The Invention of 'Folk Music' and 'Art Music': Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner

New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism

by Matthew Gelbart

We tend to take for granted the labels we put to different forms of music. This study considers the origins and implications of the way in which we categorize music. Whereas earlier ways of classifying music were based on its different functions, for the past two hundred years we have been obsessed with creativity and musical origins, and classify music along these lines. Matthew Gelbart argues that folk music and art music became meaningful concepts only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and only in relation to each other. He examines how cultural nationalism served as the earliest impetus in classifying music by origins, and how the notions of folk music and art music followed - in conjunction with changing conceptions of nature, and changing ideas about human creativity. Through tracing the history of these musical categories, the book confronts our assumptions about different kinds of music.

Genres: Nonfiction

300 pages, Hardcover

First published September 30, 2007

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this in my folk music seminar. Much of the specific content didn't really apply to me, but the underlying idea is one worth thinking about: "folk" is a constructed concept linked strongly with a specific place, time, and context.