Folk music

About: Folk music is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2420 publications have been published within this topic receiving 17951 citations. The topic is also known as: folk.

Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression

Abstract: List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsPreface to the Second EditionIntroduction1. The Boy Who Became a Muni Bird2. To You They Are Birds, to Me They Are Voices in the Forest3. Weeping That Moves Women to Song4. The Poetics of Loss and Abandonment5. Song That Moves Men to Tears6. In the Form of a Bird: Kaluli AestheticsPostscript, 1989Appendix. Kaluli Folk OrnithologyGlossary of Kaluli TermsReferencesDiscographyIndex

Authenticity as authentication

Abstract: This article argues for the prematurity of any dismissal of the notion of authenticity as meaningful within popular music discourse. It synthesises a range of views as to how authenticity is constructed, and offers a tri-partite typology dependent on asking who, rather than what, is being authenticated. It focuses on rock and folk genres, but also argues that the generic nature of the typology makes it applicable to any other genre wherein listeners are concerned to ask whether a musical utterance can be construed as sincere. Preamble ‘Authentic’. ‘Real’. ‘Honest’. ‘Truthful’. ‘With integrity’. ‘Actual’. ‘Genuine’. ‘Essential’. ‘Sincere’. Of all the value terms employed in music discourse, these are perhaps the most loaded. They are familiar from the writings of academic scholars, as will be made plain below. They have been present, in their various ways, in fan and journalistic writing (most notably in the pages of Rolling Stone). In almost all cases, it is music to which these qualifiers can be attached that such writing, and presumably thinking, has prized. Of the terms, it is the first which is most familiar from academic discourse and is, therefore, the one to which I shall reduce the others for the purposes of this article. On occasions, attachment of this term can be justified with close reference to details of sonic design, even if such a process is extremely long-winded: in a previous article, I have demonstrated the viability of just such an approach. 2 Elsewhere, such an attachment is more arbitrary. In the long run, the resultant experiences in these latter cases may be even more analytically interesting in that the influence of the musical text on these occasions may be said to be nil. 3 There are, however, various authenticities, sharing a base assumption about ‘essential(ized), real, actual, essence’ (Taylor 1997, p. 21): they are concisely described in Gilbert and Pearson’s identification of the requirements of a 1980s ‘authentic’ rock, wherein artists must speak the truth of their (and others’) situations. Authenticity was guaranteed by the presence of a specific type of instrumentation . . . [the singer’s] fundamental role was to represent the culture from which he comes. (Gilbert and Pearson 1999, pp. 164–5) The purpose of this article is to explore just some of the ramifications of the term and to offer a globalising perspective analysing the three senses conflated in the above quotation: that artists speak the truth of their own situation; that they speak the truth of the situation of (absent) others; and that they speak the truth of their own culture, thereby representing (present) others. It will do this with primary reference to rock music and to contemporary folk music, although I believe my analysis to be applicable to other genres. Only two other writers appear to have

The Romantic Generation

Abstract: Preface Music and Sound Imagining the sound Romantic paradoxes: the absent melody Classical and Romantic pedal Conception and realization Tone color and structure Fragments Renewal The Fragment as Romantic form Open and closed Words and music The emancipation of musical language Experimental endings and cyclical forms Ruins Disorders Quotations and memories Absence: the melody suppressed Mountains and Song Cycles Horn calls Landscape and music Landscape and the double time scale Mountains as ruins Landscape and memory Music and memory Landscape and death: Schubert The unfinished workings of the past Song cycles without words Formal Interlude Mediants Four-bar phrases Chopin: Counterpoint and the Narrative Forms Poetic inspiration and craft Counterpoint and the single line Narrative form: the ballade Changes of mode Italian opera and J. S. Bach Chopin: Virtuosity Transformed Keyboard exercises Virtuosity and decoration (salon music?) Morbid intensity Chopin: From the Miniature Genre to the Sublime Style Folk music? Rubato Modal harmony? Mazurka as Romantic form The late mazurkas Freedom and tradition Liszt: On Creation as Performance Disreputable greatness Die Lorelei: the distraction of influence The Sonata: the distraction of respectability The invention of Romantic piano sound: the Etudes Conception and realization The masks of Liszt Recomposing: Sonnet no. 104 Self-Portrait as Don Juan Berlioz: Liberation from the Central European Tradition Blind idolaters and perfidious critics Tradition and eccentricity: the idee fixe Chord color and counterpoint Long-range harmony and contrapuntal rhythm: the "Scene d'amour" Mendelssohn and the Invention of Religious Kitsch Mastering Beethoven Transforming Classicism Classical form and modern sensibility Religion in the concert hall Romantic Opera: Politics, Trash, and High Art Politics and melodrama Popular art Bellini Meyerbeer Schumann: Triumph and Failure of the Romantic Ideal The irrational The inspiration of Beethoven and Clara Wieck The inspiration of E.T.A. Hoffmann Out of phase Lyric intensity Failure and triumph Index of Names and Works

‘The magic that can set you free’: the ideology of folk and the myth of the rock community

Abstract: Rock, the saying goes, is ‘the folk music of our time’. Not from a sociological point of view. If ‘folk’ describes pre-capitalist modes of music production, rock is, without a doubt, a mass-produced, mass-consumed, commodity. The rock-folk argument, indeed, is not about how music is made, but about how it works: rock is taken to express (or reflect) a way of life; rock is used by its listeners as a folk music — it articulates communal values, comments on shared social problems. The argument, in other words, is about subcultures rather than musicmaking; the question of how music comes to represent its listeners is begged. (I develop these arguments further in Frith 1978, pp. 191–202, and, with particular reference to punk rock, in Frith 1980.)

The study of folk music in the modern world

Abstract: FOREWORD BY ALAN DUNDES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION 1. The Origins of Folk Music, Past and Present 2. Folk Music and Oral Tradition 3. Classification: The Discursive Boundaries of Folk Music 4. The Social Basis of Folk Music: A Sense of Community, A Sense of Place 5. The Folk Musician 6. Folk Music in Non-Western Cultures 7. Folk Music and Canon-Formation: The Creative Dialectic between Text and Context 8. Folk Music in the Modern World Bibliography Index