Folk and art musics in the modern Western world

Abstract

This final chapter will gather various strands, suggesting how the folk and art music categories hardened in their present forms and perpetuated themselves into today's world – and how they affect our thoughts both about earlier periods of music history and about current music-making. A final ripple: folk music and art music encounter popular music Perhaps the last major readjustment to the concepts of folk and art music happened as these came to sit alongside a third category, “popular music.” This music was “popular” no longer in the old sense of culture shared across classes; rather, as the Industrial Revolution changed Europe forever, its definition came to be based on a new set of criteria revolving around the taint of the commercial, of politics, and of class. Alongside the relationships in Figure 6.1 (p. 204), a new schema emerged around the middle of the nineteenth century (see Figure 8.1). The modern paradigm into which we fit “folk” music and “art” music is a combination of the two frameworks (Figures 6.1 and 8.1). Certain anti-commercial values date back to the later eighteenth century – when the supporters of both “national music” and musical “classics” set themselves up against “fashionable” music – but the fashionable music they railed against did not yet have the characteristics of “popular” music as we know it (i.e. as in Figure 8.1: associated with crafty manipulation for a mass audience).