Modernization and Urbanization

Folk music in the modern world undergoes many processes of change, but two large processes—modernization and urbanization—dominate and influence many of the other processes. By portraying the influences of modernization and urbanization rather expansively, I do not mean to contradict studies of musical change that have attributed broad influences to other processes, notably Westernization, which Bruno Nettl couples with modernization in accounting for the massive impact of the West on music throughout the world during the twentieth century (Nettl 1978 and 1985; cf. Kartomi 1981, and Shiloah and Cohen 1983; for models that apply to different forms of expressive behavior, see Levy 1966, vol. 1, and Peacock 1968:217-33). Rather, I am focusing my consideration empirically on the genre of folk music. Quite simply, modernization and urbanization impinge more directly and profoundly on folk music than do many other inclusive processes of change; moreover, most of the changes that folk music undergoes in the modern world can be measured as degrees of modernization and urbanization.

That the two processes overlap is obvious. Urbanization has never been as extreme and rapid as it has been throughout the world in the twentieth century. We observe the ways in which the two processes overlap in the role played by the radio in many rural areas. The radio clearly exemplifies modernized technology, but it mediates a cultural product that is urbanized: the mass or popular music generated in the city. The two processes, nevertheless, frequently influence different aspects of folk music. Modernization often affects most directly the musical and structural aspects of folk music, by altering the way in which oral transmission occurs, for example, or by providing a technology that refashions the role of the performer. Urbanization, in contrast, more directly affects the social aspects of folk music, by supplanting the isolated rural community in which most individuals share in the expressive culture. Still, these aspects rarely change in isolation from each other; instead, they tend to exhibit similar responses to many of the same conditions, further suggesting the efficacy of comparing and contrasting modernization and urbanization as broadly significant processes of change.

Many of the musical changes effected by modernization are external and obvious. The instrumentarium of the folk musician expands, admitting new instruments while rendering others obsolete. There are also deeper transformations of the instrumentarium, including the mass production and reproduction of instruments that were previously handcrafted and personalized. Learning to play musical instruments is also streamlined by the creation of “teaching methods” or the mimicking of style and repertory from records, thereby weakening and replacing certain structures of specialized transmission in the community. Technology is the most obvious type of modernization. Technology provides a means of exposing oneself easily to unlimited quantities of repertories and doing so in a neutral fashion. Thus, each repertory broadcast on the radio has the same social context as every other repertory, with the need to make specific value and social judgments stripped away by the technological medium. Technology creates new audiences, and, when mass produced like the early phonographs in rural America, it does so inexpensively (Spottswood 1982:63). Radio, records, and tapes reach individuals who would otherwise not participate in the musical life of a community (Wallis and Malm 1984:2-3 and 11-14). One form of passivity may replace another, but passivity, nonetheless, acquires a much broader base. Kenneth S. Goldstein has argued that technological advances have always presaged folk music revivals (1982:3-4). Technology need not destroy the more traditional settings; microphones may intensify the involvement of a community in its musical life by multiplying the number of settings in which folk musicians perform, perhaps freeing ethnic musicians from the confines of a church basement but not necessarily abrogating the external boundaries of the community.

Modernization also enables the juxtaposition of musical and structural aspects, thereby collapsing their temporal and historical specificity. Radio is an expressive medium in which juxtaposition is by definition constant. The record shop markets juxtaposed styles and repertories in complex ways. Not only does the record shop provide a venue for the gathering of vastly different musics, each with its own bin and classification system, but its basic artifact, the single record, intentionally mixes styles and repertories, dialects and genres, to bear witness to the sheer virtuosity of its performers and to broaden its aesthetic appeal—in other words, to make it more effective as a marketing device.

The impact of modernization on folk musicians is sweeping. Modernization creates the notion of a stage as a social space reserved for the performance of music (Neuman 1976:2). The stage imposes a distance between the performer and the audience, which at least momentarily is the rest of the community. The stage has also become very specialized, thus a signifier of the complexity of folk music in the modern world: the festival stage signifies one kind of audience; the coffeehouse mike another; the recording studio still another (Paulin 1980:12-13). Modernization has transformed the ways in which one can become a folk musician, either eliminating traditional patterns of learning or making them ineffective as paths to success according to the diverse extracommunity criteria for success. Virtuosity, to some degree always a measure of the instrumentalist’s specialization, has the additional virtue of increasing marketability within many folk music subgenres. Fiddling contests and the sometimes frenetic tempi of bluegrass are only two ways in which the criteria for virtuosity are measured and codified. Technology may further expand the limits of virtuosity by its penchant for juxtaposition, as when recording engineers edit out the rough spots from a performance or patch together the best parts of several performances, thereby transforming the illusion of flawless virtuosity into an ideal.

Urbanization has special bearing in the reconsideration of folk music because of the long-standing role ruralness has played in the definition of the genre. The ubiquity and complexity of urbanization call in question the validity of discussing folk music within a community or social sphere that is geographically, physically, or technologically rural. As urban areas have expanded, ruralness as defined by isolation has become increasingly fictional to the point of being meaningless. Urbanization now affects profoundly even those areas that are not metropolitan centers. Not just technology but fairly constant migration to and from urban centers ensures more or less constant contact with the city.

Urbanization topples one of the most sacred tenets of folk music theory: the distinction between rural and urban. Accordingly, new groups and social divisions have come to characterize folk music, making it necessary to state new tenets that admit the impact of the city on folk music. The interaction of urbanized groups also assumes new forms—for example, the pluralistic interaction of different groups occupying the same area. A corollary to the proliferation of new social bases is the expansion of the number of groups of which any individual can be a member. Thus, the oblique interrelation of social groups in this type of urbanization precludes measurement in purely historicist terms. Such interrelations are not the simple result of successive phases as outlined, for example, in the Redfield-Singer model, in which primary urbanization, or adoption of sedentary residence that permits the formation of a single “great tradition,” gives way to secondary urbanization, or contact with other cultures that eventually subsumes a multitude of “little traditions” (Redfield and Singer 1962:335-36). Instead, more empirically based terms are necessary for the recognition of an infinite number of juxtapositions beyond secondary urbanization and the dissolution of a hierarchical connection between great and little traditions.

More than many other processes of change, modernization and urbanization are especially relevant to a study of folk music during the past two centuries. Much of the technology that affects the transmission of folk music exists because of the industrial revolution. Even more important than specific objects of technology are the processes whereby all forms of technology are inexpensive and mass-produced. Almost anyone can easily procure a dulcimer or a banjo, a guitar or a fiddle. Our basic precepts for the combinations and hierarchies of social organization have also changed profoundly during the two hundred years since the French Revolution with its recasting of the modern, secular nationstate. We may take this relatively novel form of the nation-state for granted, but we do so only in conjunction with an acceptance of implicit and explicit concepts of national music. Welsh, German, or Kurdish folk musics are creations of the modern nationalistic imagination, and yet various groups stand ready to argue the reality and ancient roots of such musics. These transformations in the modern world have tended to skew the ways in which folk music canons form, yielding canons that no longer require any basis in ruralness or generation-to-generation transmission. The resulting conceptualizations of folk music in the modern world are certainly vaster, and indeed also richer.

Patterns of Change

The conservative nature of much folk music scholarship often projects the patterns of change resulting from modernization and urbanization in a negative light. When transported to the city, traditions die away; the mass media impoverish repertories and level style differences; true folk music exists only in an older, more innocent generation; modern society poses a very real threat of extinction. Closer examination of the persistence of folk music, however, does not justify this necrological stance. More commonly, patterns of change occur dialectically, with waning repertories being replaced by more vital ones and new, vibrant styles emerging when others lack the flexibility to withstand change. These dialectical patterns, therefore, account for change in a much more positive way, concentrating on the processes of ongoing change and accepting the ossification of some products as a natural result of that change.

An inevitable marker of musical change is a shift in the social basis of folk music. As the primacy of one form of social organization recedes, there is a realignment of previous groups and the formation of new groups with completely different social bases. The tremendous mobility characteristic of modern societies makes such realignments commonplace. Indeed, migration, even within rural areas, has long been a factor associated with musical change and the formation of new canons. Neil V. Rosenberg points out that the Piedmont region of the American South was subject to considerable shifting of population while remaining relatively as rural as other parts of the United States; nonetheless, the resulting musical and social confluence in the Piedmont made it a caldron for a degree of musical change that belies commonly held conceptions of the South as a bastion of musical stability and uniformity (Rosenberg 1985:20; cf. Denisoff 1973:15-23 and Wilgus 1971:137). The formation of new groups resulting from shifting populations has become one of the most fruitful areas of folk music study. In the United States, folk music study has increasingly concentrated on immigrant and ethnic studies. The meaningfulness of ethnicity as a central criterion for studying folk music style shows little sign of subsiding as large-scale immigration of Asians offers new perspectives for understanding the social basis of music in a pluralistic society (e.g., Jairazbhoy and DeVale 1985).

The changing social basis of folk music is seen not only in the emergence of new groups but also in the freedom with which individuals participate in more groups than one as the result of increasingly permeable social boundaries (Barth 1969:9-16). Accordingly, individuals encounter more than one musical repertory and type of musical behavior, both randomly and as a matter of choice (Royce 1982:185-88). Individuals toting quite different cultural baggage, “foreigners,” cross social boundaries unchecked and are able to participate rather quickly in the cultural activities of the group, their distinctive contributions rarely discernible as a fillip to the status quo (Nettl 1985:163). It is exactly this foreign challenge to the status quo—so effectively obscured in the modern context—that wields tremendous potential for the formation of a new canon (Kenner 1984:369).

Shifting patterns of individual group membership mean that pluralism must be viewed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Pluralism becomes considerably more complicated than a mosaic with discrete parts—ethnic groups, for example—forming the whole. Instead, certain groups achieve influence outside their own boundaries. That is especially true of groups that gain greater control over the processes of urbanization. Serbo-Croatian folk music exerts a sort of hegemony in the musical life of Pittsburgh, where Serbo-Croatian musical organizations dominate in such diverse institutions as Duquesne University, home of the “Tamburitzans,” and the Pittsburgh Folk Festival, whose organizers are almost exclusively Tamburitzan graduates (Haritan 1980). Folk music style, too, rides the coattails of modernization, with the result that some groups are willing to invest their interests in rather specific styles. Bluegrass is one of the best examples of a style that attracted a following from diverse groups by forging a tradition through the modern media of festivals, the urban folk music revival, records, and eventually television (Rosenberg 1983).

Another dialectical process of change has been the dissolution of the stratification of musical genres, with replacement by new patterns of generic interaction. Whether one accepts the historical legitimacy of stratification or not, it can be argued that social and historical distance did separate some aspects of folk and art music. With the growth of urbanization, however, that distance grew smaller and eventually disappeared. Thus, folk and art music do not occupy discrete strata. Even in the early nineteenth century, folk music in Central Europe was accorded artistic treatment, appearing in arrangements for large choruses and in collections intended for the scrutiny of scholarly investigators. Not surprisingly, the manipulation of folk music to approximate artistic ends assisted in a process of defining and inculcating nationalism. Ironically, nineteenth-century European concepts of nationalism depended on the ability of collectors and arrangers to demonstrate convincingly that the gap between folk and art music was not great. Folk music in these nationalistic exercises served as the link to a protonationalistic cultural unity, whereas its artistic reformulation was meant to traditionalize that unity in contemporary musical activity.

Modern folk music demonstrates a somewhat different interaction with popular music. This interaction has benefited from the proximity of the strata these two genres putatively occupied, both being the music of nonelite groups (Ivey 1982:133). Whatever technology’s specific roles may be and whatever the extent of its mediation of popular music, many musicians have successfully controlled the popularization of folk music. Again, the history of bluegrass is illustrative of the ways in which the figurative fences between folk and popular music are carefully straddled. On one hand, bluegrass depends on the mass media to broaden its appeal and to create selective markets. On the other, bluegrass musicians judiciously defer to their “roots” in folk music in order to retain their “core audience,” which now has a historical continuity quite independent of the various experiments in popularization to which bluegrass has been subject (Cantwell 1984:143-56).

One of the most subtle dialectical changes rendered by modernization produces a gradual transformation in the concepts of timelessness that attend folk music. In traditional society the age of a folk song has two markers, one definite and the other indefinite. Transmission provides the definite marker: the folk song’s tenure in an individual musician’s repertory begins when it is learned well enough to be performed. The indefinite marker derives from a general consensus that the song was known in an earlier generation, perhaps in association with a particular singer, and that it is probably much older than that. Replacing this concept of timelessness is one in which the past is consciously invoked to serve as a surrogate for the present. Tradition therefore comes into existence because of the fabrication of continuity with the past. The practice of constructing continuity by selectively choosing, and not infrequently selectively inventing, the past is a particularly modern phenomenon, dependent on its implicit collapse of time and space (Hobsbawm 1983:11-12). Folk songs thus become evocative symbols of the past, and they legitimize the traditionality of a contemporary context by virtue of their symbolic value. It is not important (or possible) that a specific historical moment and place be represented; nor is there any awareness that musical styles, genres, and repertories are juxtaposed in ways uncharacteristic of any past. Rather, folk music, because of its new timelessness, carries the weight of continuity and tradition.

Timelessness, however, does not negate the concern for authenticity; one might even say that the complete collapse of time is a necessary precursor to the invention of a new authenticity, with its specification of moment, event, and actor. The most glaring example of fabricating authenticity is the creation of Scottish Highland tradition in the imaginary personage of Ossian, who had presumably chronicled the early days of Highland tradition in epic and ballads actually composed by James Macpherson, a real eighteenth-century Scotsman (Trevor-Roper 1983); that Ossian should have given birth to a tradition filled with bagpipes and tartans is further evidence of the role timelessness plays in the establishment of tradition. Folk songs authenticating history continue to comprise one of the most common American genres of anthology, the premise of which is that folk song retains some deep-seated value that makes its historical tale constitute a “folksong heritage of America” (Knott 1953:143; cf. Darling 1983, Forcucci 1984, and Scott 1983).

Revival is an overt and explicit act of authentication. The revivalist not only identifies a specific time and place for folk music but is fundamentally concerned with recreating its value-laden social context. Folk music should suggest the nature of that social context while filling in some of the specific details to prove that authentication is part and parcel of revival. Real or not, these details have random and disconnected origins, and mustering them for the purposes of revival provides yet another guise for timelessness. Revival is, in an ideological sense, the ultimate collapse of time and space because it fully admits of the efficacy of that collapse for creating contemporary meaning. Revival relies heavily on new symbols masquerading as the old. Thus, when borrowing folk music from the past, the revivalist assumes that the audience will simultaneously imagine one set of values, strip those values from the music, and allow new, presumably immanent, values to assert themselves. The implied age and authenticity of revived folk music are often shifted to such external, nonmusical aspects as the naming of pieces or styles. The rubric “old-time,” with its transparent assurance of age, is one of the most prevalent symbols of such a non-musical aspect in American folk music. Those who perform country music, therefore, prefer to call it (or the roots it represents) “old-time” rather than “hillbilly”; more popularized subgenres of ethnic folk music similarly become ethnic “old-time” music, as if there were some fear that this was not the case.

Revival abates impoverishment by empowering even a reduced census of performers and organizers to identify specific musical activities as central to a tradition. Indeed, it is often because the census is small that revival, whatever its effectiveness, has particular urgency; Nettl has suggested that such is the case in the recent resurgence of traditional music in the Middle East (1985:157). Revival is inseparable from some of the most widespread contemporary institutions of folk music. Folk music festivals are essentially revivalistic; the donning of symbols that redirect cultural awareness to the past contributes to the spirit of revival. National music and nationalism overtly channel the revival of the past by suggesting a continuous connection to a historical stage of protonationhood. The practice of reissuing old recordings, especially early field recordings, puts technology at the service of revival. Even the institutionalization of written traditions of folk music results from the explicit goal of editors to spur revival, to make the folk music of the past live again in new forms of expression. Its effectiveness has made revival a prime means throughout the world of capturing the past in order to build traditions in the present (ibid.: 162).

One final dialectical pattern of change characterizes the commodification of folk music. Commodification in this sense refers to the replacement of primary-group functions for folk music with circulation among many groups, whose ability to consume folk music does not depend on specific social function (Baumann 1976:65-67). In other words, folk music becomes a commodity with market value. Media develop for the production and sale of folk music, and remuneration comes from people with whom the folk musician has little or no contact. Only in theory does the musician have a sense of the specific cultural boundaries of his or her audience. Nonetheless, the folk musician endeavors to expand those boundaries, whether for ideological reasons—the message—or for reasons fundamental to the corporate structure of the recording industry.

Commodification inevitably leads to specialization and professionalization. Songwriters, arrangers, sound technicians, and festival organizers—all are professionals in the modernization of folk music. Quite simply, no single professional folk musician can manage all aspects of performance, so there results increasing dependence on specialization. Defining the folk community, then, is its ability to consume various specialties—to patronize coffeehouses or buy concert tickets, to concentrate interest on bluegrass or limit it to ethnic folk music. Its repertory and “original” functions notwithstanding, folk music often becomes popular music. Its relation to a public—a folk community—is not ostensibly different from that of popular music, even if the audiences are often smaller. Perhaps galling to advocates of a more pristine cultural role for folk music, commodification has, nevertheless, secured new audiences and new social contexts for folk music in the modern world.

Responses to Change

If folk music undergoes general patterns of change because of modernization, the responses of specific musicians and communities are often quite contrasting. Revival might best be achieved by several responses, depending on the goals of a particular community and the means of response it has at its disposal. More often than not, these responses overlap, again according to the specific community they come to characterize. Even in the vague dialectics that the following order suggests with pairs like consolidation and diversification, popularization and classicization, I mean to suggest that seemingly opposing responses may well complement each other. The rather positive tenor that follows in the discussion of these various responses is intended as exactly that. I do not intend this tenor to conceal changes that others would construe as negative: impoverishment, abandonment, extinction of repertory. But my concern here is with responses—conscious actions on the part of musician and community to stave off, redirect, or intensify change—rather than with the forces that bring about these responses. Thus, it is arguable that a consolidated repertory exemplifies impoverishment, but when a community concentrates its repertory in order to preserve certain value-laden pieces, this becomes a response that arrests impoverishment. Some might regard popularization as an abandonment of traditional social contexts; but as a response popularization expands the existing social contexts and creates more inclusive, rather than exclusive, audiences for folk music.

Consolidation results from the identification of salient aspects within the tradition—whether repertory, style, or social venue—and the consequent concentration on these aspects. An anthology of folk songs consolidates by claiming they are deutsche Volkslieder or “the English and Scottish popular ballads.” Delimiting the instrumentarium also consolidates, thereby allowing musicians to concentrate on refined technique or virtuosity, as is the case with the mandolin in bluegrass. Social transformations also lend themselves to consolidation. German-American immigrants in the nineteenth century concentrated their repertories of folk songs in several publication formats, all of which stripped away differences in dialect and variation, and they superseded these repertories with a core of songs in Hochdeutsch. The egalitarian, restrictive slot on a folkfestival stage (“twenty minutes for each act”) forces consolidation, albeit a form accompanied by a sense that this slot encapsulates the essence of Polish-American folk song or West Virginia clog-dancing. At the musical level, consolidation often takes the form of synthesis or syncretism, which permits the emergence of an innovative style, leading to an overall expansion of the repertory—in other words, to diversification (Waterman 1952 and Nettl 1978:133).

Diversification is in many ways the obverse of consolidation, for it is less concerned with the salience of tradition than with the quantity and breadth of the performance. Modern folk music ensembles therefore perform in many, often unrelated styles. Other ensembles purposely seek to diversify their instrumentarium. Consolidation and diversification may accompany each other. Contemporary German folk musicians, for example, exhibit a tendency to make one of two choices regarding dialect repertories (Paulin 1980:24). On one hand, some musicians consolidate by concentrating on a single regional dialect (for example, Michael Bauer on pfälzisch); on the other, there are musicians who sing in several dialects (for example, Zupfgeigenhansl). Modernized concepts of musical tradition both tolerate and encourage diversification. Country music regularly combines traditional, religious, and popular elements, tempering them even more with styles drawn from bluegrass or ethnic “old-time” music. Diversification consciously spawns musical pluralism.

The biographies of contemporary musicians often bear witness to a path that begins with a traditional orientation to folk music but moves ineluctably in the direction of popularization. This general path would threaten the generic correlation between folk and popular music, if in fact many professionals did not choose to pause and maintain that correlation. Thus, bluegrass remains overall a mixture of folk and popular music, despite the very real opportunities to capitulate to the pressures and seduction of popular culture (cf. Cantwell 1984:1-18). Popularization in a different sense is very important in the revival and invention of folk music tradition, which require popular acceptance of sweeping representations of musical styles for which little or no firsthand familiarity is available.

Classicization and Westernization are two responses that differ somewhat from popularization because of the genres they normally combine. In general, folk musicians do not demonstrate a tendency toward becoming art musicians or performing art music, although more do in Western than in non-Western contexts. Modernization, nevertheless, has long encouraged the influences of Western art music. Harmonization and arrangement for chorus was a normal component of the public dissemination of folk music in nineteenth-century Germany; these techniques legitimized folk music by stressing its general compatibility with traditions of art music (Baumann 1976:66-67). The display of virtuosity by many folk musicians is also evidence of the desire to perform as one would in Western art music (Nettl 1985:137-38). Classicization also betokens a connection with the past, and in so doing it becomes a frequent handmaiden of nationalism, despite its external universality.

Institutionalization includes a number of responses, all of which result in the reformulation of groups to maintain folk music tradition. Institutionalization may effect the appearance of new ensembles or the emergence of new functions for older groups. In many German-American communities in the Midwest, church choirs regularly performed in social contexts outside the church, combining their staple religious repertory with secular folk songs. Institutional undergirding extended thereby to both sacred and secular repertories of German-American music (Bohlman 1984b). Growing literacy often produces various forms of institutionalization. Literacy, in effect, creates a number of cultural types who participate in the institutionalization of folk music: collectors, editors, publishers, teachers, chorus directors, even accompanists. The study of folk music also institutionalizes by providing places and methodologies that enable scholars to examine folk music in systematic ways.

Specialization affects virtually all aspects of folk music in the modern world. In certain ways, this response is the binary opposite of institutionalization, for it reflects a proliferation of individuals involved in the maintenance of tradition. Specialization results when an individual acquires and exercises special skills that fit in with a larger whole. Institutionalization also encourages the acquisition of special skills but tends to organize them hierarchically in relation to organizations. Clearly necessary for the professional basis of some folk music activities, specialization is also a component of the choices necessary for juxtaposing repertories and articulating the need to revive and authenticate.

With folk music extirpated from primary functions in small groups and communities, new cohesive functions form, and many of these functions, especially when they are the products of specialists, result from ideologization. Even though new cohesive functions may theoretically assume myriad forms, they tend to exist empirically in rather specific ways, reflecting the cultural, political, and musical concerns of a specialized group. The breakdown of the rural, agrarian populace has stimulated many English folk song scholars to resituate the social basis of folk music in the urban, industrialized working class (Lloyd 1967:316-411 and Harker 1985:231-32; cf. Keil 1982:58 and Greenway 1953:5-10). Ideologically, this argument replaces one form of stratification with another, which is tempered by British Marxian historiography. The encouragement of ethnic folk music in many American communities often rests on the notion that certain conservative social institutions should centralize the musical culture of the ethnic community. Comprising the core of many Eastern European ethnic communities in Pittsburgh, for example, is the Catholic church, albeit its ethnic American version. In this version Pittsburgh Slovaks revive both Slovak folk dance and the mass in Slovak by coupling the performance of folk dance troupes with religion at special city-wide gatherings; presiding over Slovak folk festival days is always a priest, who continually draws attention to the ideological basis of Slovak folk music in America: the church and its teachings, with their special meaning for Slovak-Americans. Nationalism is one of the most extreme and pervasive manifestations of ideologization. The specific ideological symbols of nationalistic folk music—for example, those chosen to represent the German Wandervogel youth movement (the camaraderie of youth, wandering in nature, and the guitar as the musical instrument of the German Volk)—may be relatively few, but they are nevertheless conceived to specify the ideology of nationhood as directly as possible. Ideology determines the ways in which time and place collapse and how the musical activities that result from this collapse articulate a specific message to a specific group. Ideologization serves, therefore, as a response that invests even more meaning and symbolism in folk music than it might otherwise convey.

Folk Music in the Modern World: Some Fundamental Corollaries

The performance of the “Zum Lauterbach hab’ ich mein’ Strumpf verlor’n” medley (example 10) demonstrates many of the salient qualities of folk music in the modern world. Both text and context reveal the permeation of modernization throughout the tradition of which the song is a part. Interpretation of some aspects of the performance, such as the persistence of German-language songs in the United States, would suggest that the tradition is conservative; other aspects—the adaptation of the “blues-yodeling” style of Jimmie Rodgers, for example—challenge that interpretation of conservatism, making us wonder whether we are really observing the deterioration of ethnic tradition and the unmitigated encroachment of popular music. Neither interpretation is really wrong; neither is really correct. “Zum Lauterbach” juxtaposes a remarkable range of elements from a complex traditional framework, rendering modernism a normative context for the performer, his audience, and the community of which they are a part.

The area of eastern Wisconsin in which “Zum Lauterbach” was recorded in 1984 has contained a large German population since the mid-nineteenth century. German folk music traditions have long flourished in the area, and “Zum Lauterbach” must qualify as one of the best-known German songs. Its transmission takes place in numerous subgenres, ranging from fairly straightforward vocal versions to complex arrangements for the hundreds of “Dutchman” bands that play throughout the Upper Midwest. In short, it is hardly surprising to discover singers in this German-American region who know “Zum Lauterbach.” Why, then, the Jimmie Rodgers style? Why the truncated version? How can we account for the other songs that are appended, one of them in English and rather banal?

Close analysis of “Zum Lauterbach” reveals that this performance makes sense, that is, the seemingly disparate and unrelated parts fit together to yield a logical whole. The logic of this whole, however, depends on a broadly accepted concept of modernization in the canon. We have already established that the German text and melody of “Zum Lauterbach” is well known in the region. So, too, is the singing style and the larger genre and repertory with which it is inextricably associated: country-western music. The singer, much enamored of Jimmie Rodgers, adapts the Singing Brakeman’s style with relative success. The guitar accompaniment simplifies the style in order to make it unobtrusive, so it will not conflict with the German songs; it is the yodeling that confirms the style, and it does so by clearly framing other musical elements. The synthesis of melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic elements clearly demonstrates syncretism. The melodies are similar in structure, phrasing, and overall contour; melodically, one almost has the sense of variant verses of the same song. The rhythm is flexible enough to allow alteration, and the harmonic similarity of different sections reinforces the feeling of a repeated structural pattern. The yodeling, though it might conflict with the unity of the performance, actually enhances that unity by outlining the harmonic structures that accompany each of the texted sections.

Zum Lauterbach hab’ ich mein’ Strumpf verlor’n

EXAMPLE 10

Translation

EXAMPLE 10

The sources of the song’s components seem at first to be incompatible, but here, too, the logic of the whole eliminates the differences of the parts. “Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken” is as familiar to the German-Americans of the region as “Zum Lauterbach.” It also has incarnations in a wide range of traditional subgenres. If we regard the blues yodeling as intrinsic to the style, “Where, Oh Where, Did My Little Dog Go?” has perhaps the most anomalous source of the various components in this performance. It probably did not come directly from Jimmie Rodgers. We cannot be sure that Rodgers never performed the song, but a recorded version of it is unknown (Porterfield 1979:378-429); we can safely say, then, that the singer is not mimicking Jimmie Rodgers, as he was wont to do otherwise. “Where, Oh Where” is simply lifted from a more general popular music repertory that circulated in eastern Wisconsin, a repertory with only tangential connections to country-western.

The context that makes this pastiche of style and repertory possible is the radio. The singer performs frequently on local radio, a medium that permits him remarkable stylistic peregrination. Some audiences will pick and choose which styles and repertories they prefer, but overall the region’s pluralism results in musical tolerance. It broadcasts a tradition with very diverse facets. The ethnic and socioeconomic complexity of eastern Wisconsin, therefore, makes a folk song like “Zum Lauterbach” possible. Historical moment, place, style, ethnicity, and genre—all conjoin around the song, and in so doing they reshape its many parts into a whole that is perfectly recognizable and meaningful to the folk musician and his community.

To accept the existence of folk music in the modern world requires a reformulation of many of the conservative theories that scholars and ideologues have long used to delimit folk music as a genre. It requires that we amend intractable notions of isolation, ruralness, purely oral tradition, and primary function; those unwilling to do so have few choices but to track down vestiges or to reshuffle the pages of older collections. These would seem to be particularly thankless tasks, given the diversity that modernization has stimulated.

The relation of folk music to its social basis in the modern world has grown more complex. Regardless of size, single groups have come to regard more than one kind of music as their own. A corollary of this expansion of social basis is that a single repertory of folk music is no longer the property of a single group or community. Even when a community shares relatively the same styles and repertories, these contain aspects that come from different sources. Moreover, the social basis of folk music is continuously in flux, with groups altering their concepts of the ways in which musical style and social behavior shape their folk music canons. Musical activity, in some cases, has come to define the subgroup, rather than the subgroup defining its musical practices. Thus, ensembles may come into existence to perform ethnic music at folk festivals or public ethnic events, even when there are no clear contexts elsewhere. New contexts may emerge as festival ensembles diversify to provide the necessary catalyst for a transformation from subgroup to folk music community, with the latter developing a broad foundation for the support of its own musical culture.

Stratification is no longer a meaningful designation of folk music as a genre. Separation of musical genres into strata of folk, popular, religious, and art or, alternatively, into class structures results from aesthetic and political exclusiveness and avoids the empirical consideration of musical change. It is still possible to separate elements of folk and popular music, but we most often encounter them in a state of confluence. The distinguishing marks of art music—innovation, complex combinations of simultaneous sounds, virtuosity—also influence many folk musicians. Finally, the increasing presence of non-Western music, in which stratification may be irrelevant as a generic label for folk music, undermines the past tendency to reduce folk music to an idealized stratum devoid of change.

The performance of folk music is rarely not specialized. Performers develop special skills and concentrate on specialized repertories. The different responses to change result in many patterns of specialization, patterns that may cross the threshold into professionalization, consolidate a personalized style, or draw attention to a specific ideological position. Like the performer, the audience is specialized, sometimes along more traditional lines, as in the intensification of interest in one’s own ethnic music, and sometimes along the lines of patronage of institutions that specialize in the cultivation of specific subgenres.

Both oral and written tradition become more complex. Modernization is not, in fact, the supplanting of oral tradition by written tradition. The greater diversity of folk music requires that the aural responses to folk music be both broader and more refined. The community and the audience engage in oral processes of interpreting their canons. Written traditions, too, are not reducible to the use of musical notation. Folk musicians use written traditions in various ways, some as merely a rough outline, others as a means of rapid learning, still others to expedite ensemble performance. Technology often combines oral and written traditions. A recorded performance, therefore, provides a fixed type of written text, yet one that musicians learn from orally.

The many contexts of folk music in the modern world mean that musical change occurs multidimensionally. Musical change ceases to observe deterministic paths of development, along which specific causes yield predictable effects. Linear interpretation of musical change would never predict the version of “Zum Lauterbach” that actually emerged. Such a performance results from influences that are both random and carefully invested with meaning for a specific group. This confluence of randomness and specific agenda has forged a new folk song—one can justifiably say a unique song whose cultural locus is in a multidimensional tradition that modernization has made possible by collapsing time and space. The elements of “Zum Lauterbach” are related, but not because of a shared cultural message and not because of similar temporal origins. Instead, their relatedness depends on a heterogeneous assortment of hybrid styles and juxtaposed cultural values, all of them tempered by the community’s extensive tolerance of the expressive potential of folk music in the modern world.