Gelbart — The Invention of Folk Music and Art Music

Author: Matthew Gelbart
Title: The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner
Year: 2007
Type: Academic book (Cambridge University Press)

The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner is a book by the musicologist Matthew Gelbart, then at Boston College, published by Cambridge University Press in 2007. It argues that “folk music” and “art music” became meaningful concepts only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, each defined in relation to the other, when the classification of music shifted from its function to its origin, a shift driven first by cultural nationalism. Its evidence is the writing about music in eighteenth-century Scotland, beginning with the reception of James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, and in Germany from Herder onward, in eight chapters running from about 1700 to the modern world. Harry White called it a thoughtful and important book and its account of Scottish musical thought persuasive and original, while finding its treatment of Beethoven’s Scottish song arrangements less convincing and writing that it gives no account of Ireland.

Gelbart, then a musicologist at Boston College, published the book with Cambridge University Press in October 2007.¹ The publisher describes its argument: earlier systems classified music by its function, but for about two hundred years classification has centered on creativity and origins, and “folk music and art music became meaningful concepts only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,” each defined in relation to the other.¹ In this account cultural nationalism drove the first classification of music by origin, and changing ideas about nature and human creativity shaped the two categories.¹

The first chapter, “Function to origin,” covers national identity and national genius from about 1700 to 1780. Later chapters cover the invention of folk modality from 1775 to 1840, authenticity as a musical idiom, organic “art music” and individual original genius, and the legacy of geography in musical categories. The last of the eight chapters covers folk and art music in the modern Western world.¹ White wrote that the book’s “persuasive and original address upon the history of Scottish music and of Scottish musical thought” shows how much European, and especially German, musical thought owed to Scottish ideas about music, many of them taking their cue from James Macpherson’s Ossian poems.² In White’s summary, Gelbart argues that the influence of Johann Gottfried Herder on the idea of folk song has been “dangerously overrated” and that it was effectively unknown in Britain before about 1800, and he shows that from 1779 Herder treated folk song as “material” for poetic art.²

White, reviewing the book in the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland in 2009, called it “this thoughtful and important book.” He found its account of Beethoven’s arrangements of Scottish songs for the publisher George Thomson less convincing, wrote that its concern is almost entirely with Scotland and Germany and that it gives no account of Ireland, and regretted the absence of a bibliography.² Julian Onderdonk, in Current Musicology, called it “an indispensable addition to the general history of Western musical culture,” and the Journal of the American Musicological Society’s reviewer called it “a very fine book that wants to be widely read.”¹ Music & Letters described it as dense.¹

Key contributions

• Folk music and art music as categories invented together in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, each defined against the other.
• The shift from classifying music by its function to classifying it by its origin, driven first by cultural nationalism.
• The importance of eighteenth-century Scottish writing on music, from the reception of Ossian onward, in forming the idea of folk music.
• A revised view of Herder, whose influence on the idea of folk song the book finds overrated.

See also

• Romancing the Folk — Benjamin Filene’s 2000 history of the people who presented American roots music
• Segregating Sound — Karl Hagstrom Miller’s 2010 history of the division of Southern music by race
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music
• Pop as craft — the debate over pop as a craft