Dr. Dieter Ringli

Folk and Popular Music - two disused categories?

Don’t worry, Ladies and Gentlemen; I’m not going to bore you by resuming a discussion that was apparently concluded long ago. Finally we are talking about new trends in Musicology at this Congress and not about historical disputes. However, we live today in a time when the different branches of Musicology are drifting apart more and more: musicologists from different fields cannot or do not want to understand each other anymore. I think this development is not only unfruitful, but in the long run disastrous for the whole of Musicology. A discussion about the categories of Folk and Popular Music may show an approach that can help to bridge these existing gaps and allows a new - or at least a different - view of Music as a research subject.
Let me start with Folk Music: at the VII Congress of the 'International Folk Music Council' in São Paulo in 1954, the scientists from the participating countries, most of whom were historical musicologists, agreed on the following definition of Folk Music:
'Folk music is the product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission. The factors that shape the traditions are: (i) continuity which links the present with the past; (ii) variation which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or the group; and (iii) selection by the community, which determines the form or forms in which the music survives. […] The term does not cover composed popular music that has been taken over ready-made by a community and remains unchanged, for it is the re-fashioning and re-creation of the music by the community that gives it its folk-character (Journal of the International Folk Music Council, VII, 1955, p. 23).
Since then, there have been numerous proposals to improve or amend this definition, but the parameters were set. The following attributes are traditionally connected with Folk Music: oral transmission, a repertoire that is refined by age and selection, unknown authorship, re-fashioning by individuals and thus integration into everyday life.
On the other hand, there is Popular Music, composed or collated by authors known by name and transmitted to the audience in a technically reproduceable form so that every change, conversion or further development by the community is impossible. There was also a wide debate about Popular Music in recent decades, but this also failed to find a final and convincing definition for the term. Despite this, in this case there is some sort of consensus. Popular Music is defined by factors like popularity, publicity, commercial success, industrial production and dissemination by mass media and - last but not least - trivial musical structure. (This last point is a controversial issue of course, but implicit in most definitions.)
I don’t want to discuss all these definitions in detail. This has been done extensively and sufficiently in the last fifty years and I don’t think that I can add anything fundamentally new to this discussion. What I’d like to do here is to check by the use of a simple example whether the minimal consensus previously mentioned that was reached on the definitions of Folk Music and Popular Music is applicable in practice.
A few weeks ago, I was invited to a garden party by an old friend of mine. There were about sixty people between the age of a few weeks and more than seventy years. On the invitation card it was requested that one should bring a musical instrument. It was a beautiful midsummer evening, we barbecued some meat, ate, drunk and had a chat. At first there was some music in the background from a CD player (the usual stuff like Manu Chao, Madonna or Paul Simon) until nobody replaced the last CD that had come to an end. After the meal the older guests - relatives of the host, aged from 60 to 75 - gathered inside the house, where the host played together with a friend some of the so called 'Bowl-Duets' by Mozart (K487) on the clarinet. After the dessert, the guests unpacked their instruments: two acoustic guitars, an electric guitar, a flute, an accordion and the two clarinets again. They started to play some music together: Blues, Old-Time Jazz, Jazz-Rock, some Italian folk-tunes (because the accordion player was an Italian) and some Swiss folk-tunes, since the clarinet is the common lead instrument of Swiss folk music. All of the musicians were amateurs. The only professional musician among the guests, a violin teacher, had left her instrument at home…
Well, to which category would you attribute these musical events?
At first, everything seems clear: to start with, popular music from CDs, then art music or so called 'classical music' played from a score and finally folk music, played by amateurs and embedded in everyday life, an oral or at least aural transmitted repertoire, that has been selected and re-fashioned for almost a hundred years.
But what about if, at the start, instead of a CD of Manu Chao or Madonna, we had heard Antonio Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons' or a recording of Swiss folk music? Whether my friends were bankers or farmers this could have equally been the case. Would we say as quickly as before, that this is popular music? And if not, why not? After all, it would again have been popular, technically-reproduced repertoire unchanged over a long period, and in which the musical structure is comparatively trivial - by comparison with a symphony by Gustav Mahler, for example. What if the host had played - instead of Mozart - some Jazz standards from the Great American Songbook, arranged for two clarinets, or some Swiss folk tunes? It would also have been a rendition of sheet music - in Swiss folk music, it has been the norm for the past 150 years that the lead clarinet player plays from music (only the accordion and the double-bass players accompany by ear). Would it be appropriate to attribute this musical event to a different category purely due to the different sheet of music that was used - particularly since most of the listeners wouldn’t have noticed the difference? And, finally, the jam session at the end: are we really willing to say that Blues, Old-Time Jazz or Jazz-Rock are part of Swiss folk music? According to the previously-mentioned criteria, we would have to agree. All the same, we hesitate, because as a result we would not only contradict the musicians but also the maturity of the Swiss population, and this appears to be a paradox in a folk music definition.
The fundamental problem with these terms of 'Folk' and 'Popular' music is not that the criteria are not precise enough or incomplete, but that we try to use them to distinguish different genres of music. It is evident that this does not work. We can never deduce a musical structure from non-musical criteria. As a normative demarcation these terms are no good. However they are of utmost significance when we try to find answers to the questions that are implicit in these terms. Most of the folk music definitions ask about the way of transmission; the repertoire that is refined by age and selection refers to æsthetic norms; the unknown authorship and the re-fashioning by the individuals concern aspects of production, emergence and the function in everyday life. The particular characteristics of popular music, like popularity and fame, raise the question of dissemination and perception of a certain kind of music; technical reproduction refers to the conditions of development and production. Finally, the trivial musical structure points to the character of the construction and rapidly connects it to an æsthetic assessment.
The usefulness or strength of the terms 'Folk' and 'Popular' music is not their function, i.e. as a definition of a musical genre, but the questions that are ultimately linked to these terms. The anticipated answers to the questions above are therefore not categorically 'either/or' but gradual nuances of different characteristics of these aspects. The viewpoints I mentioned above are (as a basic principle) relevant for every kind of music, though to a different extent. Let me take the oral tradition as an example: the case of a repertoire being transmitted purely orally has become a very rare exception nowadays. Not only has music from almost every genre been available in a written form as a matter of course in Europe for the past few hundred years, but also (and above all) the transmission of music in every genre by radio, television and sound carriers has reached the remotest places of the world. Nowadays in the area of folk music there are hardly any musicians who live their lives completely untouched by any technical reproduction of music, any more than there are classical musicians who learned to play their music exclusively from written material. Problems like articulation and phrasing, rubato or intonation were always and are (to this day) mostly orally transmitted in a teacher-student relationship.
In addition, the technical production and reproduction is no longer limited to popular music. Folk music recordings are very popular among the people that live in a certain folk music tradition. In Switzerland, there is hardly any folk musician who has not made a recording even if he is an amateur. Thus the question of the conditions of the production can be very instructive. Some modern concert halls are also equipped with computer-aided adjustable echo-chambers, which can change the characteristics of the room acoustics and adapt it to the playing ensemble. Opera performances in venues with inadequate acoustics or in sports stadia make use of sophisticated sound systems. To know how such a technology functions and what effects it can create, can be just as important for the understanding of a certain kind of music as may be the knowledge about historically-correct use of catgut strings, because both factors greatly influence the sound.
It’s no use putting the right label on a certain kind of music - oral or written, audio-technical or acoustic. Rather we have to realise the specific kind of influence of every single factor on music.
“Why should we pay such attention to these aspects? They concern only the socio-cultural context and not the most important thing itself: the music”, I hear the historical musicologists ask. In that case we have to ask: “what is the most important thing?”. The idea that a score, whether we call it a 'work' or an 'opus', is emphatically the music itself, is quite a challenging statement, which only works under certain assumptions. Of course, the terms 'work' or 'opus' have a long tradition in western art music. Looking at music from this point of view, it is therefore justified. However, to claim that the analysis of a work in the sense of interpretation of its musical structures is the only approach, concerning the music itself, is an oversimplification of a very complex issue. This statement reduces music as an acoustic expression of human culture to just a theoretical construction - the work or the opus - that allows for only a very narrow perspective. That being said, there is nothing against structural analysis, as long as we keep in mind that with structural analysis we don’t analyse the music itself, but only a certain aspect of a multifaceted and finally unfathomable human expression. The problem of the analysis of musical structures is a methodological one. The analysis of musical structures is limited to the melodic and harmonic aspects of music.
This may somehow be adequate for the western art music of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. For all the rest, it is obviously too narrow. However, we cannot even understand the western art music of the last century from this point of view. And we certainly can’t comprehend popular music by using these categories, because in popular music the main focus is on 'sound', i.e. the timbre, the quality of the tone. In Karlheinz Stockhausen's music the quality of the sound makes much more sense than the pitch and the duration of the single notes. And just as many hours of creative work have gone into the synthesizer sounds of Madonna's album 'Ray of light' as into Beethoven’s motivic work in the 5th Symphony. All the same, musicology has not yet been able to develop a method of analysis of the structure of sound that can deal with the sonic events of the last one hundred years. In practice - and there we are back to the new trends in musicology - musicologists have reacted in two different ways to this dilemma: on one hand, they concentrate on analysing the context of music. Particularly in the United States, the more social-science-oriented fields of musical research have become quite common, the so-called New Musicology or Cultural studies, popular music studies and ethnomusicology. The problem with this kind of research is that - as anticipated - the pendulum has swung too much to the other side. New Musicology is too involved in the ideological debate of criticising society and neglects not only the music itself but also methodological and precise scientific work, which often happens, for example, in the field of gender studies. Don’t get me wrong: gender is an important subject but I don’t understand why the question of gender should be so much more important than that of age groups, for example. I agree that the idea of gender mainstreaming should be supported, but it can’t replace methodological and precise scientific work. Furthermore, it cannot be denied that music seems to be more or less accidental in the subject of these studies, and the author could just as well write on clothes fashions, or family relationships.
On the other hand, the following tendency becomes apparent in European (and especially German) universities: historical musicologists evade this debate about methods and subjects and take refuge in their garden of the structural analysis of classical composers. And they lay claim to the name 'musicology' (not 'historical musicology') as an exclusive possession - although they ought to know better.
Here we should ask ourselves what musicology should and can contribute in the future. Humanities and social sciences can never be as productive as natural sciences are. They lack the spin-offs like Teflon-coated frying pans, sleeping pills and silicon chips. Therefore humanities and social sciences have to answer questions that are of importance or at least of interest for society, otherwise society will not be willing to fund these kinds of sciences any more. But how can you expect answers to the questions of the 21st century, if you explore time and again - with a methodology of the 19th century - the works of long-dead composers? Let’s face facts: this kind of historical musicology has become an end in itself. Nobody is interested in it except for the specialists themselves. Of course, concertgoers and aficionados of classical music appreciate receiving information about the works of Mozart or the life of Bach from an expert. But do we need researches on Bach or Mozart for this? Do we need researchers who try to illuminate, with the oil lamp of philology, details in biographies or in musical structures based on exhaustive source materials, details that go much further than any music lover, any musician or any composer is interested in? To invoke a long tradition of humanities that should be preserved will not save that kind of historical musicology for a long period of time, even if the conservative structures of European universities will prolong this agony considerably.
On the other hand we shouldn’t keep it a secret that this kind of historical musicology still exists because so far no convincing alternatives can be found regarding the analysis of musical structure, not in cultural studies, nor in popular music studies, nor in ethnomusicology. These branches have certainly made a step forward towards a modern musicology by broadening the field with new aspects and the questions I mentioned above. However, so far by their terms they can access the methods of social anthropology, sociology and linguistics and adapt them to their needs. In the field of sound or sonic events - the field that distinguishes musicology from any other science - they have remained remarkably helpless. Of course, popular music studies have recognised that in certain genres the melodic and harmonic correlations are not so important because the main impact is in the level of sound. But to this day we don’t have even a rudimentary methodology to analyse the quality of sound. In ethnomusicology we have known for a long time that in addition to our twelve tempered semitones there are completely different scales and that some of them are more sophisticated. But even ethnomusicologists that like to describe themselves as so-called objective social scientists can’t often say more than statements such as: “this interval is sometimes a little bit less than a minor third”, if they make any comment on sonic events at all. Or they present series of measurements in Hertz or Cent without asking themselves how to interpret them meaningfully.
If we leave aside the eternal conservatives among the historical musicologists and hope that the mentioned backlash is a transitory German phenomenon, the general tendency in musicology has gone towards an opening of methodology and subjects for more than a decade. Nowadays the different genres of music are more and more on a par not only in the audience's favour but also in academic research. Therefore the importance of categorising, for instance, music into folk and popular music, which was the starting point of my considerations, has decreased. This process, which isn’t concluded yet, it is not only gratifying but also absolutely essential for the survival of musicology. Be that as it may, there is still a lack of a methodology for analysing the field of sound or tone or timbre. Not only ethnomusicology would take advantage of that but also the research on Bach and Mozart and all those who deal with the music of the 20th century. Beyond that it will be necessary to develop possibilities to join the results of the aforementioned increasing diversity of subjects and methods. That way we can avert the impending danger of divergence and isolation of the different branches of musicology and benefit from the results of research in a synergetic way. Nobody will disagree that we cannot refrain from the employment of modern technology.
In fact we are still at the beginning of a long path but the prospects are promising. As a trend-setting example I’d like to mention the projects of the Institute for Research and Archiving of Music (IRAM) of the University of Skopje. At this institute they recognised in time that the digitisation of sound recording is the basis not only for any dissemination through mass media but also for every kind of computer-aided analysis. This somehow trivial awareness will eventually have enormous consequences for future musicology. First of all, it will be necessary to acquaint the students with the handling of digital technology. Therefore we have to develop courses and finance the appropriate equipment. The lack of such courses and equipment shows how little musicology hitherto cared about the enormous progress in audio technology that can be considered as a paradigm shift. Second, we have to try to convert as many sound recordings into digital format as possible, from the archives all over the world. Not only to save them for the future, but also to bring them into a format which we can use for computer-aided analysis.
I’m proud that the university of Zurich is involved in one of these projects, where we had to develop first of all a practicable technical process to digitise analogue sound recordings which were of a good quality. The developed technique was then used to save the recordings of the Macedonian ethnomusicologist Zivko Firfov, which he made in the sixties and seventies and which is now used as basic material.
The next step will be to try to build a database from which one can retrieve rather more than just audio files. The sound recordings will be linked with other secondary data, like time and location of the recording, instrumentation, information as to participating musicians, lyrics, scores and transcriptions, MIDI data, graphic material and if available video material. Already the structure of this database is an enormous help for transcribing. A draft of a transcription can be played via MIDI and synthesizer parallel to the original recording and one can control it easily by ear. This allows transcribing very quickly and without error. (On the flip side, such databases help students to learn to read scores by showing in parallel the music that is heard and the corresponding note in the score on the screen.) I think you can imagine that access to this completely transcribed and evaluated database opens totally new perspectives, and especially because we can hope that in future there will be such databases everywhere in the world and they can be linked together. As a result the currently poorly-regarded term 'comparative musicology' will get an absolutely new meaning and dimension that will be groundbreaking, not just for ethnomusicology.
In a third step that follows from the recognition that the digital format is the basis of future research, it is required to develop convenient software for analysis or to learn how to use commercial software in such a way that we can make precise, comparable and checkable statements about sound. Even here, the Institute of Skopje is on the right track. First experiments to measure and show microtonal intervals and the frequencies spectrum seem to be promising.
I’m positive about the fact that a serious musicology in the 21st century will be operating much more technologically compared to what we are used to so far. But this doesn’t mean that we then become mechanical technocrats. It will not be possible to hand over the thinking about music to the computer. But the application of the technological possibilities I presented to you will enable thinking and researching on music in a totally new dimension.
This is at the moment to some extent a future vision, but I assure you that the future already began - not only in Macedonia.