The Articulation of Folklore As a Sign of Ethnic Culture

Abstract

Musical ethnography (or, as this scholarly discipline is now called, ethnomusicology) encompasses an extremely broad field of study. It deals with "things" (as does instrumentology, studying musical instruments), with "texts" (as do folkloristics or history), with rituals [obriady] and social "institutions" (as do ethnography and sociology), with behavior, communication [obshchenie], and thought (as does psychology), with speech activities (as does psycholinguistics), and with performance practice (as do esthetics or theater and ballet studies). But, in my opinion, it may be that articulation—as the all-determining method of existence of music in an oral tradition—could be named as the most specific, and, at the same time, the most system-forming aspect of the ethnomusicological objective. It thereby acquires an ontological status in folklore.