Prolegomena to a Comparative Study of European Folk Music

Abstract

he objectives of this paper are perhaps less portentous than the title might indicate. Prolegomena is merely a Greek word for prefatory remarks, suggesting an initiation of discussion rather than an exposition or systematization of ideas; here, the initiation is one of identifying problems in a comparative study, with particular reference to the folk music of Europe. Why Europe? Why comparative? For that matter, why the folk music of Europe? The following discussion will try to clarify some of the major issues involved and draw together the threads of argument in relation to each of these problems. It is perhaps significant that and American ethnologists have been turning to problems of perceiving Europe as a culture complex, isolating factors which dissolve the diversity of local practices in a larger kind of unity (Rohan-Csermak 1967:45-58). Recent appreciation, moreover, of the intercontinental dimensions of the European ethnic complex (i.e., one which extends beyond a geographic notion of Europe) has been recognized by scholars like Sigurd Erixon in the term European and Western ethnology (Erixon 1938:137-72). Conrad Arensberg expresses much the same idea by World culture area, grand area, and European and (Arensberg 1963: 75-99). Herskovits proposed analogous views in speaking of the Euro-American cultural stream, Euro-American culture, and Euro-American tradition (Herskovits 1949). The overseas has altered considerably many characteristics of his cultural life in the Old World, but what is equally true is that acculturation and change have taken place in the original homeland just as much as in the adopted one (Rohan-Csermak 1967:55). At any rate, while recognizing geographical, historical, linguistic, political, economic, and religious differences across the continent and its extensions, theorists imply in the use of these terms a basic unity underlying the structure and organization of culture and society. That the continent itself is, in cultural terms, diverse and complex, cannot be denied. Yet in the search outwards from the particularities of smaller, single cultures, to the understanding of larger groupings linked by geographical proximity, long historical association, or common cultural consciousness, Europe seems ripe for a test case. For the fact is that we simply