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This chapter is the first of several in the first section of the book (“Places of Jewish Music”) that locate Jewish music on the landscapes of European modernity. Rather than treating the village as an isolated place, in which folk music was limited only to Jews, the chapter reveals processes of change and transition. Jewish folk music facilitated and was the product of border crossing, particularly from a concern with the mythical past and to an historical engagement with the present. Jewish folk music practices and repertories were vastly different across Europe, weaving vernacular languages and myths together, while conveying distinctive cultural identities. The chapter includes numerous case studies of Jewish villages in the German Rhineland, on the borders of France, Germany, and Switzerland, and in rural Moravia and Romania. The “Seven Holy Cities” (sheva kehillot) of Burgenland, border region shared by Austria and Hungary, provide at rich set of specific case studies.

This chapter deconstructs Cajuns’, and Cajun music’s, folk categorization. It analyzes three separate interpretations of folk culture as espoused by influential public intellectuals. Alan and John Lomax’s famed ethnographic folklore excursions through the American South, with a focus on the individuals and cultural contexts that informed the Depression era Cajun musical landscape, open the chapter. The first Cajun musicians to perform on a national stage at Sarah Gertrude Knott’s National Folk Festival are also included in this study as an example of Cajun music’s attachment to contemporary trends in the public consumption of folklore and the genre’s attachment to the American national project. William Owens’ little know field excursions are then used to demonstrate the perpetuation of Cajun music’ folk categorization.

Taste is a social rather than private matter, and can be used as a marker of superiority, a taste for the “refined” over the “vulgar”. By the second half of the 19th century, a distinction had arisen between “art music” and “popular music”, even if not expressed in exactly those terms. The gap between art and entertainment was caused primarily by an intense dislike of the market conditions that turned art into a commodity. Non-serious music was perceived as that which did not tax the mind and was consumed merely as an amusement, usually alongside the distractions of talking, laughing, or dancing. The idea of a second-class light music provided critics with a means of condemning any music that bore the signs of the popular — features they regarded as fashionable and facile (leicht meaning “easy” in German), rather than progressive and serious — whether or not such music enjoyed success in the market place.

Communists loomed large in the first decade of Britain's post-war folk music revival, and cultural historians have been quick to suspect a central Communist Party cultural policy co-ordinating activity. This chapter revisits the folk revival's communism, unsettling the received narrative. It challenges the usual periodization, which finds the revival's origins in the post-war period, by restoring to view pre-war communist engagements with folksong. It argues that once the revival was underway in the 1950s, the relationship between the Communist Party leadership and individual folk activists such as A. L. Lloyd and Ewen MacColl was more conflicted and removed than the standard narrative implies. At the same time, distinctly communist ideas about social formations, class, and oppositional culture became a co-ordinating common sense for the revival's left flank, taking on a new lease of life in the context of the emerging folk music scene.

As a re-evaluation of Bob Dylan's folk rock performance at Newport highlights, one central controversy of fusion music has been centered on the relationship between traditional and popular music. This discourse becomes especially apparent in the broader historical background of the partly strongly interrelated folk music revivals. The subsequent historical overview thus sketches the different Folk Revivals in America (1930s-1965) and American Folk Rock (1965-1970) and the Second British Folk Revival (1950s/60s), including the Skiffle Craze and the development of the folk club scene, which has strongly shaped the discourses regarding electric folk. As the focus of this study is set on electric folk from its emergence in the mid-1960s until its disappearance in the late 1970s, later developments after the re-emergence in the 1980s are only briefly sketched.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and into the 1960s decade of rebellion, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) developed significant relationships with cultural and artistic movements. The youth wing of the CPA, The Eureka Youth League (EYL), played a particularly important role in the attempt to forge an alliance between musicians and communism. First through jazz, and then through two folk music revivals, the EYL sought to use music to recruit members and to foster its ideological and political struggles. In the end, the EYL's and CPA's relationship with both jazz and folk was tenuous. Yet along the way, the music itself flourished. This, then, is a story of tensions between and paradoxes surrounding the Party and musicians sympathetic to it. Yet it is also a story about how the cultural life of Australia was greatly enriched by the EYL's attempt to use music as a political tool.

This chapter focuses on one of the most fundamental sociocultural determinants of creative activities: ideology. Drawing from ethnomusicological ethnographic research, it examines differing cultural belief systems, values, and attitudes that may restrict, inhibit, encourage, or liberate musical creativity. It presents six case studies that demonstrate widely varying beliefs and conventions concerning musical creativity. They are: Venda traditional music from South Africa; pre-1970s Suya ceremonial music from Mato Grosso, Brazil; Western Classical and Romantic art music as studied and performed in Western Europe and North America in the late 20th century; American post-revival folk music; Finnish contemporary folk music; and festival music of the Aymara-speaking indigenous people from Conima, Peru.

A hybrid revival genre like electric folk illustrates the difficulty of a strict separation of art, folk, and popular music. This is also corroborated by a deeper analysis of the relationship between electric folk and traditional English music. This chapter starts out with a picture of traditional music as depicted by the collectors of the First Revival, Cecil Sharp in particular, whose definition was also adapted by the International Folk Music Council in 1954. Issues discussed here include: the ideal of a “pure” English folk music tradition, the separation of traditional music from popular/commercial music, the disappearance of the tradition, exclusiveness of oral transmission, the ideal of unaccompanied singing, editorial changes and notational aspects. Discussing several modern controversial perspectives on the relationship of traditional and popular music, including Dave Harker, Karl Dallas, Alan Lomax, and Simon Frith, the chapter argues for more a flexible application of the various concepts.

In order to discuss modern revival and fusion processes from a broader perspective, this chapter presents the case study of the New St. George, an American English electric folk band. The interview with band leader Jennifer Cutting adds a relativizing angle to the specific situation of a hybrid music band, such as the musical selection process, the performance situation, and the business side. As the specifically marginal situation of American English bands reveals, hybrid bands often have to work with compromises much stronger than the dominant “Celtic” scenes, which can fall back on a much broader local and global network. While thus appearing as a highly specific genre, English electric folk is nevertheless also being revealed as a highly influential genre — be it with regard to the more successful “Celtic” branch — yet also with regard to folk rock approaches in neighboring countries like Scandinavia.

This chapter examines the changes in Sibe folk music during modern times in China. It traces the brief history of musical reforms and the use of music in social reforms in Çabçal in the twentieth century from the restrictions of the Cultural Revolution to the contemporary soundscape. The chapter considers Sibe shamanic ritual music on the national stage and the state of contemporary shamanic ritual in Çabçal. It argues that although a great deal of energy has been devoted to the reform and control of Sibe folk music in the twentieth century, wider issues of social change brought about by the Chinese Community Party (CCP) have played the decisive role in the changing patterns of musical behaviour and the impoverishment of Sibe folk music over the past few decades.

This chapter argues that a modern revival of traditional music is accompanied by a shift in the sociocultural network of which the original music had been a part. Traditional and revival cultures thus often represent two completely different sociocultural environments. Likewise, many English revivalists did not grow up in a traditional, but rather an American musical environment, which was also imitated and adapted. Yet, becoming increasingly part of a global mainstream, many — strongly influenced by A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl — subsequently started to rediscover English music as a counter-identity. The modern re-adaptation process was also shaped by the use of modern mass media, which led to a broad selection process. Yet many musicians developed an intensive and conscious relationship to the tradition. While political issues also played a central role, traditional music was especially taken as a strong means of cultural identity within a globalized context by these musicians.

From the early 1960s through to the mid-1970s, a widespread desire on the Italian left to resist the ‘schematization of everyday life’, triggered by the pressures of politics and mass media, led to a politicization across different musical genres. The discourse of intellectuals and artists was significantly influenced by the writings of the founder of the Italian Communist Party Antonio Gramsci, and in turn led the PCI of the early 1970s to an unambiguous commitment to resist ‘any impulse to identify with any specific “poetics” or “tendency”,...to ignore the great variety of creative experiences’ (Giorgio Napolitano), whilst affirming a faith in innovation and renewal as the vehicle for oppositional sentiment. This chapter examines this complex cultural network as it manifested itself in the distinct musical terrains of folk music, rock, jazz, and free improvisation, and avant-garde music theatre.

At the height of the McCarthy era, a period that marked the low point of both communism and peace activism in the United States, the communist left continued to promote its ideas about peace through song. Beginning with the Progressive party campaign of 1948, communists and their supporters sang their opposition to U.S. Cold War policies and promoted brotherhood among men, usually in those (male) terms. Intense anticommunism limited the impact of songs written and disseminated by ‘people's artists’ in the early Cold War years. Nonetheless, their work had an impact in the long run despite the repressive era in which they sang. Through hootenannies and records, and in the pages of publications such as Sing Out!they kept alive a movement culture that influenced the next generation of musicians, whose peace songs reached a popular audience in the 1960s.

This chapter introduces the main concern of the book: the interaction of ‘rude’ (‘folk’), ‘vulgar’ (‘popular’), and ‘polite’ (‘art’) music, from about 1760 on. It deals, first, with the differentiation of these categories at this period, then with the neoclassical ethos and its ideal of the simple, natural, and (as we should now say) ‘accessible’, all of which entailed a new attitude to popular music. Whatever its ideals, in practice neoclassicism was highly eclectic. Its music made constant use of the popular, habitually setting it off against the learned.

Ernie Lieberman grew up in the midst of the folk revival that took place during the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. This chapter describes how folk music came to be important to the American left, the issues on which they focused (union organizing, racial and gender equality, peace), and Lieberman's own participation in the movement. As a child in the 1930s, he admired Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and sang folk and protest songs at summer camp, Progressive party conventions, and on tours for the Civil Rights Congress. In the 1950s, he performed and recorded albums with the first interracial folk group, and later, as political folk music began to reach a wider audience, became a songwriter.

This article discusses two new artistic musical traditions, beat-boxing and mashups, in terms of their communal, changeable forms as displaying hallmarks often associated with folk music. Investigating the relationship between aesthetic choices and identity concerns highlights the central theme of the man-and-the-machine, the cyborg, and the inter-connected cognitive functioning of man and machine—all increasingly a part of reality at the beginning of the 21st century.

Folk music is one of the good things of this world which, like freedom, health, and prosperity, one values most when one is in danger of losing it. There is, however, no need for despondency, for the very agencies that have been the enemies of folk music are being pressed into its service, as is shown by the International Catalogue of Recorded Folk Music. Through the processes of mechanical recording, folk music is not only being preserved but is being made available for study and enjoyment by a wider circle than has ever before been possible. The printed or written notation on which one has hitherto had to rely gives one the form and substance of folk music; but, however accurate it may be, it cannot portray all the subtle nuances of intonation, rhythm, and ornamentation that give the style and character of the folk musician's art.