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Event date & time:
11.08.2021 at 00:00
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Location
London
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Category
Arts/Entertainment
Although there are methods-inductive, empirical, analytical, comparative, evolutionary, dialectical-that are common to all the sciences, each discipline today strives to develop its own particular approach to its specific subject matter or to find the method that can be applied most successfully in its field.
What is the specific method of music folkloristics?
In this science, as in all other sciences with which it is related - ethnology, linguistics, aesthetics, psychology, etc. - various methods have been tried.
Musical folklore primarily uses the method of observation, since it deals primarily with a concrete material, with contemporary and available facts to which we have immediate access. By "observation" is meant not only looking (visual observation) but also listening (auditory observation). And in addition to visual and auditory observation, observation can also be a motor observation, for example(Example mp3 download) , when, in order to better understand a dance tune, we are not content to hear it or see it played, but line up to play it ourselves. We also have a motor observation when, in order to grasp better the rhythm or beat of a song, we beat it figuratively with movements of the hands or the feet-"one does not learn a chorus by looking alone."
But every present fact, every present folk-musical form, has its antecedents, its past stages, which direct observation cannot show us. The number of present forms, however great, is negligible in comparison with the number of forms which have disappeared in the course of centuries. And the whole present is built upon the past. The origins of today's rhythmic and melodic forms have long since ceased to exist. If one wants to trace them, if one wants to look into the past of the folk song - and this is absolutely necessary for scientific research - one must use the historical method.
The whole subject of musical folklore, however, cannot be considered exclusively from a historical point of view. The folklorists of the last century were more interested in the origins of things than in the things themselves. And this gave folklore a strong push in the direction of history, in the direction of historical development. Soon this direction, reinforced by the ideas of Romanticism and by some purely national and nationalistic impulses, assumed such proportions that reaction was not long in coming. It became apparent that some scholars, in their infatuation with historicism, were neglecting actualization and thus steering folklore in reactionary directions: In one's quest to trace the origins (the origins of things), one turns to cancer; the historian who looks backward eventually begins to go backward as well."
Folklore is not an exclusively historical science, nor is it part of history. "Man," says van Gennep,* "is already beginning to recover gradually from the disease of the nineteenth century, which may be called historical delusion, and which makes him believe that all our modernity is of value only to the past, and that, as the author of a famous novel writes, the living are of value only to the dead. "Â
Relationships
In order to ascertain the relationship between folk-musical forms and to arrange (classify) them into groups on the basis of their morphological characteristics - similarities and differences - musical folklore can make particularly successful use of the comparative method. This method enables us to discover certain regularities in folk-musical phenomena, to formulate certain laws.
In the past there has been a rather heated polemic between the advocates of the historical and the comparative method in folkloristics. The reason for this essentially pointless and useless dispute is to be found in the efforts of methodological monism, which aimed at imposing a common method on all branches of science. In this struggle the advocates of the comparative method emerged victorious. This was inevitable, since they represented the standpoint of the natural sciences. For the time being, the comparative method - without excluding the historical method - opens up greater possibilities for musical folklore.
Musical folklore is not limited to the collection and recording of folk songs, for folklore in general is more than a mechanical accumulation of facts and observations. The material collected must first be sifted and arranged, classified. It is much more important, but also more difficult, to explain it, to trace the origins of the folk forms, the causes of their appearance, their origin, their development, their spread, and their decline. For example, if the stages of development of a folk musical form, an act, a dance custom are to be studied by pointing to evidence in ancient texts or dated documents, one cannot in such a case resort to the historical method.
