creation” Sharp termed “communal authorship” (Sharp 1965:12-13 and Vaughan Williams 1954:55-58; cf. Karpeles 1951:11-12). Ernst Klusen has been especially vehement in his attempts to redress the idealization of folk music by earlier German scholars, and he calls for replacement of the term Volkslied with Gruppenlied (group song), hoping thereby to achieve a more realistic assessment of the process of folk music creation and transmission (Klusen 1969, 1973, and 1986).

The theories perceiving the origins of folk music in the acts of individuals permit considerable latitude in the ways composition takes place. The composer may use either oral or written techniques. A composed piece may use relatively new melodic material, or it may borrow from previously existing pieces. Contrafaction, the application of an existing melody to a new text, is commonplace for certain subgenres. Composition seldom fixes a single version, even when the composer inscribes the piece first in a written format.

In contrast, very different theories account for questions of compositional motivation and social venue. Some theorists call for universality, claiming that humans naturally create (Blacking 1973 and Sharp 1965:42). Others prefer to cast creativity in the context of specialization. The circulation of folk songs on single sheets of paper—broadsides or broadsheets—may involve considerable specialization. Not only is there a specific composer, but a new song may require engravers, printers, illustrators, street hawkers, and even street performers. Each of them, however, plays a creative role in establishing the link between written and oral tradition. The involvement of individual specialists in folk music traditions also raises ideological issues concerning the transformation from composed piece to community property and the remuneration or exchange of goods that marks innovation within the tradition. Implicit in any close consideration of the composer’s role is the rebuttal of locating the origins of folk music in the Volksgeist or the idealized egalitarian society of a golden past.

Folk music in a process of coming into being. The compromises between metaphysical origins and individual determination range widely. Most of them accept, nevertheless, that folk music tradition admits new pieces that are the products of individuals but then submits them to a scrutiny that originates in the community. Few contemporary theories would fail to accept the probability that new pieces constantly come into being (see, e.g., Nettl 1973:5-6), even if more conservative perspectives require age as a true measure of tradition. Various forms of the compromise exist in a few theories—for example, in the distinction between individual origin and communal authorship that Sharp and Vaughan Williams make (Vaughan Williams 1954:54-58). Origin thus has both individual and communal determinants. Distinguishing many of the compromise theories is the admission that change occurs and has occurred historically. Contemporary tradition is therefore distinct from that of the past and perhaps completely unlike anything that may have existed at a point of origin. When change is accepted as a normal component of folk music tradition, any rigid conceptualization of origin necessarily becomes impossible.

Authenticity and Change

Authenticity and change are concepts that dialectically address the relation between origins and the present, emphasizing the ways in which one is reached from the other. These concepts therefore establish temporal frameworks for tradition; they provide a historical perspective. Authenticity in this sense can be defined as the consistent representation of the origins of a piece (or a style or a genre) in subsequent versions or at later moments in the tradition’s chronology; with regard to those aspects that are salient, the piece remains the piece (cf. Karpeles 1951:14). The focus of authenticity is on the past; change, in contrast, more often focuses on the present. Authenticity need not be idealized and strictly construed, but it often is. In its most rigid forms, authenticity eschews change, or at least views it as aberrant. Authenticity tends therefore to assign primacy to the centrality and perpetuation of a particular canon (Wiora 1949:16). In the Anglo-American ballad tradition, the Child ballads constitute this sort of canon, always buttressed against defilement by unauthentic versions. Many scholars have presumed, therefore, that the Child ballads have long existed as a grouping with natural origins, and they search to discover ballads that conform to and justify the canon, even manufacturing authenticity if need be. Authenticity may also be ethnically prescribed (e.g., Saygun 1951:7). Performers, too, often search for solace in theories of authenticity that tell them how to do certain things in certain ways in order to reconstruct the authenticity of the style, that is, to play only the “original” version.

Because the acceptance of change focuses on the way differences arise to distinguish subsequent versions from the original, it is often the antithesis of authenticity. Preoccupation with origins and concern for a preexistent canon are often irrelevant; they may also ignore what is presumed to be reality or what is relished as vitality. Theories of change, thus, concern themselves more with processes than with the products of an earlier time. Whereas the active preservation of authentic versions may theoretically form one extreme of change, theories of change more commonly interpret the appearance of variants as inevitable, if not normative. Accordingly, the role of the individual creator is intrinsic to the customary evolution of tradition.

Change assumes many forms, some emphasizing development of the tradition, others the processes of disintegration that sometimes accompany oral tradition. Theories of folk music origins have traditionally observed three broad directions of change. The first includes various patterns of growing complexity, whether these proceed “naturally” according to evolution or accord special privilege to folk music as inspiration and melodic source for other genres (Wiora 1949:14). The opposite direction has understandably been more notorious, for it designates the upper strata of society as the source for materials worked by the folk substratum into folk music. Called gesunkenes Kulturgut (fallen cultural artifacts) by its architect, Hans Naumann, this theory (Naumann 1922) earned a remarkably diverse following and captured the indignant attention of many critics who spent considerable time debunking it. A third category of theories might be subsumed by the rubric diffusion, which demonstrates change not so much in the variation of individual pieces as in the general mobility of repertories. Individual pieces, therefore, had tremendous abilities to wander from culture to culture, regardless of place and conditions of origin (cf. Tappert 1890 and Wiora 1953). In each of these three general directions, change causes tradition to proceed progressively away from origins, rendering the depictions of those origins increasingly abstract and immaterial to the vitality of the tradition.

For those seeking to delimit the generic realm of folk music, assessing the balance between authenticity and change is often extremely important. If one believes that the true substance of folk music lies in its elements of authenticity, the unauthentic is of great danger. Ordaining the “unauthentic” is its otherness: its contrast with the aesthetic ideal of the past and its witness to the challenge of the present. When the presence of the unauthentic exhibits imbalance with the authentic, pieces cease to be folk music, crossing the border into popular music instead. As popular music, the unauthentic contributes generic characteristics of its own: a known composer, a recent composition, association with diverse and urban social functions, transmission by the mass media. The contrast with authenticity becomes ever sharper, the genesis of folk music more tautologically restrictive. Only the past can prescribe the conditions of contemporary folk music, but the past is beyond our ken. When argued in its most stringent forms, authenticity widens the gap between the past and the present, idealizing the validity of folk music’s origins but purposely failing to define them.

The Dialectical Articulation of Folk Music’s Origins

As the search for origins juxtaposes the past and present of folk music—harmoniously or not—it generates many of the most important dialectical considerations in the study of folk music. Not least of these considerations is the dialectic between the universality and the relativism of folk music. Does everyone have folk music? If so, is folk music then a link to the common origins of the human species, or of all culture? One might counter by asking why folk music so often exists in circumscribed repertories and delimited cultures—for example, as a genre of “national music” in some theories. If such relativism is accepted, does folk music therefore constitute a cross-cultural construct that might suggest a universal basis for polygenesis? These questions further frame the entire concept of folk music as a genre of folkloristics. To be a genre, folk music must demonstrate some commonality with regard to its origins, but that same commonality tends to idealize the genre to such extremes that individual pieces consistently fail to conform to its conditions.

Universality and relativism appear in other forms, as in the location of origins in communality or individuality. For many folk music theorists the community is the only possible setting for the origins of music. Cohesion, consciousness of the natural world, and the compulsion to share culture all underlie tradition and generate a folk spirit. But it is impossible to deny that the individual creates and engages in the generation of new songs. The dialectical relation makes clear, however, the realization that community is an aggregate of individuals. In different ways, then, communality and individuality specify that the origins are theoretically timeless, whether ubiquitous in the past or ongoing in the present.

The search for origins also suggests the dialectical relation between realism and modernism. Many theories rest on the premise that folk music imitates, but they assume a proximity to the object imitated that is made more difficult by the modernization and urbanization of society. Realism and modernism on their surfaces imply the possibility of rapprochement: the real can be modern; the modern can be real. But practice belies rapprochement when one insists that change must embody the past to be traditional.

Realism and modernism have other theoretical companions, including the relative role that oral and written tradition play in the transmission of folk music. Extreme interpretations would see realism as a means of generating oral tradition, treating realism even as a type of mnemonic device. Modernism, in contrast, makes available new techniques for facilitating transmission. In effect, oral tradition extends backward in time beyond the point of recollection, whereas written tradition arrests and redirects the flow of transmission by specifying the vehicles for individual actions. Considered together in dialectical relation, however, oral and written traditions suggest that the possibilities for folk music’s origins are virtually limitless.

Is folk music art or artifice, a form of expression that is natural or one that is learned? Yet another dialectical concern results from probing the genesis of folk music to contrast its aesthetic and functional aspects. Aesthetic independence accrues to any assertion of primordial origins; if not fully expressed at the time of origin, basic aesthetic characteristics were at least immanent. Functional associations mean that folk music changes as society changes; here, too, there is a sort of aesthetic immanence in the plasticity that permits change to occur. The questions of art and artifice, of course, return one to the roles of nature that theories of origin require or ignore. If the origins of folk music ultimately rest in nature, there results a universality claiming that all people are naturally folk musicians. When all people can aspire to the performance of folk music, the need to practice, excel, or specialize diminishes, again returning us to an idealized society. In contrast, when change and the creation of new pieces result from artifice, differentiation and specialization require that certain individuals emerge as folk musicians and others only passively participate in tradition. But, of course, folk music is both art and artifice. Some musicians do stand out in tradition because of their investment of time in the learning and acquisition of specialized skills, but they cannot depart too far from the community’s expectations without stepping outside the tradition. The individual musician’s ability to introduce new pieces and new processes of composition necessarily benefits from the traditional models of folk music’s origins held by the community. The formulation of concepts of origin—whether tenaciously holding to the past or turning to the innovation of the present—continues to undergird folk music tradition.

One may or may not believe it possible to muster enough empirical evidence to identify the origins of folk music or to discuss them in a meaningful way. Eventually, we recognize that there are pieces whose origins we can identify and those about which we can only speculate. Similarly, we may observe elements of style whose introduction into tradition can be traced to the contributions of identifiable musicians; other stylistic practices may appear immalleable over time, extending the possibility of discovering any circumstances related to their genesis far beyond the limits of available evidence. Speculation, at some level, remains a part of the search for origins.

Speculation is also a process of questioning, and the queries it raises as we endeavor to sort out the beginnings of folk music are central to the study of this genre of folklore. Just as the origins of folk music range from a mythic past to the specificity of the present, so too do concepts of folk music embrace elements of the unrealizable and the real, the intangible and the tangible. In part, folk music is an aesthetic ideal; in part, it is a functional accompaniment to basic social activity. Tradition is fashioned from both an authenticity that clings to the past and a process of change that continuously reshapes the present. That folk music is both a product of the past and a process of the present is essential to the commingling of stability and vitality, which together provide the substance and dynamism of oral tradition.