Folklore and Dialectical Materialism. A Case Study of Ethnomusicological Research in Communist Romania

Abstract

"Romanian ethnomusicology has a series of less discussed and, implicitly, less understood topics. One of them is the relatively vast literature that addresses the new folklore that appeared after the installation of the communist regime and the folk music of artistic ensembles performed on stage. Most of the texts written on these subjects display a strong political and ideological pressure. Consequently, they are either forgotten or superficially perceived as evidence of a repressive regime, adding to the general belief that the communist regime turned peasant art into an instrument of propaganda. Starting from a study signed by Ioan R. Nicola on music collected from Mărginimea Sibiului, we will try to understand the theoretical horizon and the ideological limitations that influenced the way researchers wrote about contemporary music phenomena in the second half of the twentieth century. Despite the constraints, we argue that ethnomusicologists had at hand a coherent system of analysis of the folk music, which they had to adapt to the official ideology. Keywords: new folklore, amateur artistic ensembles, folk performance, ethnomusicologic research, communist ideology"