Social Basis Spawned at the Cultural Core

The earliest European theories articulating an interrelation of folk music and social basis portrayed folk music as if it were the cultural core of noncomplex society. Speculations on the nature of folk music and the social organization of nature were tautologically circumscribed (Herder 1975:167-85). Protoevolutionary models portrayed music and the other arts as immanent in culture; these arts in turn owed their cultural basis to the link between humans and nature (e.g., Forkel 1788:69). To understand music was to understand the social basis for human expression. Folk music was the crystallization of the cultural core. As folk music was structured, so too was the rest of society.

The location of folk music at the cultural core has persisted to the present day, even though the reasons and motivations for insisting on such location have proceeded along different paths and contrast greatly. Both Enlightenment and early Romantic writers often portrayed folk music as a bridge between the natural and the civilized worlds. Both humans and animals naturally produced song, but for the former there were also an inherent order and the ability to express emotion. For Herder and subsequent generations of writers on folk music, it was the language of the soul or the heart (Forkel ibid.); folk music encapsulated the cultural core before society complicated it.

Nineteenth-century Europe came to accept and insist upon more complex models of society. The nation more fully resembled society in its ultimate form, and nationalism epitomized the cultural core. Burgeoning nationalism was nothing short of a primary impetus to the development of full-blown theories of folk music. It is hardly surprising, then, that folk music quickly came to symbolize another cultural core, that of the nation. If the Enlightenment model of folk music applied to all human society, the nineteenth-century model had geographic and political boundaries. Folk music found a place on the map.

In addition to the nationalist ends that motivated much European folk music research, other concepts lent it leitmotifs suggesting a powerful sense of place. Of these, the persistent urban-rural dichotomy is best known. This dichotomy did not simply derive from two contrasting social structures but was often invested with a real recognition of physical distance. Bartók claimed that it was essential to collect folk music in villages “as far as possible from the centers of civilization and transportation routes” (Bartók 1972a: 159). Conversely, the city has more recently become the focus of intensive folk music research because it is a center for the convergence of different folk music styles and repertories (Nettl 1976:123-36). Even the folk music revival of the 1950s and early 1960s is often delimited by the additional adjective urban.

For reasons both political and historical, regionalism has supplanted many folk music concepts earlier shaped by nationalism. No American region has benefited more from the practice of equating a body of folk music with a prescribed area than the South (Malone 1979, esp. 4-17). Linking all explanations for the implicit stylistic unity of Southern folk music is a list of factors yielding stability. And if there is a region of the United States whose very geography is a source of stability, then, say the advocates of a Southern regional style, it is the South. Southern folk music, Alan Lomax says,

is an antique tradition with traits from many parts of Britain, moulded into a distinctive regional style by a common pattern of life. . . . Poverty and isolation permitted this backwoods music to develop on its own for more than a century. Thus it grew strong enough to absorb urban influences and produce a regional style (hillbilly) which has attracted vast city audiences (Lomax 1960:153; the parentheses are Lomax’s).

Another means of defining folk music’s position at the cultural core has been the search for a stylistic essence or unity that realizes the infrastructure of society. Unlike geographically determined models, the stylistic approach conceives of a cultural core that characterizes the human composition of a community rather than its physical location. The descriptions of culture that result from the stylistic approach sometimes appear little different from those that a geographic approach would have produced. In fact, several of the most influential stylistic approaches continue to employ metaphors to describe the relation of musical style to location.

The most influential conceptualization of geography’s impact on culture to inform European, especially German, folk music research was Kulturkreislehre (theory of culture area). Initially growing from German theories of cultural history and ethnology, Kulturkreislehre was refashioned by musicologists to determine patterns of stylistic integrity that would make comparison possible. Implicit in this notion of comparison was the possibility that musical style could develop in specific, rather than random, patterns that would allow the music of one culture to demonstrate palpable similarities, even parallels, when compared to music of another culture (Schneider 1976:10). The greater the similarity in the course of cultural history, the more extensive the stylistic similarity of folk music. Werner Danckert (e.g., 1937), a proponent of Kulturkreislehre, perceived remarkable degrees of unity in the folk music styles of large cultural regions, especially in Europe, the focus of Danckert’s primary research. Common historical origins enabled musical traits to migrate from nation to nation within Europe, further strengthening the stylistic unity that stretched from the “primitive” to the “high cultures” of the Continent (Danckert 1970:3). The folk music of Europe produced a closed “style-province,” justified by the singular direction of its cultural history (ibid. :4).

The most extreme position of folk music style as cultural core has been staked out by Lomax in his sweeping theory of cantometrics. The basis of cantometrics is the claim that many aspects of society imprint themselves in music because music is ipso facto a communal activity. Singing “invites group participation. Whether chorally performed or not, however, the chief function of song is to express the shared feelings and mold the joint activities of some human community” (Lomax 1968:3). If at first glance Lomax’s statements have the ring of platitudes, his plans for quantifying the stylistic role of music at the cultural core soon specify and focus the claims of cantometrics. A unified cultural core, signified by the degree of collectivity, is more musical than one that is not unified; extensive and shared musicality result when a society normally acts in concert.

Those areas that seem “most musical” in the popular estimation—Central Europe, Africa, and Polynesia—are also renowned for their highly coordinated group singing and dancing. In other words, Africans, Polynesians, and Central Europeans are seen as having an extraordinary talent for music, precisely because they are adepts at cohesive kinesthetic behavior (Lomax 1968:171).

Both Kulturkreislehre and cantometrics falter when musical style fails to exhibit normative patterns throughout a given society. Attractive because of their virtually one-to-one equation of musical style and cultural core, the theories often account poorly for societies in which such an equation does not exist. This is especially true of societies in which change—social and musical—has not been unidirectional, as Danckert perceived it in Europe, or where contact at a distance from the cultural core has fragmented musical style. If, indeed, there are societies in which music does not simply function “to augment the solidarity of a group” (ibid.), folk music style may have no more than a tangential relation to the shifting characteristics of the cultural core.

The equation of musical style and cultural core often results in the extension of ideological overtones to folk music. If music stands in such close relation to society, it clearly exhibits considerable power. Few attribute a broader range of power to music than Jacques Attali: “It is an attribute of power in all its forms” (1985:6). In his mystical rendition of Marxism, Attali quantifies and qualifies the equation of music and cultural core, seemingly transmogrifying the equation to the function of ritual, whereby music not only replicates but generates social structure: “Music creates political order because it is a minor form of sacrifice” (ibid.:25). Such power is rarely lost upon those who would envision a canon of folk music with a specifically ideological resonance for society (Wong 1984). This ideological function is undoubtedly one of the primary motivating forces for the formation of new canons of folk music.

Religious doctrine, too, has often recognized the power of music to bolster the cultural core. In some cases, as in Judaism, the line between traditional music and the music of tradition has been nebulous for centuries. Religious subgenres of folk music occupy considerable portions of the total corpus of folk music in some parts of Scandinavia, especially in Norway. In many areas of German settlement in the American Midwest, hymns and other religious genres passed from written sources to oral tradition within several generations, thereafter constituting the largest body of folk music for many German-American communities (Bohlman 1984b; for a different ethnic group, see Frey 1960). Just as the exigencies of immigration necessarily reshaped the cultural core in the case of these German-American communities, so too did music undergo considerable change in order to retain its close proximity to the core. Thus the equation of folk music and cultural core does not require the stasis or immutability of the core. But as change does occur, it becomes evident that external influences also come to bear on folk music’s social basis: influences emanating from the cultural boundaries.

The Social Basis Emanating from the Boundaries

As modernization has deflected much of the centripetal attraction that justified the equation of musical style with cultural core, folk music research has increasingly focused on diverse influences. Theories that large geographic units like nations or continents were composed of smaller units like regions or pristine rural villages have become less and less tenable during the twentieth century as the borders of these units were battered by war and their populations often took up residence elsewhere. Old cultural cores wore down and new communities arose; contact with the external world became a physical reality, which in turn made cultural boundaries and differences more visible. Folk music has not, however, diminished in its symbolic role of distilling and representing a community’s social basis; rather, it has responded to a changing social basis by changing itself, absorbing different repertories, and reflecting a stylistic congeries.

Cultural boundaries are not themselves a product of modernization; the relative ability of such boundaries to include or exclude, to sanction or thwart change, however, has become a more significant determinant of community in the twentieth century. In settings where cultural contact is pervasive, the assertion of cultural boundaries is often a matter of choice, making them flexible (Barth 1969:14); elsewhere, observance of boundaries may be a product of normative social exchange (Lockwood 1984:221). The formation of ethnic boundaries in the American immigrant setting, therefore, accompanies a growing awareness of folk music styles other than those previously situated at the cultural core. Technology, too, breaches the boundaries of musical repertories and styles, for the mass media make contact with music cultures throughout the world a common occurrence.

It is now generally accepted that ubiquitous culture contact has not caused the wholesale disappearance of cultural distinctiveness or the use of folk music to signify that distinctiveness. Contemporary theory asserts that the identity that shapes groups and generates folklore may be both shared and differential, that is, derived from both core and boundary, similarities and differences (Bauman 1972:34). Such theory goes a long way to explain the complexity of ethnic groups in industrialized nations. When we go so far as to say “the term ‘folk’ can refer to any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor” (Dundes 1965:2), we tender great latitude to the social basis of folklore. But does an equivalent latitude also extend to repertories of folk music or style of musical performance? If change and identity are simply matters of choice, how far can one go toward choosing one’s own folk music? Some means of moderating musical change might instead make the process of choice and musical acculturation more manageable, indeed possible at all. Much of that moderation takes place because of the presence of cultural boundaries.

The first type of folk music to lend itself readily to the study of cultural boundaries was that of immigrant groups. In recent decades theories of immigrant-group culture have proliferated, often ascribing considerable creativity to the group in its choice and maintenance of cultural boundaries. Previous studies, however, admitted relatively little creativity. The focus of many studies was actually on the core, with cultural boundaries admitted as defense mechanisms generally in retreat toward the core. Folk music of the immigrant group was a simple matter: it accompanied the group from the old country, and it remained as long as the boundaries were sufficient buttresses against the outside. The boundaries, however, had to be sure and steadfast over time.

As a corollary of Kulturkreislehre, a significant body of German folk music research turned to the study of Sprachinseln (speech islands). Folklore and folk music survived in these islands, isolated as they presumably were from the outside world. In most of these studies, survival bore primary witness to the strength of cultural boundaries. The Gottschee colony of Austrians in northern Yugoslavia, for example, maintained a tradition of folk music with relatively little change from the fourteenth century well into the nineteenth century (Brednich and Suppan 1969). When retention became so complete that it existed outside the boundaries of external society, “marginal survival” was said to have characterized the culture of the immigrant group. Thus the music of the Amish in North America has changed at an extremely slow pace because of the completeness with which the group is separated—musically as well as culturally—from mainstream society (Hostetler 1980:225-30 and Nettl 1957). Were survival to be the prevailing result of sustained division from the outside, cultural boundaries would have to obviate, rather than enable, change.

In most modern nations ethnic groups do not exist in isolation from each other. The conglomerate culture that results from a multiethnic society, pluralism, reflects the multitude of strategies for change and acculturation that its various groups undergo. Pluralism is only possible if the boundaries separating ethnic groups exhibit flexibility and permeability, if the exchange of members and culture across the boundaries does not tear them down (Barth 1969:14). Folk music, therefore, is not simply the practice and property of a single ethnic group, but it may have very different functions when the settings for its performance shift. The same musical ensemble may perform both inside and outside the ethnic group; it may perform in settings in which ethnicity is simply taken for granted and in those that demand a clear statement about ethnic values to those who are at best vaguely familiar with the ethnic group, as, for example, on the stage of a folk festival that promulgates a new “theme” each year.

The flexibility of boundaries makes possible the negotiation of different concepts of folk music style, repertory, and function. In many areas of pluralistic culture folk musicians encounter audiences that may differ considerably from performance to performance. The profile of one audience may be that of the ethnic community of the performer; another audience may contain a mixture from several of the ethnic groups in an area; still another might consist only of members from a community completely unlike that of the performer.

When performers who are specialists or professionals successfully meet the contrasting musical demands of these audiences, it is because of their ability to recognize the cultural boundaries, whether delimiting or expansive, and to locate each performance accordingly. In many areas of the Middle East, such specialists as the °asheq (literally lover, but with many other meanings) expand their repertories not only to appeal to diverse ethnic groups but also to circumvent a wide range of other cultural and religious restraints (cf. Blum 1972 and Reinhard 1975). The result for such specialists is often a creative expansion of their own repertory, as well as that of the area or region in which they actively perform.

In extreme southwestern Wisconsin, one of the most creative folk music specialists is Charles Bannen, an octogenarian Irish-American farmer. Having lived his entire life in an area of ethnic pluralism, Bannen performs, alone or with other musicians, in virtually every performance context found in the area. Two forms of creativity are evident in the tradition Bannen maintains as a specialist. First, from a core of Irish and Irish-American songs, Bannen has expanded his repertory to include a wealth of songs from other ethnic groups and American social institutions: churches, house parties, dances, and folk festivals. His repertory now ranges widely, from railroad songs to German dance tunes (which he occasionally performs in scatted versions) to nineteenth-century Protestant hymns (Bohlman 1980:171). Second, Bannen frequently creates new versions of the songs in his repertory by shifting musical aspects that serve as boundary markers. Thus Irish songs are rendered less Irish by removing certain types of embellishment (ibid.: 176-78).

A somewhat more extreme result of Bannen’s boundary awareness is the combination of two versions in a single perfomance, most often leaving the seam between the versions—the symbolic representation of the boundary—clearly intact. I recorded a version Bannen performed of “Streets of Laredo” (known also as “Cowboy’s Lament” and “Tom Sherman’s Barroom”) in 1977 (example 4). Bannen’s performance combines two versions, one more common in the eastern United States, the other more common west of the Mississippi (cf. Thorp 1966:180 and Abrahams 1970:76-78). The boundary falls between phrases three and four of the first verse. Comparing the versions on each side of the boundary, it is clear that Bannen knows the common western version better; in fact, he sometimes performs the song with the melody of that version intact. Still, there are occasions when audiences prefer the eastern version, especially younger audiences for whom that version was more common in school songbooks. By building on the foundations of versions he knows better, Bannen marks the boundary between the innovative and the traditional in his repertory (cf. Will 1909 and Barry 1987:72-73).

The boundaries animating the creativity in Bannen’s repertory reflect very different processes of group identification in a pluralistic region of the Midwest; concomitantly, the social bases of folk music are very different. At one level, ethnicity predominates; at another level, religion determines cultural boundaries; at still other levels, generational cohesion and the availability of technology shape the formation of musical repertories and styles. But the flexibility with which Bannen treats the folk music of the region is a function of his own creativity. Conversely, there are repertories of folk music in other traditions that do not depend on the creativity of individuals but rather on the accumulation of multiple stylistic boundaries that can (and often must) respond to a variety of influences that shape and reshape the repertory itself. Flexibility and change, therefore, may have been prerequisites for survival.

Folk music in the pre-Holocaust Jewish communities of Europe exhibited many of the characteristics of this high degree of internal boundary flexibility. This flexibility notwithstanding, the separation of different traditions, especially Jewish and non-Jewish, was clear. Folk songs of a religious nature, for example, frequently absorbed influences from a variety of non-Jewish and secular sources. New songs often resulted when well-known tunes were used to set Hebrew texts; occasionally, vernacular texts also entered the tradition on the coattails of borrowed tunes.

The Streets of Laredo

EXAMPLE 4

In Eastern Europe folk songs in both Hebrew and the vernacular Yiddish were fairly common, often resulting from earlier didactic use. One of the best-known examples of bilingual folk song is “Yavo adir” (May the mighty one come), the text of which addresses the joy attending the eventual arrival of the Messiah (Idelsohn 1967:392-93 and 402). One version of “Yavo adir” (example 5) retains the religious and linguistic boundaries of the common Eastern European version but changes the Yiddish sections to German (“Wer wird das sein?”) and the Ashkenazic Hebrew to Sephardic pronunciation. These changes are the result of a protracted musical journey from Eastern Europe to Germany and then to Israel, where the singer immigrated in the late 1930s. The performance of “Yavo adir” transcribed here bears influences from each stage of the journey. Eastern European versions often utilize the minor mode, with evidence of Phrygian suggested (e.g., ibid.). The German-Israeli version, however, was sung in the major mode, with implications for harmonization clear at several points. If the melody is most likely baggage from journeying through Germany, the Sephardic Hebrew is unquestionably an Israeli influence, acquired as the singer learned modern Israeli Hebrew after immigration.

The evidence of multiple cultural boundaries in folk music, whether the result of performers’ choices or a part of the tradition, usually testifies to considerable creativity in folk music. Such creativity has no doubt always been a force for change in folk music, but it is even more widespread in the folk music of industrialized and multiethnic societies. Here the very presence of cultural boundaries is more extensive, as are the choices necessary to negotiate them. But as these choices multiply, so do the processes of change and the varieties of folk music itself.

The Social Basis of Dialectic between Cultural Core and Boundaries

When different ethnic communities and social groups come into contact, the interrelation of cultural core and boundaries becomes more dynamic. As one is forced to recognize other traditions, one is more sharply aware of the characteristics of one’s own. In an immigrant community of Hungarians in the United States, for example, awareness of what is American defines by contrast what is Hungarian. Moreover, the coexistence of these two traditions may yield the dialectical interaction that we term Hungarian-American, with its juxta-position of internal and external. The “oppositional process” of identity not only produces new patterns of group-formation; it also strengthens the role of folklore as a shared and common set of traditions (Dundes 1984:149). The result of this contact with other groups and the attendant awareness of other boundaries was once thought to be the erosion of characteristics distinguishing one group from another. More extensive studies of group identity over time, however, reveal the capacity of social communities to absorb differences across cultural boundaries and to incorporate these differences into the dialectic between core and boundary. Interpretations of this dialectic have proved it to be a remarkably creative force in shaping the social basis of communities, especially those within a larger complex society (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1983:42-43).

Yavo adir

Translation

EXAMPLE 5

EXAMPLE 5

The mediation of internal and external influences on folk music may take the form of several complex processes. Some of them are most evident in the emergence of new groups or subgroups in society. The impact of other influences is most readily measurable in changes at the core and the boundaries; new repertories exemplify the former, new modes and venues for performance the latter. In modern societies these complex processes are all of a whole. As new subgroups form, repertories are reshaped; as musicians diversify their performance settings, they effectively negotiate cultural boundaries. In this section I shall concentrate on several components of this complex dialectic mediating the cultural core and boundaries. I draw for illustration largely from the folk music of ethnic groups because of the contrast they provide: on one hand, the social basis of an ethnic group has long been assumed to be fixed; on the other, closer scrutiny of ethnic folk music reveals that it does not conform to a static, preservationist model but undergoes rapid change because of the creativity that a multiethnic environment inevitably engenders.

When particular needs arise that require specific responses of identity from a group, choices are made to channel these responses through institutions. These responses, the “folklore of ethnicity” (Danielson 1977 and Stern 1977), often result when an ethnic group chooses to express its self-perceived ethnicity for certain occasions but finds no reason to do so for other occasions. The process of making these choices is sometimes called cultural foregrounding (Kirshen-blatt-Gimblett 1983:43-44) or situational use of ethnicity (Royce 1982:18); the mechanism making this process possible is the social institution. For the most part, expressive behavior that is identified as appropriate for institutionalization normally receives a considerable investment of time and symbolic value from the group. German immigrant groups, for example, often use the singing society as the fundamental institution for the performance of folk music. In many areas of the American Midwest, this institutionalization of the singing society encompassed other areas of musical activity. The singing society might, for example, supply many of the performers for local operetta; it might maintain an accompanying instrumental ensemble, which in turn performed elsewhere, not infrequently for non-German functions (Bohlman 1982:26-27). For subsequent generations of choristers the folk song traditions of the singing society provided a means of contact with symbols of German culture that may not have been readily available in the home or school. The institution of the singing society thus strengthened German ethnicity within the community and in groups outside the community by intensifying awareness of German traditions and by providing a way for outsiders to participate in German musical life.

A primary vehicle for institutionalization is technology. Printing was one of the first technological media to influence folk music. Even from the earliest endeavors to print folk music in one form or another, two distinct directions characterized the institutionalizing impact of printing. The first produced what were essentially new songs by printing texts on broadsides and broadsheets and referring to tunes current in oral tradition. Consolidation most often resulted from the second use of printing. One form of the consolidating influence was the anthology, whereby a regional tradition was published in representative examples, that is to say, with boundaries clearly evident. For immigrant communities anthologies often served as the primary means of establishing a shared repertory and its related practices. This was the case among many Northern and Central European immigrant groups in the Midwest. Songbooks circulated within these groups, often published by a central ethnic publishing firm. Accordingly, local differences in musical style, dialect, and musical repertory diminished as the songs in these books became representative of the second and third generations.

The institutionalization of ethnic folk music demonstrates considerable resilience and the ability to change. Technological developments that influence other areas of musical activity may also alter the ways in which folk music is institutionalized. Recording technology, for example, was a primary—in some areas the primary—means of maintaining a vital tradition of ethnic folk music in North America throughout much of the twentieth century (Gronow 1982). More recently, the cassette recording has exerted a tremendous influence on musical traditions worldwide (Wallis and Malm 1984). Although some critics blame technology for transforming active folk music traditions into passive ones, within which most members of the ethnic group content themselves with a small, homogeneous sampling, a less pessimistic counterargument recognizes the potential for technology to expose larger audiences to a greater diversity of music. Moreover, recordings, as well as printed sources, play a vital role in the technologizing of oral tradition: musicians commonly learn new pieces directly from a record or tape cassette.

The institutions of ethnic culture do not simply reaffirm tradition from within; they may also strengthen ethnicity by allowing and then controlling the mixture of a group s traditions with those of other group’s and external society in general. In studying “Ukrainian country music” Robert B. Klymasz observed a community of Canadian immigrants that freely utilized country-and-western music—a genre clearly representative of mainstream, English-speaking North American society—to revitalize Ukrainian music traditions. Although certain compromises in the active practice of the Ukrainian folk music tradition had to be made, these usually resulted in the emergence of new ways of keeping the tradition alive. The recording of Ukrainian country music, therefore, “exploits sound in order to process, codify, store and transmit the ethnic experience in a form that can be repeated over and over again as a sort of passive, psychic activity” (Klymasz 1972:373).

Folk festivals also serve as an institutional mechanism whereby ethnicity is made manageable. Many folk festivals reduce the active process of ethnic identification to several common denominators, most commonly food, dress, and folk music. The boundaries of these common denominators are carefully controlled, thereby ensuring a democratic pluralism while maintaining the necessary proviso of manageability. The size of food booths, for example, is often uniform. Musical performances may likewise be uniform, with each ethnic group performing a medley that lasts for a prescribed period and choosing from limited dance forms and musical genres—perhaps circle dances and harvest songs—that all groups presumably share. The differences between groups that could perform for hours and those that do well to prepare fifteen minutes are minimized by the festival. The history of many festivals starting after World War II shows steadily growing participation of new groups, with relatively little attrition by older groups. The folk festival has therefore succeeded in shoring up some preexistent boundaries, reinscribing others that had ceased to function as such, and ensuring permeability by sanctioning only those expressive genres that were easily visible and exchangeable across boundaries (cf. Dyen and Bohlman 1985, Haritan 1980, and Forry 1986).

Toward New Social Bases for Folk Music

Folklorists commonly assert that folklore is a function of shared identity. This assertion carries with it a further assumption, that the social basis of a group sharing folklore is flexible, subject to virtually any conditions that can produce a shared identity. One would more reluctantly accept parallel claims for folk music. Is folk music a function of shared identity? If “the first test a folklorist could make of membership in a folk group is the members’ awareness of shared folklore” (Brunvand 1986:41), could the folk music scholar extend the same test to shared music? One could argue that the subculture of British punkers shares a folklore; but would one designate their shared music folk music? Symphony orchestra musicians share many common factors specifically related to music, but they are not infrequently oblivious to genres others call folk music. In these cases we would not question the existence of an adequate social basis for folklore, but we are harder pressed to proclaim this social basis adequate for folk music.

Throughout this chapter, nevertheless, I have not questioned what I consider an appropriate association of folk music with social basis, either that pertaining to a sense of place or that pertaining to a sense of community. And I have admitted to this social basis considerable flexibility, especially the ability to change in response to external influences and internal specialist-performers. Taken together, the changes that I have admitted can yield a social basis very different from that yielded by earlier theories about communal participation and dispassionate reproducibility of shared behavior. This call for a new conceptualization of folk music’s relation to different social bases is therefore consistent with the broader understanding of folk music posited throughout this book.

The social basis of folk music is constantly in flux. That flux, however, is not freely determined by any choices made by any group perceiving self-identity. It is, instead, a flux that results from the dynamic interrelation of core and boundaries. This dialectic couples persistent change with conservative tendencies that stem change. Necessitating the dialectic is folk music’s essentially performative nature. As a genre of expressive behavior, folk music must be learned, and some form of repetition is requisite. Folk music cannot be acquired at will; it restricts, to some extent, the openness to choose and share identity.

If the social basis of folk music changes according to certain constraints, it changes nonetheless. In this chapter I have examined some of the processes that make change possible but channel it in certain directions. The geographic basis of folk music has not disappeared, but it has effectively migrated from rural to urban models, from simple to complex settings. Here, new boundaries arise; the influences on musical genres are greater, but no urban musical gray-out is in sight (see Reyes Schramm 1982 and Nettl 1985:76-78). Modernized social institutions, ranging from singing societies to recordings, reformulate the core traditions but rarely, if ever, eradicate them. These social institutions and the folk traditions they shape are determined by processes of group identity that mediate the choices of identity necessary for maintaining a specialized genre of folklore such as folk music. Such processes, furthermore, enable a community to choose whether the social basis of its folk music will reflect the ascribed pluralism of the folk festival or the embellishment of mainstream popular culture. In the modern world the folk music of every social community confronts a tremendous quantity and diversity of influences. Yet because of its complex relation to the patterns of identity forming the infrastructure of the community, folk music continues to undergird a social basis that animates change and directs tradition.