Reflections on the Problem: How Old is the Concept Folksong?

Wiora, Walter

doi:10.2307/767454

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“…We found a very interesting precedent of the Rousseauian idea in a book written in the 17th century by Walter Hamond [19], a ship's surgeon, where he praises the virtues of the inhabitants of the island of Madagascar and considers them as the happiest people in the world (the book was designed as propaganda for England's efforts to occupy Madagascar) ( [20], p. 112). In the field of traditional songs, for example, the overvaluation of the other peasant in relation to urban life is a constant theme among the folklorists; for Johann Gottfried von Herder "The folk is not the mob on the streets, who never sing or compose, but only yell and garble things" ( [21], p. 23). Speaking of the rhythmic richness of "African music", it has been written, for example, that "Africans have not merely cultivated their sense of rhythm far beyond ours, but must have started with a superior sense of rhythm" (William E. F. Ward in [5], pp.…”

Section: Overvaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Music and Alterity Processes

Martı́¹

2014

Humanities

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Abstract:The concept of alterity constitutes an important issue in anthropological research and, therefore, in the study of musical practices, as well. Without it, we could hardly understand other kinds of music situated in different spaces and time from the observer. In order to effectively approach these musical practices, we have to develop strategies to help us reduce as much as possible that which distorts the vision of the other. However, beyond the strictly epistemological and methodological issues, the study of music cannot ignore the ethical question related to the manner in which Western thought has understood and treated the other: through a hierarchical and stereotypical type of thinking based on the condition of otherness. Throughout the article, different alterity procedures are presented and discussed, such as synecdochization, exoticization, undervaluation, overvaluation, misunderstanding and exclusion. Taking these different alterity strategies into account may help us to better understand how the musical other is constructed, used and ultimately instrumentalized.

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Section: Overvaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Music and Alterity Processes

Martı́¹

2014

Humanities

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Traditional Music and Cultural Identity: Persistent Paradigm in the History of Ethnomusicology

Bohlman¹

1988

Yearbook for Traditional Music

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As many of the articles in this volume of the Yearbook for Traditional Music celebrate the first forty years of the ICTM and the concerted, if indeed polyphonic, voice that that organization has provided the study of traditional music throughout the world, they evoke a mood of reflection and reexamination of the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. Reflection was abundantly evident as the ICTM paused in 1987 to call attention to its achievements with a grand commemoration in Berlin, itself taking stock of a 750-year history. But the reflective mood of the ICTM's fortieth year was not simply a matter of panegyrizing the past; rather, it seemed equally concerned with reexamining the present and future in light of that past, with contrasting the old and the new, with juxtaposing them and encouraging ethnomusicologists to welcome that which has more recently come to shape our understanding of music throughout the world.

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Reflections on the Problem: How Old is the Concept Folksong?

Abstract: This year musicology should remember the two men who have given a greater part of their creative life to the folk song: Béla Bartók, who died a quarter-century ago on September 26, 1945, and Werner Danckert, who passed away on March 5, 1970.

Cited by 2 publications

References 2 publications

Music and Alterity Processes

Music and Alterity Processes

Traditional Music and Cultural Identity: Persistent Paradigm in the History of Ethnomusicology

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