Musicologica Austriaca (Sep 2015)
Folk Music Research in Austria and Germany. Notes on Terminology, Interdisciplinarity and the Early History of Volksmusikforschung and Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft
Abstract
Discussing controversial issues of Volksmusikforschung in Austria and Germany, the article focuses on European folk music research, with its theory, method, and terminology, in a historical and interdisciplinary perspective. Drawing basically on scholarly traditions of the German-speaking countries and Russia, it shows that key issues of comparative musicology and ethnomusicology (anthropology of music), such as music in culture, participatory observation, function-based genre concepts, and comparative research, were developed in the study of European folk music starting in the late 18th century. The folk music discourse contains two basic trends: (1) folk music as a subject of scholarship (from the Enlightenment to 19th century realism), (2) the folk song as an object of idealization (pre-romantic and romantic period). Against the background of the intellectual history of folk music research, the article enters debates on (a) folk music and ideology (nationalism, social romanticism), (b) Volksmusikforschung in Austria before and after 1918, (c) folk music and popular music as different but interlinked fields of research, and (d) issues of homogeneity.
