BITHELL e HILL - The Oxford Handbook of Music Revival

T H E OX F O R D HA N D B O O K
O F
M U SIC R E V I VA L
THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF
MUSIC REVIVAL
Edited by
CAROLINE BITHELL
and
JUNIPER HILL
1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Oxford handbook of music revival / edited by Caroline Bithell and Juniper Hill.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–976503–4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Music—History and criticism.
I. Bithell, Caroline, 1957- editor of compilation. II. Hill, Juniper, editor of compilation.
ML160.O96 2014
780.9—dc23
2013047204
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
List of Contributors ix
About the Companion Website xi
PA RT I â•‡ TOWA R D S M U LT I P L E T H E OR I E S OF
1. An Introduction to Music Revival as Concept, Cultural Process, and
Medium of Change 3
Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell
2. Traditional Music, Heritage Music 43
Owe Ronström
3. An Expanded Theory for Revivals as Cosmopolitan Participatory
Music Making 60
Tamara Livingston
PA RT I I â•‡ S C HOL A R S A N D C OL L E C TOR S A S

R E V I VA L AG E N T S
4. Antiquarian Nostalgia and the Institutionalization of Early Music 73
John Haines
5. A Folklorist’s Exploration of the Revival Metaphor 94
Neil V. Rosenberg
6. A Participant-Documentarian in the American Instrumental Folk
Music Revival 116
Alan Jabbour
vi Contents
PA RT I I I I N TA N G I B L E C U LT U R A L H E R I TAG E ,
P R E SE RVAT ION , A N D P OL IC Y
7. Reviving Korean Identity through Intangible Cultural Heritage 135
Keith Howard
8. Music Revival, Ca Trù Ontologies, and Intangible Cultural
Heritage in Vietnam 160
Barley Norton
9. The Hungarian Dance House Movement and Revival of Transylvanian
String Band Music 182
Colin Quigley
PA RT I V NAT IONA L R E NA I S S A N C E A N D
P O STC OL ON IA L F U T U R E S
10. National Purity and Postcolonial Hybridity in India’s Kathak
Dance Revival 205
Margaret E. Walker
11. Choreographic Revival, Elite Nationalism, and Postcolonial
Appropriation in Senegal 228
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach
12. Revived Musical Practices within Uzbekistan’s Evolving National
Project 252
Tanya Merchant
13. Two Revivalist Moments in Iranian Classical Music 277
Laudan Nooshin
14. Reclaiming Choctaw and Chickasaw Cultural Identity through
Music Revival 300
Victoria Lindsay Levine
PA RT V R E C OV E RY F ROM WA R , DI S A S T E R , A N D
C U LT U R A L DE VA S TAT ION
15. Revivalist Articulations of Traditional Music in War and
Postwar Croatia 325
Naila Ceribašić
Contents vii
16. Cultural Rescue and Musical Revival among the Nicaraguan

Garifuna 350
Annemarie Gallaugher
17. Toward a Methodology for Research into the Revival of Musical Life
after War, Natural Disaster, Bans on all Music, or Neglect 372
Margaret Kartomi
PA RT V I I N N OVAT ION S A N D
T R A N SF OR M AT ION S
18. Innovation and Cultural Activism through the Reimagined

Pasts of Finnish Music Revivals 393
Juniper Hill
19. Revival Currents and Innovation on the Path from Protest Bossa to
Tropicália 418
Denise Milstein
20. Bending or Breaking the Native American Flute Tradition? 442

Paula J. Conlon
21. Toward an Application of Globalization Paradigms to Modern Folk

Music Revivals 466
Britta Sweers
PA RT V I I F E ST I VA L S , M A R K E T I N G , A N D M E DIA
22. Contemporary English Folk Music and the Folk Industry 489
Simon Keegan-Phipps and Trish Winter
23. Ivana Kupala (St. John’s Eve) Revivals as Metaphors of Sexual
Morality, Fertility, and Contemporary Ukrainian Femininity 510
Adriana Helbig
24. Trailing Images and Culture Branding in Post-Renaissance Hawai‘i 530
Jane Freeman Moulin
25. Grassroots Revitalization of North American and Western European
Instrumental Music Traditions from Fiddlers Associations to
Cyberspace 551
Richard Blaustein
viiiâ•‡â•‡Contents
PA RT V I I I â•‡ DIA SP OR A A N D T H E
G L OBA L V I L L AG E
26. Georgian Polyphony and its Journeys from National Revival to
Global Heritage 573
Caroline Bithell
27. Irish Music Revivals Through Generations of Diaspora 598
Sean Williams
28. Reviving the Reluctant Art of Iranian Dance in Iran and in the
American Diaspora 618
Anthony Shay
29. Musical Remembrance, Exile, and the Remaking of South African
Jazz (1960–1979) 644
Carol Ann Muller
30. Re-flections 666
Mark Slobin
Index 673
List of Contributors
Caroline Bithell, Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, University of Manchester, UK

Richard Blaustein, Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Anthropology and Adjunct
Professor of Bluegrass, Old Time and Country Music, Eastern Tennessee State
University, USA
Naila Ceribašić, Research Advisor, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research,
Zagreb, Croatia
Paula J. Conlon, Patricia Deisenroth Presidential Professor, School of Music, University
of Oklahoma, USA
Annemarie Gallaugher, Instructor, Pre-Graduate Preparation Program, English
Language Institute, York University, Toronto, Canada
John Haines, Professor of Music and Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, Canada
Adriana Helbig, Assistant Professor of Music, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Juniper Hill, Lecturer, School of Music and Theatre, University College Cork, Ireland,
and Research Associate, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, UK
Keith Howard, Professor of Music, SOAS, University of London, UK
Alan Jabbour, Founding Director (retired), American Folklife Center, Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C., USA
Margaret Kartomi, Professor of Music, Monash University, Australia
Simon Keegan-Phipps, Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, Department of Music, University
of Sheffield, UK
Victoria Lindsay Levine, Professor of Music, Colorado College, USA
Tamara Livingston, Director of the Department of Archives and Records Management
and Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, Kennesaw State University, USA
Tanya Merchant, Assistant Professor of Music, University of California, Santa Cruz,
USA
Denise Milstein, Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Columbia University, USA
x List of Contributors
Jane Freeman Moulin, Professor of Ethnomusicology, University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa,

Hawai‘i, USA
Carol Ann Muller, Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach, Senior Research Associate, African Studies Centre, St
Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK
Laudan Nooshin, Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, Centre for Music Studies, City
University, UK
Barley Norton, Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, Goldsmiths, University of
London, UK
Colin Quigley, Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, Irish World Academy of Music and
Dance, University of Limerick, Ireland
Owe Ronström, Professor of Ethnology, Gotland University, Sweden
Neil V. Rosenberg, Professor Emeritus, Department of Folklore, Memorial University,
St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada
Anthony Shay, Associate Professor of Dance, Pomona College, USA
Mark Slobin, Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music, Wesleyan University, USA
Britta Sweers, Professor of Cultural Anthropology of Music, Co-Director of the Institute
for Musicology, and Director of the Center for Cultural Studies, University of Bern,
Switzerland
Margaret E. Walker, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Musicology, Queen’s
University, Kingston, Canada
Sean Williams, Professor of Ethnomusicology, Irish Studies, and Asian Studies,
Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington, USA
Trish Winter, Senior Lecturer in Film, University of Sunderland, UK
About the Companion Website
www.oup.com/us/ohmr
Username: Music2
Password: Book4416
Readers are invited to visit the companion website to The Oxford Handbook of Music
Revival where they will find a wealth of complementary material. A wide selection of
audio and video tracks and additional illustrations exemplify concepts and traditions
discussed in the individual chapters. These are cued in the text with the icons and
and can be found in a password-protected area of the website labeled Resources.
Additionally, some authors have compiled further reading lists, discographies, anno-
tated webographies, and other materials for readers who wish to explore the topic fur-
ther or to supplement use of the book for teaching purposes. These can also be found on
the website.
T H E OX F O R D HA N D B O O K O F
PA R T I
TOWA R D S M U LT I P L E
T H E OR I E S OF M U SIC
R E V I VA L
C HA P T E R 1
AN INTRODUCTION TO
M U S I C R E V I VA L A S C O N C E P T,
C U LT U R A L P R O C E S S , A N D
M E D I U M O F C HA N G E
J U N I PE R H I L L A N D C A ROL I N E BI T H E L L
Acts of revival, restoration, and renewal have been influential forces shaping and
transforming musical landscapes and experiences across diverse times and places. In
this volume, we set out to examine the many faces and impacts of musical revival from
a contemporary and global perspective. We offer a combination of theoretical essays
and ethnographic case studies, many of which present new research on folk, tradi-
tional, indigenous, roots, world, and early music scenes in a variety of post-industrial,
post-colonial, and post-war contexts. Supported by the insights and perspectives
offered by a cohort of thirty contributors, we aim to (a) review and expand existing
revival theories and explore new avenues for understanding revival processes; (b) exam-
ine music revival as a crucial cultural process for constructing meaning and effecting
socio-cultural change; (c) consider the potential of post-revival as a theoretical concept
and propose new paradigms for analyzing the transformative dimensions and contem-
porary ramifications of revival movements; and (d) reveal the extent to which the legacy
of revivalist visions continues to shape our musical and social worlds.
The Significances of Revival
A music revival comprises an effort to perform and promote music that is valued as old
or historical and is usually perceived to be threatened or moribund. Generally speaking,
revival efforts engage a number of intertwined processes and issues. First, revivals are
almost always motivated by dissatisfaction with some aspect of the present and a desire
4 Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell
to effect some sort of cultural change. Revival agents usually have agendas specific to
their socio-cultural or political contexts and in this sense may also be regarded as activ-
ists. Second, identifying musical elements and practices as old, historical, or traditional,
and determining their value, often involves selecting from or reinterpreting history and
establishing new or revised historical narratives (a process implicating scholars as well
as performers and promoters). Third, transferring musical elements from the past to the
present (or from one cultural group perceived as preserving lifeways that are in direct
continuity with the past to a cultural group that perceives itself as being more mod-
ern) entails a decontextualization and a recontextualization—or what Owe Ronström
(1996 and this volume) refers to as shifts. Such recontextualization may be temporal,
geographical, and/or social; the social shifts discussed in this volume include appropri-
ations across class, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, nationality, and political persuasion.
In the process of recontextualization, various transformations may take place. Fourth,
the elements of activism and recontextualization inherent in revivals necessitate the
establishing of legitimacy, in order to persuade others to accept the musical and cultural
changes being promoted and to allow the appropriating group to be perceived as legit-
imate culture-bearers. The act of legitimization frequently relies upon invocations of
authenticity. Fifth, revivals often spur the development of new methods and infrastruc-
tures for transmitting, promoting, and disseminating the revived music, which may
involve festivals, competitions, educational institutions, organizations, government
policies, recording and distribution companies, and so on. Finally, if successful, revival
efforts may result in the establishment of new subcultures and affinity groups or may
become part of mainstream culture; we designate this phase as “post-revival” in order
to highlight the profound and long-term impacts that revivals may have on music, soci-
ety, and culture. These six themes—activism and the desire for change, the valuation
and reinterpretation of history, recontextualization and transformation, legitimacy and
authenticity, transmission and dissemination, and post-revival outgrowths and ramifi-
cations—are the core themes running throughout the chapters in this collection. Each
is discussed in more detail in later sections of this introductory chapter.
The intentional act of reviving, restoring, and reimagining the past for purposes of the
present has been a recurring and important cultural phenomenon across cultures and eras.
Revival as a label, however, is contentious, and several of the contributing authors to this
volume challenge its appropriateness or modify the more normative assumptions on which
it rests. Mark Slobin’s earlier observations still capture some of the prevailing criticisms:
To revive means to bring back to life, and clearly this is not what we’re talking about.
In the first place, I don’t think expressive culture really dies; you’d have to think of
culture as a straight-line evolution to believe that, and I don’t. I think of it more as a
spiral, changing, but dipping back along the way.
(1983: 37)
While in many cases “revival” may be an inappropriate descriptor in its literal sense
of “resuscitation” or “resurrection,” the concept nonetheless places an important
emphasis on revivalists’ perceptions and their desire to engage with the past. In this
AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL 5
volume, then, we employ the term as a type of shorthand to encompass a range of

more nuanced processes, some of which were suggested by Slobin (1983), namely
regeneration, renaissance, revitalization, rediscovery, reshaping, re-interpretation,
re-focusing, re-assessment, re-articulation. To these we might add reclama-
tion, recovery, rescue, recuperation, restitution, restoration, renovation, reinven-
tion, re-implementation, reactivation, re-traditionalization, re-indigenization,
re-appropriation, resumption, resurgence, recycling, reproduction, revision, and
re-creation. As the ubiquitous “re” prefix suggests, what these processes share is a
fundamental motivation to draw upon the past and/or to intensify some aspect of the
present. Ralph Linton’s earlier definition of a nativistic movement as “any conscious,
organized attempt on the part of a society’s members to revive or perpetuate selected
aspects of its culture” (1943: 230, emphasis added) offers another way of sidestepping
an overly literal focus on revival. In its extended sense, revival may also be seen as
continuity—a deliberate effort to retain or keep alive as opposed to literally bringing
back from the dead—or as the act of making visible that which has been hidden.
Slobin continues his reservations about “revival”:
Second, it’s clear to many trained observers that even when people seem to be reviv-
ing things, that is, exhuming them and breathing life into them, what they get is
something new.
(1983: 37)
The many case studies in this volume confirm that each instance of supposed revival
results in some sort of transformation or innovation, whether it be a new musical style,
new methods of transmission and performance, new functions and meanings, or even a
new music (sub)culture. In paying attention to these transformations, we shift the empha-
sis from the past to the present and future and, in the process, further refine our under-
standing of revival and its ramifications. It is in this spirit that Ronström (this volume)
emphasizes revival as a form of cultural production. Milstein, meanwhile, proposes that
viewing revival as a “current” allows us to extend our enquiries to “musical movements
that engage in revivalist activities without producing formal revivals” (this volume).
Revival Scholarship and

Scholar-Revivalists
The history of the contentious concept of revival is closely connected to the (often under-
played) history of the involvement of scholars in revival processes and the changing
intellectual trends that influenced them. The Oxford English Dictionary (third edition)
indicates that the metaphorical application of revival to artistic and cultural practices
(dating from 1587) predates both the use of the term in its literal sense of “restoration or
return to life” (1608) and its use in association with religious activities (1702). According
to John Haines (this volume), we owe this earlier metaphorical usage to the activities of
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century antiquarians—the earliest revivalists to debut in this
volume—who attempted to resurrect and restore ancient music from antiquity (some-
times attempting to demonstrate—if not invent—connections between their local his-
tories and what they perceived as the great ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome).
After antiquarianism, the scholarly disciplines most engaged in music revival work were
folklore, followed by ethnomusicology and musicology, with some important input
from anthropology and history.
Two major intellectual trends of the nineteenth century would spur on
scholars-cum-revivalists for generations. The first was the theory (or myth) of cul-
tural evolution, with its emphasis on folklore as survivals of ancient practices among
the peasants. The second was romantic nationalism—promulgated by the German phi-
losopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803)—with its belief that folk poetry and
customs reflect the soul of the nation. Together, these led to the collection of folk music
and other cultural artefacts and practices across many cultures, and to their promotion
as the pure/authentic/historical/traditional/ancient cultural expressions of a nation,
region, or ethnic group. Nationalistic agendas, concepts of cultural evolution, and fears
that modernization would lead to a cultural grey-out—prevailing intellectual trends for
much of the nineteenth century and in some cases into the mid-twentieth century—led
many folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and collectors to seek out and prioritize musical
items that they viewed as culturally “pure” and old, avoiding those “contaminated” by
the influence of foreign, urban, or modern culture (see, for example, Child 1861, Sharp
1907 and 1917, and Lomax 1968). These collectors and scholars played a tremendously
influential role in selectively identifying music as folk/traditional/ancient, selectively
valuing certain forms of musical expression according to their own aesthetics and agen-
das, selectively determining criteria for authenticity, and selectively canonizing and pro-
moting historical music for public dissemination and education.
Particularly in Western Europe and North America, late nineteenth-century and early
twentieth-century folklorists thereby played an important role in laying the groundwork
for many folk revivals (for examples, see Haines, Hill, Keegan-Phipps and Winter, and
Sweers, this volume). And yet, at the same time, folklorists often dismissed and devalued
revival processes and revival cultures as inauthentic and therefore unworthy of academic
study or governmental funding, with clear demarcations being drawn between so-called
revivalists and traditional folk artists, source musicians, or primary culture-bearers
(see Conlon, Jabbour, Rosenberg, and Shay, this volume, as well as Rosenberg 1991 and
Titon 1993). This delegitimizing of revival culture is best epitomized by folklorist Richard
M. Dorson’s (1950) distinction between folklore and “fakelore”—a term that is still occa-
sionally employed in the early twenty-first century by scholars who wish to distinguish
between what they perceive to be authentic and inauthentic folk music.
Meanwhile, in the field of anthropology, Anthony Wallace (1956) proposed a semi-
nal theory of revitalization movements, of which he considered revival movements
to be one subset. Influenced by structuralist-functionalist paradigms, he viewed revi-
talization movements as the means for a cultural system responding to stress to bring
about necessary changes (which may be inspired by the past, and/or borrowed from
other cultures or invented anew) in order to reach a “new steady state.” Many aspects of
Wallace’s theory remain applicable, including his emphasis on revitalization movements
as “deliberate, conscious, organized efforts by members of a society to create a more sat-
isfying culture” (279) and his critical awareness that “avowedly revival movements are
never entirely what they claim to be, for the image of the ancient culture to be revived
is distorted by historical ignorance and by the presence of imported and innovative ele-
ments” (276). Where Wallace’s theory falls short, in retrospect, is in his functionalist
view of culture as a holistic organism-like system, which fails to account for the forma-
tion of the myriad subcultures and transnational affinity groups that have increasingly
characterized revival cultures from the 1960s onwards.
Changing trends in academia very gradually acquiesced in accepting revival as a legiti-
mate subject of study. Scholars in the field of folklore and, more particularly, the newer
field of ethnomusicology (itself increasingly influenced by anthropology, as reflected
in the title of Merriam’s seminal work, The Anthropology of Music [1964]) began to
focus less on the collection of authentic texts and more on cultural processes and con-
texts. The study of popular culture gradually became more respected. Philip Bohlman’s
The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World (1988) and Mark Slobin’s Subcultural
Sounds: Micromusics of the West (1993) served to validate contemporary manifestations
of folk and traditional music in the Western world as legitimate objects for investiga-
tion alongside the living traditions of more distant cultures that had long been the prime
territory of ethnomusicology. As self-reflexive and subjective scholarship gained promi-
nence, and as former revivalists from the folk booms of the 1960s achieved secure aca-
demic positions, several revivalist-scholars wrote about their own first-hand experiences
(see, e.g., Rosenberg 1993, and Jabbour, Rosenberg, and Shay, this volume).
A groundbreaking work by historians was influential in refocusing the scholarly
lens on the traditions of modern society. Closely related to the concept of revivals,
Hobsbawm proposed the concept of “invented tradition,” which was applied to decon-
structing the nationalist rituals of modern nation-states. Asserting that “ ‘traditions’
which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented”
(1983: 1), Hobsbawm argued that,
insofar as there is such reference to a historic past, the peculiarity of ‘invented’ tradi-
tions is that the continuity with it is largely factitious. In short, they are responses to
novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish
their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition.1
(Ibid.: 2)
Frequently cited in literature on cultural phenomena that would fall under our defi-
nition of music revival, the discourse on invented traditions reflects a broader intellec-
tual trend towards deconstructionism and cultural criticism ascending in the 1980s and
1990s (perhaps spurred on by postmodern disillusionment with grand narratives and
the fall from grace of absolute truths, now decentered by the postcolonial multiplicity
of previously subaltern voices). Charles Briggs went on to present an important critique
of scholars who, in employing analyses of invented traditions, delegitimize culturally

meaningful practices by pointing out historical discontinuities. Holding “the power to
confer a sense of historical presence on some forms and withhold it from others,” schol-
ars of invented tradition thus become “arbiters of cultural genuineness, akin to the way
that folklorists claimed the authority to distinguish the traditional from the modern—
or . . . ‘folklore’ from ‘fakelore’ ” (Briggs 1996: 460). These reservations notwithstanding,
deconstructing the invented histories of revived traditions is still a vital tool in under-
standing revival processes and concomitant plays of power.
The latter half of the twentieth century saw a dramatic increase in scholarship on
music revivals. Matching the trend towards particularism in post-Cantometrics eth-
nomusicology,2 most of these publications chronicle and interpret, through ethno-
graphic or historical methods, the revivals of specific music cultures.3 Important
theoretical groundwork was laid in two collections of essays, Transforming Tradition
on the North American folk music revivals of the 1950s and 1960s (Rosenberg 1993) and
a special issue of the World of Music journal entitled “Folk Music Revival in Europe”
(Fujie 1996). Both volumes exemplify, in their respective case studies, how the process
of reviving a tradition leads to transformations, how tensions arise between preserva-
tion and innovation, and how authenticity is invoked and manipulated. As many of the
contributing authors to Transforming Tradition were themselves participants in revival
activities, they offer important insights into the role of scholars and public folklorists as
revival agents. (Four authors from these collections, Blaustein, Jabbour, Ronström, and
Rosenberg, add further reflections in this volume.) Offering a more critical stance on
revival agents, Benjamin Filene (2000) reveals the crucial, but often hidden, role that
middlemen and cultural brokers play in manipulating academia, government institu-
tions, and the music industry—the modern power structures for disseminating revival-
ist ideology.4
A seminal theoretical model on music revivals was presented by Tamara Livingston
(1999). Synthesizing the existing literature on European and American folk and early
music revivals, and drawing from her own research on choro revival in Brazil, Livingston
defined revivals as “social movements which strive to ‘restore’ a musical system believed
to be disappearing or completely relegated to the past for the benefit of contemporary
society” (66). She emphasized the activist nature of revivals, asserting that
Revivalists position themselves in opposition to aspects of the contemporary cultural

mainstream, align themselves with a particular historical lineage, and offer a cultural
alternative in which legitimacy is grounded in reference to authenticity and histori-
cal fidelity.
(Ibid.)
She also offered a recipe of ingredients common to most revival movements, includ-
ing core catalysts, original sources, an ideology and discourse, a community of follow-
ers, organized activities, and supporting industries (ibid.: 69). Her model—which she
reviews and reflects upon in her contribution to the present collection—has provided a
useful frame of reference for many of the authors in this volume.
Rethinking Revival in the Twenty-first Century

Central to our motivation in planning this volume was the desire to fill gaps that we per-
ceived in the existing literature and expand the general theoretical discourse on music
revivals. These gaps, and the opportunities to forge new pathways that they opened up,
became particularly apparent to us when we participated in the 38th World Congress
of the International Council for Traditional Music in Sheffield, England, in 2005, for
which one of the themes was “Reviving, Reconstructing, and Revitalizing Music and
Dance.” Most prominent among the areas we felt were ripe for further exploration were
the theorizing of authenticity, the documentation and explication of recontextualization
processes, and, in particular, the conceptualization of post-revival, together with more
detailed research into the ongoing impacts that are the legacy of revival movements. We
were also aware of a wealth of fascinating and original work on contemporary trends
that were not articulated in terms of revival but might nonetheless offer productive
insights if viewed through the revival lens. Revivalist ideologies in North America and
Western Europe may have tended, as Livingston suggests, to be “constructed on certain
modes of thinking and structuring of experience that are shared by middle class peo-
ple in consumer-capitalist and socialist societies” (1999: 66), but this is only part of the
story. One of our objectives has been to explore the nature of ideologies of renewal and
reclamation in other parts of the world, constructed in the language of different philo-
sophical and ontological lineages.
The most obvious limitation of the extant English language literature on music reviv-
als is, of course, its geographical coverage. The vast majority of work has focused on
Western Europe and North America, with a smaller body of work on Eastern Europe
and Latin America.5 The present volume attempts to rectify this imbalance with chap-
ters on the Middle East (Nooshin, Shay), Central Asia (Merchant), South Asia (Walker),
Southeast Asia (Howard, Norton), Indonesia (Kartomi), the Pacific (Moulin), Latin
America (Gallaugher, Milstein), Africa (Muller, Neveau Kringelbach), and indigenous
North America (Conlon, Levine). As part of the project of extending the revival concept
to fit a broader variety of socio-cultural contexts, many of these authors offer their own
definitions and interpretations.
In seeking to cast the revival net wider, we have embraced phenomena that may not
have been defined in emic terms as revival movements, but nonetheless entail processes
of retrieval, reconstruction, and recontextualization of the past to serve present pur-
poses. In this sense, Livington’s model, with its emphasis on the oppositional character
of revivals, might best be viewed not as definitive but rather as one metaphor (“revival as
social movement”) among others. Alternative metaphors pursued by some of our con-
tributors include revival as cultural rescue (Gallaugher), revival as therapy for trauma
and recovery from the devastation of war or disaster (Ceribašić, Kartomi), and revival
as assertion of indigenous culture following the lifting of former colonial oppression
(Bithell, Conlon, Helbig, Levine, Neveu Kringelbach, Norton).
Many of our chapters further refocus the revival lens on technological, economic,
and institutional phenomena that have increasingly impacted the way revived musics
are experienced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These include, for
example, the prominent part now played by commercial media (Moulin), the Internet
(Blaustein), festivals (Helbig, Keegan-Phipps and Winter), academies (Hill, Merchant),
national governments (Howard, Neveau Kringelbach), and UNESCO’s policies regard-
ing Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (Bithell,
Norton). We also expand revival theories in our encompassing of global trajectories,
from diaspora and exile (Muller, Williams) to trans-ethnic and transnational affinities
(Bithell, Conlon, Shay). In the following sections, we discuss a set of themes and issues
that remain crucial to our understanding of all of these variegated manifestations of
revival.
Motivations: Revival as Activism
We may assume that musicians and other agents of revival always have a reason for
wanting to perform, promote, or disseminate music from the past. While it is possi-
ble that this motive may be aesthetic, in the majority of cases there are clear (if some-
times unspoken) agendas linked to contemporary social, cultural, and/or political
circumstances.6 The activist nature of revival efforts has been acknowledged as one
of the defining characteristics of revivals throughout the history of their documenta-
tion, from Wallace’s recognition of revitalization movements as deliberate, organized
efforts by dissatisfied members of a society under stress to construct a more satisfying
cultural habitat (1956: 265), to Livingston’s identification of the main purpose of reviv-
als as being to improve existing culture and/or serve as an alternative to mainstream
society (1999: 68).7 Ronström (this volume) goes so far as to proclaim that revivals are
“a missionary and a visionary phenomenon: there are revivals not because there has
been a past, but because there is a future to come.” This missionizing quality is reflected
in the fact that many revivals are driven by impassioned and committed individu-
als—Wallace’s “charismatic leaders” and Ronström’s “burning souls.” The pivotal role
played by such figures is evident in many of the case studies that follow (see, e.g., Bithell,
Conlon, Hill, Levine, Milstein, Nooshin).
Reflecting on revival activity around the world during the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, we suggest four general motivational categories (allowing that any
given revival movement may have motives from more than one category). The first is
related to a dissatisfaction with aspects of the modern world, variously expressed as
anti-modernization, anti-industrialization, anti-urbanization, anti-secularization,
anti-technology, anti-commercialization, anti-consumerism, anti-capitalism, anti-mass
media, or anti-institutionalization. Modernity—that place where, as Marx put it, “all
that is solid melts into air”8—may be viewed as a distortion or deviation from the “natu-
ral” path, leading not to new horizons of unlimited opportunity but to alienation and
confusion. Revivalist rhetoric in these cases may, for example, bemoan the deperson-
alization, ethical or moral degradation, or existential meaninglessness of contemporary
society. Representations of the past—often romanticized, sometimes imaginary, and

always selective—frequently evoke positive images of community-oriented interper-
sonal relationships, unmediated and noncommercial musical expression, pre-modern
simplicity or innocence, pastoral tranquility, or the nobility of the peasant (for exam-
ples, see Haines, Helbig, this volume, Linn 1994: 116–179, and Boissevain 1992). In such
revivals, it is not uncommon to see revivalist activities that prioritize participatory
music-making, face-to-face interaction, community building, self-expression, and/or
creativity. These kinds of activities may also prove attractive to classically trained musi-
cians who welcome the opportunity to be free of the stylistic constraints of the classical
orthodoxy and its often authoritarian, competitive ethos.
The second broad category in this generalizing typology of revival motivations is
the bolstering of the identity of an ethnic group, minority group, or nation, which
is often coupled with a distancing from, or othering of, foreign ethnic or cultural
elements. The primary socio-historical contexts for these motives are instances of
nation-building, independence struggles and newly independent states, anti-colonial
struggles and postcolonial aftermath, and civil rights and minority pride move-
ments. Identity-bolstering motives may also be linked to xenophobia, reactionary
stances against immigration, or perceived threats from foreign influences, including
imperialism, Westernization, or globalization. On one hand, exalting the professedly
ancient heritage of a specific ethnic group or nation may be a strategy for demonstrat-
ing, to oneself and the international community, the worthiness and validity of the
group. The classic example of this is the plethora of narrative sung poetry that, during
the period of heightened European nationalism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, was compiled from peasants or historical sources, edited, and promoted
with implicit or direct comparisons to the exalted Homeric poetry of ancient Greece
(see Hill, this volume, and Wilson 1973). Bithell, Howard, and Norton (this volume)
demonstrate the continuation of such processes of establishing international recog-
nition of cultural value through the appointment of artistic practices and artefacts
to UNESCO’s lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage. On the other hand, revivals may
be motivated by the desire to restore some sort of ethnic purity or demarcation, as
exemplified in this volume’s chapters on war-torn Croatia (Ceribašić) and the dis-
puted ethnic ownership of Transylvanian traditions (Quigley). Both ancientness and
ethnic purity or cultural uniqueness are often emphasized in revivals in newly inde-
pendent nations, as evidenced in postcolonial India (Walker) and post-Soviet states
such as Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Georgia, and Latvia (see Merchant, Helbig, Bithell, and
Sweers, respectively). Continuing associations of folk music with ethnic purity dem-
onstrate how the legacy of eighteenth-century romantic nationalist myths of folk
music as the soul of a nation continue to shape twentieth- and twenty-first-century
ideology.
The third general type of motive for revival efforts is political. Revival activities
have been employed for both left-wing and right-wing purposes, by both govern-
ments and protesters. The best documented cases have been grass-roots revivals
in North America in the service of socialist, communist, labor, and civil rights
movements (see, e.g., Cohen 2002, Denisoff 1971, Eyerman and Jamison 1998, Filene
2000, Lieberman 1995, Reuss and Reuss 2000, and Weissman 2005); other work
has focused on state-sponsored socialism and communism in Eastern Europe (see
Buchanan 2006, Olson 2004, Porter 1997, Rice 1994, and Slobin 1996). In some cases,
traditional music is invoked simultaneously by both the ruling regime and its con-
testers (see Howard, this volume).
The fourth motive is a practical response to natural or human disasters, as a result of
which musical and other cultural practices have been torn away rather than abandoned
or evolved. Such was the case in Afghanistan, for example, following the years of violent
repression by the Taliban and in Cambodia following the ravages wrought by the Khmer
Rouge, both of which resulted not only in certain forms of musical expression being
suppressed but in musicians themselves being imprisoned, deported, or killed. Natural
disasters—such as the tsunami that devastated coastal areas across South Asia in 2004
or the earthquake in Haiti in 2010—have likewise caused the deaths of many leading
artists and teachers, the destruction of cultural infrastructures, and the displacement
of whole communities. In such situations, the revival of musical and other artistic prac-
tices has played a vital role in both individual and collective recovery (see Ceribašić and
Kartomi, this volume).
Why, then, is music from the past an effective means of activism? The answer lies
in part in the recognition that the past is not only a source of inspiration, but also a
source of legitimacy (or occasionally healing). As Hobsbawm asserts, “what [tradi-
tion] does is to give any desired change (or resistance to innovation) the sanction
of precedent, social continuity and natural law as expressed in history” (1983: 2). If
the activist efforts of revivalists are successful, they may then lead to new subcul-
tures or alterations to the mainstream, as discussed later in this chapter. Next, how-
ever, we turn to a more general consideration of the significance of history and its
representation.
The Mobilization of the Past and the

Selective Use of History
Revivals, by definition, depend on some kind of relationship with the past. Most often
they seek to reintroduce forgotten, abandoned, neglected, suppressed, or otherwise
interrupted practices from the past into the present. They may also stem from a desire
to restore the integrity of present practices that are seen to have lost some defining
aspect of their original form or meaning. The past, however, far from being clear-cut,
is a notoriously slippery entity whose invocation involves both conscious practical
choices and strategic rhetorical maneuvers. Trends in the representation, mobilization,
and contestation of the past have been widely theorized by historians, archaeologists,
and anthropologists. As part of the postmodern turn, exponents of what became known
as post-processual or interpretative archaeology embraced a notion of the past as sub-

jective, fragmented, malleable, multidimensional, and multivalent (see, e.g., Hodder
et al 1995, and Ucko 1995). Conceived in these terms, the past offers what musicologist
John Butt has referred to as “an infinity of different worlds” (2002: 17), together with a
treasure-trove of cultural symbols that may be adapted to many different uses and func-
tions in the present. Here we wish to highlight three themes in the deconstruction of the
past: the ideologically contingent and selective nature of received (or imagined) histo-
ries, the symbolic potential of the past, and the dynamic tensions to which competing
interpretations of the past may give rise.
Different perceptions of history may shape both the rhetoric and actions of revival-
ists. Jabbour (this volume) observes that “people often see the past as more stable and
unchanging, and the present as more dynamic and changing,” imagining history as lin-
ear progress, like a jet plane taking off. In contrast, Jabbour posits, if we view history
as cyclical, oscillating, and meandering, then revivals may be viewed as a natural part
of culture’s ebb and flow. A somewhat parallel view is common amongst some Native
American peoples who, as described by Levine (this volume), consider history to be
cyclical and view what we have defined as revival processes as the periods of sleep and
wakefulness that cultural expressions naturally undergo.
Regardless of their meta-views of the nature of history, revivalists are typically united
by their adherence to a “received history” (Boyes 1993: xi). Stories about the past are
rarely heard first-hand. They are most often passed down and, in the process, undergo a
series of refinements: corrections are made and new errors introduced, facts are forgot-
ten and elaborations added, inconvenient details are erased and rough edges smoothed
off. The gaps left by memory and documentation (which by their nature can never be
complete) are filled in by educated guesses, assumptions, and imaginative leaps. The
“history” that results is highly selective—at best a partial truth—and continues to be
molded by its interpreters, but it is this version of the past that then becomes part of the
collective memory.9 Burt Feintuch even suggests that we might view revivals themselves
as forms of memory, “loaded with the ambiguities that memory presents” (2006: 14).
Revivalists, then, are active agents in reinterpreting, modifying, and forging new
histories.
The Past in Music, a special issue of the journal Ethnomusicology Forum, was inspired
by the guiding principle that “musical practices in the present are shaped not only by
past experience but also by ideas, feelings and beliefs about the past” (Bithell 2006: 4). Its
contributors built on the notion of the past as symbolic resource in exploring the ways
in which music can be harnessed not only to invoke but also to transform the past.10 The
act of reimagining or reinventing the past assumes particular prominence in the case of
revival initiatives with a strongly countercultural character that look to the past to com-
pensate for the shortcomings of the present as described in the previous section. Music
genres associated with a supposedly simpler, purer way of life untainted by “progress”
become a doorway into this quasi-mythic past-as-refuge. Transported into the present,
the revived elements—like those of the nativistic movements described by Linton—
serve as “symbols of a period when the society was free or, in retrospect, happy or great”
(1943: 233). Revivalists, then, are concerned not simply with “the music itself ” but also—
or even more—with the projected values and partly imagined lifestyles they associate
with it. In setting out to regain Paradise, revivalists embrace the music of the past as an
act of “non-violent resistance” to modernity (DeTurk and Poulin 1967: 22)—a perspec-
tive that chimes with Svetlana Boym’s theoriziation of nostalgia as not only a longing for
lost dreams or for times and places that have slipped beyond our reach but also a “rebel-
lion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress” (2001: xv).
The attraction of the past, then, rests not so much on what it was actually like, in a lit-
eral sense, but on what it has come to represent and how it may be used to justify action
in the present. As Ronström expresses it:
Revival is only partly about ‘what once was’. More importantly, it is about ‘what is’
and ‘what is to come’.. . . In essence revival is a process of traditionalisation that goes
on in the present, to create symbolic ties to the past, for reasons of the future.
(1996: 18)
Several of the case studies in this volume illustrate the ways in which the past is selec-
tively employed, manipulated, and at times even fabricated to add legitimacy to choices
made in the present, to challenge established orthodoxies, or to dispute claims to par-
ticular histories or traditions (see especially Hill and Walker). In some instances, revival
performances may be more convincing to contemporary audiences for being based on
imaginary histories (see Shay, this volume, and Taruskin 1982). Indeed, Lowenthal pro-
poses that “heritage the world over not only tolerates but thrives on and even requires
historical error” (1998: 132; see also Norton, this volume).
Of course, not all revivalists are converts to postmodernism and metaphor. Some
believe that they know what the past was really like and seek to replicate past practices as
accurately as possible. They might base their reconstructions on surviving memoirs or
iconographic evidence whose accuracy or legitimacy goes unchallenged, seeing the pre-
cision of the reproduction as a measure of authenticity. Those who adopt this more fun-
damentalist and essentializing stance may come into conflict with those who take up a
comparatively progressive position that allows for a more creative refashioning and that
acknowledges the part played by present need. Niall Mackinnon’s distinction between
reviving and re-enacting is helpful here. A re-enactment requires “a suspension of the
present, allowing the past to be entered into, but in a bounded sense,” whereas in the
case of revival (as Mackinnon defines it) the past is entered in a more symbolic way that
“allows continuity through a process of artistic evolution” (1993: 7).
As communication systems, markets, and modern transport systems have brought
ever more distant parts of the planet within reach, world music—or other people’s folk
music—has to some extent replaced autochthonous folk traditions in offering an alter-
native to the mainstream. Nostalgia for a more wholesome time and place may now
be projected onto someone else’s present rather than one’s own past, and the desire to
take refuge in a simpler, purer world may now be fulfilled by stepping sideways into
contemporary societies elsewhere in the world rather than backwards into a less than
tangible past (see Bithell and Williams, this volume, and Laušević 2007). This sideways
step corresponds to Wallace’s second “choice of identification”—importation—which

he envisages as a parallel choice available to revitalization initiatives alongside revival
with its retrospective orientation. Both strategies may be seen to share, however, a simi-
lar psychological underpinning. Importation may also result not merely in a one-way
borrowing but in mutual exchange or collaboration, in which case it may give rise to the
kinds of musical production that we depict as belonging to the post-revival stage.
Recontextualization and Transformation
Some degree of recontextualization, whether intentional or circumstantial, is inherent

in the very concept of revival. Ronström (this volume) suggests that we conceptualize
revival processes “as shifts between different historic, geographic, social, and cultural
contexts, between the individual and collective, private and public, informal and for-
mal, and between different mythical geographies.” “Shift” is useful in furnishing us with
a comparatively neutral, depoliticized concept that is suggestive as much of a natural
process as of individual intention or institutional strategy. Strictly speaking, recontex-
tualization takes place each time a song, tune, dance, or story passes to a new exponent
(even if it is often masked by a conceptualization of the performer as a faceless conduit
of tradition, perhaps exacerbated by a lack of recognition of the crucial role of individual
variation in many oral traditions). In other cases, the act of recontextualization is more
blatant or dramatic, and it is shifts of this order that most concern us here.
Let us begin by considering the revivalists themselves. As many commentators have
observed, revivals are often set in motion by individuals or clearly defined groups who
are partial outsiders to the chosen tradition rather than core culture-bearers. Hence
the much-remarked paradox at the heart of the North American folk revival of the late
1950s and 1960s, whereby young, white, middle-class, educated city-dwellers champi-
oned and appropriated for themselves the cultural practices of older, black as well as
white, working class, illiterate farmhands, miners, and industrial workers. Examples
from this volume include Native American musicians switching from Western band
and jazz music to the traditional Native flute (Conlon), conservatory students brought
up in Western classical music becoming Finnish folk musicians (Hill), British choirs
learning to sing Georgian polyphony (Bithell), Americans adopting Irish and Iranian
traditions (Williams, Shay), and revivalists re-infusing their own lost traditions with
material from neighboring regions or tribes (Quigley, Levine). Even if they come from
the same region, ethnicity, and class, the first generation of performers of a revived
tradition are usually relative outsiders in the sense of having been raised in different
musical idioms and environments before adopting the revived tradition. Shifts such
as these have sometimes led to the line being drawn between “genuine” inheritors of a
tradition and “revivalists” (as described earlier in this chapter). New converts inevita-
bly adapt the music they discover to their own stylistic preferences and performance
conventions, at times unconsciously. In some cases, they purposely strive to “improve”
the tradition (a practice common especially in romantic nationalist and Soviet revival
efforts). Some incorporate further influences from other sources, resulting in new
hybrid styles, for which Ellen Stekert (1966) proposed the label “new aesthetic.”11 What
is most interesting about these shifts, from a critical perspective, is not the question of
legitimacy as much as the reasons why they happen, what they reveal about broader
psycho-social processes, and what part they play in the subsequent directions taken by
spin-off and roots-based popular music genres.
Dividing lines between traditionalists and revivalists, or insiders and outsiders, have
a pernicious quality and should not be taken at face value. As many of the case studies
gathered here show, the reality is often closer to a continuum than to two sides of a coin.
This becomes especially clear when we consider the contemporary generation, where
many of those who are successful on the global music scene—armed with a diary packed
full of concert and festival dates, and with strings of albums and awards to their credit—
are the children or grandchildren of those who were counted among the “true” guard-
ians and inheritors of the art form and rarely strayed far from home. These younger
pioneers may, at some point on their journey, have helped to drive a revival movement.
At the same time, they themselves grew up “in the tradition” and we may even find the
voices of their younger selves in archival collections of ethnographic field recordings.
Where they differ from their forebears is in the opportunities that were available to
them: The world itself had changed.12
The notion of a continuum, meanwhile, is suggestive of a quasi-evolutionary process
that might be construed as a straight line leading from past to future and this, too, is
misleading. Often, as many of our case studies illustrate, different individual identi-
ties, stances toward tradition, and ways of being with music co-exist (see especially the
chapters by Conlon and Milstein). In some cases, we see the same musicians behaving
in different ways in different contexts and maintaining seemingly divergent styles and
repertoires in parallel. In others, we see different individuals or lineages drawing from
the same musical well but operating in different contexts, or interpreting and taking for-
ward the same traditions in different ways, and some of these pathways may be con-
temporaneous from the outset. Of relevance here is Max Peter Baumann’s model, which
distinguishes between “those who define folk music traditions within the concepts of
purism (with a tendency towards stabilizing or even regressive preservation) and of syn-
cretism (with a tendency towards reinventing the past by emancipatory creation to the
point of breaking the local and regional frontiers)” (1996: 80). These definitions clearly
relate to other differences, such as in the positions adopted with regard to the interpre-
tation of the past on the one hand and the role of the artist on the other. Here we might
most readily think in terms of a spectrum with its suggestion of gradations between two
extreme positions, or alternatively—as we move closer to the notion of post-revival—
sectors of a circle where the shared point of reference is the seed, or question, at the
center but where there is no attempt to establish a hierarchy in the diversity of responses.
Let us now turn our attention to the environment in which a genre or practice tar-
geted for revival is performed. In the folk music revival archetype, one of the first acts
of recontextualization is often a shift from the fireside, barn, village square, or other
intimate location where friends and neighbors gather to make music and dance, to the
concert stage, where the performer is clearly distinguished from the rest of the company,
who are now assigned to the role of audience. This shift from—to adopt Thomas Turino’s
(2008) terminology—participatory to presentational performance has many ramifica-
tions. It demands a degree of organization: a date is set, the event is publicized, and tick-
ets are sold. The performance thus becomes a transaction: money changes hands and
expectations are set up. This in turn might inspire some adjustments on the part of the
performer. Instrumental accompaniment may be added to songs that are more often
sung a cappella. Intervals may be standardized so as to make the music sound more “in
tune” to the modern ear. As performers become more accomplished, they may be eager
to push the boundaries beyond traditional standards of artistry. As a next step, an artist
may start to receive invitations to perform further afield and thus may assume a new role
as cultural ambassador. In appearing at festivals, he or she may be exposed to different
kinds of music and have the opportunity to exchange tunes, stylistic approaches, and
ideas about the meaning of tradition and the role of the performer. Some of these influ-
ences will be taken back to the home culture, where they will appear as innovations—
perhaps framed positively as inspired advances or, more negatively, as departures from
the tradition.
All of this is part of a gradual process of professionalization, institutionalization, com-
mercialization, and commodification. Artists who continue on this path and become
ever more cosmopolitan in their outlook may be accused of moving away from their
roots or of selling out to fame and fortune. Performers themselves are often keenly aware
of the tensions accompanying such a trajectory and struggle to find their own balance
between faithfulness to, respect for, or continuity with “the tradition” and their right
to pursue their own creative paths as autonomous artists. Some have argued that all
traditions start somewhere, and there is no reason why what today seems like a new
departure should not become the tradition of tomorrow. Here we may note Eyerman
and Jamison’s proposal (referencing Rosenberg 1993) that “what is at work in periods
of recombination or transformation is both more creative than revival and less creative
than invention.. . . Musical traditions are . . . made, and remade, in processes of mobiliza-
tion” (1998: 38–39). At the same time, transformations wrought through revival efforts
may open up alternative artistic pathways that provide opportunities for creativity not
available in other idioms.
Mackinnon’s category of re-enactment is again relevant here. Many of those who
identify as traditional musicians would themselves argue that they are not aiming to,
and should not be expected to, reproduce their music or dance exactly as it was at some
putative point in the past. If this were the goal, then the result (this argument continues)
would be nothing more than a museum piece. The notion that a tradition is fixed is in
any case a fallacy. A tradition is always in movement and for something to continue
as part of a healthy, living tradition it has to correspond with the needs and concerns
of its own time. This rationale holds even greater sway if the performers in question
are seeking to enlarge their audience or convert more followers to their cause. They
may be promoting a form or practice that is marked as ancient, and the accompanying
discourse may be rife with references to history and the past, but the product itself has
to appear both relevant and palatable. In some cases, the argument that music has to
change in order to survive might appear as little more than a rhetorical ploy to justify
innovations that might otherwise be cast as more radical departures, but rhetoric is also
what interests us here. Meanwhile, in some contexts (including the new Grammy Award
categories, drastically modified in 2012), “roots” now serves as a catchall label embrac-
ing what may once have been juxtaposed as traditional and contemporary, or authentic
and revivalist, and to some extent erases—albeit controversially—the thorny distinc-
tions between them.
In other types of revivals, recontextualizations may follow different paths. In the
process of reviving classical music and dance traditions, a (semi-)professional art form
patronized by a small elite may be made available for the masses (see Nooshin, this vol-
ume). Sacred traditions may be transplanted from temples to secular institutions (see
Walker, this volume). A professionalized, commercialized recorded music may be trans-
formed through revival into a participatory folk tradition, as happened in the bluegrass
revival (see Rosenberg 1985).
In the process of these various repositionings, many transformations take place: in
aesthetic norms and tastes, in the relationship between performer and audience, in the
creative dialogue between the performer and the musical raw materials, in the aspira-
tions of the individual artist, in performance contexts and locations, in the functions
and meanings attached to the music and its performance, and in broader rationaliza-
tions about the place of music in society and the nature of tradition in the modern world.
The theme of revival as transformation surfaces often in the literature: see, for example,
Burt Feintuch’s chapter “Musical Revival as Musical Transformation” that provided the
inspiration for the title of the collection Transforming Tradition (1993). In some ways,
the “trans” prefix—transition, translation, transubstantiation, transportation, transfor-
mation—is helpful in letting us off the “re” hook (see Slobin, this volume) and giving us
more positive endorsement to face forwards rather than backwards.
Transformation is often linked conceptually with innovation while innova-
tion continues to be juxtaposed to tradition, as suggested by the titles Transforming
Folk: Innovation and Tradition in English Folk-rock Music (Burns 2012) and Indigenous
Popular Music in North America: Continuations and Innovations (Neuenfeldt 2002).
Innovation is nonetheless worthy of investigation in its own right. Milstein (this vol-
ume) suggests that “revival currents, as distinguished from movements, open avenues
for innovation rather than recycling practices or re-creating a fictitious past.” Yet recy-
cling pre-existing material in new ways—one of the most fundamental creative tech-
niques (see Boden 2004 and Lessig 2004, 2008)—is a common means for the renewal
of music cultures. Innovation processes that directly manipulate historical material, or
that more loosely draw inspiration from imagined pasts, are fundamental components
of revival (see especially Conlon and Hill, this volume). Such transformations may relate
to the musical fabric—the music itself—or may be at the level of new uses and functions,
new contexts and meanings, new cultural infrastructures, new markets and means of
dissemination. Of course, some aspects may be renewed while others stay the same or
even revert to an earlier form, and critical observers may be more alert to these nuances
than those closer to the tradition’s epicenter (see Sweers, this volume). Other dynamics
are at work in diasporic situations where musical practices in the new homeland may
be preserved in a form closer to how the tradition used to be in the world that was left
behind. While the geographical displacement may be monumental, the temporal dis-
placement may be on an entirely different scale. Time may be slowed down in compar-
ison with the homeland, such that more “ancient” practices are preserved in the new
location while, in the original location, the tradition has moved on. Perhaps the most
important point to underline here is that transformations are never monolithic: They
are not a neatly choreographed affair where everyone moves in the same direction at the
same time.
Authenticity, Authority, and Legitimacy
As recontextualizations engender transformations in sound, practice, and context, the

new generation of performers (whether technically “outsiders” or not) are left vulner-
able to having their right to be bearers and innovators of a tradition questioned. There
are numerous examples of scholars, government policy-makers, and even revival art-
ists themselves doubting or denying the legitimacy of revivalists and their music. As
discussed above, folklore scholarship has a long history of dismissing revivalists. In
musicological discourse, debates about authenticity in the early music revival have been
extremely heated, particularly regarding with what authority modern performers inter-
pret historical music, as exemplified in Taruskin’s article “The Authenticity Movement
Can Become a Positivistic Purgatory, Literalist and Dehumanizing” (1984) (see also
Leech-Wilkinson 2002, Morrow 1978, and Waitzman 1980).13 In relation to government
policies, specific notions of authenticity may be employed to judge which types of musi-
cians are deemed worthy of recognition and support as National Heritage Fellows or
Living Human Treasures and which are not (see Conlon, Howard, and Jabbour, this vol-
ume, and Titon 1993). Some revival artists may feel themselves unauthorized and censor
their own creativity. Others may feel frustrated, defensive, or defiant in the face of oth-
ers’ judgments of their authenticity (see Shay, this volume).
Thus, establishing authenticity is often a crucial act if revival artists are to gain accep-
tance and respect for themselves and their music. In instances in which revivalists are
striving to achieve an activist agenda or to establish a viable alternative to the main-
stream, conferring authenticity can also be a useful strategy for obtaining support and
acceptance for change. In such cases, the evocation of the past may help to disguise
change and innovation as conservativism and preservation (see, for example, Hill, Shay,
and Walker, this volume).
In nearly every instance of revival, then, authenticity is invoked, and frequently hotly
contested. Often, however, artists and scholars alike have been guilty of conflating the
definition of authenticity with the idealized criteria used to establish authenticity. As
Weisethaunet and Lindberg observe, while authenticity may be perceived by academics

as a quality ascribed to representations, most others take it literally as an essence inher-
ent in an object (2010: 465–466). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the terms
authentic and authenticity invoke a sense of genuineness, “being true in substance,”
and “being what it professes to be in terms of origin or authorship.” Additionally, and
significantly, they also carry the meanings of being authoritative, valid, and “of estab-
lished credit,” as well as being “entitled to acceptance or belief,” and, in the original 1340
usage, “entitled to obedience or respect.” In sum, the label “authentic” expresses a triple
meaning: genuine, authoritative, and deserving of our credence. Successfully and con-
vincingly wielding this label thus has the potential to confer power and legitimacy. The
process of establishing authenticity begins with the highly selective and subjective iden-
tification of particular aspects or elements in a music-culture, followed by the decision
that they should be perpetuated and the assertion of their value. These selections become
ideals, models to strive towards, measures of assessment, and the criteria for establish-
ing authenticity. In revivals, these idealized criteria are often historical—though history
may be reinterpreted, imagined, or selectively focused in order to emphasize criteria
that resonate with contemporary interests. In popular music or the visual arts, other
more contemporary criteria, such as authorship or self-expression, may be more highly
regarded. The agents who determine the criteria for authenticity may be scholars and
collectors, producers and promoters, artists, or fans; conflicting assertions of authentic-
ity amongst different parties are not uncommon (see Hill, Merchant, Shay, and Walker,
this volume).14
The types of criteria upon which authenticity hinges vary widely according to cul-
tural and historical context. The selection of ideals reflects shifting technology, politi-
cal motives, and general intellectual leanings.15 Nevertheless, we have observed broad
trends in what may be categorized as (1) product-oriented criteria, (2) person-oriented
criteria, and (3) process-oriented criteria.
Product-oriented criteria encompass physical objects such as manuscripts, ephem-
eral objects such as songs, and sound products in both recordings and live perfor-
mances. In notated traditions that venerate music as text, revival movements may
prioritize repertoire and focus on composers’ sketches and certain editions as authori-
tative. In orally transmitted traditions, the documentation of melodies and song lyrics
into written notation before the advent of recording technology led to a high valuation
of melodies and texts that were perceived to be the most traditional (epitomized in
Anglo scholarship by the obsession with Child ballads). Increasing availability of audio
recordings facilitated a focus on idealized sounds, such as timbre, accents, ornamen-
tation, and other elements referred to as style, as well as production-related sounds,
such as acoustic and unprocessed sound (see Rosenberg 1993: 12–13 and Feintuch 1993).
The emphasis on period instruments, temperament, and intonation in the historically
informed performance movement in Western art music also exemplifies sound product
as authenticity criterion.
Person-oriented criteria comprise the traits of source musicians or communities, per-
formers, and/or creators. One common trend is to idealize persons hailing from remote
regions that are believed to have been isolated from some of the conditions that caused
cultural change in the revivalists’ population centers (e.g., industrialization, religious
conversion, political revolutions, or economic development).16 Such cases discussed
in this volume include Hungarian revivalists appropriating music from Romanian
Transylvania (Quigley), Finnish revivalists collecting material from Russian Karelia
(Hill), and French scholars researching songs in Québec (Haines). Age and education
are other person-oriented criteria, employed especially by collectors in seeking out
source musicians (see Sharp 1917 and Lord 1960, who both valued songs collected from
older illiterate singers).
The most problematic and potentially insidious person-oriented criterion for authen-
ticity is ethnicity, which stems largely from the blood-and-soil variety of nationalism.
This is particularly relevant in revivals of folk music—not surprisingly, as the term folk
(or Volk) was coined by Johann Gottfried von Herder, whose widely disseminated pro-
paganda about folksongs as the soul of a nation still influences the significance of folk
music around the world. However, it may also be employed in other idioms, such as jazz.
A prime illustration in this volume is Merchant’s exposition of her informants’ belief
that tradition is in the blood and that proficiency in Uzbek music is correlated with hav-
ing Uzbek bloodlines.
A key contemporary arena in which person-oriented criteria are employed is in the
contentious authentication of who owns tradition. Such debates often pivot between
the aim to protect the heritage of certain ethnocultural groups (especially indigenous
ones) from exploitation versus the desire for artists around the world to have access to
traditional material in the public domain, regardless of their ethnic heritage, and not
have their creativity limited by intellectual property restrictions (Brown 2003; see also
McCann 2001, Mills 1996, and Zemp 1996). Communal ownership of a shared tradition
may be relatively clear for an intimate and participatory music culture such as the Suya
in the Amazon basin (Seeger 1992). However, when the concept of communal ownership
is extended from localized networks of physically interactive and interrelated people to
the imagined community of the nation, then there is a danger that the primary criterion
for determining the authority of a tradition holder may be his or her ethnicity or nation-
ality. As Brown (2003) warns, one group’s urge to claim ownership of cultural goods may
well obscure the creole nature of the goods themselves and deny similar rights to other
groups that share the goods’ collective history of creation and stewardship. This situa-
tion has created tense arguments in Hungary and Romania over the purity and owner-
ship of musical heritage from ethnically diverse Transylvania (see Quigley, this volume).
Issues become even more complicated when individuals shift their ethnic identifica-
tion (Gallaugher, this volume) or when the ethnocultural boundaries of the group are
extended or contracted into different configurations (see Hill 2007).
Much emic discourse about authenticity emphasizes purity, and in particular eth-
nic purity. These ideals are especially prominent in the initial stages of postcolonial,
post-independence, and postwar situations, as demonstrated here by chapters on India
(Walker), Ukraine (Helbig), Uzbekistan (Merchant), and Vietnam (Norton). The use
of ethnic criteria in establishing and contesting claims to particular musical genres or
instruments came to the fore particularly strongly in the context of the Balkan wars of
the 1990s (see Longinović 2000, Pettan 1998, and Ceribašić, this volume). In the process
of claiming ethnic purity, however, intercultural influences are frequently underplayed
(see Helbig, Norton, and Walker). Conversely, a small but growing trend has been to
herald hybridity as a criterion of authenticity (see Gallaugher and Levine, this volume,
and Taylor 2007).17 Meanwhile, in cases in which musicians participate in the perfor-
mance of traditions originating from other ethnic groups, these ethnic “outsiders” must
find other ways of asserting their authority as performers (see Bithell, Conlon, and
Williams, this volume).
If the essentializing tendencies of person-oriented authentication are at their most
extreme in the case of ethnicity, similar processes of authentication may also apply to
other criteria, and here, too, they are laden with unequal power dynamics. Several chap-
ters in this collection illustrate the continuation of different plays of power, whether in
relation to gender inequalities (Conlon, Helbig, and Walker), racism and xenophobia
(Blaustein and Ceribašić), or class inequalities (Blaustein, Howard, and Walker). Yet by
the end of the twentieth century, attitudes towards notions of purity and authenticity
had shifted—albeit not globally—as certain restrictions imposed in the name of tradi-
tion could now, from the perspective of civil or human rights, be framed as discrimina-
tory: sexist, racist, elitist, or imperialist. The desire to respect a people’s culture balanced
by the need to protect human rights have led to significant tensions, which, though
rarely motivated by specifically musical concerns, have colored the climate in which
public cultural displays take place. This has, in some cases, lent a different kind of legiti-
macy to those seeking to break through local restrictions.
While many of the person-oriented criteria discussed thus far are group centered,
another important stream centers on the individual. Establishing individual author-
ship is one of the most important grounds for authentication in the art world (for
example, establishing whether a particular painting really was painted by Van Gogh).
Lineage may be another important means for individual artists to establish their
authenticity (see Walker, this volume). Meanwhile, in Western art music, perform-
ers, conductors, and editors often vie to establish authority by invoking the composer’s
intentions—which Taruskin sees as another means of asserting personal authority
(1992: 317).
A third commonly invoked category of authenticity criteria is process-oriented. This
category includes transmission, creation, and reception. Historically, great emphasis
has been placed on the circumstances of transmission for establishing the authentic-
ity of both source musicians and revivalist performers and this continues to carry sig-
nificant weight in many circles. Depending on the cultural context, oral transmission
and guru-apprentice relationships have often been considered more valid than learn-
ing via books or institutions. (This value system is sometimes used to authenticate
scholar-performers within the field of ethnomusicology—for example, in assessing how
ethnomusicologists achieve their “bimusical” credentials.) Institutionalized transmis-
sion has been relatively underplayed and understudied in ethnomusicological literature
to date. In this volume, case studies by Hill, Merchant, and Quigley reveal some of the
authentication strategies employed by academy musicians and institutions (see also

Keegan-Phipps 2007).
Creative processes seem to have become a more highly valued index of authenticity
since the latter third of the twentieth century, particularly in Western contexts. A gen-
eral shift from product-oriented to creative process-oriented criteria may have been
influenced by several factors. Albert Lord’s (1960) groundbreaking work on oral com-
position encouraged folklore and classics scholars to focus on traditional creative pro-
cesses around the world (see the journal Oral Tradition and, e.g., Pihl 1994 and Titon
1994). Since many folklore scholars were also engaged as agents of revival, this intel-
lectual trend influenced revival activities as well (see Hill, this volume). Political pro-
test song movements, such as those in the United States and in Latin America in the
1960s, foregrounded the composition of topical songs in folk-inspired styles in response
to current events. Though later developing into less overtly political singer-songwriter
genres, the emphasis on writing songs in response to life experiences has in many cases
remained, and iconic role models such as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Victor Jara, and
Silvio Rodríguez continue to be revered and emulated. Furthermore, Weisethaunet and
Lindberg (2010) suggest that literature on the blues as an expression of deeply felt emo-
tions influenced the development of expressing one’s feelings as an important marker of
authenticity in rock discourse. As many later revival generations were raised with rock
as a part of their mainstream cultural environment, this valuation of personal expres-
sion has been carried back over into folk and traditional music.
Valuing creative process may entail concerted efforts to learn traditional musical
vocabulary, forms, and syntax so that revivalist performers can compose and improvise
in a traditional style, as in Ronström’s (1998) description of the Swedish folk revival. It
may entail the invention of a new method for the systematic generation of professedly
traditional music, as in the development of the radif in Iran (Nooshin, this volume). Or
it may be embraced in a more abstract valuation of individual and artistic expression,
as in the Finnish ideal of embodying the creative folk spirit and synthesizing all of one’s
influences (both traditional and otherwise) into personal creations (Hill, this volume).
Such emphasis on, and valuation of, musical process usually allows for greater degrees
of individuality, artistic freedom, and innovation.
Revival activities oriented more towards innovation and creativity may be perceived
by some as being less traditional or pure, as depicted in Baumann’s (1996) model of
purism versus syncretism as contrasting revival approaches. In effect, this is a case of
conflicting authenticity criteria. Innovation, if pursued according to certain criteria,
may be argued to be just as traditional and authentic as faithful replications of histori-
cal pieces. Indeed, in instances in which shifts have occurred from product-oriented to
process-oriented approaches, the new generation of revivalists often attempt to delegiti-
mize the earlier revivalists’ authenticity markers: Ronström’s description of this process
in Sweden, for example, critiques earlier revivalists who “merely reproduce the collec-
tive leftovers stored in museums and archives” (1998: 40–41; see also Hill and Merchant,
this volume, and Filene 2000: 183–232). Under other circumstances, as Livingston
(1999: 80–81) notes, innovation may be an indicator that the revival has moved into a
post-revival phase and historical authenticity is no longer an overriding concern. These

trends chime with Feintuch’s suggestion that “it works better to think of tradition as a
territory of the imagination rather than as a standard for some notion of authenticity”
(2006: 9).
The reception process is described by Ronström (this volume) as “the authentic-
ity of the consumer”: “The authentic is the experience, the taste, or the emotion. What
is true is what feels true, a position explored by the growing experience industry.” To
this we might add Weisethaunet and Lindberg’s (2010) depiction of the “authenticity
of experience” as a fan’s ability to identify with someone else’s musical expression or see
themselves in a new light by listening to a piece of music. Here we focus more on the
consumer’s judgement of the performance and/or the performer. This layer of authentic-
ity exists in a realm apart from the performer’s understanding of authenticity. To some
extent, it depends on expectation—an expectation that may be ill-informed, based on
mythology, inherited prejudice, or manipulated by market forces. At its most mundane
level it may focus on visible signs and symbols such as costume and, in the case of “folk”
performances, baskets, floral wreaths, pitchforks, guns, or other such accoutrements.
(See Shay, this volume, for examples of Orientalist expectations influencing Iranian art-
ists; for more on the importance of visual symbols, see Helbig, Moulin, and Sweers, this
volume.) The mismatch between consumer expectation and artistic intention (or con-
temporary reality) has been especially remarked upon with regard to world music art-
ists from the African continent, who have often found themselves accused by Western
audiences of inauthenticity for their failure to match an antiquated, colonial-flavored,
and ultimately racist imagining of Africa as “primitive,” “natural,” and in other ways
pre-modern—sometimes marked by a proliferation of drums and grass skirts. Timothy
Taylor (1997) has used the term “strategic inauthenticity” to describe the stances adopted
by artists such as Angélique Kidjo and Youssou N’Dour, who have insisted on their right
to appear, and make music, as autonomous, creative artists and as citizens of a modern,
cosmopolitan world. This stance relates to a broader discourse often adopted by artists
at the more innovative end of the spectrum who speak of authenticity in terms of being
true to one’s own creative impulse, one’s own life experience, and the concerns of one’s
own age or era. The conservatism or prejudices of some world music audiences notwith-
standing, the international stage has been an important space for artists to create and
explore away from the scrutiny and authenticity criteria of the home community.
Transmission, Dissemination, and

Promotion
In order for a music revival to be successful, revivalists must publicize their selected
tradition to new audiences and enable new performers to learn. The inevitable recon-
textualizations of traditions undergoing revival, whether temporal, geographical, or
social, often lead to radical changes in the nature of transmission and dissemination.
In folk music revivals, a fundamental shift frequently occurs from in-person, informal
oral transmission to more deliberate, formalized, and often standardized methods, usu-
ally supported by new infrastructures. In almost all cases hereditary modes of transmis-
sion have to be modified because those of the revivalist generation have not grown up
in the tradition and therefore need to be initiated in a way that allows them to bypass
more organic, lifelong processes of acculturation and apprenticeship. New teaching and
learning methods have to be found, especially if revival musicians do not have access
to a community of primary culture-bearers or source practitioners. In some cases, this
may be because the last generation of guardians of the tradition in its original habitat has
already passed away or because artists and teachers have been lost as a result of war or
natural disaster.
In considering transmission processes, Ronström’s equation of revival to an act
of translation suggests helpful perspectives. A translator does not set out to substan-
tially change the original text, yet the new text he or she produces is rarely a literal,
word-for-word translation: In order to make sense to the target reader, it has to involve
some degree of reinterpretation informed by knowledge of the cultural context in which
it will be received. In recent thinking in the field of literary translation, a distinction has
been made between “cultural transfer” as a one-way activity (akin, perhaps, to trans-
plantation) and “cultural transmission” as a reciprocal process that emphasizes the
mediatory and pioneering role of the transmitter.18 In the case of revivals, transmitters
always play a crucial role, whether the students with whom they are working are from
a foreign culture or simply from a different social class or age set. Revivalists who have
consciously learnt a tradition after being introduced to it later in life, as opposed to hav-
ing been born into it, may be well positioned to undertake the role of transmitter, which,
in addition to musicianship, demands a facility for pedagogical communication and the
ability to explain the tradition to outsiders or newcomers. Source musicians may offer
the best role models but they are not necessarily the best teachers and translators.
Proactive dissemination, via a range of media, may be required either to help draw
in and train new converts or to bring the musical output of revivalists to a wider audi-
ence. In addition to the revivalists themselves, stakeholders may come to include record
companies, music publishers, festival and tour organizers, and archives. Changes in the
wider word have also influenced modes of dissemination. Many latter-day revival cul-
tures have been strongly impacted by the spread of new media and technologies, the
emergence of the world music industry, and trends in heritage conservation and cul-
tural tourism.
The earliest method used by revivalist-collectors to disseminate their work and pro-
vide learning materials was to publish collections of musical notation, for example in
national songbooks. In the process of rendering orally transmitted music into notation
changes were inevitably introduced. Some of these changes have been the unconscious
results of mishearing, the inadequacy of notation in capturing all dimensions of a per-
formance, and the isolation and decontextualization of small segments of music from
a larger whole. Other changes have been deliberate as collectors “corrected” texts and
melodies to fit their own aesthetics or adapted them in ways that made them more suit-
able (in their eyes) for popular consumption. In order to encourage the widespread
performance of the songs and tunes they collected revivalists have been known to
simplify melodies by omitting ornamentation and variation, force them into standard
time signatures and tonalities, and add what they perceived as more modern accom-
paniment. Such compromises often helped make the material more accessible to new-
comers to the tradition, in some instances allowing it to spread like wildfire as acolytes
eagerly added the latest new item to their personal repertoire (as in the case of the
American publication Sing Out! whose circulation reached tens of thousands in the
early 1960s).
As technologies developed, learning materials were made available in a variety of new
media, beginning with audio recordings. While learning from audio recordings may
reduce the changes brought about by the subjective process of transcription and the
limitations of notation, and may be considered by some to be a form of oral transmis-
sion, it nevertheless introduces changes in transmission. The fact that learners are likely
to listen to the same version of a piece over and over, for example, may lead to a loss of
variation and a degree of standardization and homogenization.
The publication of revival materials in print and recorded forms has usually occurred
alongside a new performance culture supported by dedicated infrastructures, such as
record labels, folk clubs, and festivals. Record companies, distributors, and festivals that
may have started out as grassroots initiatives have often become part of an established
industry now firmly embedded in a capitalist economy and driven by other agendas
(financial, regulatory, etc.). Promotion of the product itself is often accompanied by the
dissemination of a discourse and rhetoric, via CD liner notes, concert programs, web-
sites, and reviews, and this is one means by which received histories gain wider currency
and claims to legitimacy are reinforced (see Conlon and Moulin, this volume). Some
forms of promotion, such as competitions, may introduce further changes in perfor-
mance practice via the rules they enforce (see Goertzen 1997).
Festivals and folk clubs have been important sites for newcomers to hear and meet
their role models in person, as well as for networking and community building in
general (see Blaustein and Quigley, this volume). Festivals also offer unprecedented
opportunities for artists and promoters to showcase their products, and have been
especially significant in bringing revived repertoires to the attention of ever more
diverse audiences, including tourists (see Keegan-Phipps and Winter, this volume).
Rebranding contemporary interpretations of folk music as world music, folk-rock,
post-folk, nu-folk, or other trendier labels may extend their appeal to home audiences
whose habitual comfort zone may be rock, jazz, indie singer-songwriter, or main-
stream popular music, as well as to new international audiences for world music. Large
festivals with multiple stages also allow for cross-programming and for casual encoun-
ters, on the part of festival-goers, with styles of music that they would not deliberately
seek out.19
Opportunities for “foreign” enthusiasts to learn to perform music or dance from
outside their own culture have also become more widespread. These include the
participatory taster workshops included in many festival programs, intensive summer

schools (often in the country of origin), and weekly classes in the student’s own local-
ity. Such cross-cultural transmission calls for teaching styles to be adapted to the new
context and in some cases special teaching methodologies have been developed explic-
itly for non-native learners (see Bithell, Conlon, Shay, and Williams, this volume, and
Solís 2004).
Other key locations for the transmission and dissemination of traditions-in-revival
have been national institutions, including conservatoires. In many cases, the institu-
tional support of previously marginalized idioms has been part of a broader official proj-
ect to reconfigure national identity and history, following either independence from a
former colonial power or radical regime change (see Merchant, Neveu Kringelbach, and
Nooshin, this volume). In other cases (particularly in socialist and socialist-democratic
countries), the adoption of a revived tradition into state-supported academies has been
tied to a populist or socialist-oriented democratization of music culture by accommo-
dating the “music of the people” in prestigious cultural spaces previously reserved for
elite Western art music. In addition to training new generations of professional musi-
cians and music teachers, the process of institutionalization has substantial impacts,
which, to summarize briefly, may include professionalization, artification, standard-
ization, homogenization, an imposition of Western art music pedagogy and values, the
development of traditional music theories, status changes, the creation of new hierar-
chies, and the intensification and dissemination of certain value systems and ideological
agendas.20
At the governmental level, policies of international bodies such as UNESCO have
exerted increasing influence on national strategies for cultural promotion. Since
2001, traditional forms of expression from all parts of the world have been added to
UNESCO’s masterpiece proclamations and listings of intangible cultural heritage. In
order to become a party to the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible
Cultural Heritage, a state must commit itself “to take the necessary measures to ensure
the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage present in its territory” by com-
piling inventories and documentation, and by “endeavour[ing] to ensure the widest
possible participation of those that create, maintain and transmit the heritage, and to
involve them actively in its management” (UNESCO 2003). The many ramifications
of UNESCO’s interventions and related state policies are explored in the chapters by
Bithell, Howard, and Norton.
In the twenty-first century, the Internet also serves as an important platform for
both the dissemination of teaching materials and the creation of new networks, whose
members may exchange materials and experiences, and even perform together, without
ever meeting face-to-face (see Blaustein, this volume). At this level, revival continues to
thrive as a grassroots, bottom-up activity but its community is more likely to take the
form of a scattered, transnational affinity group than a local collective or national sub-
culture. This kind of community also partakes of the nature of diaspora—another fea-
ture of the postcolonial world that has assumed ever-greater prominence as a theoretical
tool as well as an existential reality (see, e.g., Gandhi 1998).
The Post-revival Turn: Revival Legacies
The kinds of shifts—recontextualizations, transformations, and innovations—sum-

marized thus far inevitably introduce changes to a tradition and may result in a music
or dance practice initially selected for revival evolving to a point where it has become
something new that now enjoys an independent existence, free of its once symbiotic
connection to a particular social, political, or aesthetic cause. The motivation behind
the original revival impulse may in any case have lost much of its potency as the core
revivalists have either achieved their objectives or moved on—whether to other causes
or to new identities as independent performing artists in the commercial entertain-
ment world. Spin-off traditions may also evolve in different directions as some of the
original revivalists, or the next generation to whom they pass the baton, seek to break
free from the restrictions imposed by the purist arm of the revival and develop practices
more apropos to their own contemporary reality. Regardless of how progressive these
changes may be, aspects of the revivalist discourse and value system nonetheless con-
tinue to carry influence (for examples, see Ceribašić, Conlon, Howard, and Milstein,
this volume).
In other instances, the revived practices may undergo less radical shifts as they
gradually settle into something akin to Wallace’s (1956) “new steady state” (preceded,
in Wallace’s model for religious revitalization movements, by phases of “adaptation,”
“transformation,” and “routinization”), and this may involve their adoption by the
mainstream. They might undergo a process of classicalization or gentrification, in the
course of which they are accommodated to the dominant musical discourse, or they
might become “hip” in the eyes of a younger generation for whom retro is progressive.
Alternatively, they may retain a more niche identity apart from the mainstream but with
their future seemingly secure in the hands of a new subculture or affinity group. (For
examples of various “new steady states,” see Blaustein, Hill, Jabbour, and Quigley, this
volume.) As they evolve, these revived traditions may become less bound to demands
for legitimacy and stringent rules governing authenticity: compromises may be made
or anxieties relaxed as broader horizons are glimpsed. The identities assumed by leading
exponents may also change—for example, from cultural militant to cultural ambassa-
dor or creative artist.
Some commentators have referred to these developments in terms of a breakdown
of the original revival. Ellen Koskoff, for instance, suggests that all revivals go through a
period of boom and bust before they break down completely (2005: 69). Livingston also
speaks in terms of “breakdown” in describing how the tension between preservation
and conservation on one hand and creativity and innovation on the other can lead to a
splintering of the revival community into fundamentalist and progressive factions. Is
such breakdown inevitable and does it in fact equate to demise? If so, what fills the space
that the revival vacates? Conversely, might a revival ever be said to be “never-ending,” as
the title of Michael Scully’s (2008) book would have it? The new wave of resurgence in
English folk music in the early twenty-first century was hailed by some as a third revival.
Does this suggest a cycle that will simply go on and on, until we reach a tenth, a fiftieth,
or a hundredth revival? Both Jabbour and Levine (this volume) explain revival phenom-
ena as a recurring, cyclical process that is part of the natural ebb and flow of culture.
Certainly the myriad manifestations of revival described in these collected essays dem-
onstrate the universality of the appropriation and employment of the past as a tool com-
monly employed by humans to (re)shape their cultural environment in times of need.
Nevertheless, for each surge of revival activity, logic suggests that there will come a time
when a particular revival movement might be said to have either failed or succeeded. If
a once-neglected genre has been safely reinstated and is no longer at risk of extinction,
then it no longer makes sense to frame it in terms of revival. This is not, however, the end
of the story. The question remains: what comes after revival?
Here we suggest a theoretical middle ground between the two poles of breakdown
and never-ending revival, for which we adopt the notion of post-revival. A post-revival
phase is characterized first and foremost by the recognition that a revived tradition has
become firmly established in a new context where it can no longer be described as either
moribund or threatened and is therefore no longer in need of rescue. This post-revival
space may also be populated by spin-off genres and practices—the “new sounds, new
textures, and new repertoires” for which the revival served as a catalyst (Livingston
1999: 81). Of course, the transition to a post-revival state is, in practice, a gradual pro-
cess. Usually, there is no clear boundary between “revival” and “post-revival,” and in
some cases we might identify particular trends as having a post-revival quality while
others remain rooted in a revivalist gestalt. As a concept, however, post-revival is espe-
cially useful for the way in which it allows us to acknowledge the significance of the
original revival impulse and to identify a new musical or social culture as part of its
legacy. Post-revival also recommends itself as an analytical tool because of the ways
in which it resonates with other “posts”: post-modern, post-industrial, post-colonial,
post-national, post-ethnic—terms which color the ethnographic environments of many
of the case studies in this volume.
“What comes after revival?” was precisely the question on the lips of many Corsican
musicians as they recognized that the riacquistu (lit. reacquisition) set in motion in the
1970s had succeeded not only in reversing the decline to which traditional music had
seemed to be condemned but in elevating it to an unprecedented position of prestige that
coincided with its entry into the world music market—a circumstance that introduced
new dilemmas and challenges, as captured in Jean-François Bernardini’s trenchant
observation that “to preserve what you have acquired is one thing, to give it a future is
another” (cited in an edition of Corse-Matin, 2000). For many late- or post-revival art-
ists, the answer to the question “what next?” has lain in exploring their individual cre-
ativity alongside experimenting with a more eclectic palette of musical idioms, including
influences from beyond their own culture. In explicitly drawing a line under the revival
proper, musicians free themselves from the apron strings of “tradition,” laying claim to
their right to move forward in the same way that any artist who has never been cast as a
spokesperson for a tradition is allowed to move forward, and inviting audiences to judge
their work on its own merits. At the same time, revivals may leave behind a foundation
of infrastructures—financial, institutional, social, and knowledge-based—that serve as
platforms for new post-revival artists entering careers in national institutions or global
markets. Revival legacies also bestow many signifiers—particularly related to ethnicity,
nationality, and heritage—which post-revival artists must maneuver and manipulate.
These post-revival turns present a new set of questions. As musicians engage with the
global music industry and incorporate influences from the transnational networks in
which they now operate, how do they conceptualize their relationship with the home
tradition? How do they reposition themselves in terms of genre or style? How does their
view of their role as artist change? A range of answers to these and other questions are
presented in the case studies assembled here.
Is revival itself, then, just a phase? In some senses, the answer has to be yes. One of
the most significant shifts of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been
the music industry’s recasting of folk or “roots” music as world music. This has its par-
allel in the realm of cultural policy and conservation where local traditions have been
redefined as world heritage or, in UNESCO’s terms, the intangible cultural heritage of
humanity. This particular shift—from an inward- to an outward-facing stance, and from
local and national to global frames of reference—is of cardinal significance, as under-
lined in the theoretical contributions by Ronström and Sweers (this volume). In this
context, post-revival sits within broader trends and processes—as captured, for exam-
ple, in Arjun Appadurai’s model of global flows (1996) or Ulf Hannerz’s theorization
of transnational connections (1996)—and enters into articulation with contemporary
redefinitions of cosmopolitanism, globalization, and ethnicity as offered by these and
other cultural theorists. The language of postcolonial theory is of critical importance in
allowing us to conceptualize contemporary identities and intercultural relations free of
the shadows cast by the old world order. Yet running across this new landscape we can
clearly trace the tracks leading out from once local revival movements and, at a more
global level, we can understand the contemporary trends captured in this new language
as part of the continuing, age-old cycle of cultural renewal.
The ultimate drawback of the “post” option, of course, is that it still ties us to what
has gone before and in so doing denies the present its own identity, its own dynamic, its
own validity. Considering cultural manifestations as post-revival developments allows
us to give revivalists their due by uncovering the full impact of the “work” of revival and
acknowledging the universal and continuous significance of revival as a fundamental
cultural process. At the same time, post-revival sows the seeds of a new beginning.
Contents Overview
The thirty diverse chapters in this collection are divided into eight thematically orga-
nized sections. The first set of essays provides a theoretical foundation that paves the way
for the rich selection of case studies brought together in the following seven sections.
These case studies, punctuated by ethnographically informed conceptual essays, docu-

ment revival initiatives and theorize their multivalent impacts on music and dance cul-
tures around the world. The volume concludes with a short Afterword.
Section I, “Towards Multiple Theories of Music Revival,” comprises three essays
whose authors debate the various significances of revival, deconstruct revival as cultural
process, and propose new models for understanding the effects of revival in the contem-
porary world. Following this introductory chapter, Owe Ronström offers a framework
for theorizing the discursive move from “tradition” to “heritage.” Presenting revivals as
decontextualizations, metaphorical transformations, and shifts between different his-
toric, geographic, social, and cultural contexts, he goes on to explicate the critical shift
from knowers to doers and marketers as revival agents and to propose that “heritage”
can be seen as a homogenizing counterforce to the diversifying and globalizing forces of
post- or late modernity. Tamara Livingston reflects on how the influential revival model
that she proposed in her 1999 Ethnomusicology article has subsequently been applied
and adapted to a variety of case studies and suggests how this model might be expanded.
Highlighting the participatory aspects of revivals as sites of social bonding and significa-
tion, she proposes that revivals play a vital role as powerful agents of cultural renewal
and social reintegration.
Section II, “Scholars and Collectors as Revival Agents,” focuses our attention on the
critical role played by academics, documentarians, and public folklorists in revival
processes—a role that has often been under-scrutinized. Early music scholar John
Haines chronicles the intellectual history of antiquarians, the shared roots of musicol-
ogy and ethnomusicology, and the development of universities into a modern indus-
try. Illustrating the impact of academia on the centuries-long revival of early music, he
also elucidates the links between the revival of European medieval music and folk tradi-
tions. Neil Rosenberg uses his own experiences as a folklorist and revivalist of North
American traditions to deconstruct the complex relationship between the discipline of
folklore and folk revivals. Following a critical review of his own seminal contributions
and other revival literature, he proposes several alternative concepts to revival. Alan
Jabbour’s narrative account of his roles in the American old-time string revival reveals
the mutuality of the relationships between documentarians and the people they docu-
ment, and how these relationships shape transmission processes, funding allocation,
and the establishment of new traditions. Jabbour also reminds us of the cyclical nature
of revivals and the dynamics of intercultural and intergenerational flows.
Section III, “Intangible Cultural Heritage, Preservation, and Policy,” throws light on
official local, state, and international strategies to preserve cultural traditions, highlights
the structures and tensions created in top-down revivals, and explores the interface
between institutional and grass-roots initiatives. Keith Howard examines the revival
of South Korea’s intangible cultural heritage against the backdrop of state-led and
UNESCO policies as well as student-led initiatives. Through the examples of folk, per-
cussion, shamanic, and court traditions, he challenges arguments that preservation cre-
ates sterile museum objects by demonstrating how each has been utilized as the basis of
new creativity. Barley Norton chronicles transformations in the Vietnamese music and
dance tradition ca trù, which in 2009 was inscribed on UNESCO’s Urgent Safeguarding
list. In contrast to Howard, he argues that revivalist discourse that promotes ca trù as
intangible cultural heritage threatens to limit its musical and ritual meanings, to define
its contemporary social relevance in primarily nationalistic terms, and to make it more
difficult for a vital, innovative musical culture to emerge. Colin Quigley investigates
the Hungarian dance house movement and its journey from 1970s urban youth culture
to state promotion and UNESCO recognition. Stressing the national yet inter-ethnic
and multi-state character of the dance house revival and its integration of activism and
scholarship, he explores the consequences of institutionalization for the string band
idiom of rural Transylvanian from which the original movement drew its inspiration.
Section IV, “National Renaissance and Postcolonial Futures,” charts the powerful role
that revived traditions have come to play in newly independent and post-revolutionary
societies. It explores tensions between notions of purism and syncretism, the inter-
play of continuity and transformation, and the dynamics of national institutions such
as state ensembles and academies. Margaret Walker examines the revival of kathak,
the classical dance of North India, which accompanied Indian independence from
Britain in 1947. Proposing that the move to independence offered extensive opportuni-
ties for shifting identities, she deconstructs the evolution of kathak as a genre whose
hybrid roots, stemming from Mughal courts, courtesans, and rural folk theater,
were eclipsed in its reinvention as a male, devotional, Hindu tradition and symbol of
middle-class Indian identity. Revisiting existing revival theories, she proposes a frame-
work that embraces postcolonial experience and thereby sheds light on contemporary
manifestations of global hybridity. Hélène Neveu Kringelbach traces the transforma-
tions of neo-traditional dance in Senegal, from the influences of French colonial policy,
to the role of state-sponsored folkloric troops in post-independence nation-building, to
the regionalist agendas of urban migrants and international emigrants. While empha-
sizing the role played by musical and choreographic theater in creating seductive ver-
sions of history, she argues that revival is a process that stretches not only in time but
also in space. Tanya Merchant explores the ramifications of institutionalized musician
training in a nationalist, post-Soviet project in Uzbekistan. She examines the multiple
narratives of history and authenticity enacted in the teaching, aesthetic priorities, and
performance of (Westernized) arranged folk music from the Soviet era and “traditional”
music derived from more ancient maqom practices in the Uzbek state-run conserva-
tory. Laudan Nooshin examines two revival movements in Iranian classical music. She
contrasts the revival that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, with its emphasis on “purity”
and “authentiticy,” with the more forward-looking revival following the 1979 Iranian
Revolution that appealed to notions of “revival as renewal” and yet was only made pos-
sible through conditions established as part of the first. Victoria Levine analyzes the cru-
cial roles of individual activists and bodies such as the Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage
Committee in re-establishing Native American culture in Oklahoma following more
than three centuries of colonial suppression. Comparing the Choctaw and Chickasaw
cases (the former growing out of a community-based, grassroots effort while the latter
originated within the tribal government), she argues that these revival stories are less
about loss than about finding ways to reclaim cultural identity by integrating historic
practice with contemporary experience.
Section V, “Recovery from War, Disaster, and Cultural Devastation,” demonstrates
the urgent, pragmatic, and emotional needs that revival agendas strive to fill through
the reconstruction of music, dance, and other performing art traditions in communities
that have been decimated by war, violence, revolution, political oppression, economic
exploitation, or natural disaster. In her case study of the Homeland War (1991–1995)
and its aftermath in Croatia, Naila Ceribašić describes how both official and grassroots
articulations of traditional music were used as tools for coping with wartime insecurity
and destruction, for uniting (and sometimes dividing) people along national and ethnic
lines, and for reconstructing local identity and history in war-ravaged villages. In her
Nicaraguan case study, Annemarie Gallaugher contextualizes the role of music in resur-
gence and development movements of indigenous and African-descended peoples in
Latin America. She shows how the revival of Garifuna music, as an integral part of a cul-
tural rescue movement initiated during the Sandanista revolution, facilitates the reas-
sertion of a previously harshly suppressed identity as well as the creation of a dialogic
space for renegotiating intercultural relationships. Margaret Kartomi explores how, in
post-tsunami, post-conflict Aceh and Sri Lanka and post-Taliban Afghanistan, the arts
have been used to help overcome trauma, restore morale, and maintain peace. On the
basis of these case studies, she proposes a preliminary methodology for research into
musical revivals following major catastrophes, censorship, and neglect.
Section VI, “Innovations and Transformations,” interrogates the dynamic tensions
and paradoxes between preservation and change and illuminates how the past has
served as inspiration, catalyst, and justification for changes in the present. Juniper Hill
discusses how Finnish activists have used revival as a strategy to legitimate both musi-
cal innovations and social alternatives, exemplified by three distinct movements that
entailed editing epic songs to bolster nation-building, embracing amateur instrumen-
tal music to rejuvenate depressed rural areas, and re-entering the creative processes of
ancient music to foster greater artistic freedom and experimentation. In her case study
on Brazilian popular music, Denise Milstein narrates how Protest Bossa musicians from
the cultural center of Rio de Janeiro strove to authenticate their political agendas by
engaging musicians from the peripheral region of Bahia, who, in turn, utilized revival
ingredients in their irreverent, avant-garde songs to fuel the controversial Tropicália
movement. Milstein reveals how disjunctures in center-periphery perceptions com-
bined with influences from mass media and changing political regimes can spur radical
transformations out of revival currents. Paula Conlon chronicles the transformations of
the Native American flute, from Native Plains courtship ritual, to moribund tradition,
to 1960s revival, to cross-cultural New Age fusions and international Grammy-awarded
commercial success. Questioning how far the flute can travel and still remain connected
to its heritage, she explores the ways in which different artists have been interpreted as
traditional or nontraditional, and shows how “purists” may in fact be innovators and
innovators may retain elements of the tradition. Focusing on the Baltic countries, Britta
Sweers explores three globalizing perspectives that have influenced discourses of revival
and related processes of musical transformation: the sceptic, hyperglobal, and transfor-

mationalist. Questioning the extent to which meta-perspectives can help elucidate the
impact of global flows on music revivals, she concludes that, while the examples pre-
sented support a transformationalist perspective, an adequate contemporary approach
to revival requires the combination of all three perspectives.
Section VII, “Festivals, Marketing, and Media,” illuminates the infrastructures
and industries that have developed for the display, dissemination, and marketing
of revived traditions, as well as the politics of representing, commercializing, and
rebranding music-cultures for new audiences and new generations of participants.
Addressing the early twenty-first century resurgence of English folk music and the
important role of folk festivals, Simon Keegan-Phipps and Trish Winter consider the
ways in which the increasingly commercialized and professionalized infrastructure
of the burgeoning folk industry coexists and interacts with the established philan-
thropic, anti-commercial, and amateur ethos of the folk arts. Adriana Helbig focuses
on the revival of the ethnic Ukrainian midsummer ritual of Ivana Kupala (St. John’s
Eve) following independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, with particular refer-
ence to gender discourses and identities. Against the backdrop of Kupala celebrations
as spaces within which people are invited to explore their heritage, she questions the
extent to which the populist neo-pagan ideals of female purity and motherhood asso-
ciated with the revived rituals have influenced both contemporary understandings
of femininity and the realities of women’s lives in post-Soviet society. Jane Freeman
Moulin centers her discussion on a popular trailer projected daily in cinemas in
Hawai‘i since 1992 by the movie theater chain Consolidated Amusement. She inves-
tigates the cinematic image of the trailer as a vehicle for cultural meaning, analyzing
the way in which it embeds visual and auditory icons of the Hawaiian Renaissance
and showing how it continues to engage contemporary perceptions of place and cul-
ture in an ethnically pluralistic, post-Renaissance Hawai‘i. Richard Blaustein exam-
ines how North American old-time fiddling has become an international cultural
movement using modern technology to generate and sustain a trans-Atlantic com-
munity. Focusing in particular on the new communities and social practices enabled
by the spread of the Internet, he shows how this special-interest “micromusic” group
uses networking tools such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, blogs, and listservs to
pursue its nominally old-fashioned passion and fulfill present-day emotional and
social needs, thereby enabling its devotees to maintain a coherent sense of distinctive
identity in a rapidly changing world.
Section VIII, “Diaspora and the Global Village,” explores how emigrants, musicians
in exile, and foreign affinity groups reclaim, recontextualize, and reinterpret musi-
cal traditions in diasporic and transnational contexts, and how these trends intersect
with constructions of identity and belonging in the home territory. In her study of vocal
polyphony from the Republic of Georgia, Caroline Bithell explores the multifaceted
links between cycles of national revival since the mid-nineteenth century and the inter-
nationalization of Georgian polyphony in the post-Soviet period. Proposing that the
proliferation of Georgian choirs outside Georgia might be viewed as a “third existence”
of folklore and a natural extension of internal revival processes, she pays particular
attention to the role of intermediaries, to learning methods that help non-Georgians
to achieve a more Georgian sound, and to the motivations and rewards of different
stakeholders in these cultural exchanges. Sean Williams explores attempts by the Irish
diaspora to connect to an Ireland of the imagination informed by narratives of loss.
Deconstructing notions of Ireland as remaining in the rural past while the diaspora
hovers in the urban future, she demonstrates the generational renegotiation of authen-
ticity, and the centuries-long, dynamic relationship between Irish and diasporic identi-
ties. Anthony Shay explores the many facets of revivalist Iranian dance in the United
States. Drawing on David Guss’ festival theory, Jane C. Desmond’s concept of dance as a
vehicle for constructing national and ethnic identity, and his own constructs of “parallel
traditions” and “choreophobia,” he contrasts the complexities of self-representation by
Iranian Americans with the politics of representation in Iran, problematizes the orien-
talism and exoticism employed by both Westerners and Iranians, and explores the sig-
nificance of Iranian dance for non-Iranian performers. Carol Muller considers the ways
in which South African jazz musicians living in exile during the height of the apart-
heid era reclaimed both the musics of their homeland and their musical and political
freedom. Drawing on Edward Said’s notion of being “out of place” and Diana Taylor’s
theories about archives and repertories, she extends ideas about musical revival by
focusing on the use of human memory in the absence of a prior recorded archive of
South African music.
Mark Slobin’s afterword brings the volume to a close with an analysis of the prefix
“re-” and its various connotations of reversing, re-appropriating, restoring, rebuilding,
and refurbishing. He concludes by suggesting that, in looking back over our engage-
ment with the past, revival scholars might best move forward by stepping sideways into
interdisciplinary domains.
Notes
1. Rosenberg (1993: 20) dismisses Hobsbawm’s explanation of invented traditions because of
its focus on the formal activities of governments and institutions rather than on the infor-
mal aspects of culture and customs that Rosenberg feels are more relevant to folk revivals.
In this volume, we analyze the important role that states, institutions, and various govern-
mental policies wield in revival processes, in addition to more grassroots-driven revivals
(see chapters by Levine, Howard, Merchant, Norton, and Quigley).
2. Lomax’s theory of Cantometrics (1968) was perhaps the last major study in the field of
ethnomusicology to collect data from, and theorize about, a multitude of music cultures
from around the world. The theory received heavy criticism, and since then the majority of
ethnomusicologists have focused on conducting individual case studies in one region at a
time (or, in some cases, following one ethnic group or affinity group across a diaspora).
3. See the many monographs on British folk revivals (Boyes 1993, Brocken 2003, Munro
1984), the Norwegian fiddle revival (Goertzen 1997), the Russian folk revival (Olson 2004),
various North American folk revivals (Allen 2010, Cantwell 1996, Cohen 1995 and 2002,
Dunaway, Beer, and Seeger 2010, Groom 1971, Kearney Guigné 2008, Mitchell 2007, Scully
2008, Weissman 2005), Gregorian and plainchant revivals (Bergeron 1998, Zon 1999), and
various overlapping early music revivals (Cohen and Snitzer 1985, Emery and Morowitz
2003, Haskell 1988, Kirkman 2010, Palmer 1989). For Central and Eastern Europe, see also
the contributions to Slobin (1996). Other monographs that do not include explicit refer-
ence to revival in their titles but nonetheless focus on processes of revival, revitalization,
and/or recontextualization (often indicated by the formulation “from . . . to . . . ”) include
Bithell 2007, Goodman 2005, Sapoznik 2006, Slobin 2002, and Sweers 2005.
4. Filene (2000: 5–6) proposes that these cultural brokers often strove to cloak their own
power so as not to undermine the authenticity of the performers they promoted.
5. The majority of the revival literature on Western European musics has focused on folk/
traditional music and early music. Many insights could yet be gained by additional, future
research on revival themes in other eras of Western art music and in popular musics.
6. In some cases, even aesthetic motivations may be reactionary. For example, Nicholas Cook
suggests that the neoclassical movement of nineteenth century Europe strove to recap-
ture what were perceived as timeless classical aesthetic values in contrast to the virtuosity
and showmanship culture of the piano wars (personal communications, November 2012,
Cambridge, England).
7. We use the term “activist” in a broad sense to denote a continuum from “intentional” to
“militant.”
8. This formulation, which appeared in the Communist Manifesto, lent itself as the title
of Marshall Berman’s seminal book All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of
Modernity (first published 1982).
9. Classic texts on collective memory include Halbwachs 1925 and 1950 (republished 1994 and
1997), Connerton 1989, and Lipsitz 1990.
10. For a broader approach to ethnomusicology’s engagement with the study of history see
Blum, Bohlman, and Neuman 1993. Monographs in which the invocation of the past, or the
role of memory, in the musical expression of the present is a central theme include Emoff
2002, Harris 2004, Romero 2001, and Shelemay 1998.
11. In Stekert’s analysis, the “new aesthetic” is one of four categories, the others being tradi-
tional singers, imitators, and utilizers (the latter including “urban pop” and “urban art”
groups).
12. Monographs that examine musicians and musical cultures in transition between local
and global worlds include Bithell 2007, Buchanan 2006, Goodman 2005, Kapchan 2007,
Klein 2007.
13. The notion of the “authenticity police” (applied to those who adopt a more traditionalist
approach to performing the music of the past) puts in frequent appearances in the context
of early music. See also Nooshin, this volume, with reference to Iranian classial music.
14. For monographs that take authenticity and its negotiation by indigenous performers and
producers as their main focus, see Bigenho 2002 and Meintjes 2003.
15. Weisethaunet and Lindberg (2010) provide an overview of how discourse in different
fields has focused on different authenticity criteria: the author-work relationship in art dis-
course; the autonomy of self in existentialist philosophy; the self in contrast to the culture
industry and mass society in the Frankfurt school of philosophy; feeling and expression in
rock criticism; and expression of social conditions and nationalism, as well as opposition
to cultural grey-out, in folklore.
16. A related strategy famously used by John and Alan Lomax was to seek out musicians serv-
ing life sentences who, due to their lengthy imprisonment, had been isolated from recent
commercial music.
17. For a more general discussion of hybridity and creolization as creative interplay, authentic
experience, and contemporary reality, see Hannerz 1996.
18. See, for example, the website for Studies on Cultural Transfer and Transmission (www
.soctat.org).
19. Burns (2012), for example, argues that the presentation of English folk music at world
music festivals has stimulated significant growth in folk music audiences at home since the
mid-1990s.
20. For further accounts of the institutionalization of folk and traditional musics, see Hill 2009,
Keegan-Phipps 2007, McGraw 2009, Nettl 1985, Stock 1996 and 2004, and Wang 2003.
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Chapter 2
Traditional Mu si c ,
Heritage Mu si c
Owe Ronström
Revival
What is revival? A funny word to start with, used in many contexts: religion, medicine,
architecture, arts, music, and more. A “re-” that points backward, suggesting something
that was, combined with a form of the Latin vivere, to live. The result—an invocation of
life that presupposes and builds on the vanishing, missing, or dead. The already alive
resists revival. In as much as life is a prelude to death, remembering is a prelude to for-
getting. Revivals owe their existence not to life and remembrance so much as to death
and forgetting because it is from the dead and forgotten that revivals are produced.
A key to many understandings of “revival” is the notion of a past from which some-
thing is brought to a second life. And yes, much revival is about representing the
past—but the representation itself takes place in the present. To be “about” also implies
interpretation and staging, as in a theater. Even if what is staged refers to a past, it always
takes place in the present. And, like theater, much of revival is about creating and shap-
ing the sublime. What makes such productions meaningful is not so much what they
point at or refer to, but the “affecting presence” that is their result (Armstrong 1971). The
effect is a dichotomization of the world into primary and secondary levels of existence,
and the opening of a distance between the representing and the represented (Handler
and Linnekin 1984: 287). The importance of representations lies not so much in their
relation to what really happened there and then, but in their meanings and functions
here and now. To paraphrase William Thomas’s famous theorem, we might say that what
interests us is not whether things are true or authentic, but whether such a belief has
true and authentic consequences. Crucially, as Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett writes,
“Despite a discourse of conservation, preservation, restoration, reclamation, recov-
ery, re-creation, recuperation, revitalization and regeneration,” revival—like heritage,
44 Owe Ronström
tradition, and other forms of history use—“produces something new in the present that
has recourse to the past” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 149).
As much as revivals are about what has happened, they are also about what may,
should, or must happen. The past is activated to achieve something that is yet to be. If
revivals are windows to some past, they also open doors to what is to come and pave the
way toward the future (Ronström 2005). Revival is a missionary and visionary phenom-
enon: There are revivals not because there has been a past, but because there is a future
to come. Like Walter Benjamin’s famous angel of history, revivals make us “move for-
ward backwards” (Benjamin 1968: 257–258). As with so many other productions of the
past, revival stages what was, in the present, for reasons still to come.
Revivals are productions whereby things, actions, or ideas are actively brought from
one context to another to make them accessible to new actors, in new places and times.
Again, like preservation, heritage, tradition, and other forms of history use, and like
memory production in general, revival is a “decontextualization” (Bauman and Briggs
1992) or, to quote Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a “re-coding operation” resulting
in a “transvaluation of the obsolete, the mistaken, the outmoded, the dead, and the
defunct” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 149). By means of decontextualization, recoding,
and transvaluation, things, actions, or ideas are transformed into examples or exhibits
of themselves, in a way that foregrounds their pastness or remoteness and moves the
production and display that is going on to the background (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
1998: 151, 156–165). Fundamentally, then, revival is an act of translation. Like all transla-
tors, the revivalist is trapped by the paradoxical dilemma of how to make sense of the
foreign. He must “communicate the very foreignness that his interpretations (the trans-
lator’s translations) deny in their claim to universality. He must render the foreign famil-
iar and preserve its very foreignness at one and the same time” (Crapanzano 1992: 44).
One way to achieve this is by employing tropes, metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche.
Metaphor is a means to organize our thinking, propose analogies, and create similari-
ties (Scaruffi 2005), with its essence being “understanding and experiencing one thing
in terms of another” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 5). Revival can be described as precisely
this—a “metaphorical transformation” (Grundberg 2000), “a mapping from some
source domain to some target domain” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 36) that sets different
fields of association in interaction with one another (Black 1962) and produces “a spark
between latent and manifest denotations” (Lacan 2002).
Other basic tropes found in revivals, as in most productions of the past in the present,
are metonymy and synecdoche. One consequence of having concrete bits and pieces to
symbolically represent abstract and absent wholes is that much effort has to be invested
in making us overlook the specific parts and the gaps between them, why such parts and
gaps are chosen, by whom, and for what purposes. Metonymies can either stand alone or
be combined to form long, intertwined chains in which every whole becomes a part that
stands for another and larger whole, ultimately invoking vast mythical landscapes, chro-
notopes, or taleworlds. Such mythical landscapes can become explosively charged with
implicit meaning and be used as tools or weapons by individuals and groups to expand
social and cultural space and to win and exercise power (Ronström 1990).
Traditional Music, Heritage Music 45
Shifts
In the most generalized sense, then, revivals are products of social processes by which
the absent is represented in the present, for purposes in the future, by the use of cul-
turally bounded expressive forms. A way to conceptualize this phenomenon is as shifts
between different historic, geographic, social, and cultural contexts, between the indi-
vidual and collective, private and public, informal and formal, and between different
mythical geographies.
In many ways, shifts are central to revival. The phenomenon seems to be, if not born
from, then at least fueled by, the large migration waves that occurred in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, most notably those that moved millions to the Americas. The
spatial and social shifts that these led to kicked off a previously unseen interest in dif-
ferent pasts, memories, histories, traditions, and heritages (Klein 1998). But also, in less
literal senses, shifts are central. Many folk music and folk dance revivals in the Western
world have been explicitly built on shifts over time, from some past to the present; but,
implicitly, they have also depended on social and spatial shifts, from rural to urban, from
peasants and workers to an educated middle class, and from the local to the regional,
national, or global. All these shifts notwithstanding, as long as they have taken place
within what is understood as “a nation” or “a culture,” the result has often been consid-
ered not only “the same” but also naturally “ours.”
Understanding revivals as decontexualizations, recoding operations, metaphoric
transformations, and shifts places emphasis on the ongoing, on production. Such a
perspective points to producers, agents, resources, values, and motives, and to the
basic modes of production. In general terms, what characterizes this kind of cul-
tural production? At the core, we typically find a body of entrepreneurs or “burn-
ing souls” who initiate the production by identifying something that could or should
be revived. The identification has several aspects: uniqueness, similarity, continuity,
and legitimation (Brück 1984). Through a number of distancing techniques, such as
classification, typologization, and description, objectification is produced, to which
is added values such as uniqueness and individuality. Objectification is necessary for
standardization, by which similarity and recognizability is achieved, which in turn
produces continuity, which may be the most important of these aspects. A histori-
cally grounded continuity is a prerequisite for authenticity, a quality mark that cre-
ates legitimation. Because few of the original burning souls can manage legitimation
alone, it is necessary to establish contacts with individuals (researchers, experts) and
institutions (universities, museums, media, festivals, schools) that produce, control,
and distribute the necessary knowledge. Authenticity, then, is a result of successful
legitimation, not an inherent quality of the object. The institutionalization that fol-
lows such procedures leads to formalization, and then to consolidation, strengthen-
ing, and completion of the objectification. All the steps in the production sequence
help to raise the homogenization, a prerequisite for an effective uncoupling of the
46 Owe Ronström
objects from their former contexts, which in turn is necessary for a successful distri-
bution of these objects.
Like tourism in general and heritage production more particularly, revival produces
the local for export (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 153). When sufficiently homogenized
and uncoupled, it is possible for objects to spread over vast areas on globalized motor-
ways. Such processes are never one way, never complete. By becoming available to new
actors in new contexts, a sequence in the opposite direction is initiated. The standard-
ized and globally distributed products become again localized and charged with new
values and meanings. If, in some respects, the products may still look the same, in
other respects, they become more diversified. Hence, there are no truly “global” prod-
ucts: Everywhere, they take on new guises, uses, functions, and meanings.
Agents
Approaching revivals as productions leads us to agents, entrepreneurs, constructors,

and further to “factories” in which certain procedures and mechanisms are at work,
producing imageries, mindscapes, affective modes, emotional set-ups, and ways to
approach, perceive, and handle the absent thing that is to be revived. Three modes seem
to be of special importance to revival production—historization, aesthetization, and
authenticity. Historization is about attaching pastness, a quality central to many revivals.
When pastness is attached, historization makes us look to what is represented, rather
than to that which represents. Historization is a mode of production that foregrounds
the absent at the expense of the producers and the production itself. Much revival is
also about reformulating and controlling aesthetics. Through aesthetization, values that
transcend the here and now can be attached, which may bring what is revived into con-
nection with the eternally human and beautiful. An effect of aesthetization is visuality, a
central quality and a key to revival production.
Authenticity is about attaching factuality, truth, and also affect. Authenticity struc-
tures the ways revivals are produced, distributed, and consumed. One way of slipping
out from the true–false dichotomy that is central to the idea of authenticity is to perceive
it as a “key,” a “framing device” in Erving Goffman’s sense (Goffman 1974). From this
perspective, authenticity can be understood as a mode that induces certain understand-
ings and meanings. Authenticity is linked to legitimation and is important not so much
for what it points to as for the emotions it brings about. To control authenticity is to exer-
cise power over the past, as well as over the present.
There are many authenticities. One is the authenticity of the producer. What is judged
is how well the result matches the original intentions of the producer, the core of the
classical Western art myth. Another is the authenticity of the product. When an object
is produced as authentic, it is valued according to how well it represents the category
it belongs to, how “typical” it is. This is the authenticity of much folk art, valued for its
authentic origins. A third is the authenticity of the production. Here, the focus is on
neither the product nor the producer, but instead on the way in which things are done,
which makes authenticity a question of production competence—using the right mate-
rials, methods, and tools. A fourth is the authenticity of the consumer. The authentic
is the experience, the taste, or the emotion. What is true is what feels true, a position
explored by the growing experience industry. A fifth is the authenticity of the model or
archetype. When an object coincides with the prototypical model, it may become per-
ceived as more valuable and authentic than other objects of the same category.
From Knowers to Doers and Marketers
Any field or arena consists of at least three typical positions in relation to the actors’
motives or goals. Take the field of music. Most musicians’ prime motive is simply to
make music: We can call them “doers.” For the typical doer, quality and authenticity
are values anchored in the music making itself and the experiences that evolve from it.
For another type of actor, it is not doing but knowing that music is about. For the typi-
cal “knower,” the knowledge itself is the goal. Quality and authenticity are anchored in
the managing of knowledge, typically in scientific procedures. A third type of actor is
one whose prime motive is to distribute and sell the results of the activities of doers
and knowers. These actors include producers, managers, teachers, salesmen, and entre-
preneurs of different kinds: We can call them “marketers.” For marketers, the goals of
doers and knowers are, more often than not, means to reach other goals—for example,
to raise attention, spread messages, attract audiences, or make money. Typically, qual-
ity is related to how successfully such goals are reached, and therefore quality is readily
translated to quantity.
Doers, knowers, and marketers are three analytical positions that relate in different
ways to the modes of revival production. Since they are analytical positions and not
roles, one and the same individual can take all three positions, depending on the context
of analysis. Together, these positions make up a system, an analytical model that can
be used to uncover processes of change in the control of and power over the expres-
sive forms that make up the center of a musical field (Lundberg, Malm, and Ronström
2000). By applying these analytical categories to the development of the field of folk
music in countries like Sweden, Norway, Finland, England, France, and Hungary since
the late eighteenth century, it is possible to follow two important shifts: first from know-
ers to doers, and then from doers to marketers.
The concept of “folk music” was coined in northwestern Europe in the late eighteenth
century, on the initiative of knowers. The content grew out of long-standing negotia-
tions between knowers and doers (Figure 2.1). By the late nineteenth century, folk music
in most European countries had became institutionalized and petrified into a national
symbol, and, as such, it survived into the 1970s.
At this point, however, a new generation of young doers instigated a massive folk
music revival movement. They were many, well-equipped, and they soon became
48 Owe Ronström
Knowers
Folk
music
Doers Marketers
Figure 2.1 Three positions in the field of folk music: late eighteenth century.
Knowers
Folk
music
Doers Marketers
Figure 2.2 Three positions in the field of folk music: the 1970s.
well-trained. Their activities made available more and more of the “original” sources
of folk music: musical transcriptions, recordings, and texts. Thus, the doers became
equipped with new tools, while, at the same time, knowers rapidly lost control over such
important parts of the field as aesthetic evaluations and definitions of central concepts
(Figure 2.2). By breaking the knowers’ monopoly of the sources of knowledge, these
young revivalists were able to move folk music from urban salons and national manifes-
tations to small clubs, dance halls, and large popular outdoor celebrations. As a result, in
many of these countries, there were now more folk musicians than ever before.
The popularization of folk music during the 1970s and 1980s led to the emergence
of new types of actors, ones who, up to this point, had been almost insignificant in the
field of folk music: record producers, managers, and festival organizers. The more doers,
the bigger the market, and the bigger the market, the more marketers. With them came
stickers, flyers, riders, posters, and demo tapes, all important features of the pop/rock
musical format that, during the following decades, was to become standard in the field
of folk music, too. In the course of only a few years, marketers took control over arenas
and media central to the field (Figure 2.3).
The perspectives and goals of the marketers soon came into conflict with the already
established and institutionalized perspectives of both doers and knowers. This resulted
in a split in the field and saw the birth of new types of “folk-based” local musics, as
well as a more transnational “folk-based” music that soon became known as “world
Knowers
Folk
music
Doers Marketers
Knowers
Doers Marketers
folk world
music music
music” or “local music not from here (wherever here is),” as the editor of Folk Roots,
Ian Anderson, later summarized the world music phenomenon (Anderson 1997: 13; cf.
Brusila 2003: 11) (Figure 2.4).
One result of these shifts was a new wave of mediaization of the folk music scene,
a process whereby local forms of music are adapted to mass media (Wallis and Malm
1984: 278–281). The ideas about the locus of music, or “where the action is,” changed. For
example, in Sweden, folk musicians had tended to hold that their music was primarily
located in the interactions between musicians, and between musicians and audience.
This was institutionalized in the fiddlers’ gathering (spelmansstämmor) and expressed
through its focus on informally playing together. Recordings were seen as second-
ary representations of music. By the early years of the twenty-first century, often the
opposite was true—as had long been the case in the world of rock and pop. The prime
locus of modern folk or world music shifted to formally controlled situations, such as
festivals, studios, or rehearsal rooms. Live performances were now seen as secondary
representations of recordings or of recordings still to be made. This led to a new level
50 Owe Ronström
of objectification of the music, which was now conceived not so much in terms of the
“anonymous folk traditions” of the old days, but as artistic creations of especially gifted
individuals, a bow to the old romantic notion of the divinely inspired composer and art-
ist that has long been cultivated in the domains of classical and popular musics.
Another result of these shifts was a festivalization of the field of traditional music. This
led to changes in the behavior of both musicians and audiences. Musicians consciously
produced music for festival stages, with increased levels of expression and effect.
Audiences “zapped” between different stages and programs, leading to even higher lev-
els of expression and effect. At the same time, music making and consumption were
increasingly concentrated on certain times and places (Lundberg et al. 2000: 336–340;
Ronström 2001). As a consequence, the horizons and labor markets for folk musicians
expanded from the local and regional to the national, transnational, and global. Whereas
earlier folk musicians typically saw their own county or region as their primary working
area, now the most popular folk groups toured extensively on a worldwide basis.
Yet another obvious result was a general trend toward professionalization. As a conse-
quence of bringing folk music into the ordinary music school system, not only did tradi-
tional musicians become more numerous, they also played more proficiently and were
equipped with better quality instruments. In countries like Sweden, Norway, Estonia,
and Hungary, up to the early 1980s, traditional music was not formally taught in schools
but had to be learned informally from older musicians in fiddlers’ teams, folk groups,
and cultural associations, or at community gatherings. By the early twenty-first century,
traditional music was taught at all school levels up to university level. Whereas, earlier,
the old folk musicians were the “heroes” or stars of the field, this status was now more
often accorded to young, well-educated folk musicians.
These shifts from knowers to doers, and from doers to marketers, are important trends
in the folk music field. The number of marketers has become larger than ever before, and
it is among the marketers that we find many of the most ardent “burning souls.” What
they are burning for is not necessarily more or better music, or more money, but more
ephemeral goods such as raised visibility, recognition, and status for “their” kind of
music, for their country or ethnic group, if not for their record company, artist agency, or
festival. Through this development, folk music has become part of a growing worldwide
“attention economy” (Goldhaber 1997a,b), which in turn is closely related to the new
global mode of heritage production. This can be understood as part of a massive trend
affecting a large part of society, nicely summarized by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett as
“from the informative to the performative” (see Ronström 2007: 182)—a shift from the
intellectual capacities that had previously been so central to the sensual, the emotional,
and the experiential. When the emotional and experiential are foregrounded, what was
once an end becomes a means: objects are transformed into instruments for the expe-
riencing subjects, valued as long as they produce the right emotional experiences. This
creates a drive for raised levels of aesthetic expression, and then aesthetics, not ethics,
morals, or knowledge, become leading principles for evaluation (Bauman 1994). Taken
together, these changes—from knowers to doers and marketers, and from knowing,
doing, and marketing to the results and effects (emotional experiences, performances,
profits, raised attention)—represent a new order in the power structures surrounding

the production and management of musical knowledge that, without doubt, will have
many further consequences in the future (Lundberg et al. 2000).
Outlines of a Musical Geography
The tendencies I have outlined here are but a few of the systemic structural changes that
have occurred in the field of folk music, changes that have moved it into new territories,
new musical mindscapes. On the one hand, it has moved closer to the classical and pop-
ular music domains, thereby becoming equipped with new formats, values, and types
of musical behavior. On the other hand, radical changes have also taken place within
the field itself. One of these concerns the ideas of what kind of pasts this music stems
from, and why it should be preserved. In the following section, I discuss some aspects of
what we might identify as a broad change from “tradition” to “heritage.” A generalized
comparison of these notions, based on fieldwork in Scandinavia, Hungary, the former
German Democratic Republic, and Yugoslavia, will point to some of the differences.1
We might start by thinking of “folk music” as a kind of live-action role-playing based
on “old music.” What you are supposed to do may be fairly clear to most participants.
But what is it all about? What kind of world is to be staged? What roles are there to dis-
tribute, and what symbols and values to manage? You have to know something about
time and place, friends and enemies, social and cultural norms. You may not need all the
details, but you will certainly need a basic understanding of the “big storylines.” Taken
together, these stories, ideas, norms, and values make up what could be called a virtual
reality world, a “mindscape” (Ronström 1996; 2007), “chronotope” (Bakhtin 1981), or
“province of meaning” (Schutz 1945).
In this light, “traditional music” and “folk music” are headlines, captions for “a ter-
ritory of imagination” (Feintuch 2006: 8). What is staged is something rather different
from the past lived reality that is claimed to be represented. But, then again, the idea
was never really to reconstruct an authentic image of a bygone world as it once was but
rather to stage it as it ought to have been.2 From such a world, you should not ask for
empirical truth.
The result of a marriage between local musics and the widely disseminated ideas of
philosophers, linguists, ethnologists, and cultural historians of the late eighteenth cen-
tury, the mindscape of “folk” or “traditional music” was, from its birth in northwestern
European countries at the beginning of the nineteenth century, understood as grow-
ing naturally out of the landscape, producing a continuous musical geography of dis-
tinct local musics. The notion of a tradition leads to the local, with the idea that this
music belongs to, represents, and is used and loved by a local “folk.” Such ideas soon
became institutionalized in a large domain organized according to a musical “geosophy,”
whereby a folk and their music were represented as consequences of place.3 The idea
of a music that is “intimately bound up with place” (Feintuch 2006) has, from the very
52 Owe Ronström
beginning, been a constitutive element of the “folk” or “traditional” musical mindscape

in Western Europe. During the last decades of the twentieth century, however, a number
of major changes occurred in this musical mindscape and the domain built around it,
especially in Northwestern Europe (Ronström 2010).
In the following section, my focus is on the mythical landscape or “world” of folk or
traditional music in Northwestern Europe and, more particularly, on the ideas and sto-
ries that fiddlers learn together with their tunes—stories about the origins, functions,
and meanings of the tunes themselves, about what their music is and where it belongs.
I will call such worlds “musical mindscapes,”4 a concept that urges us to understand phe-
nomena like fiddles, fiddle music, and folk music as both mental and physical—“mind”
for the former and “scape” for the latter. Mindscapes are set up by establishing a certain
perspective that makes us see a few things and overlook a whole lot more. Mindscapes
are institutionalized in “domains,” large networks of interlinked practices, ideas, arti-
facts, and institutions. These domains operate in different ways, with different goals, and
occupy different niches in time and space. What I argue is that, as an effect of “the inter-
mingling of presence and absence in novel ways” (Giddens 1990: 21), the ideas about
where folk and traditional music comes from—the musical mindscapes of this music—
are now changing rapidly.
From “Tradition” to “Heritage”
In a northern European context, “tradition” and “heritage” may seem more or less syn-
onymous.5 And indeed, they are in many ways similar. Both are produced from things
past—memories, experiences, historical leftovers. Both promise things in danger of dis-
appearing—they promise a second life as exhibits of themselves, by adding value through
an evocation of pastness, exhibition, difference, or indigeneity (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
1998: 149–150). They operate on the same markets and are rationalized and legitimized
in much the same way.6 It is nevertheless important to recognize that they are not the
same—that we are, in fact, dealing with two rather different modes of production, two
different mindscapes of the past, anchored in different domains.
To begin with, the “tradition” mindscape centers around the rural, the “old peasant
society” of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and is mainly geared to pro-
duction of locality and regionality. “Heritage,” on the other hand, is predominantly
urban, even when located in the countryside, and is geared to the international or
transnational. Whereas “tradition” tends to use time to produce “topos” (place, distinct
localities, interconnected into large cultural geographies), heritage tends to use place to
produce “chronos” (pasts more loosely rooted in place).
The two mindscapes operate with rather different interfaces. Tradition produces a
closed space: You cannot just move into it. Tradition works much like ethnoscapes or
VIP-clubs: To enter, you have to be a member or be invited by a member. Membership is
genealogical; it comes through birth or marriage. Heritage produces a much more open
space that almost anybody can move into. Instead of membership by birth or marriage,
the right kind of values and wallets are necessary. Using computer language, we might
say that whereas tradition operates like Windows, with restricted access to the source
codes and with closed interfaces, heritage operates more like Linux, with open sources
and interfaces.
If tradition is principally in the plural, such that every parish or every group of folk
can have its own tradition, then heritage tends to be understood in the singular, as “our
cultural heritage.” There is much less heritage, which makes it more precious and expen-
sive. If “tradition” produces the local, “heritage” clearly is tied to larger units such as
the nation, Europe, or—as in World Heritage—the entire world. Anybody can make a
tradition, but not everybody can have or appoint a heritage, which is why heritage pro-
duction—to a much higher degree than tradition—is in the hands of specially approved
professional experts who select what is to be preserved according to certain approved
criteria. Selection is the key; the more selection, the more need for expertise. In that
sense, heritage is a good example of the kind of global abstract expert systems, depen-
dent on new forms of impersonal trust, that Giddens has described as one of the conse-
quences of late modernity (Giddens 1990).
Tradition brings about ownership and cultural rights: The local tradition produced
is understood as belonging to the locals. Heritage tends to resists local people’s claims
for indigenous rights. Heritage tends to “empty” objects and spaces, which makes it
possible to refill them with all kinds of owners and inhabitants. Whereas tradition can
be produced locally, the production of heritage is centralized and produces something
beyond the local and regional, beyond the distinctive, the ethnic, the multicultural. It is
everybody’s and therefore nobody’s.
Not least important is how the two mindscapes structure feelings. Tradition tends to
evoke a nostalgic, bittersweet modality, a longing for and mourning over lost good old
days, together with commitments to honor a specific local past, often personalized as
“family roots.” Heritage is about a much more generic past that you may pay an occa-
sional visit to without much obligation, nostalgia, or grief. It is an “inspiring model, a
spicy and mythical taleworld without attaching sorrow” (Gustafsson 2002: 181). If tra-
dition mirrors the desires, anxieties, longings, and belongings of modernity (Eriksen
1993), heritage is more of an answer to processes in the late or postmodern world that
promote play and experience, a shift from the informative to the performative in rela-
tion to the past.
Heritagization
These changes in the musical mindscapes of folk or traditional music are great and
impressive. As I have pointed out, in many places in Northern Europe there is now more
folk music, practiced by more numerous and better educated folk musicians than ever
before. Many of these people do not see themselves as traditional musicians, as in the old
54 Owe Ronström
Swedish spelmän, but as professional folk musicians, fusion artists, world musicians. As
doers and marketers have taken control over the mindscape, knowers have been trans-
formed from definers and controllers to mere suppliers of material. A whole new musi-
cal infrastructure has developed, from teaching institutions to festivals and clubs, and
traditional music has been transformed into a world of managers, posters, riders, festi-
vals, copyright issues, and record releases.
I argue that “tradition” and “heritage” are two forms of production of the absent in the
present, for purposes still to come. Both are global phenomena that are “downloaded”
locally to redefine, reformulate, and take control over aesthetics, history, economy, and
power. I also argue that folk music, at least in northwestern Europe, is now rapidly mov-
ing from an older “tradition” mindscape into a much more recent “heritage” mindscape.
Even when traditional music is understood as “folk” or “national,” it is today often posi-
tioned in a global arena. This shift from tradition to heritage introduces new discourses
and redefines concepts; it changes our understandings of what kind of pasts the music
comes from, to whom it belongs, and what it stands for, all of which are signals of impor-
tant changes in the production of collective memory and history.
The shift from tradition to heritage is deeply interconnected with globalization. As
an effect of new, globalized technology, local styles are uncoupled or disembedded
from their former musical mindscapes, their specific places and pasts, and made avail-
able over large spaces as “local musics, not from here” (Brusila 2003: 11). Freed from
former understandings of “local,” specific forms of traditional music are boiled down
to a minimum of signs, a few distinctive and highly typified stylistic traits that become
possible to download and stage everywhere. Megan Forsyth, in her work on Shetland
fiddlers, calls this “Shetlandising.” The traditional Shetland fiddling styles are boiled
down to a minimum of signs in the form of a few distinctive and highly typified stylis-
tic traits representing the Shetlands as a whole, which makes it possible for Shetland
fiddlers to play jazz, pop, or rock with a Shetland touch and for non-Shetlanders any-
where in the world to, in a sense, become Shetland fiddlers (Forsyth 2007). Another
obvious example is klezmer music, a globalized style of recent American origins often
staged as old local “Eastern European-Jewish” (Slobin 1984). In his book Fiddler on
the Move, Mark Slobin analyses klezmer as “heritage music,” along lines similar to
those I have outlined here. “Heritage,” Slobin notes, “replaces older terms perhaps
now thought of as problematic. A prominent victim is the word ‘traditional’ ” (Slobin
2000: 13).
When music is homogenized, uncoupled, and spread via global motorways over
large areas, problems will inevitably arise with control over ownership and use of rights.
Fiddle music from Cape Breton, homogenized as “typical” Cape Bretonish, is today per-
formed also in the United States, England, and Scandinavia. This may eventually lead
to a kind of crisis for the fiddlers in Cape Breton when they discover that they are not
in control of this “local music, not from here,” to the extent that they might no longer fit
into the model of themselves as themselves and thus become inauthentic (cf. Feintuch
2006). And, because traditional music and heritage music so often are used as represen-
tations of local or ethnic identities for whole groups, regions, or nations, the tendencies
I have outlined here will no doubt again turn these music domains into battle grounds in
new and unexpected ways.
Such changes have implications for both individuals and groups because they may get
access to more musical forms to express their emotions, affections, and identities. There
are also implications for the global music and tourist industries, as well as for transna-
tional organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO), with its World Heritage Lists. These global structures seem
to have much to gain in terms of control over resources by promoting music as heritage.
When local fiddle music, formerly understood as “traditional,” is transformed to “heri-
tage music” or even to “World Heritage” music, it most certainly will have effects on
musical behavior, the understanding of what the music is, represents, and comes from,
and the mindscapes and domains of these musics.
A New Historical Subject?
“In motion”—so could a good deal of “modernity” be summarized. Whole societies

are set in motion, literally: Modernity is the era of mass movements and utopic visions.
Individuals are set in motion, socially, spiritually, culturally, economically, politically,
and, not least, geographically. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued, motion,
break-up, and change is the core of modernity: “all that is solid melts into air” (Marx and
Engels 1848, chapter 1). The inherent motion of modernity becomes apparent against
a background of immobility and stability. If motion and change belongs to modernity,
then stability belongs to the society out of which modernity develops and against which
it braces itself, the “traditional peasant society.”
In a common version of historiography, this is what the picture looks like: develop-
ment, relentlessly progressing forward, toward modern times—an accelerating change
that brings about a need to look backward, to a previous society, with greater continuity,
more solid values, and a slower tempo. When everything is set in motion, history, tradi-
tion, and heritage become handrails to hold on to.7
There are reasons to be critical of this picture. In a series of articles, the Norwegian
folklorist Anne Eriksen discusses the relationship between “tradition” and “modernity.”
She starts by showing how ideas about “a genuine folk culture” grew out of a produc-
tive contrastive interplay with “modernity” or “modern society.” When modernity is
characterized by breakup and the melting of all that is solid, tradition is characterized
by stability, authenticity, secure social relations, and a life closer to nature. Modernity
is pluralism, a world full of choices for the individual. Tradition, contrariwise, is fixed
solutions and solid collective norms (Eriksen 1995: 23).
This view, Eriksen goes on to argue, does not depend on any objective realities. The
notion of “a traditional society” is a modern idea that grew out of the opposition to mod-
ern society and was, thereby, a part if it (cf. Handler and Linnekin 1984). “Tradition” is
the fixed point that is necessary to bring about a new world set in constant motion. To
56 Owe Ronström
praise old traditions does not necessarily mean being against modernity. On the con-
trary, by inducing stability and continuity, the notion of “a tradition” becomes a prereq-
uisite for breakup and modernization. Even when traditions are revived and fostered
as a means to symbolically reconnect to a lost world, and even if these traditions are
used as handrails to hold on to when the winds of change blow hard, they nevertheless
become springboards for cultural change (Eriksen 1993: 24). Hence, Eriksen concludes,
if tradition is created by modernity, the opposite also must be true: that modernity is
created by tradition. It is by using the ideas about tradition as context that modernity
emerges as text (Eriksen 1995: 24).
The base of Eriksen’s constructivistic argument is the idea that the human world is
constituted by difference and that things can become visible for humans only through a
productive contrast to something else, to what they are not. What if we apply this argu-
ment to heritage? I have described heritage as a new type of cultural production of dif-
ference, a new mode of production of the past that builds on and strengthens already
established ideas about an essential qualitative difference between past and present.
I have also argued that the production of heritage, at least in northwestern Europe,
should be understood in relation to its predecessor on the market of historical repre-
sentations—the traditional peasant society. Now, if tradition is a modern concept, born
out of modernity as its constitutive contrastive mirror image and as a projection of its
inherent dreams and anxieties, could we then not understand heritage as part of a simi-
lar constitutive contrastive mirror image, emanating from the dreams and anxieties of a
new and different type of society?
The ideas about “the old peasant society” and “tradition” were born in the late
eighteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, they had taken shape in a
mindscape in which the territory was the nation and the time was a recent past, the sev-
enteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The historical subject that was created to populate
this mindscape was “the folk.” Born out of modernity as its constitutive contrast, this
mindscape contributes to modernization.
The idea about “heritage” that breaks through during the late part of twentieth cen-
tury builds on older practices, but produces a new type of mindscape. Its time is differ-
ent, a rather vague, stretched out “past.” Its territory is another, more individually based
“glocality.” The kind of modernity that produced tradition as its mirror image is no lon-
ger relevant. A crisis of representation (Ristilammi 1994: 31; cf. Harvey 1989), or a series
of dislocations (Laclau 1990: 39), brings about a new society, one more disembedded,
individualized, glocalized, fragmented, multicultural. New elites represent themselves
through new cultural forms, placed in new mindscapes, populated by a new type of his-
torical subject of which, as yet, we see only vague contours.
If “traditional mindscape” can be seen as the mirror image of an emerging urban
modernity, I propose heritage as yet another mirror image, a homogenizing counter-
force to the diversifying and globalizing forces of post- or late modernity. As a con-
stitutive part of this new world, heritage contributes to producing it as a visible and
objectively existing reality.
Notes
1. This part of the present discussion is abbreviated from Ronström 2007.
2. A paraphrase of the core idea of The Society for Creative Anachronism. See http://www.
sca.org/officers/chatelain/sca-intro.html (accessed March 17, 2011).
3. “Geosophy,” a notion from John Kirtland Wright, stands for metaphysically inspired
world-views, as opposed to physical geography (Gillis 2004: 17).
4. Mindscape is a concept related to Mikhail Bakhtin’s “chronotope.” As Bakhtin (1981) points
out, the chronotope defines the genre. It is by being placed in a certain chronotope, or a
certain mindscape, that phenomena like folk or traditional music become meaningful.
5. In Europe, “heritage” is a relatively new word that has been incorporated into an antiquar-
ian discourse, standing initially for “old valuable buildings, monuments, and sites” and
later for almost anything worth preserving. Its usage differs quite significantly from North
American usage. In the United States, students studying their home language at college
may now be called “heritage speakers” (Slobin 2000: 12), a phrase difficult to understand if
translated into European languages. A phrase like “I have Swedish heritage” may be mean-
ingful in North America, but will not be understood in a Western European context.
6. They also share a set of double references: first, to something in the past that is reenacted
in the present, then to artefacts as well as behavior, and last, to the process of handing over
things from one generation to another, as well as to the objects that are handed over.
7. A good example of this perspective is Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983).
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C HA P T E R 3
A N E X PA N D E D T H E O RY F O R
R E V I VA L S A S C O S M O P O L I TA N
PA RT I C I PAT O RY
M U S I C M A K I N G
TA M A R A L I V I NG STON
In 1999, I wrote an article entitled “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory,” the pur-
pose of which was to propose a conceptual framework for thinking about music revivals
as a particular musical phenomenon distinguished by a certain set of shared assump-
tions, activities, and characteristics. The period since the 1960s has seen a plethora of
music revivals and cultural renewal movements occurring across the globe. Scholarly
interest in the subject has increased dramatically from a few publications in the 1980s
to a surge of interest beginning in the 1990s and continuing into the new millennium.
Clearly, music revivals have been an area of growing interest, not only for those who
participate in them but as the subject of research.
I was approached by the editors of the Oxford Handbook of Music Revival to contrib-
ute a chapter commenting on the application of my original model in the diverse case
studies presented in the volume and offering a critical reflection on my earlier thinking
about revivals. With this in mind, I begin my chapter with a brief summary of the main
points I made in my original model. I reflect back on how my interest in music revivals
came about as a result of the combination of academic curiosity and personal experi-
ence with participatory music making. This section is followed by a critical reflection of
my original model in light of the case studies presented in the volume, in which I argue
for the continued utility of my original model, albeit with some additions and modifica-
tions. In the next section, I suggest future directions for revival scholarship. In particu-
lar, I argue that the participatory aspect of music revivals deserves special consideration,
given its importance as a critical site for the intersection of musical practice and social
signification. I point to the work of ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino on participatory
music and social constructions of individual identity (Turino 2008) and encourage the
REVIVALS AS COSMOPOLITAN PARTICIPATORY MUSIC MAKING 61
adoption of these concepts and theoretical frameworks in future scholarship on music

revivals. I end the chapter with some observations on the vital roles played by music
revivals as agents of cultural renewal and social healing, and their efficacy in making the
past come alive in the present.
A Model for Music Revivals: Summary and

Origins
In my 1999 article, I defined music revivals as social movements “with the goal of restor-
ing and preserving a musical tradition that is believed to be disappearing or completely
relegated to the past.” I further argued that the purpose of revivals is twofold: “to serve as
cultural opposition and as an alternative to mainstream culture” and to “improve exist-
ing culture through the values based on historical value and authenticity expressed by
the revivalists” (Livingston 1999: 68). Synthesizing the literature on music revivals avail-
able in English (see the Companion Website for a bibliography in 3.Livingston.web.bib-
liography.docx ), I developed a list of distinguishing characteristics common to music
revivals, including:
1. An individual or small group of “core revivalists”

2. Revival informants and/or original sources (e.g., historical sound recordings)
3. A revivalist ideology and discourse
4. A group of followers forming the basis of a revivalist community
5. Revivalist activities (organizations, festivals, competitions)
6. Nonprofit and/or commercial enterprises catering to the revivalist market
(Livingston 1999: 69).
I noted in my article that a key component of music revivals is a particular ideology

and discourse based on the assumption that current musical practices of the tradition
undergoing revival represent and manifest historical continuity and fidelity to historical
sources, thereby constituting it as an authentic cultural expression.
Reflecting back on my interest in revivals and the research that led to the develop-
ment of my original model, it is interesting to note the way in which the subject came
to occupy my attention. In the 1990s, I was a graduate student in ethnomusicology at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, engaged in studying Brazilian urban
popular music. I was particularly interested in the plucked string-based instrumental
style called choro. As I related in the introduction to my 1999 article, the focus of my
doctoral dissertation research shifted several times before settling into its final form.
At first, I thought I would be producing a historical study of a musical tradition that
no longer existed, as the literature referred to it in the past tense. The unexpected dis-
covery of a contemporary choro recording opened up the possibility of conducting an
62 Tamara Livingston
ethnography of a living tradition. Once I began my research in Brazil, however, my focus

shifted once more, from an ethnographic study of the current choro scene (which was
admittedly undergoing a low point during the time of my fieldwork in the early 1990s)
to the great burst of choro activity (the renascimento or rebirth) that had exploded on the
music scene in the 1970s. I discovered that the choro revival had a strong participatory
element. Choro musicians frequently told me that the most authentic form of choro was
that found in the choro roda or jam sessions governed by an unspoken set of rules privi-
leging the art of making music together rather than highlighting any one musician over
another. Comparing the choro revival to revivals in the United States that were more
familiar to me, I was intrigued by striking similarities in activities, structures, and dis-
courses, and I felt compelled to look more closely at music revivals as a general musical
phenomenon.
Looking back on my fieldwork, I realize that my interest in music revivals was not
purely academic. As a classical guitarist immersed in a largely solo repertoire, I par-
ticularly relished opportunities to engage in participatory music making as a change
from my classical music upbringing. As a graduate student, I played a number of differ-
ent instruments in a variety of ethnic music ensembles, including a Javanese gamelan
ensemble, an Andean panpipe group, a Balkan music group, a Peruvian huayno ensem-
ble, and a Russian Folk Orchestra. Even though some of these groups gave perfor-
mances, the most enjoyable aspect for me was simply playing music with other people.
In Brazil, I had numerous occasions to listen to choro revivalists reminisce about the
revival period and talk about why they became involved. For many new converts, it was
the participatory choro roda that attracted them and opened the door to a new musical
and social world. These attitudes and emotions resonated strongly with my own experi-
ences of participatory music making and have, since that time, informed my new inter-
est in the participatory aspect of music revivals.
The Model for Music Revivals Revisited
The diversity and scope of recent music revival case studies exhibited in this volume
offered a unique opportunity for me to reevaluate my original model in terms of the
variety of perspectives and analytical frameworks presented from disciplines including
ethnomusicology, folklore studies, cultural anthropology, and dance studies. My first
question was whether my original model provided a useful framework for other music
revival researchers. Given the number of contributors who found at least some aspect of
it useful or who incorporated definitions or terms from my 1999 article, I am encouraged
to think it may still have some utility in facilitating cross-cultural study and analysis of
music revivals and could continue to be of use as a preliminary framework. Certainly,
the assertion made in my 1999 article that music revivals are an important feature of the
twentieth-century landscape should be expanded to include at least this early part of
the twenty-first century. It is also clear that music revivals and related movements are
not confined to North America and Western Europe, as the scope of the Music Revival
handbook suggests. Further cross-cultural analysis critically examining the similarities
and differences of these cases will improve our understanding of the particular intersec-
tion of global and local processes as they inform such movements.
At this point, it seems appropriate to comment on the use of the term “revival.” Many
contributors to the volume have noted the limitations of the term and the particular
baggage it carries. Admittedly, the term does not translate evenly or well across cultures.
Revivalists themselves may be reluctant to use the term for their activities. Given these
shortcomings, ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin suggests that the term has outlived its
usefulness and should be abandoned. I would argue, however, that it still serves a pur-
pose: First, it provides a means for identifying and collating musical movements that
share certain characteristics, and, second, it gives us a preliminary framework with
which to analyze and discuss the ways in which these movements support or depart
from the defined usage. Hill and Bithell’s qualification of “revival” as a broadly defined
term designating a number of related processes—including regeneration, reclamation,
resurgence, and recreation—that share the “fundamental motivation to draw or build
on the past, and/or to intensify some aspect of the present” is eminently practical and
allows us to continue to speak of these movements as related phenomena.
The importance of metaphor as a means of understanding various revivalist processes
and dynamics is a useful analytical perspective brought to light by the present collection
of essays. My original model was based on a survey of music revivals in North America
and Western Europe that tended to be framed by revivalists as reactions against and
cultural alternatives to mainstream culture. Yet, as noted by Hill and Bithell, the case
studies in this volume reveal that revivalists may position themselves in ways that
emphasize various goals for the revival movement; for example, as cultural restoration
of indigenous traditions (Conlon and Gallaugher). Particularly striking are the cases
presented by Ceribašić and Kartomi, in which music revivals serve as a means of cul-
tural healing or restoration after catastrophic events, including war and natural disas-
ters. Significantly, metaphors such as these also serve to highlight the ways in which
music is able to do vital social and cultural work that language and other cultural realms
cannot. In each case, it is important to recognize and understand revivals as processes
(as argued by Alan Jabbour and others in the volume) carried out through music (or
dance) and instigated by individuals for the purpose of accomplishing particular social
and cultural goals. This view allows for a much more accurate and nuanced consider-
ation of the motivations and internal dynamics of these movements.
An interesting point to consider is whether the processes of professionalization, insti-
tutionalization, commercialization, and commodification, noted by Hill and Bithell
as part of inherent processes of recontextualization within revivals, are inevitable and
therefore a necessary aspect of music revivals. These processes are often the source of
angst for revivalists as they struggle to position themselves ideologically within the
revivalist discourse of historical continuity, authenticity, and preservation yet teach,
advocate, and promote their tradition to others. Scholars have been resistant until
recently to even consider music revivals as legitimate subjects for scholarly inquiry,
revealing deeply held assumptions about the standards for authentic music practices.
Even if these processes prove to be inevitable, we should not make the mistake of con-
sidering them as unidirectional, with a set of predictable outcomes. These processes can
just as easily engender new flows back toward the participatory continuum. Musical
systems are fluid, and it is not hard to imagine counterrevivals or other movements,
currents, and eddies, taking the tradition along other paths. Indeed, within any revival,
anytime the music is performed in a face-to-face participatory context, one could argue
that, at that instant, the revival has been transformed or reclaimed as a participatory
act of social-musical interaction. It is incumbent on scholars to trace these paths wher-
ever they may lead, considering them as additional venues and means for accomplishing
revivalists’ goals.
The assertion I made in my original model that music revivals are middle-class phe-
nomena and that revivalist ideologies tend to be constructed on certain modes of think-
ing and structuring of experiences shared by middle-class people in consumer capitalist
and socialist societies is one I would like to revisit. At the time my 1999 article was writ-
ten, I was hesitant to assert the relationship between music revivals and social class. On
the one hand, it seemed clear to me that revivalist conceptions of “modern” and “tradi-
tional,” the tendency to value and emphasize presentational over participatory forms of
music making, and the treatment of music as a thing that can be turned into a commod-
ity were products of a certain worldview and certainly not universally held. Yet, I was
uncomfortable locating the source of this transnational worldview in a particular social
class and suspected there would be limitations in applying this concept in a global con-
text. Although this assertion may hold in certain cases in North America and Western
Europe, as well as in postcolonial contexts (see for example Walker), it may not be as
relevant in other cases of renewal and reclamation.
Within a global context, Hill and Bithell note, it is important to recognize and unpack
multiple ideologies of renewal and reclamation, each situated within its own ontological
genealogy, goals, narratives, and discourse. To this end, I suggest that looking at these
tendencies and characteristics as hallmarks of a broad cosmopolitan cultural formation
is of much greater utility. According to Turino, cosmopolitan cultural formations are
“defined by habits of thought and practice derived from a combination of Christianity
and capitalist ethos and practices under the umbrella discourse of modernity” (Turino
2008: 118). He continues that there are several sources and types of cosmopolitan life
ways and habits of thought, tracing their source to European and U.S. colonialism and
capitalism or to its “competitive alternative,” the modernist-socialist cosmopolitan for-
mation embraced by the former Soviet Union and China (Turino 2008: 118). Those who
adopt these life ways either consciously or unconsciously may come from any num-
ber of classes, although they are most predominant in middle-class and postcolonial
elites. The significant difference between cosmopolitanism and class is that the former
emphasizes a particular worldview, not income level. As Turino writes, this cultural
formation exists outside the confines of social class, nationality, or ethnicity: “Like
diasporas, cosmopolitan cultural formations involve prominent constellations of hab-
its that are shared among widely dispersed groups in countries around the world; but
unlike diasporas, cosmopolitan formations are not traced to any particular homeland
(Turino 2008).
Unpacking the motivations of individual revival participants, however, requires
a much more granular approach. Turino warns us that although there may be many
adherents to a cosmopolitan cultural formation, “for any given individual, the models
for habit formation, thought and practice are multiple” (2008: 120). He continues that
“the more eclectic a person’s experiences are, the more eclectic her habits, and the more
tools we will need to understand her patterns of decision making and social action and
interaction” (2008: 120). In revival participants, large cultural formations, such as cos-
mopolitanism, are cross-cut by a number of specific affinity groups or “cultural cohorts”
formed by shared habits based on particular aspects of the individual, including but not
limited to age, gender, class, or color. The primary benefit of applying Turino’s model
to the study of music revivals is that it provides a framework for talking about broadly
shared habits and beliefs without losing sight of the individual and his or her socially
and individually constituted identity, and it reminds us of the necessity of grounding the
global in the local.
In my original model, I proposed that revivals were the result of the activities of “core
revivalists” taken up by a broader base of those engaged as participants in the revival.
I suggested that core revivalists were endowed with authority not so much by whether
they were insiders to the tradition, but more from their positions as scholar, academic,
or respected professional musician and, perhaps most important, their self-imposed
roles as ardent defender and advocate of “their” musical tradition. A fascinating example
noted in Bithell’s chapter on Georgian polyphonic singing is the large number of choirs
made up mostly of non-Georgians living outside of Georgia. Their impact is significant,
acting as cultural agents promoting touring Georgian ensembles, music workshops,
and pilgrimages to Georgia to study with the masters of the style (Bithell). At the time
I wrote my 1999 article, I did not expect to find this level of passion and commitment
from revivalists far removed from a tradition. This type of revivalist appears in a number
of the case studies presented here and represents an interesting challenge for ethnomu-
sicologists attempting to account for the level and intensity of their involvement.
Hill and Bithell echo my interest in the fundamental question of what involvement
in revivals reveals about broader psychosocial processes. I suggest that the reason
music revivals are so prevalent and engage so many people is that they provide mul-
tiple opportunities to fill basic social and individual needs for participants in a way that
other cultural realms cannot. Among these basic needs are the desire for meaningful
social interaction (without the burden of verbal communication), the desire for per-
sonal creative fulfillment, and the need to feel historically connected or grounded. As
a process that relies on nonverbal communication, at least in the act of making music,
music revivals are especially effective because they reach individuals through the senses
at the level of emotion and association. Music revivals offer an open invitation to par-
ticipate; without recruiting new converts, revivals soon wither and die. Revivals with a
strong participatory component are especially invitational, leading to a wide spread of
the music practice and the potential to last for decades, if not longer.
In considering revivalist communities, much has been said about the fluidity of roles,
motivations, activities, and means of communication. Borrowing Blaustein’s concept of
“constellations” used to describe internet-based musical common interest groups, one
might imagine revivalist communities as a constellation of affinity groups and networks
rotating around and engaging in the musical tradition, changing and shifting over time.
Converts to a tradition may have initially become engaged for one reason, but they may
change their stance more than once over time. To some degree, one might argue that this
is typical of all musical activity, no matter the style, tradition, or genre. Is there, then, a
particular trajectory or trajectories typical of revivalists within a musical system?
We might also look at revivals as systems capable of supporting a number of differ-
ent positions regarding the central narratives of authenticity and historical lineage, or,
as described by Hill and Bithell, as “sectors of a circle where the shared point of refer-
ence is the seed, or the question, at the center but where there is no attempt to establish
a hierarchy in the diversity of responses.” The nature of this constellation or circle may
then give indications as to the longevity of the revival, whether it self-destructs when the
majority of revivalists find the central narrative and musical parameters too restrictive
or whether it survives in loosely affiliated “postrevival” interest groups. A case in point is
the Brazilian choro revival and the central aesthetic requirement that “authentic” choro
must be played solely on acoustic instruments. This stance was challenged by those who
felt that keeping electric instruments out of choro would stigmatize it as “music of the
past” and prevent choro from become a modern, progressive art form. Conversely, cer-
tain cultural critics saw the incursion of imported rock and electric instruments as a
symbol of cultural colonialism and were eager to add their voices to those of revivalists
desiring to keep the tradition acoustic and therefore purely Brazilian. A primary reason
for the decline of the choro revival in the 1980s was the decline of government support,
but the debate over electric instruments carried over into the development of postrev-
ival styles: a traditional style using traditional acoustic instruments emphasizing a his-
toric repertoire and newly composed pieces in the older style, and a progressive style
incorporating electric instruments and experimenting with fusions of choro with jazz
and rock idioms.
Revivals and Participatory Music: How

Music Matters
Revisiting my original model of music revivals in light of the contributions to the Music
Revival volume has rekindled my fascination with the power of music revivals to effect
cultural change. Hill and Bithell have provided future researchers with a new, top-down
vantage point in their introductory essay in which they seek to synthesize and distill the
findings presented into broad categories and taxonomies. They have also succeeded in
teasing out and defining common themes and areas of interest cutting across revivals,
including theorizing authenticity and ideologies of renewal, the documentation and

analysis of recontextualization processes, and the concept and nature of “postrevival”
musical formations. There are many paths one could take to analyze these themes, and,
indeed, the contributors to this volume have used and incorporated a number of theo-
retical approaches from folklore studies, ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, soci-
ology, and museum studies to explore issues of musical innovation/transformation,
ideologies of authenticity, agency, revivalist communities, processes of festivalization
and commodification, and revivalist cultural politics.
As a musician and a frequent participant-observer for whom music plays an impor-
tant role in my personal and communal identity, I am most interested in the “doing,” the
act of musical engagement and the process of signification that may enrich it. Looking
at the point at which participatory musical practice and meaning is coupled with ideas
of historical continuity and authenticity may provide interesting insight into the inner
workings and meanings of revivals.
Thomas Turino, in his book Music as Social Life, offers a new perspective that I believe
holds great promise in the study of music revivals. Turino challenges us to consider
music not through the filter of genre, style, and subculture, nor by its association with
something else (music and religion, music and politics, music and identity). Instead, he
proposes considering music in the ways that it becomes socially meaningful. The four
basic fields of music making he proposes (participatory, presentational, high-fidelity
music, and studio audio art) are differentiated by sharply contrasting systems of values,
social goals, frames of interpretation, practices, roles and responsibilities, and sound
features. Whereas processes of commodification entail recording and possibly studio
art, the majority of the revivals presented here are characterized by mostly presenta-
tional and participatory fields, from staged contests to professional dance ensembles, to
core revivalist performers and groups, to participatory jam sessions, workshops, classes,
and camps. Indeed the pedagogical component almost always includes participatory
music as part of its endeavors.
Turino describes participatory music as “actively contributing to the sound and
motion of a musical event through dancing, singing, clapping, and playing musical
instruments when each of these activities is considered integral to the performance”
(2008: 28). Participatory forms of music making are characterized by open forms and
repetition, with subtle variation and constant rhythm preferred over dramatic contrasts,
and a dense texture that allows for individuals to enter and exit without disturbing the
musical experience. Although participants may take solos and improvise, this will not
override the concern for the overall musical texture and for remaining “in sync” with
each other. He continues, “In participatory music making one’s primary attention is on
the activity, on the doing, and on the other participants, rather than on an end product
that results from the activity” (Turino 2008: 28). In other words, participatory music is
“heightened social interaction” that arises from participants’ focus on each other in the
act of music making, for example, from synchronous body movement, body language
(including mirroring), and an inward focus on the doing rather than an outward focus
on presenting to an audience (Turino 2008: 42–43).
Closely examining the nature and role of participatory aspects of revivals has the
potential to shed light on a number of interesting questions, including the tension
between fidelity to authoritative historical sources and musical innovation and creativ-
ity. In revivals with both participatory and presentational components—for example,
the Southern old-time fiddling revival in the United States, described by Jabbour—I
suggest that fidelity to a historical style reference may serve to invite or facilitate par-
ticipation by limiting the social pressure or concern for musical innovation. Jabbour
emphasizes the importance of informal jam sessions over the activities of professional
touring groups and notes that the instrumental format allowed for a greater participa-
tory aspect than did sing-alongs in which the lead singer rotated between participants.
In the Southern old-time fiddling revival in the United States and the Brazilian choro
revival, we see that revivals offer a rare opportunity for communal music making within
cosmopolitan cultural formations that favor and privilege presentational, high-fidelity,
and studio audio art.1
The participatory music making perspective may also reveal interesting findings
about how ideologies of authenticity and historical continuity become personally
meaningful to revival participants. What happens when the sonic bonding that occurs
during participatory music making is associated with revivalist discourses of historical
continuity and authenticity? Or, conversely, just because participatory music making
is framed with a particular ideology, does this mean that participants will accept and/
or internalize these meanings? How do the motivations of players differ from those not
directly involved in performance? Are there tensions between these music fields within
revivals that result in individual and cohort shifts during the revival process? Clearly,
there is still much we do not know about the revival process, and I hope that future
researchers will take up the challenge in studying this aspect.
Conclusion: Revivals and Social

Reintegration
The potential of music revivals to make positive changes in culture is significant. Despite
the politics of culture and the exclusive aspects of ideologies of authenticity (especially
those that uphold ideas of ethnic purity or racial superiority) found in some revivals,
music has a greater capacity to heal than to destroy. Communities and nations recuper-
ating from the sudden destructive acts of nature or war or emerging from the ravages
of prolonged cultural suppression have turned to music revivals as a means of healing.
Music serves as a powerful means for restoring and re-engaging individuals with each
other, their culture, and their past. Yet the ability of revivals to work positively for cul-
tural renewal or social integration resulting from engaging in participatory music is not
limited to these extreme circumstances. The combination of musical participation and
the social cohesion it can create, combined with the powerful ideologies of connecting
and shaping the past in the present, is something that we all, especially those of us living
in cosmopolitan cultural formations, desperately need.
As an educator who has taught music appreciation and world music surveys to count-
less undergraduates in the United States, I am disturbed by the prevailing notion held by
many students, policy makers, and the media that music is irrelevant at worst and mere
entertainment at best. In the United States, neither music nor the arts are considered to be
of sufficient value to avoid cuts in primary schools. As a result, I encounter many students
whose engagement with music is limited to the role of consumer and whose musical iden-
tity is represented by the quantity of songs on his or her iPod. They may not fully realize
it, but they are starved for musical engagement and the social cohesion it facilitates. This
is not the only realm in which students are disconnected. My staff and I at the Archives
and Rare Books Division at Kennesaw State University regularly offer presentations and
tours of our archival and rare book collection to students. It is fascinating to watch stu-
dents who seem to have been born plugged in to the Internet and expect all things of
value to be available at their fingertips visit our facility. Many students are unfamiliar with
libraries or may have grown up with few books in their homes. Watching their faces light
up and their curiosity come alive as we place an illuminated medieval manuscript or a
seventeenth-century folio of Shakespeare’s dramatic works in their hands, I cannot help
but think they have been starved for the historical connection and the human touch man-
ifest in these items. For them, this tactile experience of holding these objects connects
them in a way that lectures about history cannot, for, in this way, they become a part of
the historical narrative. Music revivals offer a similar experience through music. Music
revivals, at one time the despised stepchild of ethnomusicology and folklore studies, have
at last been recognized as vital agents of cultural change. They invite all of us to be a part of
history, to reconnect musically with each other and to reintegrate our communities.
Note
1. In some cases the form of presentation (i.e., presentational, recordings) is associated with
a dominant cultural power as much as with the style or genre of the music. In Brazil during
the 1970s and ’80s, participatory communal forms of traditional music making including
samba and choro were strongly associated with concepts of backwardness, despite the work
of revivalists. Therefore, revivalists believed putting choro on stage, making high-quality
recordings, and commodifying it were absolutely necessary to bring choro into the modern
world and to compete with cultural exports from the United States and Europe.
References
Livingston, Tamara. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory,” Ethnomusicology 43
(Winter): 66–85.
Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
PA R T I I
S C HOL A R S A N D
C OL L E C TOR S A S
R E V I VA L AG E N T S
C HA P T E R 4
A N T I Q UA R IA N
N O S TA L G IA A N D T H E
I N S T I T U T I O NA L I Z AT I O N O F
E A R LY M U S I C
JOH N HA I N E S
This essay explores modern performances of medieval music as a phenomenon of musi-

cal revival. The revival of so-called early music, better known for most of the modern
period as “ancient music,” was crucial to defining other musical revivals, specifically that
of European folk music. The revival of European medieval music, like that of European
folk traditions, originated in early modern antiquarianism and was shaped by its obses-
sion with the restoration of things to an original, pure state. Both revivals underwent a
remarkable institutionalization in the nineteenth century indispensable to their becom-
ing academic subjects worthy of being included in this book. In comparing approaches
to early music and folk music, key central concerns arise in both cases, as surveyed in
this essay: their origins in the activities of early modern academic societies; a nostalgia
for the past and, nostalgia’s corollary, a dissatisfaction with contemporary culture; an
obsession with written sources paired with an academic validation of oral and illiterate
performances; and a specifically nineteenth-century trend toward institutionalization
in the wake of industrialization.
Contrary to what is sometimes asserted, the Western tradition of reviving early
music started long before the nineteenth century. In this essay, I shall distinguish
between what I shall term early music and Early Music, with a focus on the former. We
may define early music as reflecting a modern nostalgia for a musical past considered
ironically superior for its presumed innocence; and Early Music, as an institutionalized
performance movement peaking out of this general movement in the late twentieth cen-
tury. More often than not, the history of the so-called Early Music movement has been
related by partisan performers and musicologists, as some ethnomusicologists have
recently stressed (Livingston 1999: 67–68 and 74–77; Shelemay 2001: 6–10). Early Music
74 John Haines
historians frame their account as a revival beginning in the nineteenth century—either

early or late 1800s, depending on the author—and culminating in the late twentieth cen-
tury, capped off by a period of decline and, according to at least one expert, “the end of
Early Music” (Haskell 1988; Haynes 2007; Sherman 1997: 20; Taruskin 1995, 164–172).
So goes “the extraordinary revival of Early Music,” as one source puts it (Cohen and
Spitzer 1985). But such a predictable, century-long rise-and-fall narrative is suspiciously
neat and, ultimately, historically shortsighted. For Early Music—a label exclusive to the
closing decades of the twentieth century, as detailed below—should be understood as
belonging to the longer history of early music.
The Western fascination with early music goes back to the sixteenth century and the
phenomenon of antiquarianism. Antiquarians studied not only Greek and Roman antiq-
uity, but the more recent Middle Ages, which they in fact also called “antiquity.” They
believed that ancient things, including ancient music, should be revived, resurrected
from oblivion. Antiquarians also theorized about the connection between contempo-
rary folk traditions and antiquities, musical or otherwise. As they saw it, contemporary
folk traditions held the key to resurrecting ancient songs. After the early modern period,
antiquarian interest in music grew, following trends arising out of the industrialization
and capitalization of Europe and the Americas. The most crucial development relating to
more recent times was the emergence of the industrial university in the nineteenth and
twentieth century. In the late 1900s, almost as an afterthought to these major develop-
ments, the expression “Early Music” became common coin. But for centuries before this,
early music—meaning the traditional, antiquarian enthusiasm for ancient music—had
thrived, along with its sister, folk music, as I shall relate throughout this essay.
Antiquity and Its Music
From the earliest antiquarian studies, the word “antiquity” included the Middle Ages.
When the late fifteenth-century scholar William Worcestre traveled England looking
for English antiquities (“antiquitates Anglie”), he included cultural relics of the court of
King Arthur in his searches (Worcestre 1969: x–xi). From the sixteenth century onward,
English and French antiquarians called the Middle Ages “antiquity,” as in John Leland’s
De antiquitate Britannica (1534–1550) and Claude Fauchet’s Recueil des antiquitez gaulo-
ises et françoises (1579) (Evans 1956: 1–32). It was crucial at this time to associate the less
loved Middle Ages with the more prestigious Greek and Roman antiquity. In chapter 3
of his landmark work La deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse (1549), for exam-
ple, Joachim du Bellay contended that although medieval French was not as illustri-
ous as ancient Greek or Latin, it was great in its simplicity; its speakers “expressed their
thoughts with bare words, without art or ornament” (Du Bellay 1970: 22–28).1 Long after
the 1500s, this implicit association of medieval antiquity with that of Greece and Rome
would remain key to validating the Middle Ages as a distinct historical period worthy
of study.
ANTIQUARIANISM AND THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF EARLY MUSIC 75
FIGURE 4.1. “An Example of the Rulers or Chiefs in Virginia.” From Thomas Harriot, A
Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, pl. 3. (Reproduced with permis-
sion of the Royal Ontario Museum.)
The study of medieval antiquity was prompted by a modern nostalgia for a golden
age. Endemic to this nostalgia was antiquarians’ repulsion by their own modern times.
The seventeenth-century antiquarian Michael Drayton, for example, shunned his
own “lunatique Age,” bemoaning his contemporaries who would “heare of nothing
that . . . savors of Antiquity” (quoted in Evans 1956: 15). Far from being a recent idea,
this shunning of the present out of love for the past goes back to early modern anti-
quarianism. To this day, the nostalgia for a lost golden age remains a prominent theme
in the pursuit of musical antiquities. Ethnomusicologist Kay Kaufman Shelemay has
compared the Early Music movement to Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film The Lost
World (1997) “because of the manner in which both of these endeavors to construct and
transform the past in the present” (Shelemay 2001: 6). Harpsichordist extraordinaire
Wanda Landowska once confessed that the music of Bach and Couperin represented a
perfection that she thought her contemporaries could only hope to attain (Landowska
1996: 24 and 28). More recently, one scholarly enthusiast has written regarding per-
formers of early music: “living in our time, we do well to holiday in saner ages” (Godwin
1974: 15).
Significantly for the later dialogue between musicology and ethnomusicology that is
the theme of this essay, early antiquarians treated the then recently discovered Americas
and their inhabitants as a kind of parallel to medieval antiquity. As they saw it, both the
76 John Haines
Middle Ages and the so-called New World were home to noble savages. In A Briefe and
True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, Thomas Harriot stated that although
indigenous “Virginians” (i.e., Algonquians of North Carolina) “have no true knowledge
of God . . . and are destitute of all learning, yet they pass us in many things, as in sober
feeding and dexterity of wit in making . . . things so neat and fine” ([1588] 2007: 59) His
illustration of Algonquian chiefs elaborates on this, showing elegant, muscular warriors
with delicate tattoos covering their bodies (Figure 4.1). As Harriot and other European
observers of the New World saw it, Indians of the Americas, like the ancient inhabitants
of Europe, possessed a natural greatness that modern Europeans had lost. Montaigne
lauded the Tupí of Brazil as men endowed with “a very pure and simple naïveté” and
free of modern artifice (Montaigne 1906: 270). The same word Montaigne used to
describe South American indigenous peoples, “naïveté,” was already strongly associ-
ated with the good old days (bon vieulx temps) of medieval France (Haines 2004: 50–51).
English observers took a similar perspective. In his 1627 History of Great Britaine, John
Speed described ancient Britons as “poor and rude” but filled with innocence—“simple
and farre from those artificiall frauds, which some call wit and cunning” (1627: 179).
Marveling at their nakedness and “hardiness,” Speed supplemented his discussion with
engravings of the Picts taken directly from Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report pub-
lished a few decades earlier (see Figure 4.2). Such “patience” as the early Britons exhibited
“we find even now . . . in the wilder Virginians” (180–181), Speed declared, directly linking
the ancients of Europe and the primitive inhabitants of the Americas.
Thus, sixteenth-century European intellectuals conceived of the inhabitants of both
the Middle Ages and the New World as carved out of the same ancient mold: barbaric
and savage on the one hand and innocent of modernity on the other. The Tupí may have
been cannibals, Montaigne argued, but their society was superior in many respects to
that of modern Europeans. For the Spanish clergyman Bartolomé de la Casas, the inhab-
itants of the West Indies were “the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity . . . of any
people in the world” (Montaigne 1906: 268; de la Casas 1974: 38). Just as du Bellay had
argued for the similarities of medieval French and ancient Greek, so Montaigne did for
the tongues of the Tupí, praising their poetry as “Anacreontic” and their “sweet language”
as having Greek-sounding endings (279).2 Thomas Harriot felt that medieval Europeans
were just like American Indians in their wild innocence; as he put it, “the inhabitants
of Great Britain were in times past as savage as those of Virginia” (Harriot 2007: 73).
To demonstrate this point, Harriot followed his illustrations of early Algonquians with
five images of the Picts who lived in early medieval Britain. His depiction of a Pict war-
rior, a ferocious-looking, tattooed headhunter, intentionally resembles that of the early
Algonquian chiefs found earlier in the same work (Figure 4.2; compare Figure 4.1).
The concept of a single, vague premodern antiquity encompassing ancient Rome and
Greece as well as the Middle Ages endured long after the 1500s. Especially telling is the
variety of expressions used to describe medieval antiquity from 1600 to 1800: among
others, “Gothic,” “Saxon,” moyen temps, moyen âge, and, of course, “antiquity” (Voss
1972: 73–75; Evans 1956: 15, 20, and 29).3 Not until the late nineteenth century were the
now accepted labels for the Middle Ages and Renaissance first used, and this mostly
FIGURE 4.2. “A True Picture of a Pict.” From Harriot, A Briefe and True Report, app., pl. 1.
in non-English publications. Jules Michelet’s Histoire de France (1833–1867) is often

credited with popularizing “Moyen Âge” and “Renaissance” (Voss 1972: 99), but only in
the mid-twentieth century did English-language publications on music unanimously
switch to the now standard “Middle Ages.” Still in 1901, for example, the label “Middle
Ages” was absent from The Oxford History of Music (Woolridge 1901). Consensus was
78 John Haines
finally reached around midcentury, as signaled by Gustav Reese’s landmark Music in

the Middle Ages (1940). In sum, from 1500 to 2000, antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the
Renaissance were usually amalgamated into one sprawling, vague antiquity.
Antiquarians throughout these five centuries frequently used the concept of revival
when discussing things ancient. The word “revival” as signifying the restoration of old
things owes its existence to antiquarian studies, as Neil Rosenberg has pointed out; he
has identified the earliest use of the word “revival” in this sense from the 1660s (1993: 17).
Early modern antiquarians made it their goal to restore (restaurare) ancient things to a
pristine state, if necessary by first resurrecting them from obscurity (Howard 1990: 15).
For example, at the very start of his book on English antiquities, William Camden made
clear his intention “to restore Britain to its Antiquities, and its Antiquities to Britain”
(1695: preface). As antiquarianism slowly morphed into archeology, the study of old
objects and not just old literature became increasingly important. From coins to mon-
uments, antiquarian-archeologists excavated and revived the past. Writing in the late
1660s, Thomas Sprat raved that “many of the lost Rarities of Antiquity will be hereby
restor’d,” many of which had “been overwhelm’d in the ruins of Time” (quoted in Evans
1956: 29). The revival of ancient things from “the ruins of time” endured as a favorite
notion of the antiquarian-archeological movement. The French author Chateaubriand
wrote in the early 1800s of Pompei as a “living antiquity” that “had spent twenty centu-
ries in the bowels of the earth” (Chateaubriand 1969: 1505, cited in Haines 2001a: 25).
From the sixteenth century onward, the concept of restoration-resurrection-revival
was also applied to the songs and music of antiquity. For example, the sixteenth-century
historian Claude Fauchet published the texts of the songs of the trouvères from the
medieval “antiquité françoise,” whom he claimed to have “extracted, as it were, from
the prison of oblivion where ignorance had kept them in a confused heap” (quoted
in Haines 2004: 80).4 Except for the case of plainchant mentioned below, the applica-
tion of the concept of revival-restoration to the performance of songs or other music
came a little later, in the 1700s. Given the antiquarian precedent, it is no surprise that
eighteenth-century English academic societies devoted to performing music of the past
labeled their subject “ancient music,” adopting an antipopular ideology characteristic of
their sixteenth-century antiquarian predecessors.5 In the early nineteenth century, the
father of the French Concerts historiques, Alexandre Choron, might have been quoting
Claude Fauchet some three centuries earlier when he wrote of musical amateurs “who
came together to perform pieces of ancient schools, and to pull them out of oblivion”
(quoted in Wangermée 1948: 187). The label “ancient music” endures to this day, as in
the Academy of Ancient Music or the Studio de musique ancienne, two thriving Early
Music ensembles. It is important to stress that musical antiquarians of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries viewed their subject with a mixture of repulsion and curios-
ity, an attitude that originated in sixteenth-century antiquarianism. Charles Burney, for
example, would write disparagingly of “Gothic antiquities,” whose study “can furnish
but small pleasure or profit to an enlightened and polished people” (Burney 1782: 41).
For most of the period 1500–2000, then, what is now known as “early music” was called
“ancient music.” Rooted in the antiquarian activity of restoration, what could be labeled
FIGURE 4.3. “The Virginians’ Manner of Dancing at their Religious Festivals.” From Harriot,
A Briefe and True Report, pl. 18.
the ancient music movement also inherited from its antiquarian parent a fascination
with indigenous American peoples as reflecting a pure but wild mentality long lost to
moderns (see Figure 4.3).
In reviving ancient music, antiquarians frequently called on contemporary folk tra-
ditions. To give a few examples: in restoring plainchant, sixteenth-century European
Catholic authorities appealed to the oral performance of chant “handed down from a
most ancient time”; Montaigne turned to popular songs or villanelles of Gascogne,
France, for the literary revival of medieval secular song; and the Count of Tressan in
the eighteenth century used peasant songs of the Pyrénées to reconstruct medieval
epic songs (Haines 2004: 51 and 106–108; Hayburn 1979: 35). These and other musi-
cal antiquarians believed that contemporary folk traditions contained in kernel form
old performance traditions that had not been written down. In fact, their association
with illiteracy was paramount to their authenticity. Montaigne, for example, praised the
peasants of Gascogne for being free of the knowledge of “science or even writing” and
thus able to produce “popular and purely natural poetry” (quoted in Haines 2004: 51).
A little over three centuries later, ancient music enthusiast Wanda Landowska praised
80 John Haines
the “admirable old songs” of the peasants from her native Poland; “they make art with-
out being poisoned by the pride of progress” (1924: 17). For learned antiquarians, popu-
lar or folk traditions were well suited to the naïveté of ancient song, to its simple and
natural character. Because of the aforementioned connections that sixteenth-century
Europeans saw between the Middle Ages and the New World, they also linked these
two musical traditions. European visitors to the Americas were frequently drawn to the
music and dance traditions of indigenous Americans, since they believed these resem-
bled the ancient European folk dances with which they were familiar. Thomas Harriot,
for example, describes Algonquians’ festive dancing as an idyllic ritual full of sensual joy
and energy, suggesting a New World echo of the lost European golden age (Figure 4.3).
During their “large and solemn ceremony,” Harriot relates, three maidens (“the most
beautiful they can choose,” he adds) dance in the center of a circle. The nearly naked and
embracing maidens are shown surrounded by dancers and “stakes resembling veiled
nuns’ heads,” writes Harriot, imposing medieval—or at least Christian—imagery onto a
distinctly non-Christian musical ritual (Harriot 2007: 69).
Paradoxically, while antiquarians looked to oral traditions for the revival of ancient
things, they also relied on academic knowledge to extract ancient music from popu-
lar oral performances. In the revival of chant, for example, erudite counterreformers in
France and Italy believed they needed to restore (restituere) chant from its state of oral
corruption (correptio cantus) and to purge (purgare) it of certain corruptions that had
accrued over time like mold on a monument (Hameline 1997: 14 and 20). So the intel-
lectuals took it on themselves to discriminate between what was authentically ancient
or not in popular oral musics. The same mentality can be observed in secular music of
the same period, in the purported revival of Greek music by the Florentine Camerata
or in the French vers mesurés à l’antique created by the Académie de poésie et musique
(Haines 2004: 75).6 Musical imagination could also be used to supplement historical
sources. John Dryden, for example, based his heroic epic King Arthur (1691) on scholarly
medieval authors such as Bede—“to inform myself . . . concerning the Rites and Customs
of the Heathen Saxons,” as he wrote. As for the musical setting of his poem, Dryden left
it in “the Artful Hands” of Henry Purcell, “who has Compos’d it with so great a Genius,
that he has nothing to fear but an ignorant, ill-judging Audience” (quoted in Davies
2000: 255 and 273). The restoration of early music, then, apparently required literate,
academic knowledge, even when based on popular or illiterate traditions.
To sum up the preceding section, the quest for early music originated in
sixteenth-century antiquarianism and an interest in ancient music. One of the defin-
ing elements of musical antiquarianism was nostalgia for a premodern golden age.
Another was the belief that a subterranean connection existed between contemporary
folk traditions and the ancient music of Europe. The premodern golden age. included
the music of indigenous Americans that antiquarians saw as providing a novel insight
into the lost early music of Europe. Both American Indians and early Europeans were
seen as savage but noble and as superior in many ways to people of modern times. Early
modern antiquarians viewed folk traditions—from the peasant songs of Gascogne to
the indigenous dances of Virginia—as shedding light on the lost musical worlds of early
medieval Europeans. As these antiquarians saw it, these traditions could help restore
musical antiquities. In the revival of ancient music from the sixteenth century onward,
antiquarians saw themselves as pulling musical works from obscurity and resurrecting
them in order to make them available as printed texts to the general public for their cul-
tural edification.
Early Music and the Postindustrial

University
Eventually, in the predominantly academic circles where the pursuit of ancient music
thrived, the adjective “ancient” would be replaced with the even vaguer adjective “early.”
As I have already mentioned, this label “ancient music” persisted into the twentieth cen-
tury. One of the best known cases of this is Wanda Landowska’s Musique ancienne (1901),
which was awkwardly translated into English as Music of the Past (1924). Landowska
devoted the fourth chapter of her book to le mépris pour les anciens (“contempt for the
old masters”), a chapter in which she pitted the “religion of musical progress” against
“the great masters of the past” (Landowska 1924: 18 and 1996: 31). By anciens, Landowska
meant the composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century that she favored; but the
word anciens also followed a traditional antiquarian nomenclature. Landowska’s musi-
cal anciens belonged by implication to a vaster and vaguer antiquity than the baroque,
one ranging anywhere from around the birth of Christ to just before her time. Still cur-
rent in the 1920s, when the English translation of Landowska’s book was published, the
expression “ancient music” or musique ancienne was officially supplanted only a half
century later by the moniker “Early Music,” which had become standard in English by
the late 1900s. What brought about this change?
The most significant event contributing to the christening of early or ancient music
as Early Music was the remarkable transformation of the university following the
Industrial Revolution. Prior to the late 1700s, the university had largely remained the
constrained, esoteric environment it had been since the Middle Ages, focusing on dis-
ciplines closely related to philosophy-cum-theology and catering to small numbers
of students. This changed at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with
Germany leading the way. The Prussian template for postsecondary education was that
of a government-sponsored, hierarchical bureaucracy. Now swollen to unprecedented
numbers, the population of universities ranged from undergraduates and graduates
to administrators and professors, the latter devoted primarily to the printing of their
research in the booming industry of academic publishing (Clark 2006: 255–264). New
universities sprang up in the 1800s to accommodate more and more students. Along
with these came fashionable, new “luxury disciplines” (Luxuswissenschaften) such as
botany or Romance philology (Craig 1984: 70). The doctor of philosophy degree was cre-
ated, with graduate students producing dissertations in these new disciplines. Starting
82 John Haines
in the 1800s, a deluge of doctoral dissertations poured in, a majority of these being in
the then fashionable domain of philology or historical linguistics (Clark 2006: 183–184,
220–223, and 500–508).
By the late 1800s, philological studies had become the model for yet another “luxury
discipline”: the science of music, or Musikwissenschaft. The earliest German professo-
rial appointments in historical musicology (historische Musikwissenschaft), the branch
of musicology devoted to European art schools and artists (Kunstschulen, Künstlern),
were nearly all held by scholars of medieval and Renaissance music (Adler 1885: 16;
Haines 2003: 130–131). Other types of Musikwissenschaft also flourished at this time.
The so-called systematic branches included the study of non-Western music that
Guido Adler in 1885 named Musikologie. The latter “new and praiseworthy field con-
nected” to systematic musicology, Adler wrote, had focused on “folksongs of different
peoples, lands and territories” (1885: 14).7 This folk song branch of musicology, later
known as ethnomusicology, flourished alongside its Western historical counterpart
in the heyday of the German postindustrial university, notably in Berlin, with Erich
von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs (McLean 2006: 39–42 and 249). By the early 1900s,
the German academic model, including the two main branches just mentioned of the
novel science of Musikwissenschaft, had transferred to North America. German émi-
grés such as Franz Boas at Columbia University and Leo Schrade at Yale University
mentored a new generation of North American musicologists in the first half of the
century (115–116).
An echo of the extraordinary economic boom that had prompted the German postin-
dustrial academic phenomenon of the late 1800s resounded in North America a little
over a half century later. Following World War II, postsecondary institutions multi-
plied in the United States and Canada. Colleges and universities were hastily erected
to meet unprecedented demands, and student enrollments soared thanks to the baby
boom and to funding packages like the famous GI Bill (Hacker and Dreifus 2010: 35–37).
The performance of ancient music, previously the province of antiquarians, now blos-
somed in the university in the form of student ensembles or collegia devoted to such
performance. By the final decades of the twentieth century, the so-called Early Music
ensemble had become a staple in music faculties and departments (Haskell 1988: 161–
188). To the only slightly younger ethnomusicological contingent in academia, the pan-
dering to Early Music seemed, and indeed was, unfair. The mood of the late 1990s can
be seen in Bruno Nettl’s satire about a “scholar from Mars” who remarks on the curious
habit of university music students speaking of the great masters of Western music as if
these masters roamed departmental halls (Nettl 1995: 11–42 and 130–135). It should be
noted, however, that ethnomusicology experienced an only slightly delayed version of
Early Music’s trajectory in the postindustrial university. The 1950s and 1960s also wit-
nessed the emergence of ethnomusicology in North American academia, initially out-
side music departments and faculties but joining their ranks in due course. Over the last
few decades, related performance groups such as the Gamelan ensemble have rivaled
their Early Music counterparts. It goes without saying that Musikwissenschaft and its
performance ensembles, along with the entire “multiversity” system of the late 1900s,
has suffered in the early twenty-first-century crisis of the global capitalism that made
the industrial university possible in the first place (Hacker and Dreifus 2010: 1–9; Clark
2006: 139 and 163).
Quite late in the industrial university’s development, the label “Early Music” became
common coin. If one was to speak of early music, then the main question became
“Earlier than what?” In the first half of the twentieth century, there was no standard
chronological limit for the adjective “early.” In 1901, for example, the Stainers labeled
“early Bodleian music” (i.e., music collections of the Bodleian Library in Oxford) as
compositions “ranging from about A.D. 1185 to about A.D. 1505,” thereby excluding
most of the Middle Ages and nearly all of the Renaissance (Stainer and Stainer 1901).
The cutoff date for Early Music began to firm up after World War II. With the spree
of English musicological publications typical of this period came such anthologies as
Carl Parrish’s Treasury of Early Music (1958), subtitled “an anthology of masterworks
of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque era.” The musicological boom in
North American academia and related publications during the crucial 1960s canonized
the idea of early music as beginning sometime after the fall of the Roman Empire and
ending around 1750. By 1973, the concept had become official with the first issue of the
journal Early Music.
Yet almost as soon as it became an accepted idiom, Early Music grew world-weary.
Historians such as Harry Haskell performed autopsies of the so-called revival of Early
Music, worrying that its global popularity had gotten out of hand (Haskell 1988: 189–
197). The now celebrated debate surrounding authenticity around 1980 focused on the
presumably correct way of performing older music and which performances could be
considered closest to those from hundreds of years ago (Leech-Wilkinson 2002: 141–
147; Taruskin 1995: 3–47). The authenticity debate was generated in greater part by aca-
demic scorn for the unexpected proliferation of Early Music ensembles and related
activities outside academia (e.g. Renaissance fairs), both in performances and in sound
recordings. In the lead-up to this intellectual storm in a teacup, the popular long-playing
vinyl record had played an important role. The unprecedented possibilities of recorded
sound had led performers of ancient music to make exaggerated claims, such as Thomas
Binkley’s statement that his renditions of medieval music brought its performance
“close to the elusive original, an accomplishment thought impossible just a decade ago”
(quoted in Haines 2001b: 374). Recorded sound had made early music more compelling
than ever. Here as with antiquarianism, enthusiasts borrowed liberally from contempo-
rary folk traditions in the re-creation of early music. In the 1930s, for example, Max Meili
used a Swiss mountain song; at the end of the century, several groups borrowed from
classical Arabic music (quoted in Haines 2004: 244–249). Apocalyptic pronouncements
at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries about the decline or even end of
Early Music should not overshadow the fact that, as I have argued in this essay, academic
interest in restoring ancient music has endured for centuries and does not appear likely
to end anytime soon.
84 John Haines
Early Music and Folk Music
At this point, it should have become apparent to the reader just how closely related are
the revivals of early music and of folk music. If hagiographies of Early Music have fallen
prey to an overly simplistic rise-and-fall narrative, as stated at the beginning of this essay,
so have histories of Western (i.e., European and North American) folk song revival. In
fact, these histories follow nearly the same basic outline as their early music counter-
parts. The revival of European folk music is usually said to have started in the nineteenth
century, prompted by Johann Gottfried Herder’s Volkslieder (1778–1779) (Baumann
1996: 73). As with Early Music, this folk music revival is portrayed as beginning around
1800, with a high point in the middle of the twentieth century (Rosenberg 1993: 4–6).
Here, too, the entry of folk music studies into the mainstream of North American uni-
versities during the 1950s and 1960s is regarded both nostalgically and pessimistically
by writers who, it should be noted, personally experienced this period (2 and 16–17;
Jackson 1993: 73–83). Compare, for example, Bruce Jackson’s dramatic opening at a 1984
symposium on folk song revivals—“a folksong revival occurred in America thirty years
ago”—with Bruce Haynes’s description of “our movement” in the 1960s as a “revolu-
tion . . . reacting against the established style” (Jackson 1993: 73 and Haynes 2007: 40–41).
Nostalgia yields to middle-aged skepticism, however, as each sees the 1960s as foreshad-
owing a decline. For Jackson, the folk song revival of the 1960s “became ordinary,” since
it carried within itself “the seed . . . of its own destruction” (1993: 79–80). Haynes laments
the lack of improvisation and “the cover band mentality” in recent Early Music perfor-
mances that had characterized it some forty years earlier (2007: 203–214). As ever, musi-
cal antiquities breed longing for the past and condescension for the present.
For the historiography of folk music, as with that of early music outlined earlier, this
conventional rise-and-fall narrative from 1800 to 2000 does not stand up to closer
inspection. Indeed, early music and folk music grew up together. And throughout these
growing-up years, the concept of revival played an important part, as I have already sug-
gested in my discussion of Europeans’ attraction to the dances of indigenous Americans
in the sixteenth century and Landowska’s praise of Polish peasant songs in the twentieth.
Another signal case of the twin development of early music and folk music is that
of the romancero, which can boast of being one of the most successful genres in the
history of modern print. It began its life in the late Middle Ages as a collection of ver-
nacular songs or romances “enjoyed by people of low and servile condition,” as one
mid-fifteenth-century writer put it (Mérimée n.d.: 14, n. 1). The early printed romancero
flourished in Spain as part of that country’s bid to become the leading power in Europe
and the New World. By the 1700s, the romancero had spread outside Spain, emblema-
tizing various nationalistic literary heritages; French antiquarian collections of romans
were based on the Spanish romancero. When Herder published his Volkslieder in
1778–1779, he drew on this vast romancero literature (Haines 2004: 125–141; Mérimée
n.d.: 29–32). Rather than an innovator of folk song, Herder was a continuator—and at
times even a plagiarist—of a tradition that had existed for three centuries before him. By
FIGURE 4.4. Marius Barbeau transcribing a song from the phonograph. (Reproduced with
permission of the Canadian Museum of Civilization.)
the nineteenth century, the romancero was even more closely associated with national
folklores, with Jacob Grimm and Lord Byron among its disciples (Mérimée n.d.: 17 and
33–34). Considered an early source of European folk song, romanceros often mixed criti-
cal editions of medieval lyric song and national folk music, as in Paulin Paris’s work
Le romancero françois (1833) or Prosper Tarbé’s Romancero de Champagne (1863–1864)
(Haines 2008: 189–190). For many, songs of the Middle Ages and romances from the
postmedieval romancero came from one and the same primitive folkloric fund (190). As
a result of this frequent association of ancient song and folk song, nineteenth-century
critical editions of medieval texts were poised in the twentieth century to become the
template for printed editions of folk songs.
The well-known spree of folk song publications in the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury includes a little-discussed work by the anthropologist Marius Barbeau, Romancero
du Canada (1937) (Haines 2008: 189–190; Rosenberg 1993: 5–6). Barbeau’s collection
is representative of its time and of the illustrious romancero tradition and exhibits
86 John Haines
conventional sympathies between early music and folk song as well as certain assump-
tions long held by antiquarians, as discussed earlier. Throughout Romancero du Canada,
Barbeau argues that French emigrants to Canada in the sixteenth century marvelously
preserved the folk songs of their native land. In many cases, he goes on to say, their
songs go further back than the early modern era. At the time of Barbeau’s writing, the
question of what constituted a legitimate or scholarly critical edition of folk song had
become pressing. Barbeau based his 1937 Romancero on songs he had recorded over
twenty years, patiently transcribing each version from phonograph recordings (Figure
4.4). Barbeau was working in a relatively new field; Hornbostel’s landmark essay on
transcribing sound recordings had appeared in 1909, and pioneers in this area such as
Francis Densmore and Béla Bartók had started their work only a decade or so prior to
Barbeau’s publication (Haines 1999: 4; 2008: 185). Although Barbeau’s musical editions
did not rival in intricacy those of Bartók, his scrupulousness in taking all variants into
account was downright philological. Following each song in Romancero du Canada,
he catalogued all known versions in North America and Europe, beginning with the
many recorded versions he had made, each listed like so many manuscript variants of a
medieval text. Just as his antiquarian predecessors had done, Barbeau aimed to extract
the ancient songs of France from the folk songs of his Canadian romancero. Trained in
the methodology of the postindustrial university, he did this by using the philological
method of collating all versions and presenting a critical edition. Following this learned
scheme, Barbeau planned to restore these songs to an original state, like so many “Gothic
temples worn out by the wind and the rain,” as he wrote (Barbeau 1937: 83).
In Romancero du Canada and elsewhere, Barbeau glorified the Canadian folksing-
ers he recorded, calling them jongleurs. His Canadian jongleur resembled in some
ways the noble savage revered by antiquarians and archeologists. Like the indigenous
American musicians or popular singers of rural Europe, Canadian jongleurs did not
rely on writing, Barbeau claimed. Their illiteracy did not prevent them from perform-
ing feats of memory rivaling those of literate modern minds; “their memory was pro-
lific” and “their stock of songs was novel and inexhaustible,” he wrote (quoted in Haines
2008: 193). Inexplicably, the songs of the Canadian jongleurs originated in the Middle
Ages and further back yet to “the Celtic era” (Barbeau 1937: 122). Proof of this presum-
ably lay in melodic scales (such as the D mode of “Renaud”) or poetic themes (such
as the pastoral and morning-song themes in “Lisette”) (78, 129). But mostly Barbeau’s
assertion of the antiquity of French-Canadian folk songs had to be taken on faith. On
more than one occasion, he described how a song was rescued from oblivion. Of “Le
Prince Eugène” he wrote that “it was on its way to complete oblivion . . . when we caught
it just as it was about to disappear” (22). Such claims were motivated by a strong Quebec
nationalistic movement at this time. In the first half of the twentieth century, French
Canadians needed to assert their independence from English-speaking North America
on the one hand and from France on the other (Haines 2008: 188–189). Throughout
Romancero du Canada, Barbeau asserted that French folk song had been better pre-
served in Quebec than in France. For example, “Sommeilles-tu, ma petite Louison?”
had vanished from France, he wrote, but was still sung in the Montreal region (Barbeau
1937: 118).
FIGURE 4.5. Jean Beck holding his handmade instruments. (Reproduced with the permission
of Thomas Dalzell, grandson of Jean Beck.)
Throughout his prolific career, Barbeau maintained a love-hate relationship toward

philology. Raised in rural Quebec, where he was taught that real art “had to be imported
from Europe,” as he would later remember it, Barbeau studied anthropology at Oxford
and the Sorbonne. A decisive encounter with Franz Boas in 1913 prompted him to return
to Quebec and study the neglected folk songs of his own heritage (Haines 2008: 185–186).
What Barbeau had learned from the relatively new science of anthropology he now pro-
posed to apply to a corpus of songs that was rooted, as he saw it, in the Middle Ages. The
Middle Ages, of course, called for a medievalist’s approach, namely, the science of philol-
ogy. In the mid-1910s, when he set out to record and transcribe the songs of his native
terroir, Barbeau, like other ethnomusicological pioneers at this time, was very much
working out his methodology as he went along. Early on, moved by an instinctive rever-
ence for medievalism, he looked to Romance philology for inspiration (see Figure 4.5).
In 1916, Barbeau sought the help of Jean-Baptiste Beck, a musicologist who had
trained in philology. Beck had emigrated from Europe to North America in 1911
88 John Haines
FIGURE 4.6. Juliette Gaultier singing at the 1928 Canadian Folk Song and Handicraft Festival.
(Reproduced with permission of the Canadian Museum of Civilization.)
following his implication in the death of prominent medievalist Pierre Aubry the
year before. Aubry had evidently committed suicide, while fencing, following his loss
of a unique lawsuit against Beck for musicological plagiarism (Haines 1997; 2001c;
2002b: 363–366; 2004: 214–218). Recent research has uncovered that during the same
period, Beck was being sued in Strasbourg by the husband of his lover, who was the
mother of two children by him and whom he had failed to support financially (Solberg
2009). The contentious Beck fled to the United States and was working at Bryn Mawr
University when Barbeau contacted him. He at first ignored Barbeau’s letter. After some
prompting from Franz Boas, Beck responded to Barbeau’s invitation to help him tran-
scribe French-Canadian folk songs. Like many medievalists of his day, including his
nemesis Aubry, Beck strongly believed in the linkage of medieval and contemporary folk
song. His own background included a stint as a café-concert ensemble director in Paris.
Throughout his scholarly career, Beck often performed medieval music, sometimes
with popular songs. Around the time of his first encounter with Barbeau, Beck was col-
laborating with famed café-concert performer Yvette Guilbert (Haines 2004: 241–242).
As part of this active performance side career, Beck made his own medieval musical
instruments; his collection included many stringed instruments, some with elaborate
decorations (Figure 4.5). I have detailed elsewhere Beck’s epistolary debate with Barbeau
in 1917 concerning the transcription of French-Canadian folk songs (Haines 1999). The
gist of this debate was that each man defended the scientific integrity of his academic
training for essentially the same reasons. At one point, Beck claimed his “philological
rigor” was superior to what he perceived as Barbeau’s loose anthropological approach.
Barbeau professed a “historical exactitude” superior to Beck’s penchant for creative lib-
erties (1–3). That is to say, both men had similar methodologies that necessarily diluted
science with subjectivity; not surprisingly, since the twins historical musicology and
ethnomusicology emanated from the same maternal Musikwissenschaft.
Despite their presumed irreconcilable differences, Beck and Barbeau ended up collaborat-
ing some ten years later on an event that Neil Rosenberg has considered seminal in the his-
tory of folk revivals, the 1928 Quebec première of Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de Robin et Marion
(Rosenberg 1993: 6). This musical play by the medieval trouvère was arranged for modern
orchestra by Beck and performed by the orchestra of the Vingt-deuxième Royal Regiment
twice in late May 1928 (Haines 2002a). The New World performance of this “old folk com-
edy opera,” as one paper put it, was the brainchild of John Murray Gibbon, who predicted
that it would be a “musical sensation” (Haines 2002a: 287).8 Gibbon had planned the Jeu de
Robin et Marion as part of the second Canadian Folk Song and Handicraft Festival, a five-day
extravaganza of songs, dances, and art compositions by the Canadian heavyweights Healey
Willan and Ernest MacMillan.9 Like Beck and Barbeau’s arrangement of the Jeu de Robin
et Marion, other performers at the festival, such as the Bytown Troubadours and Juliette
Gaultier (Figure 4.6), freely mixed medieval music and imagery with Canadian folklore.10
Conclusion
The case of Barbeau and Beck’s collaboration serves as a fitting conclusion to this essay
on the history of early music revivals. As we have seen, this history began in earnest dur-
ing the sixteenth-century push for antiquarian research. Antiquarians thought of early
music as belonging to an immense, amorphous antiquity running from classical Greece
to the late Middle Ages. As they viewed it, the concept of revival or restoration became
crucial, since they regarded antiquities as lost and as requiring resurrection from
90 John Haines
oblivion. Endemic to this explicit concept was the implicit notion of nostalgia: the long-
ing for a long-lost world free of the literacy and industrialism that plagued modernity.
In this sense, the indigenous people of the Americas that Europeans were discovering
in the sixteenth century stirred this nostalgia, reminding them of their own “medieval
antiquity.”
Musical antiquarians and, later, archeologists—the phrase “musical archeologist” was
eventually coined in the nineteenth century (Haines 2004: 165–166)—regarded contem-
porary folk traditions, both in the New World and closer to home, as indispensable to
the restoration of early music. Folk music, as they saw it, transmitted orally what writ-
ten sources could not: the early music of the West in its most primitive and naïve form,
untainted by the literacy of modern print. Following the industrialization of the univer-
sity in the nineteenth century, the same basic view of the intimate relation between early
and folk music continued in musicological studies, and this view persists to this day.
With these academic developments in the nineteenth century, the antiquarian search
for early music was eventually institutionalized as Early Music in the late twentieth cen-
tury. As their predecessors had, these musical antiquarians turned to contemporary folk
traditions for the restoration of old sounds.
Despite their institutional differences, the studies of folk music (in the branch of
musicology first known as Musikologie) and European art music (belonging to histo-
rische Musikwissenschaft) have often interacted, as the case of medievalist Jean Beck and
anthropologist Marius Barbeau makes clear. They may have initially disagreed over the
proper way of transcribing French-Canadian folk songs. But their vision of early song
remained compatible enough to ensure their landmark collaboration at the 1928 Folk
Festival in Quebec, followed by a lifelong friendship. In the decades after the Quebec
première of Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de Robin et Marion, Barbeau visited Beck on several
occasions and cited him more than once in his publications on French-Canadian folk
song. When Beck died in 1943, Barbeau paid a visit to Beck’s widow. Shortly after this,
Louise Beck wrote to Barbeau thanking him “for your courteous words of the role my
husband played in your work, . . . I know that he would have been very proud” (Haines
1999: 4). If such sentiments aptly summarize Beck and Barbeau’s relationship over
some four decades, they also serve as a model for the interaction between historische
Musikwissenschaft and Musikologie, two disciplines that, like early music and folk song,
have more in common than not.
Notes
1. “La simplicité de notz majeurs, qui se sont contentez d’exprimer leurs conceptions avecques
paroles nues, sans art & ornement.”
2. “la poësie . . . tout à fait Anacreontique . . . un doux langage & qui a le son aggreable, retirant
aux terminaisons Grecques.”
3. Moyen âge is the French expression for “Middle Ages,” the period between antiquity and
early modern times.
4. Trouveres were medieval song-makers of northern France active in the thirteenth century.
5. See Weber (1992: 28–29 and 47–56), who considers the expression novel in the eighteenth
century.
6. Vers mesurés à l’antique refers to French poetry, popular in the Renaissance, fashioned
according to ancient Greek metrical verse.
7. “Ein neues und sehr dankenswerthes nebengebiet dieses systematischen Theiles ist die
Musikologie . . . di sich zur Aufgabemacht, die Tonproducte, insbesondere die Volksgesänge
verschiedener Völker, Länder und Territorien.”
8. Festivals, box 72, file 14, 1, Marius Barbeau Collection, Canadian Museum of Civilization,.
9. Programs, box 170, file 1, 9–11, Marius Barbeau Collection.
10. Festivals, box 72, file 14, 23; Programs, box 170, file 1, 11, Marius Barbeau Collection.
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C HA P T E R 5
A FOLKLORIST ’S
E X P L O R AT I O N O F T H E
R E V I VA L M E TA P H O R
N E I L V. RO SE N BE RG
In 1961 when I began work on a Ph.D. in folklore at Indiana University, revivals were
thought to exist outside the boundaries of the discipline. I found it challenging to
teach, research, and write about folk music without taking revival into account. By
the mid-1980s, my teaching of folksong and ethnomusicology courses, and the
research that led to my book Bluegrass: A History (1985), had convinced me of the need
to address revival directly. In 1987, I organized a panel on revivals at the American
Folklore Society’s annual meeting. From this came Transforming Tradition (1993a), a
series of studies by folklorists about North American folksong revivals. These were
important steps for me in a lifetime of studying vernacular music. In this essay, I digest
and review these and other works, retracing my involvement with musical reviv-
als as scholar and musician. My aim is to reflect on my scholarly journey as a way of
exploring the usefulness of “revival” as a metaphor for the description and analysis of
musical life.
I first heard music at home from my parents. I grew up with the aural media of the
1940s—radio, movies, and records. They were powerful influences. I remain fascinated
with the aural history of sound recordings. At seven, I began classical violin lessons.
I’ve been a musician ever since. I came to the study of music from teenage participa-
tion in American folk music revival scenes of the 1950s, first in the Pacific Coast univer-
sity town of Berkeley, California, and then at Oberlin, a small midwestern liberal arts
coeducational college in northern Ohio. By the time I got my undergraduate degree in
history, I’d decided I wanted to study folk music. Today I might have chosen to apply
to the American Roots Music Program at Berklee College of Music in Boston. But at
the start of the 1960s, the best option seemed to study at Indiana University’s Folklore
Department.
A Folklorist’s Exploration of the Revival Metaphor 95
A Journey through Folklore
The mobilization of folklore—particularly folksong—in American cultural politics

during and after the Great Depression (see Rosenberg 1993a: 8–9, also Filene 2000;
Whisnant 1983) fueled a national folksong revival that became an American popular
music boom in the 1960s. Folklore became an attractive option for those, like myself,
who envisioned careers of research and teaching about the music they had embraced
(Jackson 1993). In 1961, I entered graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington
to begin work on graduate degrees in folklore. By then, I had absorbed contemporary
American folk revival and academic folklore perspectives about my own music mak-
ing: I was a folk revivalist. Folk revivalists were considered marginal. I accepted this
stance, wanting to learn about the “real stuff ” at the center of the revival. I had a sub-
urban vision of the old cultural anthropological trope of an authentic culture “before
contact.” This “other,” I now suppose, is what Greil Marcus, writing about the music
in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, called “the old, weird America”
(Marcus 1997). I was encouraged in this vision by the campaigning of my supervi-
sor, Professor Richard M. Dorson, against “popularizers.” The “fakelore” that he railed
against included the work of folksong revivalists (Dorson 1949).1
Dorson was the leading advocate for making folklore an independent academic dis-
cipline. The American Folklore Society had been founded in 1888, but until the postwar
era of the mid-twentieth century its leadership came from other academic disciplines—
mainly the students of the Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas and the
Harvard ballad scholar James Frances Child, that school’s first professor of English.
Folklore was an area of specialists. Anthropologists reported on their research on
third-world indigenous cultures’ exotic arts as folklore, while literary scholars reported
on the oral traditions of the unlettered and the past in their own and cognate first-world
cultures as folklore. Until 1966 the American Folklore Society rotated its yearly meetings
between the American Anthropological Society and the Modern Language Association.
Folklore was taught mainly as part of the curricula of departments of anthropology, lan-
guage, and literature.
In the United States, the awarding of separate doctoral degrees in folklore began at
Indiana University in 1954. The graduates of this program and several others that began
soon afterward created and reflected the push to establish folklore as a separate disci-
pline with a unique perspective. The first widely used classroom textbook came in 1965,
Alan Dundes’s Study of Folklore, and with it his definition of a “folk group”: “any group
of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor. It does not matter what
the linking factor is—it could be a common occupation, language, or religion—but
what is important is that a group . . . have some traditions that it calls its own” (Dundes
1965: 2). The folk revival scenes I’d participated in certainly fit Dundes’s definition of
“folk groups.” They were heterogeneous agglomerations of individuals drawn to a
96 Neil V. Rosenberg
constantly changing multifaceted music culture that, like all music cultures, incorpo-
rated repertoires and performance practices that had traditional aspects. But because
of their association with “fakelore,” it was not easy in the folklore program at Indiana to
study revivals, or indeed to study any kind of music beyond the ballad traditions canon-
ized by Child.
Fortunately, a first-class world music collection was associated with the Folklore
Program—the Archives of Folk and Primitive Music, renamed the Archives of
Traditional Music in 1965. It had come to Indiana from Columbia University in 1948
with its director, the anthropologist and comparative musicologist George Herzog.
Herzog retired in 1961. His place was taken by George List, who taught introductory
courses in ethnomusicology (a newly named discipline), transcription, and analysis. In
1962, Alan P. Merriam joined the Anthropology Department and began teaching other
ethnomusicology courses.
I took all the ethnomusicology available to me as a folklore student. But I was unable
to do much field research on musical topics, for at that time the local scenes in which
I was interested weren’t exotic enough for most ethnomusicologists. I knew what was
happening locally—indeed, I was participating in it: buying and selling instruments,
learning songs and tunes, trading tapes, going to jam sessions, buying records, book-
ing bands, and so on—but had little opportunity to step back, observe, and report
(Rosenberg 1995c).
In Bloomington, I participated in the local folk revival scene (Rosenberg 1995b). At
the same time, I became involved in a larger regional bluegrass music scene. I thought
then that this brought me closer to “the real stuff.” Bluegrass had deep southern rural
origins and mainly working-class participants. It was a gritty “other” with an antique
repertoire and connections with the larger world of country music. Still informally
called hillbilly music by some and directly descended from the old-time music in Smith’s
Anthology, it seemed like the logical contemporary folk music.
In the early 1960s, bluegrass music was a music being made and consumed by peo-
ple who were mainly between the ages of twenty and fifty. The form was less than two
decades old. I embraced it as a “new thing,” an essentially young and progressive genre
with close ties to the old hillbilly music as well as with other contemporary forms like
jazz, blues, and rockabilly.
Between 1961 and 1968, bluegrass music underwent a cultural transformation as it
was first “discovered” by folk revivalists and then experienced its own revival. This was
part of a larger American vernacular music (bluegrass, old-time, blues, Cajun, etc.)
movement that included folklorists whose work I admired, like Archie Green and D. K.
Wilgus (Porterfield 2004). In 1966, I began writing articles and reviews for Bluegrass
Unlimited, a then new monthly that is still publishing today, and drafted the first of many
bluegrass liner notes.2
In 1968 I moved to St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, Canada’s newest province,
to teach folklore and to organize the folklore archive founded by Herbert Halpert, head
of the new Department of Folklore at the provincial university, Memorial.3 Plunged into
a new and rapidly evolving cultural milieu—formerly a British colony, Newfoundland
had joined Canada less than two decades before—I was teaching bright young people
and working with new colleagues, all seeking to comprehend, confront, and adjust to
living in a postcolonial world.
At Memorial, I taught “Introduction to Folksong” each semester and worked full-time
as archivist of the Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language
Archive (MUNFLA). To teach the course effectively, I began studying Newfoundland’s
musical traditions. MUNFLA was an important resource in a project of educating
young Newfoundlanders about their culture (Halpert and Rosenberg 1974, 1976). As
MUNFLA’s archivist (1968–1975) and director (1976–1990), I worked to create collec-
tions and indices for its musical holdings (Rosenberg 1991c).
Newfoundland, the world’s sixteenth largest island and North America’s easternmost
landmass, became England’s first permanent colony because of its fisheries, which for
centuries furnished cod to world markets. Fishers, first from southwest England and
later from Ireland, established small communities along its thousands of miles of jag-
ged coastlines, eventually expanding northward to the mainland Canadian coast of
Labrador (today the province’s official name is “Newfoundland and Labrador”). These
coastal villages and towns are called “outports,” which the Dictionary of Newfoundland
English defines as “coastal settlement(s) other than the chief port of St. John’s” (Story,
Kirwin, and Widdowson 1990: 863). There are few settlements in the province that are
not close to the coast; with the exception of a few paper and mining company towns in
the interior, the outports constitute its nonurban hinterland. My research on folksong in
Newfoundland focused on the music of the outports (Casey, Rosenberg, and Wareham
1972). In doing so, I embraced the conventional academic and local intellectual wis-
dom of the time that gave high value to the populist authenticity of these communities
(Overton 1988). As before, my focus was on the “real stuff.”
Newfoundland’s folk revival had deep history (they all do!) but was undergoing rapid
and extensive change. Once again I became part of the local scene, both as consumer
and performer. It would be several decades before I felt comfortable studying this reviv-
alism, an important aspect of Newfoundland’s musical traditions.
At the same time, my continuing activity as a performer of and writer about bluegrass
kept me in touch with that scene in the United States. It also led me to a related scene in
Canada’s neighboring maritime provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince
Edward Island. Consequently, in the early 1970s I became interested in the relationships
between folk and country music in that region. Concentrating my research in small
towns and rural districts, I avoided college and university communities. Again I set out
to study, properly as I thought, the “real stuff ” (Rosenberg 1976, 2010).
This research shaped my annual “Introduction to Folksong” course (Rosenberg
1984) as well as my other courses, including “Oral History,” “Ethnomusicology,” and
“Canadian Folklore.”
Teaching folklore studies gave me a valuable holistic perspective of culture from
the bottom up. In particular, I came to understand music deeply through teaching the
study of repertoire—how it is created and used, its history and logic. Historically, folk-
lore studies had focused on texts, but by the 1970s the definition of folklore as artistic
communication in small groups led to a widening of perspective (Ben-Amos 1972). The

folklore theorist Alan Dundes argued for three levels of analysis: text, texture and con-
text (Dundes 1964). Still, as D. K. Wilgus pointed out in 1972, the text (in Dundes’s broad
sense) remained the key focus, the starting point for folklore research.
At this time, my primary concern was to learn how things worked in what I began to
think of as musical systems. Structuralism, a popular theoretical approach of the time,
shaped my thinking. Another influence was Merriam’s Anthropology of Music, my first
ethnomusicology textbook. I discovered useful process models in the work of Anthony
F. C. Wallace (1956) and Kenneth S. Goldstein (1971) and began building my own mod-
els. The one that most fully reflected my interests was an essay titled “Big Fish, Small
Pond: Country Musicians and Their Markets” (Rosenberg 1986).
I began work on this model during the 1970s after studying the history and discog-
raphy of a popular bluegrass band, the Osborne Brothers (Rosenberg 1967, 1971, 1972).
Subsequently, I incorporated data from my research in Atlantic Canada (the stan-
dard Canadian term for the region encompassing Newfoundland and the Maritimes)
and drew heavily on new research on early country music history. My thinking was
also shaped by ideas and debates sparked in the classroom by early drafts of the model
and two books I used regularly as texts: Glassie, Ives, and Szwed’s Folksongs and Their
Makers (1970) and Charles Keil’s Urban Blues (1966). Here’s how I introduced my work
in “Big Fish”:
I have sought to develop a model which explains the ways in which such profes-
sionalized music, in this case country music, and folk expression are intertwined,
without assuming an evolutionary historical process for the form as a whole. Instead,
I believe, the very nature of a professionalized music which draws its workers from
an identifiable group will inevitably affect and reflect the music traditions of the
group. In other words, the music continues to function as folk music. In essence, it
speaks for the group, articulating the concerns, beliefs, attitudes and world view of
the group. Both content analysis and audience interviews support this point: it is not
the song, its text (or the performer) which is inherently traditional, but the role of
that item, the behaviors surrounding it, its function, its use and import.
(1986: 152–153)
The model was presented as a graph, a visual metaphor, in which one axis was “musi-
cian’s status” (“apprentice”, “journeyman”, “craftsman”, “celebrity”) and the other “market
level/scope” (“local”, “regional”, “national”, “international”). I discussed the way, when
performers move between levels of status and market, social and economic forces shape
musical styles and repertoires; I argued that “performers manipulate their repertoire to
advance their career while at the same time presenting songs which are ideologically
and stylistically acceptable to their audiences.” Basically this was a way of explaining
how folksong repertoires are affected by the processes of popular culture.
My arguments in “Big Fish” were shaped by the then new “performance approach,”
which looked at folklore as “aesthetically marked performances” (Fine 1996: 554). When
studying texts from this contextual perspective, folklorists generally focused their
research on small group performer-audience relationships—the local, the face-to-face.

In closing, I pointed out that because this study included performer-audience relation-
ships in nonlocal, mass-mediated markets, it might present a dilemma for folklorists.
However, to me it seemed a necessary widening of perspective.
Facing Revival
Until the mid-1980s, I generally avoided using the term “revival” in my research and
writing. Indeed, for folklorists (and ethnomusicologists—see Livingston 1999: 68) the
term often seemed little more than a put-down or brush-off. Still, by that time I was
including folk revival in my “Introduction to Folksong” course. I wrote about the
course in 1984, giving an outline and a bibliography, briefly prefacing each section.
Of the final section, “Revival,” which ended the semester, I said: “Here we turn to a
historical consideration of the North American folksong revival, and discuss this and
similar movements in terms of several useful models constructed by Anthony F. C.
Wallace and Richard Peterson. The phenomenon of folk festivals and folklorists’
involvement in it is also considered” (Rosenberg 1984: 123). The 1956 essay on revital-
ization movements by Wallace, an anthropologist, and the 1972 jazz history outline by
Peterson, a sociologist, gave structure to class discussions. Two other readings came
from folklorists. David Engle’s “Sketch,” about a German folk revival singer (1981),
provided a rare case study. Camp and Lloyd’s influential “Six Reasons Not to Produce
Folklife Festivals” (1980) had appeared in the first collection of essays to emerge
from the American public folklore movement (Collins 1980). In arguing against the
music-dominated festivals as means for advancing the cultural-political agendas of
public folklore, they were forced to acknowledge the importance of the revival that
had nurtured them. I found this a useful way of addressing the still largely undocu-
mented history of folk revivals.
My first substantial writing about folk revival came in Bluegrass: A History (1985: 166–
202). The book was grounded in the process models I’d studied or built myself, but it
didn’t discuss theory much, for its aim was to trace the history of this musical genre. The
folk revival boom of the fifties and sixties had an important place in that narrative.
My first stab at speaking in more theoretical terms about revival came in 1991. Writing
about the history of a banjo tune associated with labor strife in the American South,
I noted that the same aesthetics were found in the perspectives and agendas of both folk-
lorists and revivalists in mid-twentieth-century America (Rosenberg 1991a).
Around the same time, I returned to Newfoundland music in the first of a series of
articles that focused on the urban middle-class intellectual crafting of the rural outport
image that was central to postcolonial dialogues about the regional culture (Rosenberg
1991b). New concepts I found useful in this analysis included Raymond Williams’s “key
text” and Philip Bohlman’s “canon” (Williams 1961: 13; Bohlman 1988: 104–120).4 I attrib-
uted an earlier lack of interest in (or downright antipathy toward) this material on the
part of folklore scholars to its “popular nature” (Rosenberg 1991b: 46), thus sidestepping
“revival” in my analysis.
At this point I was editing a book of essays by fifteen scholars on North American folk
music revivals, Transforming Tradition (1993a). Its introduction sketched the history of
North American folksong revivals, culminating in popular stereotypes and understand-
ings of “folksong” and “folksinger.” Turning to the intellectual threads in this history,
I discussed two key concepts: “authenticity” and “revival.”
A section titled “The Shifting Sands of Folk Authenticity” traced the intellectual out-
line of folk music studies to show how ideology and technology had shaped the collection
and publication of folk music in the twentieth century.5 This introduced the intellectual
arena in which the fifteen contributors to this book were situated (1993a: 10–17).
The next section focused on the connections between “revival” and other key words
associated with it like “movement” and “popular culture.” All the contributors agreed
that “folk music revivals . . . constitute an urban middle-class intellectual community,”
but each tended to embrace one of two contrasting perspectives. Some viewed the revival
community as a social elite, while others saw it as a social consensus (1993a: 17–21). This
still seems an important contrast. Left unexamined was a major question: what does
“community” mean? I’ll return to these points.
Transforming Tradition’s essays were grouped in three parts, each focusing on a dif-
ferent aspect of North American folk music revivals. The first covered “The Great
Boom,” the era from around 1958, when the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” became a
pop hit, to 1965, when Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival. Its authors
included older World War II veterans like the producer Kenny Goldstein and the
scholar-teacher-activist Archie Green, who were at the center of the American scene
in those years and were what Tamara Livingston would later call “core revivalists”
(2001: 56). When I described “the small San Francisco network of record collectors” in
which Archie Green “began his intellectual quest” (1993a: 29) I neglected to mention
that the network included Harry Smith. In 1993, Smith was not nearly as well known as
he became after 1997, when Smithsonian/Folkways reissued his Anthology of American
Folk Music. The other three contributors to this section came to the revival as teens in
the fifties and sixties.
The great boom was essentially an American event, and in those essays was viewed
from American eyes. This era in popular music saw the industry dominated interna-
tionally from America, so that when “folk music” went pop, it also went international.
David Engle’s 1981 study of a German folk revival singer had examined this phenom-
enon. Later, I would write about how it introduced genres like bluegrass to international
listeners. Today’s flourishing bluegrass scenes, particularly in Europe, date from that
great boom (Rosenberg 1998b).6
Transforming Tradition’s second part, “The New Aesthetic” (1993a: 123–175), focused
on developments after the great boom, recognizing its international dimension by
shifting the focus to Canada. This part’s three articles illustrated the ways a particular
American pop boom affected music in another country and its heading came from
Ellen Stekert’s 1966 article (reprinted in the first part) “Cents and Nonsense in the Urban
Folksong Movement: 1930–1966.” Writing from an insider’s point of view about boom

subcultures, Stekert had coined the term “new aesthetic” to describe the music-culture
of urban middle-class folk music revivalists—a synthesis of “folk, classical, jazz, and pop
styles” (Stekert 1993: 99–100).
The third and final part of Transforming Tradition was titled “Named-Systems
Revivals” (1993a: 177–293), a term coined to describe music-cultures that are “aggregates
of shared repertoire, instrumentation, and performance style generally perceived as
being historically and culturally bounded by such factors as class, ethnicity, race, reli-
gion, region, commerce, and art” (177). I stressed the importance of the act of naming
because close study of the word “bluegrass,” inspired by Archie Green’s earlier work
on “hillbilly,” had demonstrated to me how naming can affect any system (Green 1965;
Rosenberg 1985: 95–131). When “revivalists become part of the system,” I suggested, it
may become “gentrified.” The politics of change when this happens entails reaching
“agreement about the cultural values that the system is thought to embody” (Rosenberg
1993a: 178). The seven essays presented case studies of the cultural politics involved in
such processes. From one, Burt Feintuch’s “Musical Revival as Musical Transformation,”
(2003: 183–193) came the idea for the title of the book.
The authors in this part of the book generally wrote not of “folk music” but
“revivals.” This shift of gaze was probably shorthand: “folk” was assumed, “revival”
included it. The assumption had the unanticipated effect of making the field of
inquiry accessible to scholars for whom “revival” was more important than “folk.”
Transforming Tradition was meant to be a utilitarian volume. I hoped its introduc-
tion, detailed general index, and extensive bibliography would encourage further
research and study.
Revival as Paradigm
“Revival” has become a familiar descriptive term in both popular and academic
discourse about music. In a 1996 entry on “revivalism” for American Folklore: An
Encyclopedia, I noted that “folklorists have been among the principal folklore revival-
ists” and concluded that “the possibility of revivalism always exists whenever anyone
identifies something as folklore” (Brunvand 1996: 623).
Perhaps more important than the contents of that essay was the very fact that the
encyclopedia’s editor, who had earlier called revivals “largely irrelevant to the study of
folklore,” included the topic (Brunvand 1979). This growing interest was also reflected
in Tamara E. Livingston’s article “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory,” published
in 1999 in Ethnomusicology. Livingston called revivals “middle-class phenomena” and
stressed their oppositional nature as cultural alternatives (Livingston 1999: 66). Her
model offered a “basic recipe” with “six ingredients” found in revivals—some “required,”
others left to “individual discretion”—that make each revival “a unique creation” (69).
This framework enabled her to sift through key issues that had arisen in the new writing
about revivals. Her list of ingredients included such useful descriptive terms as “core
revivalists.”
Transforming Tradition’s introduction discussed only a few of the various issues and
ideas presented in its fifteen essays. Livingston’s “recipe” synthesized material from these
and other publications to offer a state-of-the art framework for revival studies. Indeed,
there is much to read about revivals because, as she points out, revivals have a “strong
pedagogical component” (1999: 73). In the decade or so since Livingston’s “recipe” was
published, a large number of books about folk music revival have appeared. This reflects
the demographics of interest in revival, as the aging baby boomers who experienced the
great boom enter their anecdotage.
In a later essay for The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Livingston reprised and
streamlined her general theories and made an important point: “cultural politics are
inherent in music revivals regardless of the type of music being revived or the inten-
tions of those involved” (2001: 56). Indeed, as she points out, “revival industries” have
an important role. But any art that becomes part of a commodification process also
becomes the object of cultural politics.
Cultural Politics
When John Cohen, a core revivalist in New York’s Greenwich Village during the late
1950s and early 1960s, recalled his life in a Third Avenue loft, he populated his descrip-
tion with famous avant-garde photographers (Robert Frank), beat writers (Allen
Ginsberg), and folk pop singers (Bob Dylan) as well as the old-time musicians from
Appalachia and Peru with whom he was involved through his own art (John Cohen
2001).7 All were, in their different ways, involved in the complex cultural dialogues of
that time and place. The diversity of social and cultural connections made for a volatile
and fascinating mixture of artistic creativities.
Scholars and critics of the arts must work hard to describe products, like music,
shaped by these diverse volatilities. Charlotte Frisbie’s statement to fellow ethnomu-
sicologists, quoted at the end of Transforming Tradition’s part on authenticity, which
stressed “interests in critiquing our own history, [and] in gender, the practice and prob-
lems of representation, and the connections between music, political policy, power rela-
tions and identity” (Frisbie 1990:2; Rosenberg 1993a: 17), remains relevant. The issues
Frisbie mentioned, which along with others are often simply described broadly as
“cultural politics,” shaped my thoughts as I continued to write about my research, and
review the work of other researchers.
I was beginning to think that the sociocultural processes involved in studying and
presenting issues surrounding contemporary folk music could be more complex than
the paradigm or concept of revival might lead us to believe. It seemed important to rec-
ognize and address hitherto hidden or assumed aspects of the dialogues in which Cohen
and others, including myself, had been engaged.
My first step in this process came in a contribution to a book about fieldwork epipha-
nies; I told how my epiphany lay in the discovery that my agendas as a fieldworker in
the Maritimes differed from those of local intellectuals and colleagues and from the
perspectives of the musicians I’d been researching. “Folklore research,” I said after
describing my experiences, “invariably reveals the proprietary interests of the peo-
ple studied and all of us who study or are otherwise involved with them” (Rosenberg
1996: 144).
I viewed such proprietary interests as part of “cultural politics” in my work as
recorded sound reviews editor for the Journal of American Folklore from 1991 to 1995.
Three review essays I wrote there experimented with metaphors of process.
The first discussed reissues. I concluded that “reissuing is an enterprise of historical
revisionism in which recordings, discographies, and books on music history, ethnog-
raphy, and performance techniques are linked” (Rosenberg 1993b: 202). Revival is just
one of many possible motives in the play of proprietary interests on which reissues are
grounded.
The second turned to “representation.” Parsing this as a metaphor, I suggested that
recordings “represent” in three ways: they stand “for ideas like history, tradition, biogra-
phy or region”; they “re-present texts, tunes and the facts that accompany them, as taken
from earlier contexts”; and finally, they “synthesize a former present—the past—into a
new present” (Rosenberg 1993c: 450). I concluded that the uses of this metaphor helped
to show how “texts—words, music—are communicated, learned, reshaped, and put into
place for symbolic uses, personal or public” (461). Here, to name revival as a determin-
ing factor seemed pointless, too broad a brush.
The third of these review essays explored perceptions of instrumental music, rede-
fining “classification” as a metaphor that could stand, variously, for organizing data,
or for reading social class, or for adding to the classical music canon. I discussed the
ways “folk” instruments and the repertoires associated with them represented “alterna-
tive types of elite art music from outside of the conservatory,” in settings that valorized
“the performer instead of the composer” (Rosenberg 1995a: 200). While many of the
performers could be connected to folksong revivals, that connection did not seem to
be useful in tracking classification. In playing with “representation” and “classification”
I sought to illuminate processes sometimes obscured by the metaphor of revival.
Revivals Now
In studying the contemporary world’s music cultures, often described as postmodern

and globalized, We must ask: What is the utility of separating “revivals” from other
kinds of musical (or even more broadly, artistic) processes? It is useful to have models
like Livingston’s “recipe.” But focusing on revivalism as a middle-class “imagined com-
munity” (2001: 56) creates a quandary. Revivals don’t exist in a vacuum. We profit in our
understanding of music cultures when we recognize the presence of revivals in them,
but if we ignore the messy edges and overlaps in the realities of lived musical lives, we
may overlook important information.
An example of the problems created when revival is viewed separately comes from the
idea that a revival involves or is itself a “named system.” This is a useful concept, but it
is limiting when one studies the careers of individual musicians. Limits imposed by the
idea of named systems led me to speak in “Big Fish, Small Pond” of country musicians’
“markets,” because the musician who performs in public is “in economic terms, both
entrepreneur and product” (Rosenberg 1986: 153). Consequently, it is not always in the
interest of musicians to be identified with a named system if that identification appears
to artificially restrict their market. On the other hand, a system name can be a useful tool
for expanding the market. It is clear that musicians may have many reasons for moving
in and out of revivals.8
Another dilemma in thinking about revival is posed by the idea of “community.”
Today this word often connotes the virtual as well as the imagined and thus has become
quite a broad way of describing networks of people who share musical interests. A finer
tool is found in Bruce Bastin’s Red River Blues (1986).
The blues revival led Bastin to research what his subtitle describes as “The Blues
Tradition in the Southeast.” He drew on a generation of research into rural blues record-
ings from the 1920s into the 1940s—research that owed much to the work of English
cultural geographer Paul Oliver. Using names published on early 78 rpm records and in
subsequent discographies and studies, Bastin sought to locate and interview the musi-
cians who had made the music on these recordings. In the process of meeting them in
their homes, he learned about the musical networks with which they were associated.
These he termed “cells” (Bastin 1986: 31–32, 272, 275, 282, 288). These were geographi-
cally situated, not imagined, communities. Thus, in writing of Orange County, North
Carolina, he reports:
The county possessed quite distinct and separate “cells” of musicians, including both
the string band tradition in Cedar Grove and a blues tradition in and around Chapel
Hill, more closely identified with that of Durham. Blurring the borders of these cells
are musicians like Jamie Alston, the only black member of a white country string
band.
(1986: 272)
Bastin describes other regional cells and later speaks of “a series of separate cells or
schools of musicians” in North Carolina’s Piedmont region, detailing nuances of region
and style (288).
In his introduction, Bastin stressed that he was writing a history, not “an ethnomusi-
cological survey” (1986: x). His work, which might be called an ethnography of the past,
presented a research challenge that he responded to with the useful “cells” metaphor.
In its organic sense of the smallest unit of life, “cell” conveys activity within boundaries
while at the same time allowing for outside influences through osmosis. The political
sense of the word “cell” works this way, too.
Like “named systems,” “folk groups,” and “scenes,” “cells” are conceptual grids that we
can impose on our perceptions of people who share musical involvements. However we
choose to perceive such groups, another factor must be considered: history—the real-

ity of constant change over time. How are we to make sense of this? Christopher Small
suggests: “[T]here is no such thing as music. Music is not a thing at all but an activity,
something that people do” (Small 1998: 2). Thinking about music as an activity leads to
another useful metaphor, one that connects musicking to other cultural activities famil-
iar to folklorists: consumption.
Consumption
In the 1970s, American folklorists began lobbying Congress for the inclusion of folklore
in federal and state funded cultural institutions (see Rosenberg 2010: 185–186), and by
the end of the century this had happened: A majority of the American Folklore Society’s
members were engaged in public folklore.
With the growth of public folklore came a shift in priorities in the discipline. The
idea of “folklife,” a holistic approach pioneered in Europe, shaped the perspectives of
public folklorists.9 Folk music, one of the founding specialties, moved to the margins.
In “Reconstructing the Blues” (1993) Jeff Titon described the questions of authenticity
raised by public folklorists that were affecting the American folk music scene. Decisions
about funding performers were being shaped by complex criteria set forth in Joe Wilson
and Lee Udall’s book Folk Festivals: A Handbook for Organization and Management
(1982: 18–23). We’ll return to this issue later.
With folk music’s decline, other specialties, like the study of foodways, gained
importance. Charles Camp explained why: “[T]he folklife movement, with foodways
at its ideological bow, succeeded where the folksong revival had failed in reconnect-
ing the notion of tradition to ordinary people and the communities they constituted”
(1997: 368). Camp encapsulates in “ordinary people and the communities they consti-
tuted” the focus of public folklore in its attempt to engage a broad consensus, essential
to the continuing political success of publicly funded meliorative endeavors. Of course,
foodways has an advantage in this regard since all humans must eat whereas music is
optional. But in both cases, it is an activity that consumes its repertoire at each perfor-
mance.10 Eating and musicking and the practices of consumption that surround them
create a transcendent subjective experience. “Consumption” is a useful metaphor for
understanding ongoing processes of change in music cultures. It connotes the creation
of energy and waste, of gain and loss. Metaphors like this and the others I’ve discussed
are useful tools we create or borrow in writing about musical history.
Postrevival?
In 1997, my essay for the Smithsonian/Folkways reissue of Harry Smith’s Anthology of

American Folk Music sought to communicate lessons from decades of studying and
teaching about what I was now most comfortable calling vernacular music—a fabric
that wove revivals, survivals, and new inventions in music alongside industrial pro-
cesses, economic transformations, and business practices together over a period of
decades (Rosenberg 1999). It first seemed ironic to me that my essay was in same booklet
in which Marcus articulated the image of “The old weird America,” for from my per-
spective this was an “othering” of the music that ran contrary to much of what I’d con-
cluded in my field research and model construction.
In essence, my position was and is aligned with that of Camp’s connections with
ordinary people and communities—what I would call the “social consensus” approach
(Rosenberg 1993a: 19–20)—while I see Marcus’s invention of “old weird America” as a
“social elite” approach that mystifies ordinary people and communities.
But it’s important to understand that two very different sets of American cultural politics
are involved here. On the one hand, Camp is speaking as an advocate for public folklore, a
populist movement within the arena of state and nonprofit cultural stimulus politics.
On the other, Marcus speaks as the literary critic perhaps responsible more than any
other for ensconcing rock music in the national literary canon; his “old weird America”
connected with the artistic creations of folk-to-rock icons like Bob Dylan. Sean Wilenz
(2010) shares Marcus’s critical involvement with Dylan (they have collaborated as edi-
tors) but as a historian looks beyond Marcus to synthesize a detailed analysis of diverse
historical sources and research. Wilenz and Marcus represent an important part of con-
temporary academic and cultural criticism about music in America. They are writing
about its newest canons.
Thus in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it appears that the
great boom achieved its political and cultural goals, and we might call that “postrev-
ival.” But I’m not sure how well this travels. In 1998, when those of us who wrote notes
for the Smithsonian/Folkways reissue of Smith’s Anthology won Grammys for Best
Album Notes, I was one of only a handful of Canadians in that year’s list of winners,
and consequently the focus of considerable public attention in the form of interviews in
the national media. Subsequently, a request came from the Canadian journal Labour/
LeTravail to write about the Anthology and working-class music. This presented an
opportunity to discuss some shortcomings in Smith’s work that I felt had been over-
looked and to raise an issue of national cultural politics:
In all of the hubbub about winning a Grammy . . . I was interviewed often by

the Canadian media. I was asked many questions but no one asked the one that
seemed obvious to me: why has there been no Anthology of Canadian Folk Music
on a similar model? . . . the idea of recycling old working-class popular music
recordings to construct a national aural mosaic has not attracted its Canadian
Harry Smith.
(Rosenberg 1998a: 331)
To what extent are revivals shaped by national political agendas?

Recent Revival Studies
In disciplines like folklore and ethnomusicology, which view themselves as interna-

tional, the impact of national patterns of cultural politics are sometimes overlooked.
Four recent book-length studies of North American revival music scenes have particu-
larly interested me not only because of personal experience in the scenes they depict but
also because they illustrate how political agendas shape visions of national cultures.
Mark F. DeWitt’s Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California (2008)
explores, as his subtitle says, “modern pleasures in a postmodern world.” Discussing
identity issues, he begins with consideration of the meanings of “insider” and “outsider”
in relation to group membership. This leads him through Hall’s (1989) idea of “Other” as
he discusses music and dance that first developed among Louisiana francophones. He
uses “revivalist to refer to an outsider who plays or dances to Louisiana French music,”
explaining that he refers “to outsiders as revivalists in the sense generally understood by
those who administer ‘folk arts’ funding in the United States” as described by Titon in
1993. His purpose for “using revivalist as shorthand for cultural outsiders is not to rein-
scribe the folk arts meaning but to critique it” since his book demonstrates “the thor-
oughgoing extent of the partnership between insiders and outsiders in maintaining”
this music everywhere (DeWitt 2008: 28)—what I’d call “social consensus.”11 DeWitt
then moves to the question of identity in terms of the distinctions raised by Bauman’s
suggestion that today we are all postmodern vagabonds who share identity issues; hence
his subtitle.
I recognize in DeWitt’s narrative old friends from my participation in the Berkeley
folk scene. Here is further evidence for an enduring local interest in folk dance music
that reaches back a century in the history of the Bay Area’s arts scene. When I described
Berkeley’s revival history to Livingston, she reported that I’d suggested “a series of inter-
locking or recurring revivals on new themes at certain times,” suggesting the impor-
tance of location as an “important variable” (Livingston 1999: 83). Indeed, the themes
do change in this location. They are consumed by local population that’s a volatile mix of
longtime residents and recent arrivals to a region that has long embraced novelty, inno-
vation, opposition, and alternative routes.
In describing what he calls “Berkeley Bohemia,” historian Charles Wollenberg
describes a famous family, the Boyntons, who in 1914 moved into what locals usually
describe as a modern replica of a Greek temple, situated on Buena Vista (good views are
valued in this city), a road that snakes up the North Berkeley hills. Wollenberg tells of
the place and the family:
the Temple of Wings [is] a hillside platform with roof supported by thirty-four
Corinthian columns. Until 1923, the structure had no walls, though sailcloth could
be deployed in case of heavy wind and rain. The Boyntons often wore togas and robes
and lived mostly on fruits and nuts.12 Florence Boynton was a friend and follower
of the modern dancer Isadora Duncan, and the temple was sometimes a venue for
Duncan’s performances. The tradition was passed on to the Boyntons’ daughter,
Sulgwynn, who, along with her husband Charles Quitzow, gave modern dance les-
sons to several generations of young Berkeleyans.
(2008: 80–81)
Most of this narrative is familiar to me because I grew up in the neighborhood. Sulgwynn

was “Mrs. Quitzow” to me. Her young Berkeleyan students were girls. She regularly held
“socials,” formal dance events to which each student was encouraged to invite a boy. To
guard against gender imbalance, she kept a list of young men she knew from previous
socials who liked to dance. I went frequently to these socials as a teen. I’d enjoyed square
dancing in grade school and had a growing interest in folk music.
Mrs. Quitzow was renowned for her work as a teacher of modern dance, but at the
socials in the old temple, folk dancing shared equal time with couples ballroom dancing.
Mr. Quitzow played the piano while she taught the latest folk dances from various parts
of the world.13 Thus, in Berkeley “folk” and “modern” were part of the arts scene and
had been for a long time. This is the node at which the Cajun and zydeco dance music
revival described by DeWitt would later bloom. Shall we call this a community, a scene,
a folk group, or a cell? At least one of my fellow dancers from the Quitzows’ shows up in
DeWitt’s narrative about Berkeley’s folk music milieu. DeWitt’s foray into the history of
the Berkeley folk revival reaches back to the 1950s but acknowledges that, at that point, it
was “already flourishing” (2008:154).14 Luis Kemnitzer’s “West Coast Record Collector,”
in the new notes to the Smith Anthology (1997), gives another useful description of Bay
Area folk art consumption, from a decade before that.
Extended historical ethnography is not easy. By the time we report on the present,
it has receded into the past, and the earlier history is even more distant. DeWitt’s use-
ful summary notwithstanding, the Berkeley folk scene has yet to find its historian.
Abundant documents and willing informants exist, but creating such a wide-ranging
history would not be easy, given the complex cultural politics typical of revival processes.
John Bealle’s 2005 study of the Bloomington, Indiana, scene of the 1970s and 1980s,
Old-Time Music and Dance, subtitled “Community and Folk Revival,” deals, like
DeWitt’s work, with a place and people familiar to me. But it tells a story of events mostly
beyond my experience of just a few years earlier. In describing a music-culture that no
longer exists, Bealle laments that “postmodern culture . . . brought down the opposi-
tional wall that . . . separated the dominant culture from all that was not,” so that “sud-
denly things that were once the exclusive province of an underground economy . . . could
now be bought by anyone” (xiv–xv).
Bealle’s detailed narrative follows a folk dance and old-time music oriented commu-
nity over two decades. It’s in a college town that has a venerable history of alternative
music and interest in folk arts like Berkeley’s but a very different town-gown dynamic.
Reading Bealle’s valuable history of the politics of culture at work in that microcosm,
I encountered individuals whom I know were involved in the Northern California
Cajun-zydeco dance scene.
Like Bealle, Ray Allen in Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the
Folk Music Revival (2010) devotes considerable space to a band that began in Berkeley,
the Highwoods Stringband (Bealle 2005: 142–151; Allen 2010: 199–202). Both narratives
discuss the cultural politics that constricted the career of these talented and popular
musicians. Allen quotes one band member from an interview published in 1979, the year
after they disbanded: “[W]e’re too traditional to appeal to a wide commercial audience,
but the folklorists say we’re outside the tradition because we weren’t born into it” (Allen
2010: 202).
This was the “no revivalists” issue that affected the American old-time music-culture,
the same issue raised by Titon and DeWitt. A decade later it “exploded,” according to
Bealle, in the pages of a new magazine, the Old-Time Herald, “attracting twenty-five
printed contributions and covering a period from February 1989 to October 1990.”
Central in the debate was the “martyrdom” of the Highwoods Stringband. It stood for
the experience of many younger musicians, “having been embraced and then rejected
by traditional music festival organizers” (2005: 231). It was a controversy about who
would be paid to represent this music.
Allen closes his book on the New Lost City Ramblers with a chapter titled “Passing
for Traditional and Rethinking Folk Revivalism” (2010: 243–250) that discusses these
issues, questioning the politics of “revivalist” in the United States. He thus joins the dia-
log about the use of the term “revivalist” that DeWitt sought to critique. This dialog is
important to these students of American folk arts, for “revivalist” is part of the discourse
of governmental arts funding. This is a national political debate.
In Canada, where government funding of the folk arts has different history and struc-
tures, “revival” does not have the same meaning it has in the United States. It’s not that
there is no dialog in Canada, it’s just a different dialog. Anna Kearney Guigné’s study
Folksongs and Folk Revival (2008) depicts the work of the federally funded Ontario com-
poser and ethnomusicologist Kenneth Peacock. Before Newfoundland became part
of the Canadian confederation, outsiders studying its folk traditions had come from
Britain and America (Rosenberg 1989). Following confederation, Canada asserted hege-
mony over Newfoundland’s resources—natural and cultural (Rosenberg 1994). Guigné’s
study, subtitled “The Cultural Politics of Kenneth Peacock’s Songs of the Newfoundland
Outports,” shows how Peacock’s elite aesthetic agenda shaped his work in creating “a
major resource for Newfoundland revivalists seeking to explore the province’s folksong
traditions,” as part of his romantic “mission to capture the sounds of Canada’s musical
heritage” (Guigné 2008: 240, 237).
In Newfoundland and elsewhere in Canada, some of the songs collected and pub-
lished by Peacock and other collectors, like “She’s Like the Swallow” (Rosenberg 2007),
have become heritage symbols. The folksong revival is generally viewed as something
that happened in the pop music of the sixties, and “revivalist” is not the contentious
term that it is in the United States.
There are other contentious terms, however. Peacock was, in contemporary local par-
lance, a “CFA,” a widely used acronym for “come from away.” It refers to anyone, not
born in Newfoundland, who is a resident or tourist there (Young 2006: 54). It entered
widespread local circulation via a joke current in the early 1970s when Memorial
University had undergone considerable growth in enrollment and new faculty mem-
bers were arriving from all quarters of the globe. “You can’t get a job at Memorial,” the
joke-teller would begin, “unless you got your CFA.” Listeners would ask for an expla-
nation of the acronym, which seemed to stand for some kind of academic degree, like
“Ph.D.” In a society still used to imposed colonial leadership, “come from away” was
self-explanatory.
CFAs like Peacock were welcomed, if sometimes guardedly, in postcolonial
Newfoundland. As Guigné shows, his book became locally influential only after it was
embraced by young Newfoundland folk rockers as a musical source.
Today in Newfoundland, government policy issues surrounding the revival of tradi-
tional and folk culture are not considered through the lens of “public folklore.” Instead,
in the twenty-first century they are being addressed through work on the UNESCO
initiative to view such things as “Intangible Cultural Heritage” (Pocius 2010). In this
milieu, “CFA” is as much a part of backroom cultural politics as “revivalist” is in the
United States.
Conclusions
From my perspective as a folklorist, studying revivals was a process of self-examination

facilitated by models and metaphors. I started at “folk group” and then created a graphic
metaphor of musical process before finally turning to the close examination of revival.
I came to understand that “revival” was just one of many possible metaphors for describ-
ing processes of cultural politics in music cultures. In thinking about these processes
I explored other metaphors, like representation, classification, named systems, commu-
nities, cells, and consumption. There are others, like “scene,” that could also be explored.
All can be related to revival.
In the fall of 2010, a new women’s shoe store opened in St. John’s biggest mall. It pre-
sented its styles in six categories, one of which was “grunge revival.”15 I don’t know if that
name alludes to an ongoing cultural movement or was invented by someone in market-
ing. I also don’t know if it sold shoes. But by the beginning of December those categories
were gone, displaced by Christmas sales. “Revival” is now a familiar metaphor in the
study of vernacular music, and that makes it accessible and useful. But it must be used
carefully, because its denotations and connotations vary widely. I’ve found in such situa-
tions that leaving revival in favor of other metaphors can be beneficial.
Notes
1. Dorson’s coinage, “fakelore,” was in the style and tradition of H. L. Mencken, cofounder of
the American Mercury, the magazine in which Dorson introduced the term.
2. The inclusion of four of these articles, reviews, and liner notes in Goldsmith (2004) reflects
the interest they engendered.
3. Halpert had been a student of George Herzog at Columbia University.
4. Williams’s idea was rearticulated as “key song” in the essays of Pickering and Richards in
Pickering and Green’s (1987) volume Everyday Culture: Popular Song and the Vernacular
Milieu.
5. I did not attempt to define “authenticity”; it is a word that, as the title of the section suggests,
is constantly being reshaped according to the intellectual zeitgeist. I saw my task then being
to describe the factors that dominated this process in the era.
6. I discovered the economics behind this international pop music phenomenon when
I studied the songs connected to the 1956 and 1958 Springhill, Nova Scotia, mine disasters.
In essence, nationally mediated Canadian country songs were overshadowed by an inter-
national folk hit that is, today, the only song about the disasters that is still remembered and
heard in the Canadian media that memorialize them (Rosenberg 2000).
7. Wilenz (2010: 47–84) describes the beat-folk connections between the forties and the six-
ties in Greenwich Village more broadly. These and the related regional, national, and inter-
national artistic networks of the era were humorously envisioned by Earl Crabb and Rick
Shubb in a 17- by 22 1/2-inch poster, “Humbead’s Revised Map of the World with List of
Population.” (First published in 1967, it was reprinted in 1980 in von Schmidt and Rooney’s
“illustrated story of the Cambridge folk years,” 124–125. Crabb has posted it at, and sells it
from, his website, www.humbead.com/hmbmap.html.)
8. Livingston (1999: 72) provides a case in point, an example of the reluctant rockabilly who
would rather play country but opts for the more lucrative rockabilly gigs.
9. Ironically, “folklife” scholars in Europe were abandoning that term in favor of “ethnology”
at the very point when it became popular in America.
10. The cultures and economics of foodways and musicking can also be compared in terms
of modes of production: the snack and the jam; Carnegie Hall and the latest fashionable
restaurant; and so forth. Unexplored metaphors!
11. In Rosenberg (1993d) I describe such partnerships when discussing the work of specialists
and revivalists who became activists in a music system.
12. This sentence is the standard nonbohemian Berkeleyan description of life at the temple.
I heard it often in the 1950s. Only recently did I notice that it includes folk metaphors
(“fruits and nuts”) for homosexuals and the mentally ill.
13. We also did familiar folk dances: square dances, the Virginia reel, the Hora, etc.
14. Rita Weill’s notes to Mike Seeger’s phonograph album Berkeley Farms, which documents
“oldtime and country style music of Berkeley,” provide biographical and historical details
for early 1970s music in the scene DeWitt describes.
15. The other clever categories for shoes in the store called Spring were: urban nostalgia, dark
romance, bejeweled, new classics, and geek chic.
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C HA P T E R 6
A PA RT I C I PA N T-
D O C U M E N TA R IA N I N T H E
A M E R I C A N I N S T RU M E N TA L
F O L K M U S I C R E V I VA L
A L A N JA BB OU R
Since the 1960s, the United States has witnessed a powerful instrumental folk music
revival, which has developed many branches but has focused primarily on Southern
old-time fiddling as its source of repertory, style, and spiritual inspiration. It has been a
revival that drew deeply on intergenerational and cross-cultural contact with and docu-
mentation of elderly fiddlers and other instrumental musicians. The emphasis on the
Southern repertory and style of this revival is not new; it represents a long-standing pat-
tern in American culture, which since the early 19th century has turned to Southern
creativity for national inspiration. This modern instrumental folk music revival, though
related both to the roughly contemporaneous folksong revival and to the parallel revival
in folk dancing, reveals many features that serve to distinguish it from its folksong coun-
terpart. The various chroniclers of the folksong revival have hardly mentioned this
instrumental folk music revival in their accounts. I was a participant in this instrumen-
tal revival, and I recount a few of my experiences here, both for what they have con-
tributed to the revival and as a source of reflection on that revival’s cultural texture and
larger meaning.
Assessing Revivals
The book Transforming Tradition (1993), edited by Neil Rosenberg, contains an intro-
ductory essay by Rosenberg that is an important contribution to the published literature
on cultural revivals.1 The English-language word “revival,” Rosenberg points out, has
the American instrumental folk music revival 117
been applied in cultural situations since the 17th century, and has been applied specifi-
cally to folk culture since the dawn of the twentieth century. The term’s layers of mean-
ing are worth unpacking, because the layers reveal much and may allow us to glimpse
more about the twists and turns of cultural discourse in the modern world.
The word “revival” since the seventeenth century has been used to describe a simple
cultural circumstance, as when a theatrical play is revived, or someone revives a fiddle
tune learned from an old hillbilly 78-rpm record. Curiously, evidence for this sense of
the word predates the more literal sense of reviving a life. Here the word is somewhat
metaphorical, since the play or fiddle tune never literally “died” to be later “revived.”
It was always available in a script or on a recording and perhaps remained in people’s
memories as well. But though metaphorical, its sense is not complicated. The play or
fiddle tune was previously performed, lay dormant for a period, and is revived to active
performance.
In a more extended metaphorical usage, the earliest citation for which is by New
England preacher Cotton Mather at the dawn of the eighteenth century, “revival”
betokens a special effort to reawaken religious commitment, fervor, and devotion
(Rosenberg 1993: 17). This religious application of the term is very much alive today.
The outdoor encampments of the Second Great Awakening from the beginning to the
middle of the 19th century are echoed today in the tent revivals still flourishing in rural
American settings. But the rural tent revivals are not the only continuation of the tradi-
tion; many contemporary American Protestant churches, both rural and urban, sched-
ule occasional “revivals,” often featuring guest preachers, in addition to the regular
schedule of church events. A church revival may recruit new members, but its chief goal
is to intensify a congregation’s religious devotion, reach out to inactive members, and
reinvigorate religious practices neglected in the course of day-to-day life.
A contemporary American use of the word “revival” refers not to reawakening
culture among its existing adherents, but rather to the adoption of arts and cultural
practices outside the source cultural group. This usage seems to have grown out of
the mid-20th-century American folksong revival movement. It may have been intro-
duced by Charles Seeger, but it quickly took hold as a way of describing the imitation
of rural traditional artists by urban, educated devotees of rural folk music (Rosenberg
1993: 17–18). A white musician who imitates the style and repertory of older black blues-
men, or a New Englander who learns to sing in an old Southern Appalachian style, may
be referred to as a “revivalist.” “Revival” and “revivalist,” in this sense, have stirred anger
among some American performers by suggesting that their music, which imitates or
adopts certain folk genres, lacks authenticity compared to the art of people born into the
source cultural group.
This last meaning of “revival” leads me to offer a confession and propose a new term.
In the 1970s, as the first director of the Folk Arts Program for the National Endowment
for the Arts, I was in part responsible for spreading this use of the terms “revival” and
“revivalist” to contrast with “traditional.” Faced with a limited amount of available funds,
and encountering people inspired by the American folk revival who found their way to
the Endowment’s door, we began using “revival” and “revivalist” as terms contrasting
118 Alan Jabbour
with “traditional,” trying to convey that we sought to give priority to longstanding forms
of traditional arts maintained within traditional groups.
But what seemed conceptually reasonable as a way of prioritizing proved deeply
problematic in practice. In the earlier stages of the folk revival, it had seemed easy to
distinguish newcomers from old-timers. At the Galax (Virginia) Fiddlers Convention
in 1967 or 1968—where I was an eager participant with our band, the Hollow Rock
String Band—it was no problem distinguishing local Blue Ridge musicians from visi-
tors reared outside the region. Their music, spoken dialect, and dress were all different.
If you moved from Chicago to eastern Kentucky in 1970, drawn by a back-to-the-land
dream and the romance of the Appalachians, your singing style probably didn’t sound
like the locals. But what about twenty or thirty years later? Is one forever a revivalist,
after moving to a community, rearing a family there, and playing in local bands for a
generation or two? Based on many interviews and conversations, I would say that local
musicians themselves judge non-local musicians principally on who they learned from
and how well, not on their family name and birthplace.
The use of “revival” and “revivalist” with this meaning generated lasting antagonisms
since the 1970s between public folklorists and many activists of the folk revival, who
should have been allies.2 For years, folk revival activists blamed “academics” for impugn-
ing the authenticity of their artistic performances and creations. Ironically, the academy
was not the source—public folklorists like me set these terms into motion. Meanwhile,
a new generation of academic folklore theorists hammered out new conceptualizations
of folklore based on small-group creative performance and communication, providing
flexible alternatives to the older idea of folklore based on fixed ethnic, occupational, reli-
gious, and regional groups. The “revival versus authentic” dichotomy that we unleashed
actually missed the fresh new thinking in the academic field of folklore studies about a
more dynamic and embracing definition of folklore.
Hence, by way of atonement, I offer a fresh term as a cautionary flag in assessing the
relationship of individuals to cultural traditions. In the mid-twentieth century, a genera-
tion of literary critics of the school known as New Criticism embraced the term “inten-
tional fallacy” as a way of asserting that an author’s declared “intention” is not relevant
to interpreting a literary work. The meaning of a poem, this theory insists, can only be
derived properly from consideration of elements internal to the poem itself. Hence, a
literary work may mean what its author intended, or not, and may also reveal mean-
ings the author never intended or was consciously aware of (Wimsatt and Beardsley
1946: 468–88).3 Similarly, I propose “origin fallacy” as a cautionary reminder that a per-
son’s ethnicity, religion, place of origin, or other group membership is an untrustworthy
measure of the authenticity of that person’s artistic expression. The career of the great
Cape Breton (Canada) fiddler Jerry Holland, born and reared in Boston of non-Cape
Breton parents, illustrates the dangers of the origin fallacy. Jerry Holland’s recent pass-
ing was mourned throughout Cape Breton and wherever Cape Breton music is admired,
and his contributions to Cape Breton music have been profound.
Assessing the term “revival” invites a few broader comments on the cultural pro-
cess. We tend to think of groups as fixed entities, and we confuse “group” and “culture”
in our discourse. Both groups and cultures are dynamic, not fixed. A group acquires
new members when people marry into the group, move to where the group is concen-
trated, or otherwise join the group. It loses members by this same flow of human move-
ments. Culture is even more changeable, reflecting a constant process of sorting new
ideas and new cultural artifacts and integrating them into the repertory of an individual
or group. Perhaps the inward-facing culture of the hearth is more conservative, and
the outward-facing culture of the marketplace more open to new ideas and new cul-
tural forms. But whether at the hearth or in the marketplace, culture is interactive and
dynamic, with cultural artifacts, genres, and stylistic ideas constantly flowing in and out
of a community. Thus, it is not unreasonable to call culture itself “intercultural.” The
natural state of culture includes an intercultural flow.
People often see the past as more stable and unchanging, and the present as more
dynamic and changing. Further, they imagine movement from past to present as accel-
erating in the same direction. History, by this way of thinking, might be like a jet plane
taking off—from stasis on the ground to climbing through the air. Though we know
better intellectually, our mental models for culture and cultural history tend to be
straight-line models that fail to anticipate the oscillation, cyclic patterns, or plain mean-
dering that are clearly part of cultural history. An example of the cyclic patterns of cul-
tural history is the process by which cultural transmission through time often skips
generations. “Grandparent education” is a classic form of this cultural oscillation, which
may have the effect of causing cultural traditions to pass through troughs of inatten-
tion followed by peaks of renewed attention. The term “grandparent education” actually
represents not only literal grandparents, but other elderly family members and elderly
neighbors. It could almost be described as “non-parent education,” since the restrictive
governance of parents and the rebellion of their children can inhibit the teaching and
learning of certain cultural traditions, but it also typically involves trans-generational
inspiration and training.
Thus my fiddling mentor, Henry Reed (1884–1968) of Glen Lyn, Virginia, learned fid-
dle tunes as a youth from many elderly neighbors, notably Quincy (“Quince”) Dillion
(1827–1903), and I (1942–) learned tunes from Henry Reed, who was the age of my
grandparents.4 Was my learning from him substantively different from his learning from
Quince Dillion? Henry Reed seemed to think of me not as a documentarian but as a
young enthusiast learning his repertory and art, and there is no question that I was both
a documentarian and an apprentice in my relationship with him. Arguably, his learn-
ing from Quince Dillion and my learning from him are both examples of “grandparent
education.” Should we use the word “revival” to describe this ancient cultural pattern
of grandparent education surviving a generational trough? Or is Henry Reed’s learning
from his neighbor Quince Dillion “traditional,” but my learning from him, having not
grown up in his neighborhood, a form of “cultural revival”? These two examples teach us
more by considering their likeness than by searching for ways to contrast them. I would
argue that both cases are “traditional.” They may also be considered cases of cultural
revival, in the sense that there was a loss or diminishing of tradition for a generation,
then a revival in the next generation. But we must then acknowledge that this kind of
120 Alan Jabbour
“revival,” the result of grandparent education, is not some external force transferring
cultural goods from one culture to another. Rather, it is part and parcel of the normal
cultural process itself.
The Hollow Rock String Band and the

Instrumental Folk Music Revival
When I recorded old-time fiddlers in the mid-1960s in North Carolina, Virginia, and
West Virginia, I worked primarily with fiddlers in their 70s and 80s. There seemed to be
fewer fiddlers in their 50s or 60s, and they generally learned few tunes of the older reper-
tory I was documenting from their elders. Among the generation in their 30s and 40s,
the fiddle seemed almost a rarity, and the numbers seemed equally sparse for kids, teen-
agers, and young adults. Seeing these numbers made me pessimistic about the future of
old-time fiddling in the Upland South. I brooded that older repertories and styles would
perish quickly and forever. My documentary mission was to preserve for future research
these tunes and ways of playing, which seemed doomed to be swept away by the tides of
novelty promoted by radio and record companies—in short, by modernity.
Two factors led me to depart from the documentary course I had set for myself. The
first factor I can only describe as “animal spirits.” The fiddlers, learning that I had played
violin and was interested in fiddle tunes, treated me as if I were there not just to docu-
ment but to learn. This challenged my imagination: I began learning to play their tunes
the way they played them. Though I thought I was salvaging a dying tradition, the ani-
mal spirits in me drove me to learn it anyway. The second factor was aesthetic. The tunes
were beautiful to me—both in the abstract, as melodic structures, and in their sensuous
surface, namely, the style of their performance. Our inner response to beauty is obses-
sive. A beautiful melody or performance demands your active embrace, whatever your
documentary mission.
After I began learning old-time fiddling, I found a group of other young musicians in
the Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, area with whom I could share the music
I was learning. Bertram Levy, a Duke University medical student, introduced me to
Tommy Thompson and his wife, Bobbie Thompson. The three of them had already been
playing music together. I began bringing to the Thompsons’ house the tunes I was learn-
ing from my recording expeditions, and they learned the tunes from me. In the process,
an ensemble style evolved from our music together. The tunes we played were all purely
instrumental; singing was not part of our musical performance. The fiddle played the
melodic lead; the five-string banjo played an adaptation of the melody an octave lower
in the downstroke style known variously as “clawhammer,” “frailing,” or “knocking”; the
mandolin played a melodic line approximating the fiddle; and the guitar played a mov-
ing bass line and chords. Unlike bluegrass musicians, we never took solo instrumental
breaks but instead developed an ensemble style heavily weighted to the melody and the
treble range and repeated insistently with micro-variations. The chords were usually of
my own devising. My fiddle mentors rarely gave specific guidance for chording each
tune—though if Henry Reed’s sons were visiting when I visited, they might accompany
him on guitar—so in many cases we literally invented the chords. Of course we met
more musicians with each passing season, especially at regional old-time fiddlers’ con-
ventions, so we were not clueless about approaches to chording fiddle tunes. But nobody
else at the fiddlers’ conventions was playing the dozens of grand old fiddle tunes that
became the hallmarks of our repertory.5
People often asked us if we were influenced by the New Lost City Ramblers, a string
band formed in the late 1950s and reformed in the 1960s that had an important role in
the American folksong revival and also influenced the instrumental folk music revival.
They preceded our group, the Hollow Rock String Band, so it is natural to suppose that
they had a shaping influence on us. But they actually focused on songs more than instru-
mental music, and their earliest recordings were predominantly influenced by a dispa-
rate variety of Southern commercial recordings from 1920s "hillbilly" bands through
1950s bluegrass. The Hollow Rock String Band created its own consistent old-time style,
drawing from the repertory exclusively of living elderly musicians we had visited and
learned from. Both our repertory, which was overwhelmingly of pre-World War I vin-
tage, and the style of rendering that repertory became deeply influential on the burgeon-
ing instrumental folk music revival from the 1960s to present. Interestingly, though the
New Lost City Ramblers did not influence us, they had a significant influence on the
band organized by our banjo player, Tommy Thompson, after the Hollow Rock String
Band broke up. The Red Clay Ramblers arguably were deeply influenced by the New
Lost City Ramblers in their focus on solo and ensemble singing, their varied and mostly
recorded sources, and their manner of stage presentation.6
Our band aborning in the 1960s needed a name to enter competitions at fiddlers’ con-
ventions. The Thompsons’ house in the Hollow Rock rural community west of Durham
had become our gathering place, so we decided to call ourselves the Hollow Rock String
Band. In no time at all, a wider circle of musicians materialized at the Thompson home
for jams and quickly learned our repertory. It rapidly became a music scene involving
dozens of active musicians. Summer music and dance parties sometimes attracted a
hundred or more. We noticed that when we jammed in the parking lot during fiddlers’
conventions, we were starting to attract crowds—happily including both young folks
and old folks.
In the fall of 1967, our band taped an album in a Durham studio. The album (The
Hollow Rock String Band 1968) came out in the spring of 1968 on the West Virginia-based
Kanawha label—I think the company printed 500 copies. By then I was finishing
my Ph.D. dissertation at Duke University and had accepted a job at the University
of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the fall. Bertram Levy was leaving to begin his
Stanford University medical residency. The old band was breaking up. But the music
scene that had coalesced around us generated a new band, the Fuzzy Mountain String
Band, whose recordings (The Fuzzy Mountain String Band 1971, The Fuzzy Mountain
String Band: Summer Oaks and Porch 1972) joined the Hollow Rock albums as early
122 Alan Jabbour
influences on the mushrooming old-time instrumental music revival. Then our banjo
player, Tommy Thompson, developed another band, the Red Clay Ramblers, which
became a fixture in Durham and Chapel Hill and a popular touring band around the
country. Though there have been gradual changes in personnel, the Red Clay Ramblers
continues as a successful band in the early twenty-first century.
Reflecting now on these events and developments, I see myself as a
participant-observer—or indeed as a participant-documentarian—in an American
instrumental folk music revival that erupted in the 1960s and is still playing itself out in
the 21st century. There is an extensive literature on the American folksong revival, which
most observers date from the post-World War II era. The literature on the folksong
revival treats the instrumental folk music revival, if at all, only cursorily.7 The revival that
our Hollow Rock String Band helped to launch largely ignored vocal music, concen-
trating on instrumental technique, style, and a repertory that only slightly overlapped
with the folksong revival repertory. The entire social and cultural underpinning of the
movement was different—collective instrumental jams, as opposed to sing-a-longs that
rotated the lead systematically to each participant. I recall many music parties in the
1970s that broke up into folksong gatherings on one house level and instrumental jams
on another. We were not a footnote to the folksong revival—we were a kindred but dif-
ferent revival with strong links to the folksong revival, but also ties to bluegrass, ties to
a parallel dance revival, and, like the folksong revival, important ties to collectors and
academics.
Tales of the Instrumental Folk

Music Revival
I’ve been calling our revival an instrumental folk music revival, because not only the
fiddle but the banjo, guitar, mandolin, and other instruments received renewed atten-
tion from the 1960s on. But at its core, it has been a fiddle-led revival. Its core reper-
tory has been mostly fiddle tunes, and the fiddle is consistently the lead instrument in
the formal bands and informal jams of the movement. Suddenly in the later 1960s and
early 1970s, fiddle players were everywhere. Many had just taken up the fiddle. Only
a few like me had studied violin as a youth. Curiously, though the Southern repertory
and old-time band instrumentation were almost instantly transported to every part of
the United States and became both widespread and deeply entrenched, it took another
generation before many trained violinists suddenly became seriously interested in tra-
ditional fiddling.
Much of the literature about the American folk revival sees the revival story as essen-
tially a story about artistic performances brought to the general public, but I am con-
vinced that the revival owes as much to the scholar-collectors as to the performers.
Furthermore, many of the scholar-collectors have been performers themselves, not only
in college classrooms, but in public venues and on radio and record. Thus, the documen-
tation of folk musicians and emulation of their repertory and style become an essential
part of the story of the revival, and the story of the American folk revival begins not in
the 1950s or 1960s, but with John and Alan Lomax and dozens of other collectors in the
1920s and 1930s (Jabbour 2001: 58–76).
In this context, the modern revival of Southern old-time fiddling presents an
interesting case. The vast region of the Upland South, its geography and history tied
together by early settlement patterns, stretches from east of the Appalachians to west
of the Ozarks. The region has a long history of exporting its musical creativity—the
banjo, the minstrel stage, ragtime, blues, country music, bluegrass, and both black and
white gospel music. Its fiddling tradition is quite varied, but a number of features in
both repertory and style make the fiddling of this broad region distinctive. Since the
1960s, the Upland South has seen a vigorous revival of older fiddle styles, for which the
term “old-time” has been widely adopted. “Old-time” in its broadest sense, meaning “in
the old days” or “in an old-fashioned style,” is an old term widely used throughout the
United States. In Southern music, the term found a new use after the post-World War II
emergence of bluegrass as a new Upland South style. Appalachian fiddlers’ conventions
began using “old-time” as a technical category within banjo, fiddle, and band compe-
titions. There were now separate “old-time” and “bluegrass” categories. “Old-time”
in this sense does not refer to the age of the performers—the term applies strictly to
musical style.
Thus when our Hollow Rock String Band competed in fiddlers’ conventions in
the 1960s, we entered in the “old-time” category. So did other young musicians play-
ing in our general style. Perhaps this is how the new name for Upland South fiddling
and string band music gradually became “old-time”—a ubiquitous term that covered
more or less everything but bluegrass and country and western. Bluegrass musicians
play some old-time songs and instrumental tunes, but they have special requirements
in style and repertory that distinguish their music from the broad old-time category.
Nevertheless, increasingly and confusingly in northern North America and Europe, the
terms “old-time” and “bluegrass” are being used almost interchangeably.
Almost all my field recordings in the 1960s and 1970s were in fiddlers’ homes. One
fiddler I visited, Taylor Kimble, lived along the Blue Ridge near Laurel Fork in south-
western Virginia. After I recorded him, he asked to hear it and seemed pleased and
fascinated. A few months later, I went to see Taylor again. After we visited a while, he
proposed making some music. I went to get my tape recorder from the car, and on my
return I was surprised to see another tape recorder sitting there already. Taylor said he
had admired my tape recorder during my last visit, so he bought himself one. Now it was
my turn to admire his tape recorder—it was a lot better than mine.
After another few months, I visited Taylor again. He surprised me by playing a tune
I had not heard him play before. Even more surprising, he played it in three parts, just
like my fiddling mentor Henry Reed, who lived a long way from Taylor’s Blue Ridge
home. When I asked Taylor what he called the tune, he said “Stony Point”—the same
title as Henry Reed’s! Naturally I asked him who he learned it from. “Why, I learned it
124 Alan Jabbour
from you, Alan,” he said. “You played it for me the last time you were here, and I recorded
it. I liked it, so I learned it.”
Listen to audio example 6.1 (“Stony Point,” Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier 2000) to
hear Henry Reed’s version of this tune , and audio e xample 6.2 (“Stony Point,” A Henry
Reed Reunion 2002) to hear my version .
I met Taylor not long after his wife passed away. As a widower living alone in his sev-
enties, music became even more important in his life. Other young people, including
some who learned about him from me, came to visit, and he was happy to share his
fiddle and banjo repertory. A few years later, he was invited to visit some young musi-
cians in Maryland, and while he was there he met a widow from the Blue Ridge named
Stella Holladay, who played banjo. They had grown up fifty miles from each other and
had never met, but they took a liking to each other and fell to playing tunes together.
When I next came to visit Taylor in Virginia, he seemed very excited. “Alan,” he said, “go
out yonder to the kitchen; I’ve got a surprise for you.” I went to the kitchen, and there
was Stella sitting in a chair by the kitchen table. They had gotten married. It’s a measure
of their joy that each of them learned the other’s entire musical repertory in their few
happy years together.
My stories about Taylor Kimble illustrate how deeply intertwined the art and the
lives of us young musicians were with the elderly musicians we visited. Far from being
detached observers, we found our lives enmeshed with the life and art of the people
we had come to observe. We were living proof of the Observer Effect, as it is called in
the social sciences, inspired perhaps by the Uncertainty Principle of quantum physi-
cist Werner Heisenberg: namely, that the act of observation affects the object observed.
Heisenberg or no Heisenberg, the story of a cultural movement is not likely to be com-
plete without recognizing the impact on it of its observers. Our revival movement
begins with our interaction with—our entering into and becoming part of the lives of—
the musicians from whom we learned.
Chief among the fiddlers who shaped my repertory and style was Henry Reed of Glen
Lyn, Virginia, along the New River on the Virginia-West Virginia border (see photo-
graph in Figure 6.1). He was in his eighties when I met him in the mid-1960s, and he
passed away in 1968. Henry Reed taught me one tune that he learned in his area from
a fellow who had been down in Texas. When I got home, I learned the tune from my
recording of Henry Reed, and then taught it to my fellow band members. Other young
fiddlers learned it from us, and soon “Texas” was being played all over the region and
beyond.
Meantime I visited Henry Reed a year or two later, and he happened to play this tune
again. I asked him its name, and without hesitating he said “New Castle,” explaining that
it was the county seat of nearby Craig County, Virginia. I was a little abashed to learn
that what we were calling “Texas” was actually “New Castle.” So, as I encountered peo-
ple calling the tune “Texas,” I would politely explain that the real name is “New Castle.”
I even cheerfully took the blame for causing the confusion. But the correction was not
always greeted with a full measure of enthusiasm. One young woman, being instructed
on the proper title, looked a little defiant. As her eyes flashed, I realized she was thinking
FIGURE 6.1. Henry Reed playing fiddle in his home, Glen Lyn, VA, ca. 1966-67. Photograph
by Karen Singer Jabbour.
something akin to “You can’t take my ‘Texas’ away from me!” Sometimes the ways of
tradition overwhelm your impulse to correct it, and you need to accept the authenticity
of a tradition, even when it codifies a mistake you yourself set into motion. So, here’s—
“Texas,” or “New Castle.”
Listen to audio e xample 6.3 to hear Henry Reed’s rendition of this tune (“Texas,”
Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier 2000 ).
Not long before the Hollow Rock String Band broke up, I taught band members a
couple of tunes I had just learned. One was from Henry Reed and had no name. It was
an interesting tune in G with a nineteenth-century feel—a schottische-like I-IV-V-I
chord progression and lots of scales and arpeggios. The other was from an elderly fiddler
in Martinsville, Virginia, Joe Anglin, who called it “Lady of the Lake”—a beautiful old
minor tune in A, akin to Henry Reed’s “Ducks on the Pond,” yet different enough to learn
as a separate piece. Within a few weeks, I moved to Los Angeles, California, to begin
teaching at UCLA, and band member Bertram Levy moved to Palo Alto, California, to
begin his medical residency at Stanford University. By the time I visited Bertram in Palo
Alto, he had already begun his Johnny Appleseed mission of seeding the West Coast
with our fiddle tune repertory. His efforts had a significant impact on the budding fiddle
126 Alan Jabbour
revival in California. In the 1970s, he moved to Port Townsend, Washington, and in 1977,
he created the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes, which continues to be hugely influen-
tial in the encouragement and dissemination of fiddling in America and beyond.
Meanwhile I had moved to Washington DC, and my life increasingly took me away
from fiddling crosscurrents. But in the early 1990s, I played fiddle at a dance camp on
Lake Coeur d’Alene in northern Idaho with my old friend Tommy Thompson. The
dance camp went by the name “Lady of the Lake.” When I got there, the local sponsors
asked me enthusiastically if I would play the tune “Lady of the Lake,” so, puzzled but
obliging, I played Joe Anglin’s minor-sounding A tune from Virginia. My hosts could
not conceal their disappointment, but they could not conjure up the melody they were
hoping for, so the request languished in uncertainty. Tommy and I started working our
way through our repertory of tunes from Henry Reed and other fiddlers. On the second
or third day of the camp, by chance we played that untitled nineteenth-century-ish tune
in G from Henry Reed. Our hosts leapt up in joy. “That’s ‘Lady of the Lake!’ ” It seems
that Bertram Levy, our West Coast Johnny Appleseed of Appalachian fiddle tunes, had
mixed up the titles and called this tune “Lady of the Lake.” Now a whole dance camp on
Lake Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, was named for the misnomer.
By the late 1990s, I was playing the fiddle more again. When I played the same untitled
Henry Reed tune in G, on a few occasions someone would say, “Isn’t that an old New
England tune?” I would reply—standing up for my mentor—“No, that’s a Henry Reed
tune from Virginia.” I noticed my interlocutors would sometimes give me a look as if to
say, “Yeah, well I think I know better.” Eventually someone pointed out that Rodney and
Randy Miller had recorded the tune under the title “Lady of the Lake” on their classic
New England double-album of contradance music, New England Chestnuts. Since then
it has entered the repertory of contradance bands from coast to coast. Folklorist Gary
Stanton has actually traced the tune’s progress—from Henry Reed to me to Bertram
Levy (who accidentally gave it its new name) to Marty Somberg to Laurie Andres to
Rodney Miller and a new lease on life as a New England contradance tune. The title
“Lady of the Lake,” by the way, originally names a dance, and it has attached itself his-
torically to several different fiddle tunes, of which this is just the latest. The story nicely
illustrates the fascinating byways of tradition, when seen up close. So when I recently
recorded the tune myself, in a fiddle-banjo duet with Ken Perlman, I cheerfully acceded
to its new name, “Lady of the Lake.”
Listen to audio example 6.4 (“Polka in G,” Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier 2000) to
hear Henry Reed’s rendition of this tune , and audio example 6.5 (“Lady of the Lake,”
Southern Summits 2005) to hear my own rendition .
For more than a decade I’ve been getting together with Henry Reed’s family and other
friends every Labor Day weekend. We play a lot of music, featuring, of course, Henry
Reed’s large and distinctive repertory. At one such gathering a few years ago, one of his
sons said to me, “Alan, play ‘Rocking the Babies to Sleep.’ ” Puzzled, I said, “I don’t know
‘Rocking the Babies to Sleep.’ ” “What,” they said, “didn’t daddy teach it to you? He always
used to play it for us kids.” So they got their fiddles and taught me the tune. It is a beauti-
ful, melancholy waltz—originally an Irish song. I loved it, and it is on my most recent
CD. Like other tunes in his repertory, “Rocking the Babies to Sleep” is both venerable in
origin and, in its present version, unique to Henry Reed as the modern-day source. But
I was not the first to publish it. A group of Shetland teenagers attending a Pennsylvania
folk music camp where I was teaching learned “Rocking the Babies” from me. They put
it on a CD they released several months before my own CD.
The anecdote reveals something important about fiddling today: there is a considerable
amount of cultural cross-pollination. The Shetland fiddle revival is closely in touch with
parallel movements in Scotland, Ireland, and the Southern Appalachians. Tunes regularly
pass from one cultural region (or one cultural repertory) to another. Americans assume
that some of the traditional American instrumental tunes are English, Scottish, or Irish
in origin, and careful comparative study bears out this assumption. But the Southern
American tunes also reveal important African American and American Indian influences,
and a few tunes in the repertory come from elsewhere in Europe. A favorite traditional
waltz in America, “Peekaboo Waltz,” was a Swedish waltz before it was recast in the nine-
teenth century with a fresh English-language text describing a father playing peekaboo
with his young child. The traditional tune and new song were a hit in nineteenth-century
America and are still widely performed. The well-known Southern American break-
down “Flop-Eared Mule” first appeared in the nineteenth century on the American scene
as “Detroit Schottische” and is drawn from a widely distributed central European dance
tune. Stylistic traits, though subject to a greater conservatism, are also capable of crossing
from one region or culture to another. It is important to imagine cultural groups not as
islands sequestered from contact with other groups, but as interlocking nodes in a larger
integrated human system that provides every group with the sustaining nourishment and
creative stimulation provided by cultural interchange with other groups.
Listen to audio e xample 6.6 (“Rocking the Babies to Sleep,” Southern Summits 2005)
for my version of this tune .
I turn finally to a tune that has circled the globe. In the 1960s I learned “Over the
Waterfall” from Henry Reed and taught it to our circle of young musicians. The tune
is related to the ballad sometimes called “Eggs and Marrowbones,” in which a woman
tries to blind her husband and push him in the river but is tripped and falls in the water
herself. It is a venerable British tune, both as a song and as an instrumental tune. A nine-
teenth-century English set calls it “Girl with the Blue Dress On.” But as a fiddle tune
called “Over the Waterfall,” all modern versions stem from Henry Reed’s version, as
adopted, adapted, and passed along by me.
Our band loved the way the tune plummets down, as if over the waterfall, at the end
of the first strain, so we matched some intriguing chords to it and began playing it reg-
ularly. It was already in circulation throughout the country when it appeared on our
1968 album, The Hollow Rock String Band. It was often used as an instructional tune on
banjo, strummed dulcimer, and hammered dulcimer, helping to circulate it even more
broadly—though its very popularity among novices led some advanced players to begin
snubbing it as unfashionable.
In 1981, my wife and I were invited to Hungary for a special bilateral round of events
involving Hungarian and American folklorists. First came a conference in Budapest, then
128 Alan Jabbour
another conference in the southern Hungarian town Kecskemet, coinciding with a festi-
val of the cultures of the Danube. By then, we had met a circle of young people who were
going out to Hungarian villages—including ethnic Hungarian villages across the border
in Rumania—to document oldtime Hungarian music, dance, and crafts. They were part
of the táncház movement, an important Hungarian folk music revival (centrally featur-
ing the fiddle) and, in retrospect, a harbinger of the fall of the Iron Curtain a decade later.
In Kecskemet, they invited us to a late-night party at the Ceramics Workshop.
The Hungarian fiddlers were playing and the schnapps was flowing. At a certain point
in the party, a visiting band from Brittany began playing Breton music. Suddenly the
word got out that the tall American played the fiddle. So the Breton fiddler came over
and formally asked if I would like to play a tune. I agreed, and she turned and commu-
nicated with her band in a language I could not understand. But I could tell from the
context that they were probably debating what tune in their repertory the tall American
might know. Finally she turned again to me and said brightly in English, “Do you know
‘Over the Waterfall’ ”?
Listen to audio example 6.7 (“Over the Waterfall,” Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier
2000) for Henry Reed’s version , and to audio example 6.8 (“Over the Waterfall,” The
Hollow Rock String Band 1968) for our band’s version .
The fiddle has sustained energetic revival movements in many regions. In the United
States, the Appalachian revival is matched by a New England revival. Farther west, there
is a flourishing Missouri fiddle movement, and a powerful contest-fiddling style origi-
nating in Texas has swept across the western and central parts of the country. Various
ethnic styles have also flourished in the United States. Irish fiddling has flourished both
in Irish urban neighborhoods and with a wider, often non-Irish constituency through-
out the country. Cajun and Zydeco fiddling in Louisiana have undergone a renaissance.
New England fiddling, both with and apart from contradancing, seems to be flourish-
ing. A number of smaller traditions of fiddling seem to have survived, revived, and
thrived in the contemporary American environment.
Canada is hosting several simultaneous fiddle revivals. The Cape Breton fiddle
revival has become a powerful cultural movement with impacts radiating well beyond
Cape Breton itself, including back to Scotland, where its cultural roots lie. Other parts
of Atlantic Canada are also enjoying a surge of interest in their fiddle traditions. The
Quebecois tradition is flourishing and may be spreading. And from the Ottawa Valley
westward to the Pacific, various fiddle repertories and styles are reviving or flourishing.
Across the Atlantic, the Irish fiddle revival remains strong, has institutional underpin-
nings, and reaches beyond Ireland to Britain, Europe, and especially the New World.
The Scottish fiddling tradition seems strong and also has New World adherents. The
Shetland revival has moved into its second and third generations since collector Tom
Anderson launched it, and other areas like the Orkneys seem touched by the fiddle
revival impulse. Elsewhere in Europe, from the Nordic countries to France to Hungary,
we see signs of fiddle revivals.
Are they separate revivals? Or are they all cousins in one great international fiddle
revival? The last half of the eighteenth century bred a revolution in instrumental music
and dance, a macro-revival fueled both by the politically and socially revolutionary era
and by the democratization of the Italian violin throughout Europe. That revolution
expressed itself in various ethnic or regional forms—micro-revivals that became the
older Scottish, Irish, English, Cape Breton, New England, Pennsylvania, and Southern
Appalachian instrumental traditions we know today. It may well be that the current
revivals across North America and Europe are a similar macro-revival, within which
one may observe various micro-revivals, each tinged by the cultural particulars of its
ethnic or regional character.
Just as “Over the Waterfall” and other Henry Reed tunes quickly spread around the
country and abroad, the general Southern old-time repertory and style began to take
hold in other parts of the United States. I myself resisted the trend toward calling it just
“old-time,” feeling that there could be old-time Irish, old-time Cape Breton, or old-time
New England repertory and style—Southern music should not aggrandize the term
by adopting “old-time” without qualification, as if it were the only old-time music.
I preferred more descriptive regional compounds, like “Southern old-time music” or
“Appalachian old-time music.” But the best evidence that it is a strong and important
cultural movement is that a need is felt for a name—a simple name. Like the Henry Reed
tunes that people now call “Texas” and “Lady of the Lake,” “old-time” seems to be win-
ning out as the name, despite my quixotic efforts to “correct” the tradition. Paradoxically,
the only terminological competition is “bluegrass,” which is favored by some, especially
in Europe and other faraway places, to describe Southern old-time and bluegrass string-
band music collectively. But the passionate adherents of this Upland South instrumental
music revival—the movement’s insiders, whether they live in the Appalachians, Seattle,
or London—never call it “bluegrass.” They call it “old-time music.”
Concluding Thoughts
Many indicators point to the institutionalization of the North American and European
fiddle revivals as a cultural movement. The movement now has magazines to repre-
sent it. The Old-Time Herald, published in Durham, North Carolina, presents over-
whelmingly Southern old-time content—though, as with bluegrass, jazz, blues, and
other Southern exports, the artists may be from anywhere. Another magazine fea-
turing Southern old-time music, The Old Time News, is published in England by the
Friends of American Old Time Music and Dance (FOAOTMAD). Looking beyond
the Southern old-time scene, another magazine, Fiddler Magazine, features all variet-
ies of fiddle-related traditions, artists, and activities. Other institutional forums include
the annual Appalachian String Band Festival in Clifftop, West Virginia, known to the
national network of old-time musicians simply as “Clifftop.” The Festival of American
Fiddle Tunes, known as “Fiddle Tunes,” was inaugurated by Bertram Levy in 1977 and is
going strong in 2012 as a benchmark festival for fiddling in North America. And the peri-
patetic North Atlantic Fiddle Convention, produced by Ian Russell of the University of
130 Alan Jabbour
Aberdeen (Scotland) and known as “NAFCo,” takes place every two years and alternates
between Aberdeen and other North Atlantic sites such as St. John’s, Newfoundland, and
Derry and Donegal, Ireland/Northern Ireland.
Reading the magazines and attending the festivals, one gets a good sense of the dimen-
sions of both the Southern old-time revival movement and the kindred fiddle revival
movements elsewhere in North America. But professional folklorists, ethnomusicolo-
gists, and other cultural ethnographers have barely taken note of the Southern-rooted
old-time movement. The lack of serious attention seems not to be simply because the
movement is modern. Perhaps it is in part because we ourselves as folklorists have
played so large a part in the movement. We have been more than observers and even
more than participants—we have been major shapers of the movement. Further, like
many Southern musical movements that have preceded it, the modern old-time revival
has spread around the country and abroad—a testimony to its cultural energy, but an
enormously complicated challenge to anyone trying to limn its sphere of activity and
influence. Most important, though the movement might have seemed in the 1960s and
early 1970s like a musical fad for educated outsiders, it has now taken hold deeply with
younger musicians in the home region as well as nationwide and abroad. One can now
hear outstanding young fiddlers, banjo players, and stringbands from the Appalachian
region playing old-time tunes (including Henry Reed tunes) in an old-time style and
describing themselves as performers of “old-time music.”
The reader of this essay may have noticed that in separate parts of the essay I have
connected the Southern instrumental folk music revival (the old-time revival) to (1) a
larger American folk revival, where song was center-stage, and (2) a multicultural fiddle
revival occurring all over North America and Europe. This may seem inconsistent, but
perhaps it points to a need to place more emphasis on revival as a process for the peri-
odic energizing and vivification of culture, and less emphasis on reifying that process by
thinking of "a revival" as a culturally bounded thing. The revival of Southern instrumen-
tal folk music in the past half century has cultural connections to the American folk-
song revival, to the international fiddle revival, and to a folk dance revival as well. Seeing
"revival" as a dynamic process with interconnections ramifying in multiple directions
provides a useful antidote to our tendency to bind and circumscribe cultural phenom-
ena with the nouns by which we name them. Nouns may help us see or hear a song,
fiddle tune, or dance more clearly. Cultural processes are not so easy to see or hear and
must be apprehended by understanding their enactment through time and space. But
when we search for the fluid processes underlying the events we see and hear, we gain a
sense of culture as a dynamic system of human interconnection—like the human body’s
marvelous array of interconnected dynamic systems. From this perspective, "revival"
begins to make sense, not as something that happens to culture, but as a processual tool
by which culture as a system renews and remolds itself.
Contemporary revival movements deserve our closer attention as scholars. We
have neglected them compared to our documentation and analysis of other forms of
cultural tradition. As the twentieth century progressed, documentary tools multiplied
and became democratized, so that documentation became everyone’s way of signifying
that what was being done was important. For those who observe passively without
overt involvement in the process, it bears recalling that even dispassionate observation
may influence the process being observed, if only by signaling through documentation
that the events being documented must be important. But for others, and here I clearly
include myself, involvement with documenting a tradition has verged into actively
fostering revival and revitalization of the tradition. We are playing a major role in the
very cultural process we are documenting. For revival movements, documentation has
become an inextricable part of the cultural process. The documentarians have been
shaping forces in the revivals as surely as the people toward whom the microphones and
cameras are usually pointed.
Notes
1. My “Foreword” to that volume (pp. xi–xii) contains kernels of the ideas developed here.
In 2008, a different version of this essay served as a keynote at the North Atlantic Fiddle
Convention in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and yet another version served as the Phillips
Barry Lecture at the American Folklore Society’s 2010 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee.
2. A published debate on this issue occurred in The Old-Time Herald, a magazine widely read
by enthusiasts of Southern American old-time music. (See Benford 1989: 22–27; Wilson
1990: 25–31; and letters to the editor in vol. 1, no. 8; vol. 2, nos. 2, 3, 4, 5.)
3. The general term “New Criticism” was adopted in literary criticism from Ransom 1941.
4. See Jabbour (2000), a Library of Congress website for my field recordings and photographs
of Henry Reed and my essay, “Henry Reed: His Life, Influence, and Art.”
5. Carter (1991: 73–89) provides a thoughtful analysis of the musical style of the Hollow Rock
String Band and its impact on the instrumental folk music revival.
6. See Allen (2010) for a thorough history and critical appraisal of the New Lost City Ramblers.
On pp. 203–205 he discusses the Hollow Rock String Band, the Fuzzy Mountain Band, and
the Red Clay Ramblers.
7. See, for example, the excellent analyses of the folksong revival in Cantwell (1996), Filene
(2000), and Cohen (2002). There are also numerous memoirs and biographical accounts.
Allen (2010) provides extensive notes and references.
References
Allen, Ray. 2010. Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival.
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Benford, Mac. 1989. “Folklorists and Us—An Account of Our Curious and Changing
Relationship.” The Old-Time Herald, 1 Spring (7): 22–27.
Cantwell, Robert. 1996. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Carter, Thomas. 1991. “Looking for Henry Reed: Confessions of a Revivalist.” In Sounds of the
South, edited by Daniel W. Patterson, 73–89. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Cohen, Ronald. 2002. Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
132 Alan Jabbour
Filene, Benjamin. 2000. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music. Chapel
Jabbour, Alan. 2001. “The Flowering of the Folk Revival.” In American Roots Music, edited by
Robert Santelli, Holly George-Warren, and Jim Brown, 58–76. New York: A Rolling Stone
Press Book/Harry Abrams.
Ransom, John Crowe. 1941. The New Criticism. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions.
Rosenberg, Neil V., ed. 1993. Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Wilson, Joe. 1990. “Confessions of a Folklorist.” The Old-Time Herald, 2 (3): 25–31, 43.
Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. 1946. “The Intentional Fallacy.” Sewanee Review
54: 468–488. Revised and republished in Wimsatt, William K. 1954. The Verbal Icon: Studies
in the Meaning of Poetry, 3–18. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.Discs Cited
The Fuzzy Mountain String Band. 1971. Somerville, MA: Rounder 0010, LP. (Malcolm Owen
and Bill Hicks, fiddle; Bobbie Thompson, guitar; Vicki Owen, dulcimer; Blanton Owen and
Eric Olson, banjo.)
The Fuzzy Mountain String Band: Summer Oaks & Porch. 1972. Somerville, MA: Rounder 0035,
LP. (Malcolm Owen and Bill Hicks, fiddle; Sharon Sandomirsky, guitar; Tom Carter, banjo
and mandolin; Blanton Owen and Eric Olson, banjo.)
The Hollow Rock String Band: Traditional Dance Tunes. 1968. Charleston, WV: Kanawha 311,
1968. Reprinted 1997 with the original notes and an additional essay by Alan Jabbour, “The
Hollow Rock String Band Remembered a Generation Later,” Charlottesville, VA: County
Records CO-CD-2715, CD. (Alan Jabbour, fiddle; Bertram Levy, mandolin; Bobbie
Thompson, guitar; Tommy Thompson, banjo.)
Jabbour, Alan, fiddle, Bertram Levy, banjo, and James Reed, guitar. A Henry Reed Reunion.
2002. Washington DC and Port Townsend, WA: privately published by Alan Jabbour and
Bertram Levy, CD.
Jabbour, Alan, fiddle, and Ken Perlman, banjo. Southern Summits. 2005. Washington, DC, and
Arlington, MA: privately published by Alan Jabbour and Ken Perlman, CD.
Miller, Rodney, fiddle, and Randy Miller, piano. New England Chestnuts, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.
1980-81. Two LPs. Reissued 2001, Westmoreland, NH: Great Meadow Music, two-CD set.
Websites Cited
Jabbour, Alan. 2000. Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection. Washington: The
Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/reed/. Contains sound
recordings, photographs, extensive text materials, and a video. Accessed September 4, 2012.
PA R T I I I
I N TA N G I B L E
C U LT U R A L
H E R I TAG E ,
P R E SE RVAT ION ,
A N D P OL IC Y
C HA P T E R 7
R E V I V I N G KO R E A N I D E N T I T Y
T H R O U G H I N TA N G I B L E
C U LT U R A L H E R I TAG E
K E I T H HOWA R D
In the last few decades, we have become accustomed to the concept of cultural heri-
tage. We visit museums; we search out World Heritage Sites; we are used to tourist bro-
chures that concentrate on local customs, costumes, and cuisines. We travel the world,
expecting to find music and dance shows staged for tourists and souvenir shops selling
local trinkets in each port. Everywhere, efforts are made to preserve and present local
cultural difference. We have seemingly forgotten how scholars warned that preserving
cultural forms was not an option as society changed (e.g., Blacking 1978, 1987: 112; Nettl
1985: 124–127) and sidelined the polemic against freezing culture in preservation, as our
contemporary zeitgeist has shifted to accepting, through revival, “a past that is alive”
(Bharucha 1993: 15).
This chapter explores the revival of the intangible cultural heritage, and the inter-
face between preservation and creativity, in one key battleground for debate and legisla-
tion: South Korea (the Republic of Korea). It builds on my two monographs Preserving
Korean Music (2006a) and Creating Korean Music (2006b). Korea is today known not
just as a manufacturer of cars and mobile phones but for ancient temples and palaces,
a cuisine that famously includes kimch’i pickled cabbage and pulgogi marinated beef,
and music ranging from nongak/p’ungmul percussion bands to kut shaman rituals, aak
and chŏngak court music and dance, and more.1 By “revival,” then, I here embrace all
elements of cultural production, past and present, that in recent decades have been the
subject of both official, state-led preservation orders and community or student-led
efforts to create icons of Koreanness. As will become clear, revival takes cultural tra-
ditions that have continued in some form from the past as well as re-creating forms
that have been lost, in a creativity that is both reflective of the past and demanding of
novelty.
136 Keith Howard
Preserving Korea’s Intangible

Cultural Heritage
In many respects, South Korea has led the way in reviving indigenous performance arts
and crafts, as well as in rebuilding ancient palaces and temples. In the 1960s, the govern-
ment reframed and refocused legislation that dated back to a time when Korea was a
colony of its neighbor, Japan, to serve a new national agenda. Initially, the motivation
was a fear of loss and a desire to retain a national identity, but as time passed, the system
became a foundation on which to create relevance for today, with icons of the past being
utilized in new creativity.2 The motivation for preservation can also be framed by nostal-
gia, born in Korea as a middle class emerged through rapid economic development and
urbanization. But nostalgia is a luxury—it is for people who have time and money, not
those struggling to survive.3
The appeal to preserve the past and revive cultural forms for the present developed
along two distinct pathways, one—if I may use analogies to the political parties of the
United States or Britain—true Republican/Conservative and the other Democrat/
Labour. The first and major pathway came from the right-wing military dictatorship
led by Park Chung Hee. Park came to power through a coup in 1961 and saw in the pro-
motion of Koreanness a way to balance nationhood with modernization, urbanization,
the mass media, land reform, and rapid social change. In his first year in office, Park
promulgated Law 961, the Cultural Property Preservation Law (Munhwajae pohobŏp).
This built on but rescinded legislation inherited from the Japanese, dating back to an
Office for the Royal Family’s Property Management (Cheshil Chaesan Chŏngniguk) set
up in 1907 when Korea was a protectorate of Japan. A year after formal colonization,
the 1911 Temple Act (Jisatsurei) tightened legal constraints on archaeologists and trea-
sure hunters, requiring an inventory of all tangible heritage items considered worthy
of conservation and controlling their export. After the Pacific War, as the liberated but
divided Korea struggled with civil war, Japan rescinded its similar legislation, replacing
it in 1950 with the Cultural Property Preservation Law, the Bunkazai hogoho—using the
same Chinese characters, incidentally, that Korea later chose for its law. Note that many
politicians, businesspeople, and academics active in Korea in the 1960s had trained in
Japan during the previous decades, so it is not surprising that they looked to Japanese
legislation as a model.
The Korean law was distinguished from Japanese legislation in two ways, both
linked to the proposal to preserve Intangible Cultural Properties (Muhyŏng munhwa-
jae): music, dance, drama, plays and rituals, martial arts, and crafts and food. First,
because it was accepted that the Korean literati and court culture, the so-called high tra-
dition, had largely been imported from China, the more indigenous folk culture or “low
tradition” was embraced in an effort to create the iconicity that politicians and academ-
ics sought.4 Second, the nature of the intangible heritage meant that individual artists
and craftspersons needed to become agents for conservation and revival, teaching and
Reviving Korean Identity 137
performance. These were nominated as “holders” (poyuja), although the Korean public
normally refers to them as “Human Cultural Properties” (In’gan munhwajae). Whereas
in Japan emphasis is placed on a holder’s skills honed over a lifetime, in Korea the focus
is squarely on the performance art or craft. Since the early 1970s, each of the several hun-
dred, mainly elderly Korean holders appointed at any given time has been paid a monthly
stipend equivalent to roughly half the average wage, whereas in Japan the stipend is
greater for those conserving “high traditions” but for many years was nonexistent for
those conserving the “low.” Korean lawmakers demanded a system that, like Japan, also
preserved buildings, documents, and artifacts as Tangible Cultural Properties (Yuhyŏng
munhwajae), customs and morals as Folk Cultural Properties (Minsok charyo), and
animals, plants, fossils, and geological forms as Monuments (Kinyŏmmul). Fifty years
on, the result is striking: alongside the 108 Intangible Properties sit Tangible Property
1, Namdaemun, the six-hundred-year-old southern gate to Seoul in 2008 severely dam-
aged by an arsonist; four small volcanic outcrops on the coast of Cheju Island that are
home to unique invertebrates, red algae, poriferas, and coral insects; animals and insects
that include fireflies found only in a small area around Muju in the southwest and
long-horned beetles in Kwangnŭng Forest near Seoul; and Monument 53, the Chindo
dog—a kind of spitz with a curly tail.
In the 1960s, the operation that swung into action to carry out the demands of the
legislation was cast in the “historical-reconstructional” approach of Asian folklore
(after Janelli 1986: 24–25, using Richard Dorson’s term). This also tracked back into
the Japanese colonial period and to ethnographies that were compiled in the 1930s by
both Japanese and Korean scholars. That genres of folklore were documented reflected
decline, but also a very different enterprise: an effort to future-proof colonial rule by
documenting what was to be promoted as a shared Japanese and Korean cultural
inheritance.5 Ethnographers, then, studied local shamanic rituals, but also mask dra-
mas, dance, and music. Less attention was given to court and literati “high traditions.”
After liberation from the Japanese yoke in 1945, war and the subsequent rush to mod-
ernize all but obliterated what was left. This began to be recognized in the 1950s, from
which time we can trace a scattering of discussions in the National Assembly, and the
stark reality of loss was vividly portrayed in a series of hard-hitting articles on indi-
vidual performers and artisans published between 1959 and 1963 by the journalist Ye
Yonghae (1929–1994) in the Korea Daily News (Han’guk ilbo). Ye told me in 1991 how
his articles, collected into a book in 1963, were “like the last breath for those about to
die, like an injection of life” (interview, August 1991, Seoul). He wrote about the mak-
ing of the bamboo-and-horsehair hat, until the turn of the twentieth century normal
attire for Korean men that allowed them to tie their topknots; by 1960 only Mo Manhwa,
in his seventies, could still make the bamboo brims for the hats, splitting bamboo into
sufficiently fine yarn, while Yu Sangyun, then seventy-nine, was the last person able
to combine the hat crown and rim (Ye 1963: 337–351). Ye wrote about a zither maker,
Kang Sanggi, then sixty-eight, who was unable to sell enough instruments to survive
and so referred to himself as a joiner, “more often than not wasting his unique skill on
repairing furniture in his dingy workshop” (207). Chŏng Yŏnsu still made decorative
138 Keith Howard
knots—maedŭp—used as decorations on belts, costumes, furniture, and funeral biers,

but “frustrated by the virtual indifference to this craft by the world, he is now a bitter
man, reticent about his craft, which he alone can perform” (365–371). Ye featured more
than fifty musicians, all celebrated exponents of the dying traditions of court music, of
kagok lyric songs, p’ansori epic storytelling through song, sanjo extended repertoires for
melodic instrument plus drum, and pŏmp’ae formal Buddhist chanting.
All of these crafts and performance arts were over time destined for appointment as
Intangible Cultural Properties.6 First, though, scholars were despatched to conduct ini-
tial research and produce reports. Their scholarly reports matched Korea’s Confucian
respect for the past but enshrined two aspects that would mitigate against creativ-
ity: they sought out archetypes, and they imposed a system that was top down, requiring
authentication from above. The scholars did more than document: they reconstructed
partially lost performance genres, encouraging potential holders to return to what they
proposed as original forms (wŏnhyŏng). In reality, in the 1960s much of the available
documentation was inadequate, particularly in respect to folk arts and crafts, so schol-
ars judiciously matched historical materials to what remnants they could still observe
and added, when deemed appropriate, elements from other places and other perfor-
mance traditions. For example, diffusionist thinking encouraged the reconstruction of
mask dance dramas using common themes and character types. Hence, the report on
the Hahoe mask dance drama (Hahoe t’al ch’um), last performed in 1928, used the failing
memory of one man who as a teenager had taken a minor role in the 1920s but levered
the storyline to fit those of other known dramas. The Kangnyŏng mask dance drama,
from today’s North Korea, used data collected by a folklorist in 1943 and published in
1957 and coupled this to three migrants now living in South Korea, only one of whom
originally came from Kangnyŏng. Again, putative links between Buddhism and sha-
manism during the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) were exploited, encouraging illiterate
or semiliterate shamans to incorporate Buddhist chants (as discussed in relation to the
southwestern Chindo tradition in Mikyung Park 1985 and Howard 2006a: 146).
The reports of scholars were submitted to a Cultural Properties Committee
(Munhwajae wiwŏnhoe) and became the basis for appointments. The reports built into
several hundred large volumes, the Cumulative Research Series Reports on Important
Intangible Cultural Properties (Chungyo muhyŏng munhwajae chosa pogosŏ).7 Rarely
do reports discuss what was restructured, and in maintaining the top-down approach,
an Intangible Property was regarded as immutable and unchangeable once appointed.
The rhetoric, of course, argued differently: the musicologist Chang Sahun (1916–1991),
for many years a member of the Cultural Properties Committee, wrote that a Property
must “aim to keep originality. If one thing is appointed which is not the original form
it may have lost its value” (1982: 347). A few recognized that appeals to authenticity
were hazardous—a slippery path that had devalued folklore elsewhere (to paraphrase
Staub 1988)—and substituted historical contextualization over originality. Hence, Yi
Pohyŏng (b.1937), a folk music expert and long-term adviser to the Cultural Properties
Committee, carefully articulated in interview with me in 1990 how holders must “dem-
onstrate by performance that they belong to the history of the genre” while Properties
“must be judged as to how they fit into the background of Korean tradition” (interview,
July 1990, Seoul).
The system has, after fifty years, created both “high tradition” and “low tradi-
tion” icons of identity. In fact, three Properties have made it to the ranks of UNESCO
Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity and are promoted inter-
nationally. These were appointed in 2001, 2003, and 2005, respectively: Chongmyo
Cheryeak, music for the Rite to Royal Ancestors, in Korea also designated as Intangible
Property 1 (appointed in 1964) and the epitome of the “high” tradition; p’ansori, epic
storytelling through song, an art genre descending from the “low” tradition, in Korea
Property 5 (appointed in 1964); and Gangreung Danoje (Kangnŭng tanoje), a spring fes-
tival and ritual with origins in China mixing “high” and “low” traditions, Property 13
(appointed in 1967).
The second pathway via which Korean culture gained its iconicity came from students
and demonstrations that campaigned against the same military government that was
promoting legislation to protect the cultural heritage. Initially, these demonstrations
were cast as rituals, the biggest being the Ritual to Invoke Native Land Consciousness,
held annually from 1963 at Seoul National University. This sought to clean the campus
of “government smells” and invited shamans and folk musicians to participate. In so
doing, students turned from westernization and modernization back to the supposedly
timeless folk culture of the countryside. The same underlying motivation continued
in the 1970s with the so-called minjung munhwa populist culture of the masses, using
mask dance dramas as well as shaman rituals, and capturing the village meeting places
(madang) of old where such things were once performed, in what was known as madang
kut and, subsequently, madang kŭk (where kut signifies ritual and kŭk theater). Clearly,
though, satirical folk performances needed to be recast, replacing the landowners and
Buddhist monks of old with corrupt politicians and urban woes. Hence, adaptation was
the rule, and the form of revival undertaken gave scant attention to historical authentic-
ity. By the early 1980s, when I first visited Korea, students had added a further aspect to
their cultural quest: during vacations, they would travel to the countryside, learning the
old ways.8
Revival, situated along the confluence of the two pathways, gathered pace as stu-
dents graduated and became scholars and bureaucrats. This began to shift the top-down
agenda of preservation toward promotion, with discussions about creativity and devel-
opment. And as the constructs of identity evolved, creating icons of Koreanness from
traditional cultural forms, new cultural forms became popular, experienced as part of
westernization. Whereas traditions embraced by the preservation system were once
learned and experienced as part of daily life, they no longer are. Hence, choices had to
be made to select what aspects of the old to retain, and what creativity and develop-
ment would be allowed.9 In today’s Korea coexistence rules: traditional music (kugak),
for example, is heard alongside Western music (sŏyang ŭmak). Again, whereas tradi-
tional music served as accompaniment to court banquets and ceremonies, as part of
work activities or death rituals, or as local entertainment, both kugak and sŏyang ŭmak
today are performed in urban concert halls, supported by corporate or government
140 Keith Howard
sponsorship, and may be populist, recorded for CD and internet downloading, and
broadcast.
Social and cultural change gives rise to many arguments in Korea against preserving
the old. The arguments are not unique to Korea but in general terms tend to focus on rel-
evance (“Old folk songs or folk bands are irrelevant today”), on freezing culture (“How
can folk songs or folk bands be frozen, performed as museum artifacts in archetypal
forms that have had the very life taken out of them?”), on the notion that new forms of
cultural production have replaced the old (“Korea has developed and supports its cul-
ture, so there is no need for preservation”), and on selection (“Why are some folksing-
ers nominated by the state to perform only some genres of folk song?”).10 To consider
the first, communal rice-farming songs—to take one example of folk songs—used to
be sung virtually everywhere rice was grown (that is, primarily down the western side
of the Korean peninsula). But the need for these songs declined with land reform in
the 1950s, which got rid of many tenanted farms, and ended when tractors in the 1970s
reduced the need for any large workforce to gather at times of sowing, transplanting,
weeding, and harvesting. Again, to give a second example, Korean people used to need
funeral songs to mark the rite of passage between the worlds of the living and the dead,
and such songs have been collected from the elderly in virtually every village of Korea.
Until the recent past, and as was still common in the countryside into the 1980s, large
numbers of people would gather to send off the dead, assembling in the home of the
deceased, accompanying the bier out of the village and into the local mountain for
internment. Such gatherings differ in urban surroundings, where a bus will replace the
march through the village, and the decline of communal funerals can be charted against
the rise of Christianity. To give a third example, where village groups used to assemble
at festival times for entertainment—whether singing, dancing, or playing the ubiquitous
percussion music of old—families today gather around televisions.
Second, the notion that preservation freezes culture regularly surfaces in ethnomu-
sicology forums. Or at least it used to, but conferences of the International Council for
Traditional Music (ICTM) over the last decade stand witness to a reconsideration, not
least, I suspect, because many members have provided expert reports on music genres to
UNESCO (to which the ICTM is affiliated) for the three rounds of “Masterpieces of the
Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” in 2001, 2003, and 2005. It could be argued
that the real problem with the notion of freezing cultural artifacts is that this is precisely
what galleries and museums do throughout the world. Museums have high status, and
they showcase the products of the intangible heritage. Not surprisingly, much of the dis-
cussion about preserving the intangible heritage has therefore been framed by museum
curators and archivists. Why can’t performance arts be showcased in a similar way to the
presentation of archaeological or industrial artifacts? I note that museums are increas-
ingly interactive, inviting visitors to take part in workshops and the like, and thereby
adding the showcasing of process—for example, the creation of crafts—to that of prod-
ucts—art and craft objects).
A second counterargument is also relevant: the preservation of a performance art or
craft supports new creativity and thereby allows the generation of new meanings. The
old permeates the new by providing an icon of identity. For example, everyday court
food, Chosŏn wangjo kungjung yori, is preserved as Property 38, even though there has
been no royal court since the death of the last king in 1919 (he was survived by a son
who was in turn survived by his consort). Property 38 was appointed in 1970; alongside
it, numerous cooking schools populate the streets of today’s Seoul, teaching traditional
recipes and creating dishes that fuse old and new. Taken together, these have challenged
the widespread adoption through the colonial period of Japanese food and, over the last
fifty years, of hamburger joints and all other manner of Western cuisine. Korean dress,
hanbok, since 1988 Property 89, is much the same: on special occasions every Korean
woman wants to wear a fashionable costume that mixes old and new patterns, dyes,
and materials.11 Once everyday wear, hanbok has been supplanted by Western dress,
but revival has reinvented it as a fashion statement, a way to distinguish the catwalks of
Seoul from those of Paris.12 Or, to give an example relating to music, alongside the pre-
served court and folk music, every year sees hundreds of new compositions premiered
that use traditional instruments, sometimes mixing them with Western instruments,
and referencing old melodies and rhythmic structures to conjure sonic representations
of the air, rivers, and mountains of Korea and the emotions and spirituality of its people
(Howard 2006a: 45–46).
Third, statements to the effect that “Korea has developed and supports its cul-
ture so there is no need for preservation” hide a claim that art and culture should be
self-sustaining rather than supported by governments or other agencies. Some would
indeed argue that art and cultural production change as a society changes and will con-
tinue to flourish because of the inherent creativity of the human race. The contrary view,
that without state support art will move away from local production as it is grabbed and
controlled by media conglomerates, is also heard. In this view, art is part of contempo-
rary consumerism and shifts from active to passive involvement—hence this perspec-
tive is heard from those, in Korea as elsewhere, who are nostalgic for the past. Taken
back to music, the argument might go that folk songs that were once songs of the people
become pop songs for the people. Essentially, in the 1940s, this was Theodor Adorno’s
perspective on popular culture in Europe: as plastic, as lacking inherent value, as using
tried and trusted means to sell products. Again, after World War II, much the same sen-
timent was also behind John Maynard Keynes’s argument that the fledgling Arts Council
of Great Britain should focus on excellence above popularity, as a conduit for support to
less profitable arts. Arts funding in Britain shifted under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
In America, a vacillation between the two contrasting perspectives can be seen with
funding for the arts under Republican and Democrat administrations. In Korea, the two
sides of the argument have been a constant part of debates about preservation since the
1960s and became more heated in the 1990s, with the globalization effort of the regimes
of Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung.
Fourth, the argument about selection reflects the fact there are (or once were)
many different folk song genres in Korea that could be appointed Intangible Cultural
Properties and a large number of potential holders or Human Cultural Properties.
Funding, though, can never be sufficient to support each and every genre or person.
142 Keith Howard
Rather than debate which of Korea’s myriad performance arts or crafts should become
an Intangible Cultural Property, a few—for this is a minority perspective—argue that
it is best if none do. The choices of scholars or government agencies can certainly be
critiqued on the grounds that some are inappropriate. Or, with some genres of holders
selected, a further argument opens up, for other genres will decline as performers and
craftspersons who failed to receive support give up their practices. What happens when
those appointed for, say, a shaman ritual find they can charge more than their colleagues
who have not been appointed? Or what happens when one folksinger becomes a star
while other equally skilled singers languish unnoticed by the media?
Global Perspectives
In the 1990s, the Korean Intangible Cultural Property system became a global model
for preservation and revival as the Korean National Commission for UNESCO invited
UNESCO member state representatives to conferences and workshops.13 UNESCO had
promoted World Heritage Sites for some decades, seeing in them a shared and univer-
sal heritage. Concerns had surfaced in the 1964 Venice Charter, when Egypt proposed
flooding the Abu Simbel valley, and became more visible following the 1972 General
Conference. Although UNESCO produced recordings of disappearing music—issued
on four series—and later published its Red Book of Endangered Languages, its concern
with the intangible essentially began in 1971. UNESCO’s discussions appear to have been
jump-started by the reaction to Simon and Garfunkel’s “El Cóndor Pasa” cover on their
1970 album Bridge over Troubled Water. This took a Bolivian melody, written fifty-eight
years earlier in 1913 but itself imitative of folk music, and set it to new lyrics.14 The
Bolivian president questioned what protection UNESCO should provide to music like
this. Much later, in 1989, the twenty-fifth UNESCO General Conference adopted the
Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore, which listed
a set of provisions and recommended the establishment of national inventories of insti-
tutions, archives, and documentation systems. A shift in the tangible heritage agenda, to
accommodate beliefs and usage in World Heritage Site appointments, became evident.
As one prominent example, the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau had been
added to the list in 1979, but it was not the site so much as what happened there that was
to be memorialized. The 1989 Recommendation included provision for moral and eco-
nomic support to holders of folklore and argued that the rights of local communities to
their own cultural heritage should be protected.
By 1994, the focus shifted from documentation and archiving to revival, adding the
notion of “Living Human Treasures” (a term already in use in France). Member states
were asked to compile lists of those who practiced traditional arts and crafts. Three
rounds of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity followed,
appointing nineteen, twenty-eight, and forty-three items, respectively, in 2001, 2003,
and 2005. To this point, much discussion had taken place within the International
Council of Museums and the International Council on Monuments and Sites, and
this led to accusations of bias toward monumental European structures and the cul-
tural practices associated with them. An attempt was made to counter this within the
Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage that, with updated
guidelines, was agreed at the 2003 General Conference. The Convention recognized that
globalization brought “threats of deterioration, disappearance and destruction” and set
up an Intergovernmental Committee to oversee heritage listings—181 items had been
added by the end of 2008, and the intangible heritage was made a UNESCO strategic
priority for the 2008–2013 period (Lira and Amoêda 2009: 4).
Reviving Korea’s Intangible

Cultural Heritage
My argument is that because Korea started legislating in the 1960s, it has remained
ahead of UNESCO globally. By 2004, the year after the UNESCO Convention had been
agreed, 115 Korean Intangible Cultural Properties had been appointed at the national
level, of which 108 remained current (seven additional Property appointments had been
canceled), categorized as music (17), dance (7), theater (14), plays and rituals (24), crafts
(43), food and drink (2), and martial arts (1). I will focus on just a small clutch of these to
briefly explore how revival has occurred subsequent to Property appointments.
Folk Songs
Folk songs were appointed as Properties 19, 29, 51, 57, 84, and 95 in 1968, 1969, 1973, 1975,
1985, and 1989. Of these, Properties 19, 29, and 57 are professional genres,15 embracing
Sŏnsori san t’aryŏng, the songs of itinerant male troupes, Kyŏnggi minyo, folk songs asso-
ciated with courtesans and centered in the province surrounding Seoul, and Sŏdosori,
folk songs maintained by refugees from the northwest of the peninsula who since the
Korean War have lived in South Korea. Three Properties cover local repertoires: Namdo
tŭl norae, southern or more precisely southwestern rice-planting songs (Property 51),
Nongyo, regional dry-field farming songs (Property 84), and Cheju minyo, folk songs
from the southern island of Cheju (Property 95).16
A set of eight songs was performed as Namdo tŭl norae at the 1971 National Folk Arts
Contest by a group from Inji village, Chindo island. The set compressed the whole agri-
cultural season—placing shoots in seedbeds (normally March), transplanting (May),
weeding (June and July), a final weeding (August), and a celebratory song at harvest
(September)—into twenty-five minutes. Slow and fast seedbed-planting songs and slow
and fast transplanting songs were paired, and a story of lovesickness was incorporated in
the first transplanting song that added interest. Three weeding songs—a pair, and then a
144 Keith Howard
song originally given close to harvest when the crop could be predicted—were followed
by a final processional, “Kilkkonaengi.” Plastic rice shoots with lead bases were intro-
duced for the stage; women planted and weeded while men passed them rice shoots
and played percussion interludes between songs. One male performer danced and
played the puk barrel drum in front of the singers—clearly an introduction for stage
use, since if he did this in a paddy field he would trample the precious crop. An ox—nor-
mally for stage performances a pantomime beast festooned in ribbons—added spec-
tacle to this final song. This beast, programs announced, was a prize for the year’s most
hard-working tenant or was purchased through a mutual savings scheme and lent to
the owner of the most productive paddy fields at harvest time; these ideas are reprised
in several publications, including those by Ruriko Uchida (1980: 112) and by a group of
Chindo island researchers (Naegojang chŏnt’ong kakkugi 1982: 153–154).
In 1972, Chi Ch’unsang, a folklorist from Chŏnnam University in the provincial capi-
tal, was sent by the Academy of Korean Studies to Inji to record song texts. While he
recorded many lyrics that have since disappeared from the Property set, he also helped
standardize each song (see Chi Ch’unsang 1980, 1987).
By the 1970s, when the songs were performed as a set, decline in local singing during
the agricultural season was terminal. Elsewhere, too, folk songs were fast disappearing.
Chi was one of many involved in text collection throughout the Korean countryside,
but only much later, in 1989, was the first comprehensive recording project launched.
Then, the Korean broadcaster MBC sent three producers and eight researchers led by
Ch’oe Sangil to the southern Cheju island, where they recorded five hundred songs
over a five-month period.17 From these, MBC published ten CDs and a 366-page book
of lyrics. Joined by scholars based in regional cities, the team moved on to other prov-
inces, in seven years recording 14,300 songs that were condensed onto 103 CDs in the
Comprehensive Collection of Korean Folksongs (Han’guk minyo taejŏn). Ch’oe reckoned
his team could find barely 10 percent of the singers Chi and others had collected texts
from for the Academy of Korean Studies’ project a decade earlier; the vast majority of
singers had died. At the MBC studios in Seoul in 1999, he told me: “many of the singers
we found and recorded were old, so perhaps 20 percent have died. Probably, because
of their age, a further 20 percent can no longer sing. . . . It is no longer possible to carry
out a recording project like we did” (interview, August 1999, Seoul). As the old has
declined, so revival has occurred. Revival has placed many local folk songs on festival
stages, a move spearheaded by those involved in the appointed Properties. Local and
popular folk songs have become the sonic backdrop to films about the Korean country-
side, suggesting an iconicity of identity in folk songs that matches the deeply felt affinity
to “home” (kohyang)—the birthplace or ancestral home. And both local and popular
folk songs have become models for new creativity directed at new audiences. To give
one example, key among a new generation of singers is Yong Woo Kim (b. 1968). As a
student, much like his peers, he spent his vacations in the countryside. He learnt folk
songs from the holder of Property 51, Cho Kongnye (1930–1997) and from the holder
of Property 95, Cho Ŭlsŏn (1915–2000). Cho Kongnye taught him the women’s song
and dance genre Kanggangsullae, which he reworked as a much shorter piece for male
chorus, adding a new countrapuntal melody to his solo, on his first album, Chigye
Sori (1996). She also taught him a song for grinding meal, “Panga t’aryŏng,” that fea-
tures on his second album, Kwenari (1998), and she is heard in duet with him on his
fourth, Chilkkonaengi (2003), released six years after her death. Cho Ŭlsŏn taught Kim
“Pongjiga,” a song that once accompanied the making of horsehair hats, featuring a
refrain in which a vocal falsetto with sharp dynamic contrasts represents the weaving
of hair in and out of the bamboo frame; on Kim’s first album, it is slowed down and
accompanied by a notched flute, the tanso, and a synthesizer, in the process abandoning
the falsetto and with it any connection to weaving. Again, she taught him an unaccom-
panied milling song, “Yongch’ŏn’gŏm,” which, accompanied by piano, guitar, haegŭm
fiddle, p’iri oboe, changgo drum, and ching gong on his fourth album, became a pop song
that reached third place in the Korean charts—quite an achievement, when the Korean
recorded music industry was the second largest in Asia.18 Kim’s audience is not local vil-
lagers but urban youth, hence revival has found a new audience for old folk songs. It has
done so through adjustment and arrangement—I resist the suggestion here, much as
Kim and his audience resist it, that there has been appropriation or anything akin to an
“invented tradition.” As he remarked to me in 1999:
When I sing old folk songs my style is different to that of old singers. Our culture
has changed as times have changed. Old people grew up in the past, so they are my
source . . . but I must adapt to create my own style . . . I have to adjust my voice to fit
with the forces I am using. I work with different instruments and different voices.
(Interview, June 1999, Seoul)
Percussion Bands
Percussion bands (in Korean, nongak or p’ungmul, often referred to in English texts
as “farmers’ bands”) were appointed as Property 11 in 1966. At that time, the name
of the Property was nongak shibi ch’a. In 1985, it was renamed nongak, which many
Koreans consider a Japanese term, so p’ungmul, an alternative, has considerable con-
temporary currency for exactly the same repertoire; shibi ch’a means twelve beats (or
twelve patterns).19 Percussion bands undertook village ritual functions (named, for
example, maegut), communal work activity accompaniment (in ture and p’umashi
groups), fund-raising (kŏllip “grain begging,” ttŭlbalbi “treading the yard,” chŏl kŏllip
“temple grain begging,” and so on), and entertainment (p’an’gut). Bands were a ubiq-
uitous part of rural Korea until recent times, performing music and dance and some-
times involving dramatic elements.20 Property 11 initially appointed members of
a band from Samch’ŏnp’o in South Kyŏngsang province that had a history claimed to
trace back four hundred years. By 1980, the two initial holders had died, and a third
was nominated from Chinju (a nearby town inland from Samch’ŏnp’o) to maintain the
same performance style. Other areas, however, had equal or greater claims to recogni-
tion, and bands playing five regional styles had won prizes at one or more of the first
146 Keith Howard
twenty-three National Folk Arts Contests: “central” (kyŏnggi), “right” (udo), and “left”
(chwado) styles from the western side of the peninsula, and “southeast” (yŏngnam) and a
local Kangnŭng style from the eastern side. In 1985, three of these were appointed to the
renamed Property: from Iri, North Chŏlla province (udo); P’yŏngt’aek, Kyŏnggi prov-
ince (kyŏnggi); and Kangnŭng. The government funded a local preservation society for
each in 1986, when Samch’ŏnp’o was reappointed (yŏngnam). And in 1988, a band from
Imshil (chwado) was appointed to complete the five-style lineup.
Nongak/p’ungmul remains an iconic Korean soundworld. Watch a football match
when the Korean Red Devils are playing, and it is hard to miss the characteristic drums
and gongs. It is taught in schools, and it remains popular on university campuses.
However, village ritual practices were centered on tutelary deities, who at the New Year
would be carried around a village to bless wells, food stores, and offices—practices that
died out with modernization, sterilization, and pest control. Similarly, fund-raising
activities were inherently local, often linking to mutual savings groups (kye) that pooled
resources to buy, say, an ox, or for the construction of shared storehouses; banks, com-
merce, and farming schemes such as the government’s New Village Movement (Saemaŭl
undong), which began in the early 1970s, have rendered such activities redundant.21
Shared village entertainments, often taking place in the market or a village meeting site,
have also declined rapidly, largely giving way to family celebrations and to small group
socialization around televisions in homes.
As the traditional performance contexts for nongak/pungmul disappeared, so revival
began, recasting the genre for urban stages. Chief among the developments has been
SamulNori. In February 1978, four percussionists took to the stage at the Space Theater
(Konggan Sarang) in Seoul, and in June they adopted the name.22 SamulNori established
a genre, samullori, which was taken up by many other quartets. Today, samullori is argu-
ably the most popular Korean traditional music both in Korea and abroad. Samullori
is not nongak/p’ungmul. Its fixed pieces of relatively fixed duration contrast with the
extended and open-ended performances of local bands. The quartets have fixed mem-
bership and fixed individual roles, whereas flexibility—sometimes just men, sometimes
small groups and sometimes large—characterized nongak/p’ungmul. Samullori musi-
cians wear standardized costumes, typically white under black jackets, with two or three
colorful sashes. And whereas nongak/p’ungmul was danced and performed standing,
samullori is mostly performed seated.
SamulNori developed a core repertoire between 1978 and 1982, assembling rhythms
from regional nongak/p’ungmul styles and recasting them for its four musicians, one
to each of the core nongak/p’ungmul instruments, the kkwaenggwari (small gong),
changgo (double-headed hourglass drum), puk (barrel drum), and ching (large gong).
SamulNori’s first piece was “Uttari kut,” an assembly based on the Kyŏnggi style, and in
April 1978 they premiered their second piece, “12 ch’a, 36 karak,” based on Samch’ŏnp’o
practice and soon renamed “Yŏngnam nongak.” The group’s third piece premiered in
May 1979: “Honam udo kut” or “Honam udo nongak”—“right” style. Two members of
the quartet came from the Kyŏnggi region, one from Samch’ŏnp’o, and one from Taejŏn
at the northern tip of the Honam region. SamulNori’s fourth piece, in November 1979,
fused rhythms from each of the three core western styles, as “Samdo nongak.” Three
more pieces followed, including one, “Samdo sŏl changgo,” in which all four musicians
took changgo drums. This core repertoire remains today, played with some variation of
length and structure by all samullori quartets, and forming the basis of student percus-
sion bands. Some development has taken place, notably with Dulsori, a larger group
that tours the world and has headlined in Australia, Britain, Korea, Portugal, Singapore,
and Spain;23 but even Dulsori is recognizably modeled on the repertoire established by
SamulNori.
Shaman Rituals
In Korea, shaman rituals (kut) are veritable feasts of music and dance. Many would
contend that deep within the Korean mentality sits a legacy from shamanic and ani-
mistic rituals stretching back two thousand years or more. Kim Yŏlgyu, for instance,
writes: “our shaman consciousness is not easily lost. The consciousness may remain
with Koreans forever, because it once gave meaning to our lives” (1987: 168–169).
“Shamanism” is, of course, a term used loosely to cover a multitude of practices, and
the fusing in Korea of two traditions, one where illness is typically interpreted as a call-
ing from the spirits and where ecstasy marks spirit possession, and the other where
hereditary inheritance gives rights to ritual practice indicates a divergence from puta-
tive Siberian forms (Howard 1998). Today, the ecstatic is moving in on former heredi-
tary territory, but the basic tenets remain, wherein ritualists work as intermediaries
between this and the other world to address death or illness and to ensure good fortune.
Sustained attempts were made to stifle shamanism during the twentieth century, first by
missionaries and the Japanese and then with modernization by the Korean government.
Urbanization coupled to inroads made by modern medicine and compulsory education
has made decline considerable.
The first Property appointments that nodded to shamanism were Unsan pyŏlshindae
and Kangnŭng tanoje, appointed Property 9 in 1966 and Property 13 in 1967. From
Unsan and Kangnŭng, respectively, these Properties were preserved and promoted in
the context of a rapidly modernizing Korea on a basis somewhat akin to quicksand,
because modernization tended to be equated with Christianity more than the suppos-
edly backward shamanism. Put simply, scholars and government officials were highly
educated urbanites, wary of “superstition” and often converts to Christianity.24 The two
Properties, then, were designated as communal festivals, with officials and mask dance
dramatists as the initial holders. Despite the centrality of shaman rituals, and reflect-
ing initial unease about promoting the supposedly backward, shamans were appointed
holders only much later—Hwang Namhŭi (b.1937) for Unsan pyŏlshindae in 1992, and
Pin Sunae (b.1959) for Kangnŭng tanoje in 2000.
With the progression of students into professional careers coupling to a rise in wide-
spread nationalist sentiment, the 1970s saw the Cultural Properties Bureau petitioned
to recognize shaman rituals, but the student embrace of shamanism in demonstrations
148 Keith Howard
against the government meant that the preservation system was not able to begin to pre-
serve shaman rituals more openly until after the assassination of the military dictator
Park Chung Hee in 1979. In November 1980, three rituals were appointed as Properties
70, 71, and 72: Yangju sonori kut from the south-center, Cheju ch’ilmŏri tang kut from
the southern island of Cheju, and Chindo Ssikkim kut from the southwestern island of
Chindo. The first of these persisted with the old appointment style—the first two hold-
ers were a cow attendant (wŏnmabu) and musician—but the latter two were publicly
situated squarely in shamanism; the shaman holders, An Sain (1928–1990) and Kim
Taerye (1933–2009), were supported by ritual assistants and musicians whose biogra-
phies identify shaman parents or relatives. In 1985, three more appointments were made
in Property 82, all rituals for abundant fishing—from the east coast (Tonghaean pyŏlshin
kut), west coast (Sŏhaean paeyŏnshin kut with Taedong kut), and western islands (Wido
ttipaennori). A fourth fishing ritual was absorbed into Property 82 in 1987, from the
south coast (Namhaean pyŏlshin kut). The regional spread was completed with three
further ritual appointments as Properties 90, 98, and 104, in 1988, 1990, and 1996,
respectively: Hwanghaedo Pyŏngsan sonorŭm kut from the northwest—in today’s North
Korea but performed by migrant ritualists living in the south; Kyŏnggido todang kut,
characteristic of the province surrounding Seoul; and Sŏul saenam kut, from Seoul itself.
When I first visited Korea in 1981, the revival of shamanism had begun in Seoul,
rather than in local villages. It can be traced back to the Ritual to Invoke Native Land
Consciousness, and through madang kut. It was promoted through popular books of
photographs of traditional rituals, published under the title Han’guk ŭi kut (Korean sha-
man rituals). A Ritual Society (the Kuthoe) had begun to sponsor regular staged ritu-
als, mostly put on—somewhat curiously—in the Cecil Theatre owned by the Anglican
Church in downtown Seoul. These were transformed from the all-night rural rituals of
old to work within the space and time confines of a theater, so that, for instance, rit-
ual scenes designed to attract and placate dangerous spirits were cut while dance rou-
tines were beautified. The transformation resulted in performances that Chongho Kim
(2003) calls “ritual concerts” (a translation of the Korean kut kongyŏn). Some folklorists
and cultural theorists critique these; for example: “the tourism industry takes part in
the commercialization of shamanic art . . . Now shamans sing and dance on the stages
of theatres to inspire the spirit of artists” (Chungmoo Choi 1987: 73; see also 1989: 235–
249). Or, from the musicological perspective, as voiced by Mikyung Park: “if there is
a degenerative aspect [of contemporary shamanism] . . . then this is it.” Park reports
local informants commenting: “there’s no gusto or zest” (Park 2004: 87).25 Some sha-
mans had been invited to perform at the Space Theater by its manager, Kang Chunhyŏk,
sometimes solo and sometimes alongside SamulNori or other secular musicians. This
resulted, through the 1990s, in a series of commercial CDs that intriguingly fused sacred
and secular elements. They featured the Chindo ritualists Kim Taerye (1935–2009) and
Pak Pyŏngch’ŏn (1933–2008), who were the holders of Property 71, and the east coast
holder of Property 82, Kim Sŏkch’ul (1922–2005).26 Other ritualists, such as Property 82
holder Kim Kŭmhwa (b. 1931), became actors, appearing on celluloid, while many films
shot in the Korean countryside included snippets of shaman rituals.
In Korea today, ritual concerts are symbolic of shamanic revival. Their producers
market folklore and fill a commercial niche by building up artistic presentation at the
expense of spirituality. Hence, the reality of the spirit world and the need to bring spirits
to the stage (rather than the ritual space) gives way to an essentializing view in which
shamanism is merely part of heritage. This is not to denigrate the quality of performance
achieved, and Kim Sŏkch’ul’s music—rather than ritual—has inspired two Ph.D. proj-
ects by non-Koreans that eloquently illustrate its appeal (Simon Mills 2003, and see
Mills 2007; Simon Barker 2010). Indeed, Barker’s transformations of ritual rhythm to
create a new jazz drumming language became the subject of an award-winning 2008
film directed by Emma Frantz, Intangible Asset 82—a transformation to global stages
that would have been hardly imaginable without the revival that has taken place.27
Court Music
Since the Korean preservation system packages both folk and court, a number of court
music genres have been appointed Properties. In its narrow sense, aak denotes court
sacrificial ritual music and dance, while chŏngak more broadly incorporates music of
the literati; both are routinely used as umbrella terms for court music. But Korea no lon-
ger has any court; the last king reigning when the peninsula became a Japanese colony
in 1910 died in 1919, and the consort of the last prince died in the 1980s. Two sacrifi-
cial rituals are, however, maintained. Music and dance for the first, Chongmyo cheryeak,
appointed Property 1 in 1964 and a UNESCO Masterpiece in 2001, is today performed
annually on the first Sunday in May, for national events and festivals at the Royal
Ancestral Shrine (Chongmyo), and as a concert item divorced from the shrine. The
shrine itself, a World Heritage Site entered on the UNESCO list in 1995 but earlier des-
ignated in Korea as Monument 125, has two halls: the nineteen-room Chŏngjŏn and the
sixteen-room Yŏngnyŏngjŏn (Tangible Cultural Properties 227 and 821, respectively).
The second sacrificial ritual, music and dance in the Ritual to Confucius, the Sŏkchŏn
taeje, was appointed within Property 85 in 1986. At the Asian Games that year and again
at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, the Sŏkchŏn taeje was held up as a historically authentic
tradition to be used as a model for restoring Confucian rituals elsewhere in East Asia.28
The Confucian Shrine, the Taesŏngjŏn, is Tangible Property 141. The National Center for
Korean Traditional Performing Arts (Kungnip kugagwŏn; since 2010 known in English
as the National Gugak Center), the government-funded repository for court music and
dance, provides the musicians for both. The National Gugak Center is the successor to
court institutes dating back at least twelve hundred years; while the music for Property 1
dates from King Sejŏng’s reign (1418–1450), the music for Property 85 and the dance for
both date back in Korea to 1116, when they were received as a gift from the Chinese Sung
emperor Huizong.29
Over time, waves of decline and revival have marked both rituals. In 1918, what was
then known as the Court Music Department (Aakpu), funded by the increasingly
impoverished king, appealed to its equivalent in Tokyo for support. This led to a visit in
150 Keith Howard
1921 by the Japanese musicologist Tanabe Hisao (1883–1984), who found only the Rite to
Royal Ancestors still performed and argued that supporting it was vital to maintain the
relationship between Korean and Japanese cultural heritage.30 His intervention led to a
limited revival. Liberation in 1945 brought no restoration of the monarchy, and the rite
was again downgraded. Only parts continued to be performed. Marking the first mod-
ern revival, seven senior musicians who had trained at the Court Music Department in
the 1920s were in 1964 declared holders of the music and dance for the rite as Property
1; an eighth holder joined them in 1968. The revival, though, was not undertaken in one
go. Substantial restoration in 1969 fused the memories of the Property holders with an
investigation of historical sources; members of the king’s lineage, the Chŏnju Yi, took
responsibility for ritual procedures. Singing and the playing of stringed instruments
had stopped altogether in the nineteenth century, although stringed instruments were
still placed in the ensemble; zither playing was restored after the musicologist Yi Hyegu
(1908–2010) published an article about it (1957: 379–380), and in the 1970s singing was
reintroduced (Provine 1986: 7–10). In 1976, costumes were restored when Yi Ku (1931–
2005), the last living son of Korea’s last crown prince, Yi Un (1897–1970), presided over
the ritual. In the 1980s, texts were reintroduced that had been removed by the Japanese
colonial government beginning in 1911 for being inappropriately (Korean) nationalist.
Female dancers for sacrificial rituals had been dismissed prior to the Japanese annex-
ation. At the time of Tanabe’s visit, Court Music Department students were seconded
to provide the dance. As a limited effort at revival, this probably coincided with a sim-
plification of the dance that introduced a particular bowing movement, sambangbae,
consisting of a bend of the upper body that could be performed in three directions in
turn. The next revival of dance came in the 1950s, when male students (but since 1962,
boys and girls) attending the school associated with the National Gugak Center were
drafted in. At this time, so as not to interfere with studying the curriculum, the dance
was further simplified. Restoration of a more complete dance, based on source materi-
als, came in 1981, when the dancer and teacher Kim Yŏngsuk removed the sambangbae
movement.
The National Gugak Center has also revived other court music and dance genres and
today has responsibility for five additional Properties. Ch’ŏyongmu, Property 39, is the
only surviving court masked dance. Ch’ŏyongmu features five dancers and traces back
to the Unified Shilla period (668–907 CE).31 It had disappeared some time before 1865,
when it was revived for the first time. Without court dancers, it again fell into disuse at
the end of the nineteenth century and was revived again in the 1920s, using students
of the Court Music Department. The memories of those students facilitated the mod-
ern revival for Property appointment in 1971, and five former students were declared
holders. Taech’wit’a, Property 46, percussion and brass music for ceremonies, royal pro-
cessions, and military marches, stretches back in one form or another for many centu-
ries, with something akin to it depicted in a fourth-century tomb at Anak, near today’s
Pyongyang. A first attempt at revival came in the 1890s, to counter the development of
Western brass bands, but this was abandoned during the early colonial period. Initial
attempts were made by musicians at the Court Music Department to restore it in 1930,
hence in 1971 the Cultural Properties Committee looked to a surviving musician from
that time, Ch’oe Insŏ (1892–1978), as the first holder. Since 1993, Ch’oe’s student Chŏng
Chaeguk (b. 1942) has been holder.
Property 20, Taegŭm chŏngak, court music for the transverse bamboo flute, offers
sonic iconicity. The unique buzzing sound of the Korean instrument is known to all,
along with a legend about the flute’s invention that appears in a twelfth-century his-
tory book, Samguk yusa (Romance of the Three Kingdoms). The journalist Ye Yonghae
had written about the flute player Kim Sŏngjin (1916–1996) in his newspaper column,
so the genre and the Property itself was something of a hotchpotch repertory to allow
Kim Property holder status.32 The National Gugak Center also takes responsibility for
Properties 30 and 41, kagok lyric songs and kasa narrative songs.
Court music, including sacrificial rituals, was in the past unknown to the general
public. Likewise, the genres now appointed as Properties 20, 30, and 41 were primarily
confined to the literati. This was always a small group comprising the educated nobility
(yangban) who numbered less than 3 percent of the total population when hierarchy
was formally abandoned in the 1890s, plus a small urban middle class of professionals,
administrators, and merchants known as the yŏhangin (Sung Hee Park 2010). Today,
however, the National Gugak Center functions as the government’s loudspeaker for
music, employing some four hundred musicians and dancers in five facilities—in Seoul,
Namwŏn, Chindo, Pusan, and Cheju—and broadcasting and performing both at home
and abroad. Through the center’s efforts at revival, then, court music and dance has
become the property of all Koreans. Musicians wearing red or yellow costumes—the
royal colors—adorn tourist brochures and advertisements and act as cultural diplomats
on world stages. So ubiquitous has this become that most would assume court music
and dance has held iconicity for a long time, but this is not the case. Indeed, when the
National Gugak Center first sent court musicians to Europe to perform in 1973, the rave
reviews allowed the musicologist Hahn Man-young to reflect in a manner that indicates
how marginal court music had become to the domestic audience:
A [Korean] court piece . . . is the equal to a Beethoven symphony, and our traditional
ensembles are a match for the Berlin, London and New York Symphony Orchestras.
It is ironic that such value has been placed on Korean music not by Koreans but
by Westerners. . . . Only now that our [National Gugak Center’s] performances
have been praised abroad have our musicians realized their high artistic excel-
lence. . . . Why didn’t we realize that this was music to be proud of in a modern world?
(Hahn 1990: 39–40)
Court music also sits behind much of the vibrant Korean composition scene, a place pop-
ulated by many hundreds of composers.33 They generate new works not least for every
single performance student studying traditional music at each of several dozen Korean
universities.34 Ch’ŏngsŏnggok, one piece from Property 20, the taegŭm chŏngak reper-
tory, has proved particularly iconic. Originally the taegŭm accompaniment to a lyric
song, it has been appropriated by many, both in compositions for Korean instruments
152 Keith Howard
(by, for example, Lee Sang-kyu; b. 1944) and in avant-garde works by Korean composers
abroad such as Isang Yun (1917–1995) and Younghi Pagh-Paan (b. 1945).35 Thus, it is hard
to find a Korean who is unaware of Korean court music today. While Ye Yonghae’s com-
ment that his articles written between 1959 and 1963 functioned “like the last breath for
those about to die, like an injection of life,” may have been true at the time, the situation
in Korea today is very different, and the iconicity of court music, and of dance, ritual,
and performance costumes, has been assured through preservation and revival.
Conclusion
As Korea began to modernize in the 1960s, legislation to protect the intangible cultural
heritage was designed to give Koreans a sense of identity and a sense of pride. This leg-
islation did so through preserving performance arts and crafts that marked the nation
as special. As the preservation efforts fused with student movements, attempts at revival
gathered pace. Koreans began to identify with their traditional music and dance, and
as they did so, the revival could be sustained. It has continued to the present day. Just
as performing arts and crafts stand as sonic and visual icons of Koreanness, images
stretch beyond music and dance to papier maché and wooden masks (t’al; Properties
6, 7, 15, 17, 18, and more), black wide-brimmed hats (kat; Property 4), decorative knots
(maedŭp; Property 22), lacquerware inlaid with mother-of-pearl or shell (najŏn ch’ilgi
and kkŭnŭmjil; Properties 10 and 54), wooden architecture (taemok; Property 74), cos-
tumes (ch’imsŏn; Property 89), food (Chosŏn wangjo kungjung ŭmshik; Property 38), and
more. Not only do these icons adorn many a Korean house or apartment but also they
are the stuff of tourist shops, of Korean airports and hotels, and are the images portrayed
around the world to represent Korea. Notwithstanding modernity and the promotion
of popular culture in what has become known as “Korean Wave,” Koreanness is assured
both at home and abroad through the iconicity of the intangible heritage—the revival of
that heritage has come to define Korea within and outside the peninsula and has helped
to forge Korean people’s perceptions of their place in the world and global perceptions of
the Korean people.
There is, though, another side to this story, which I have only begun to indicate in the
case studies I have presented in this chapter. Preservation in Korea has been a process
formulated by government agencies and a broad assembly of scholars, journalists, and
nationalists. It has sought to retain archetypes and in so doing may have given ammuni-
tion to those who criticize the apparent freezing of cultural production. However, and
most important, preservation has created icons of performance arts and crafts. These
form the basis of new creativity, in a manner that some would define as “postrevival,”
allowing for the emergence of urban singers of updated folk songs, staged SamulNori
percussion quartets, ritual concerts featuring adaptations of rural shamanism, and a
highly developed and extensive catalogue of creative composition emerging from court
music. The two elements, preservation and creativity, go side-by-side, one validating the
other, and one ensuring the maintenance of activity in the other. Preservation and cre-
ativity are, then, equally important elements in revival.
Notes
1. This chapter uses the McCune-Reischauer romanization system for Korean terms; square
brackets give McCune-Reischauer where other systems are used in publications and CDs.
2. In this chapter, “icon” and “iconicity” are used not in Judith Becker’s sense, but to relate
to musical forms that, together with their visual representations, are widely recognized as
representations of a national culture and identity by Koreans. “New creativity” is used to
capture how an existing piece created in the past is used today as the basis for new creation
while avoiding the tautological literal translation of the Korean term “ch’angjak kugak” as
“new creative traditional music.”
3. Class in Korea is a contentious issue linked to a Confucian-based hierarchy that was solidly
in place until the beginning of the twentieth century. This hierarchy was divided between
a literate aristocracy, the yangban, and a largely illiterate and poverty-stricken peasantry
(with professional musicians as one of five groups beneath these, occupying a virtually
outcast position as the ch’ŏnmin). By the seventeenth century, a middle class of traders,
translators, and so forth had emerged, typically working in the towns, although their actual
identity is a matter of some dispute (see Yi Sŏngmu 1980, Lee Sŏngmu 1991, and, in relation
to music, Hahn Man-young 1990: chapters 3 and 4, and Sung Hee Park 2010). In the twen-
tieth century, the class division began to break down, but it was only with industrialization,
urbanization, and the increase in tertiary education from the beginning of the 1960s that
the farming population markedly declined and a new and educated middle class emerged.
4. The East Asian concept used here is of the “low,” “folk,” or Little Tradition contrasted to
the “high,” “court,” or Great Tradition (for which see Bauman 1992: xiii–xxi). Although it
is tempting to consider folk culture purely indigenous, population migration means that
Korean shamanism is often considered to have roots in Mongolia and Siberia while cul-
tural assimilation links, say, Korean masked dance dramas (t’al ch’um) to Chinese arche-
types and to genres still performed in Japan.
5. Hyung Il Pai (1998, 1999) offers extensive documentation for the intention to create a
shared cultural past, though focused primarily on archaeology.
6. For a full list of Properties, see Howard (2006a: 177–180). In respect of the arts and crafts
mentioned here, hat making (kat il) became Property 4 in 1964, instrument making (akki
chang) Property 42 in 1971, maedŭp Property 22 in 1968, kagok, p’ansori, sanjo, and pŏmp’ae
Properties 30, 5, 16, 23, 45, and 50, in 1969, 1964, 1968, 1968, 1971, and 1973, respectively.
7. “Important” (Chungyo) designates national (kukka) rather than regional/provincial
appointments. In my discussion here, I refer only to Intangible and Tangible Properties
appointed at the national level.
8. One might question—and I was often reminded of this when I carried out fieldwork in
rural Korea between 1982 and 1984—both the motivation and the impact of students visit-
ing the countryside. They were often intolerant of the harsh realities of rural agriculture,
of limited use as workers, and critical of the way of life. I recall one evening spent in Inji
Village, Chisan District, Chindo, where student guests were arguing with villagers that
they should not replace thatched roofs (with tin) and paper windows (with glass). The old
looked nice and was “really” Korean, they argued; but, came the retort from local villagers,
154 Keith Howard
the new was much more comfortable, glass windows were better insulated, and fewer rats
and insects could live in a tin roof.
9. In Creating Korean Music (2006b), I cast this conception in a particular frame: The past has
been obscured and mystified (after Berger 1988: 164), maintained by organizing symbolic
interpretations (after Goffman 1959: 2–4).
10. The sheer amount of discussion on the intangible heritage constitutes a good reason to gen-
eralize at this point. Over the years, I have collected more than five hundred Korean reports
and publications on the intangible heritage, a far from complete collection but enough to
demonstrate the inherent difficulty in citing specific articles or reports as representative.
11. Property 89 is ch’imsŏn chang, the craftsmanship of traditional costume, and sits alongside
Property 22, decorative knot craftwork (maedŭp chang), appointed in 1968, and Property
80, embroidery (chasu chang), appointed in 1984.
12. As a young and struggling ethnomusicologist, in 1987 I took a short-term job as a musician
playing Korean traditional music for a Korean fashion show in Paris. The show was held
twice a day for a week at Le Meridien, Montparnasse, to bring contemporary hanbok to the
French.
13. The Korean National Commission sponsored a policy meeting in Seoul in 1996 (see Howard
1996), eight workshops for representatives from thirty-seven member states between 1998
and 2002 (of which only four were held in Korea), and in 2002 led a revision of UNESCO’s
intangible cultural heritage guidelines.
14. Simon is said to have been told by the composer of another cover, Jorge Milchberg, that
it was by an anonymous eighteenth-century composer. In fact, the composer was Alomia
Robles, whose son filed against Simon for copyright infringement.
15. The distinction here is between “popular folk songs” (t’ongsok minyo) and “local folk songs”
(t’osok minyo), the former sung by itinerant performers, kisaeng courtesans, and kwang-
dae male musicians. The distinction is discussed by Howard (1999a: 1–37; 2006a: 82–86)
and Provine (2002: 880–883). One reason for preserving “popular folk songs” lies in their
prominence, as the focus of many recordings and broadcasts throughout the twentieth
century, and as the subject of much musicological study.
16. A further Property could be added to this list, the women’s song and circle dance genre
Kanggangsullae, appointed Property 8 in 1966. Although associated with local practice along
the southwestern seaboard, the first “holder” was a professional dancer and singer, Yang
Hŭngdo (1900–1968); I have discussed the two subsequent “holders,” Ch’oe Soshim (1908–
1990) and Kim Kirim (1927–1999), elsewhere (Howard 1989: 144–148 and 2006a: 90–91).
17. Previous field trips had tended to be much shorter. Chi was one of a number sent by the
Academy of Korean Studies in 1972 to Chindo for a period of just one week; the volume
they produced runs to more than seven hundred pages of oral literature (song lyrics and
stories).
18. The Korean recording industry is considered in Howard (2006c).
19. Ch’a may also be rendered as ch’ae. The use of the term nongak probably predates Japanese
colonialism, since its two Sino-Korean characters, nong for “farming” and ak for music and
dance, were certainly in use during the nineteenth century: the 1870s witnessed a promo-
tion of farming, using the nong character, and in a text for one of the p’ansori stories dating
to the 1880s, one sung episode is named “Nongbuga” (Song of farming).
20. Howard (1989: 50–61) documents one 1984 event that coupled village ritual, fundraising,
and entertainment together across a four-day period.
21. The New Village Movement began as a reaction to the increasing disparity between
urban and rural wages. It took over much that had formerly been sponsored by American
4-H clubs.
22. Initially, the quartet were part of a larger folk music ensemble; the name SamulNori was
introduced by the folklorist Shim Usŏng.
23. Clips can readily be found on YouTube.
24. This is particularly the case with scholars and officials who had studied in Europe or North
America, where Christian churches act as the center of the Korean community. For the
Korean-American case, see Ecklund (2006).
25. See also Yong-Shik Lee (2004: 43) for a perspective on the annual performances of shaman
rituals appointed as Properties, which he regards as a “ritualization of fossilization.”
26. See discography.
27. See www.intangibleasset82.com and www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeCiaVhdszA (both
accessed May 17, 2013). Barker is based in Australia, but in March 2011 he gave sellout
concerts at New York’s Lincoln Center before making two trips to London in the same
year. In respect to the film’s title, I note that in the 1980s and 1990s I translated -jae not as
“Property” (or what was then the normative Korean translation, “Treasure”) but as “Asset.”
In this chapter, I revert to “Property” because this has now been adopted as the standard
term used by Korean scholars and institutions when writing in English.
28. In 1968, a tour of Korean court musicians to Taiwan is claimed to have encouraged
the Taiwanese to reconstruct their Confucian ritual (noted in Grayson 2002: 178). The
Taiwanese reconstruction is discussed by Fu-yen Chen (1975).
29. For details see Pratt (1976), Provine (1975, 1980) and Song (1992).
30. Although Koreans vehemently disagree, E. Taylor Atkins argues that Tanabe “acted as a
saviour for a cultural resource his countrymen had enfeebled” (2009: 181).
31. As Seo Jung Rock has shown (2010), the dance has considerable importance, in Korea for
an associated text/song, and to Japan as evidence of the role Korea played in the develop-
ment of Japanese culture.
32. This is my interpretation, and will likely be contentious. However, among the many hun-
dreds of Cultural Property Committee reports on performance arts and crafts, only one
carries the name of an individual, and this is the report about Kim’s flute performance.
33. Works for Korean instruments by twenty-four representative composers are included on
the 12-CD set Ch’angjak kugak kwanhyŏnak/Creative Traditional Orchestral Music (2000).
For a review, see Howard 2001. English-language accounts of the genre include Killick
(1990, 1992), Lee Sang-Mann (1989), Chae Hyun-kyung (1996), and Gyewon Byeon (2001a,
2001b). Although some have attempted to survey this genre, typically identifying three
periods—of gestation (1939–1961), experimentation (1962–1973), and individual expres-
sion (1974 onward) (see Chŏn Inp’yŏng 1987; Killick 1990), or simply dividing into decades
(Yi Sanggyu 1995: 109–115)—to do justice to the genre is well outside the scope of this
article. Yi Sanggyu (1995) identified a total of 2,239 compositions that had been performed
by 1995, and a 1996 book compiled at the National Center listed 2,821 archived scores (Song
Hyejin et al. 1996).
34. The musicologist Lee Hyegu, in setting up the curriculum for the first degree in traditional
music at Seoul National University in 1959, made it a requirement that all performers be
examined in court music, folk music, and contemporary works.
35. For details, see Howard (1999b, 2006b: 108, 143).
156 Keith Howard
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C HA P T E R 8
M U S I C R E V I VA L ,
C A T RÙ O N T O L O G I E S , A N D
I N TA N G I B L E C U LT U R A L
H E R I TAG E I N V I E T NA M
BA R L EY NORTON
This chapter examines processes of music revival with reference to the north-
ern Vietnamese music and dance tradition ca trù, which in contemporary perfor-
mances typically features a small chamber ensemble of voice, a three-stringed lute,
and two percussion instruments (a small drum and a struck idiophone). In 2009,
“Ca Trù Singing” was successfully nominated for inscription on the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Intangible Cultural
Heritage “Urgent Safeguarding List.” This list aims to acknowledge intangible heri-
tage that is “facing grave threats” and is in “extremely urgent need of safeguarding.”1
Although the inscription recognizes that the viability of ca trù is at risk, efforts to revive
the tradition predate the UNESCO nomination in 2009: the build-up to the nomina-
tion since the turn of the millennium spurred some safeguarding initiatives, and the
first tentative steps toward revival can be traced back to the years following the end of
the Second Indochina War (the “Vietnam War”) in 1975. Drawing on this history of
revival, this chapter considers revivalist discourse relating to ca trù and the practice of
revival at the local level.
An interesting feature of revivalist discourse is the way in which history is being
invoked and revised in order for ca trù to become “intangible cultural heritage.” To
understand ca trù in its current phase of revival, it is therefore necessary to gain an
appreciation of its diverse historical manifestations, its historical ontologies that rely on
its “embeddedness” in different contexts (Bohlman 1999). Through an examination of
how the historiography of ca trù has been interpreted in revivalist discourse, I aim to
show how the promotion of intangible cultural heritage serves to limit and fix ca trù
ontologies and has shaped contemporary understandings of the genre. Going beyond
MUSIC REVIVAL AND CA TRÙ ONTOLOGIES IN VIETNAM 161
the narrow confines of the recent revival, this chapter therefore critically examines the
historical record on ca trù, drawing on research by Vietnamese scholars.
Throughout the chapter, evaluation of nationalist discourse and discussion of the his-
tory and politics of revival is balanced with consideration of musicians’ engagement with
revival processes, an engagement marked by considerable energy, enthusiasm, and deter-
mination, as well as by frustration and ambivalence toward official discourse on ca trù and
government-led and UNESCO-driven initiatives. As an ethnomusicologist who has con-
ducted field research on ca trù during several trips to Vietnam from 1994 to 2012, I have in
small ways been involved in the revival movement. In practical terms, this has included
accompanying singers on the long-necked đàn đáy lute at ca trù clubs and on Vietnamese
television, and helping to organize two European tours by one group called the Ca Trù Thái
Hà Ensemble. As a scholar, I have also been directly involved in the UNESCO nomination
process: first through being invited by the Vietnamese Musicology Institute to give a paper
at the international conference in 2006 titled “Ca Trù Singing of the Việt People,” which
was organized in Hanoi to prepare for the submission of the file; and second through act-
ing as an examiner for UNESCO when the file was submitted in 2009. I recommended in
my examiner’s report that ca trù be listed on the Urgent Safeguarding List because I broadly
agreed that the musical culture was in a fragile state, although I also made some critical
comments and recommendations about some of the safeguarding measures proposed.2
The recent trend for ethnomusicologists to do “applied” or “engaged” work with
organizations like UNESCO has led to renewed critical engagement with cultural poli-
cies and their implementation and to an assessment of the presuppositions inherent in
the concept of intangible cultural heritage (Seeger 2008; Weintraub and Yung 2009).
International proclamations and top-down action plans of cultural management, how-
ever well intentioned, may have unintended consequences, and they do not always effec-
tively encourage sustainable musical ecologies based on diverse, community-based,
participatory musical activities (Titon 2009). The discussion of processes of revival in
this chapter therefore aims to raise questions about the strategies being employed to
revive ca trù in the twenty-first century. Although ca trù’s historical trajectory is shaped
by distinctive national and local factors, the case of ca trù revivalism is, I think, significant
for considering music revivals more broadly because it highlights the historical cycles
of revival and reveals patterns of transformation—especially concerning the dynamics
between international and national agencies and local musical communities—which are
having an impact on musical practices across Asia and other parts of the world.
Revivalist Discourse: Ca Trù as Intangible

Cultural Heritage
The world today, it seems, is awash with intangible cultural heritage, and we
are surrounded at every turn by systems of cultural heritage management. The
162 Barley Norton
unstoppable advance of intangible cultural heritage has largely been due to UNESCO’s
2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, but the
Convention emerged from a longer history of discourse relating to the protection and
preservation of tradition and folklore, which has developed since the end of World War
II (see Howard 2006; Ruggles and Silverman 2009; Smith and Akagawa 2009).
In Vietnam, the concept of “intangible cultural heritage,” rendered in Vietnamese
as di sản văn hóa phí vật thể, emerged strongly around the turn of the millennium,
largely in response to UNESCO policies and the perceived threat of globalization to
Vietnamese cultural identity. In 1998, Resolution 5 of the Eighth National Congress of
the Vietnamese Communist Party, which was titled “On Building and Developing a
Progressive Vietnamese Culture Rich in National Character,” was an important turning
point in government policy toward culture (see Ministry of Culture 1999). Although
the Party has long asserted that culture should be imbued with “national character”
(Ministry of Culture 1972), Resolution 5 paved the way for laws, decrees, and action
plans on cultural and intangible cultural heritage. These include the passing of the Law
on Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2001 and the Law on Cultural Heritage in 2009, the
ratification of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural
Heritage in 2005, and the establishment of National Target Programs for Cultural
Heritage Management. In short, UNESCO-affiliated organizations in Vietnam, the
Vietnamese Ministry of Culture and Information, and state-run institutes are now con-
centrating a great deal of their energies on nominating, safeguarding, and promoting
tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The current enthusiasm for utilizing UNESCO
policies as a mechanism for revival has led to several Vietnamese music genres being
successfully nominated for intangible cultural heritage status: The imperial court music
tradition nhã nhạc and “the space of gong culture in the Central Highlands” were rec-
ognized as Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO in 2003
and 2005, respectively; in 2009, quan họ folk singing from Bac Ninh province was rec-
ognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity; and, in 2011, hát xoan folk singing
was listed on UNESCO’s Urgent Safeguarding List. At the time of writing (2012), further
nominations to UNESCO are also in progress.
So what has led Vietnam to wholeheartedly embrace UNESCO policies on cultural
heritage? The current enthusiastic promotion of cultural heritage is fueled in equal mea-
sure by nationalist anxiety and pride—nationalist anxiety about the loss of Vietnamese
cultural identity due to the forces of globalization and the influx of foreign culture and
nationalist pride concerning Vietnam’s cultural status in the world (see Vietnamese
Institute for Musicology 2004). Such pride stimulates a competitive spirit in which
Vietnamese officials increasingly measure the country’s international cultural stand-
ing by whether nominations to UNESCO are successful and through the evaluation of
Vietnam’s cultural heritage compared with that of other countries in the region and the
world at large.
For ca trù to become recognized as intangible cultural heritage in urgent need of safe-
guarding, Vietnamese officials responsible for governing cultural heritage have forged
a new discourse on revival. The key aspects of revivalist discourse on ca trù, which are
evident in the UNESCO nomination file and the accompanying video documentation
(see Example 8.01 ), may be summarized as follows:
1. Ca trù is authentic culture because it is an ancient, unique, and pure Vietnamese

art untainted by influence from “outside.”
2. The decline of ca trù in the second half of the twentieth century was due to
the Franco-Vietnamese war (from 1945 to 1954) and the Second Indochina War
(from the early 1960s to 1975).
3. Elderly musicians born prior to 1945 are the last remaining culture-bearers of
authentic ca trù, so the genre’s revival relies on elderly musicians who were
active prior to 1945 transmitting the tradition to the younger generation.
4. There is little understanding of ca trù in contemporary society and traditional
performance contexts have been lost, so new ways need to be found to promote
the genre as intangible cultural heritage.
5. In contemporary Vietnam, there is a new environment for the revival of prerev-
olutionary traditions, and intangible cultural heritage is now protected by law.
As David Lowenthal has noted in his virulent critique of the relationship between her-
itage and history, “heritage the world over not only tolerates but thrives on and even
requires historical error” (1998:132), and ca trù is no exception. Revivalist discourse
relies on a nationalist revision of ca trù historiography. Scholarly publications on the
history of ca trù, which were used to support the UNESCO nomination, demonstrate
a marked concern with origins (e.g., Nguyễn Xuân Diện 2007; Đặng Hoành Loan et al.
2006). Some scholars claim that the antecedents of ca trù date back to the beginning of
the Lý dynasty (1010–1225) in the eleventh century (Đặng Hoành Loan et al. 2006: 7).
Although this claim predates the recent revival and is based on scant historical evidence
(see ĐỗBằng Đoàn and Đỗ Trọng Huề 1962: 24), this date of origin neatly coincides with
the founding of an independent Vietnamese state and serves to support the notion that
the roots of ca trù are ancient and purely Vietnamese (see also Tran 2012).
The claim that the origins of ca trù date to the eleventh century has been challenged
by scholars at the Sino-Vietnamese Institute in Hanoi who argue that the earliest reli-
able documentation proving the existence of a musical genre called ca trù dates from
the fifteenth century (Nguyễn Xuân Diện 2007: 110). This later date of origin, however,
does not detract from the prevalent assertion that ca trù is worthy of revival because it
is an ancient, unique, and pure Vietnamese tradition. I have previously argued that this
view of ca trù’s history is fueled by patriotic nostalgia, a longing for a utopian past in
which foreign cultural presence is erased from memory (Norton 2005). The patriotic
nostalgia of the current revival contrasts markedly with interpretations of ca trù in the
postrevolutionary period following the August Revolution of 1945, when the genre was
unofficially prohibited and condemned as a bourgeois, decadent art that had been cor-
rupted by French colonialism.
Revivalist discourse often blames the demise and neglect of ca trù on the devasta-
tion wrought by war. However, the reasons why ca trù was effectively silenced after 1954
164 Barley Norton
were largely due to the ideological position assumed by the Vietnamese Communist
Party, which formed the government of northern Vietnam after the Franco-Vietnamese
war.3 Unlike other traditional music styles, such as the music theater forms chèo, tuồng,
and cải lương, which were supported in northern Vietnam through the formation of an
extensive network of state-run troupes, no organizations or performance venues were
established to propagate ca trù. The music schools and conservatories set up by the new
communist government also did not teach it. The Party did not consider ca trù to be
suitable for the new socialist society for two main reasons. First, ca trù was seen as feudal
and elitist because it was a form of entertainment for the Confucian scholars and intel-
lectuals during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Second, it was associated
with “social evils” such as prostitution, drugs, and gambling, when it was a popular form
of entertainment in “singing bars” (ca quán) in Hanoi and other urban areas in northern
Vietnam prior to 1954. The form of ca trù performed in the singing bars was known as
hát ả đào (lit. “songs of the songstresses”), but the bars were closed down by the new
socialist government after 1954. Communist rhetoric on hát ả đào argued that it been
“corrupted” by colonialism. This view is expressed, for instance, in an article by the vio-
linist and Party cadre Đào Trọng Từ:
[T]‌he a dao song was born and for several centuries was one of the most beautiful
popular artistic traditions. French colonialism ruined these village customs of virtue
and culture and reduced a dao song to the role of accompaniment to prostitution.
(Đào Trọng Từ 1984: 26)
When Đào Trọng Từ describes the songs performed by female ả đào singers as virtuous
and an integral part of village rituals prior to colonial influence, he is no doubt referring
to a form of ca trù known as hát cửa đình (lit. “singing in the village communal house”).
Compared with hát ả đào performed in singing bars, hát cửa đình has a different rep-
ertoire, performance style, and ritual function. Ca trù’s ontologies will be discussed
further in the next section, but historical evidence suggests that hát cửa đình was per-
formed during rituals held in honor of village tutelary spirits and historical personages
who belonged to famous ca trù lineages.
One of the interesting things about the way official discourse on ca trù has evolved
since the mid-twentieth century is the way revival cycles have changed as state pol-
icy and ideology have changed. In the revolutionary period from the 1950s until the
beginning of the reform era in 1986, when the “Renovation policy” (đổi mới) was
introduced, “true” Vietnamese culture was understood in terms of rediscovering
traditional culture that had been suppressed by French colonialism. Rediscovered
traditions were then subject to “correction” and “improvement” to make them appro-
priate for the new socialist society (see Meeker 2007). The aim was to preserve the
“essence” and “spirit” of traditional culture, but the forms and content were reworked
so they had “socialist content and national character.” Such a conception led to the
development of “modern national music” (âm nhạc dân tộc hiện đại) at the Hanoi
Music Conservatoire and the modification of traditional songs for the purposes of
promoting socialist ideology through the use of new revolutionary lyrics and the
reform of performance practices (see Arana 1999; Norton 2009). Although there
were a few occasions when ca trù songs were performed with new revolutionary
lyrics (Norton 2005: 33), the musical style was not altered to suit the revolutionary
socialist agenda.
In “reform era” Vietnam since the late 1980s, there has been an important shift in how
authentic musical culture is envisaged: Prerevolutionary culture is now increasingly
being expressed in terms of anxiety and concern over the loss of an authentic and rap-
idly disappearing cultural heritage. As Lauren Meeker writes:
Folk music practice prior to 1945 and those practitioners trained prior to 1945 are
now seen as part of an ever-receding “authentic.” 1945, therefore becomes ever more
urgent as a sign of loss and an impetus for preservation as the last generation to
receive their training prior to 1945 ages and passes away.
(Meeker 2007: 104)
The August Revolution of 1945 is understood to be a marker between “old” and “new”
in both the postrevolutionary period and in the reform era. As Meeker has pointed
out, however, there has been a shift in the way 1945 is referenced in relation to music.
In the reform era, musical practices that existed prior to 1945 are now presented as
authentic culture in need of urgent preservation, whereas in the postrevolutionary
period the emphasis was on rediscovering and developing the Vietnamese essence
embedded in traditional culture that had persisted despite feudalism and colo-
nial domination. Elderly musicians born prior to 1945 are now revered as the last
surviving custodians of authentic tradition. Such reverence is evident in the list of
twenty-one ca trù “folk artists” provided in the UNESCO nomination file; the young-
est person on the list was born in 1931. This emphasis on elderly musicians born prior
to 1945 also supports the argument that ca trù is “out of time” and that prerevolu-
tionary traditions need to be revived and protected by laws on intangible cultural
heritage.
Ca Trù Ontologies: An Historical

Perspective
Having outlined some of the key aspects of revivalist discourse, let us turn to an exami-
nation of ca trù’s historical ontologies. In its broadest sense, the term ca trù can refer to
vocal performances that involve the “audience” showing their appreciation and reward-
ing the musicians. The etymology of ca trù is important here: ca is the Sino-Vietnamese
word for singing or song, and trù refers to the bamboo cards or tokens that were thrown
166 Barley Norton
into a basket during performances to compliment the musicians. After the performance,
the tokens were converted into money. In contemporary performances, ca trù is usually
performed by a chamber ensemble consisting of three performers: a female singer who
accompanies herself on a percussion instrument called the phách, an instrumentalist
who plays a long-necked three-stringed đàn đáy lute, and a drummer who plays a small
“praise drum” (trống chầu) (Figure 8.1).
Although it is hard to pinpoint when this chamber ensemble gained prominence,
Vietnamese scholars have long argued that it gradually evolved from a larger ensemble
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that the reduction in ensemble size
was due to changes in performance context (e.g., Trần Văn Khê 1962: 82). Today, the
chamber ensemble is the predominant ensemble, except for some hát cửa đình perfor-
mances when a large temple drum and gong are used instead of the praise drum.
The complexity of ca trù’s history is reflected in the large number of Vietnamese terms
that refer to its different historical manifestations. So far, I have highlighted the impor-
tant distinction between small-scale performances for the purposes of entertainment
in singing bars, known as hát ả đào—also hát cô đầu (“songs of the songstresses”) or hát
chơi (“singing for entertainment”)—and hát cửa đình performances for rituals in village
communal houses. Other terms that are thought to refer to different forms of ca trù refer
to particular performance contexts defined by location or by function. Names based on
location include hát nhà tơ (“singing at official residences”), hát cửa quyền (“singing at
the royal palace”), and hát ca công (“singing in ca trù ancestors’ temples”),4 and those
FIGURE 8.1 The Ca Trù Thái Hà Ensemble with Nguyễn Thúy Hòa (singer/phách player),
Nguyễn Văn Khuê (đàn đáy lute), and Nguyễn Văn Mùi (“praise drum”) in 2009. (Photograph
by Barley Norton.)
Hát ả đảo Hát cửa đình

(“Songs of the (“Singing at the village
songstresses”) communal house”)
Hát nhà trò Hát nhà tơ

(“Singing for (“Singing at official
amusement”) residences”)
Ca Trù Ontologies
Hát cửa quyền Hát thi

(“Singing at the (“Singing for
royal palace”) competition”)
Hát ca công
(“Singing in ca trù’s
ancestors’ temples”)
FIGURE 8.2 Summary of the main ca trù ontologies.
that refer to function include hát nhà trò (“singing for amusement”) and hát thi (“singing
competition”). It is evident from historical sources that these different names delineated
important differences in performance practice, repertoire, song texts, and instrumenta-
tion. Đỗ Bằng Đoàn and Đỗ Trọng Huề (1962: 59–128), for instance, outline the distinc-
tive repertoire, song texts, and performance practices of hát chơi (i.e., hát ả đào), hát cửa
đình, and hát thi, which are listed as the three main forms of ca trù. Historical records
about other ca trù ontologies are less specific and detailed. Hát nhà trò, for example, is
thought to have been a semi-theatrical event involving humorous dance gestures imitat-
ing characters such as hunters, drunks, and madmen, but little further detail is known
(see Đỗ Bằng Đoàn and Đỗ Trọng Huề 1962: 46).
The term ca trù, which has become dominant in the recent revival since the early
1990s, seems to imply the existence of a singular genre characterized by a clearly
defined mode of performance. The diversity of performance practices and contexts
that have now been encompassed by the umbrella term ca trù, however, complicates
the notion that ca trù is a fixed, unitary genre. Such diversity does not sit easily with
a nationalistic revival discourse that relies on asserting that the essence of ca trù, and
even its musical characteristics, has remained intact for centuries. To counter the ten-
dency for ca trù to be understood as a single category with an immutable essence, it is
important to emphasize that the historical record indicates dramatic historical change
and a process of flux rather than stasis. In his chapter “Ontologies of Music,” Philip
Bohlman employs the notion of “embeddedness” to describe how music is connected
to and inseparable from other activities (1999: 19). By referring to ca trù ontologies in
the plural (see Figure 8.2), I aim to highlight how conditions of embeddedness have
168 Barley Norton
given rise to a diverse range of musical practices. The ontologies of ca trù, I would
suggest, can be thought of as a fluid network of related performance activities, some
of which overlapped and coexisted in different historical periods. The ontological sta-
tus of ca trù is important to take into account when considering processes of music
revival because understandings about what constitutes ca trù have affected contem-
porary performances. Certain understandings about ca trù have, for instance, led to
an emphasis on the reconstruction and festivalization of hát cửa đình rituals, as will be
discussed in the next section.
Much of the debate about the early history of ca trù is based on discussions about
specialist terminology. The claim that an early form of ca trù emerged in the Lý dynasty
(1009–1225) is based on references to terms such as đào nương and quản giáp, which are
found in historical records relating to the Lý dynasty court. According to Đỗ Bằng Đoàn
and Đỗ Trọng Huề (1962), the term đào nương was derived from a singer called Đào
Thị who was famous during the reign of Lý Thái Tổ (1009–1028), and quản giáp was a
title given to the official who directed singing and dance performances at the Lý dynasty
court. Both of these terms came to be closely associated with ca trù traditions: đào
nương is now commonly understood to refer to female ả đào singers and quản giáp was
an official rank associated with the administrative structures of ca trù musical guilds,
known as giáo phường, which are thought to have been widespread in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. The existence of these terms, however, does not necessarily
prove a connection to an early form of ca trù. Đào nương, for instance, likely referred
to female singers in general, not to singers of a particular genre. Dismissing Lý dynasty
origin theories, Nguyễn Xuân Diện argues that the historical sources used by Đỗ Bằng
Đoàn and Đỗ Trọng Huề only provide information about “music in general” and not
specifically about ca trù (Nguyễn Xuân Diện 2007: 19).
Nguyễn Xuân Diện’s origin theory is based on a reference to the term ca trù in a poem
by Lê Đức Mao (1462–1529), which was compiled some time before 1505. The two lines
that include the words ca trù from the poem are:
Ten cups of rice wine, hundreds of ca trù performances,
The happiness of witnessing ca trù at a celebratory banquet.5
From his reading of the poem, Nguyễn Xuân Diện concludes that by the fifteenth cen-
tury ca trù was performed at banquets held in honor of village tutelary spirits. Little evi-
dence can be gleaned from Lê Đức Mao’s poem to suggest strong connections between
the musical performance described and contemporary forms of ca trù, so many ques-
tions remain about the significance of this poetic reference. Interestingly, the term ca
trù was not commonly used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which also
problematizes the argument that the fifteenth-century musical performance referred to
by Lê Đức Mao is directly connected to contemporary forms of ca trù through a process
of linear historical development.6
From the sixteenth century onward, there is a wider range of historical evidence relat-
ing to ca trù ontologies in northern Vietnam. This includes wood carvings in communal
houses and pagodas of musical ensembles dating from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
centuries, inscriptions on stone stelae from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries,
and texts written in Sino-Vietnamese characters and romanized Vietnamese script
(known as quốc ngữ) from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.7
Wood carvings in communal houses which are thought to date from the sixteenth
century depict musicians—including, in one instance, a woman—playing a long-necked
lute similar to the modern đàn đáy. In wood carvings from the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, the đàn đáy is featured as part of a larger ensemble (Nguyễn Xuân Diện
2007: 76–78). Historical importance has been placed on these depictions because in
contemporary practice the đàn đáy is used exclusively for ca trù and is not included
in ensembles for other traditional genres. Based on the extant wood carvings, Nguyễn
Xuân Diện and other scholars have argued that, from the sixteenth century onward, ca
trù was performed in communal village performances as a form of worship for local
tutelary deities. The wood carvings from the following two centuries also provide sup-
port for the view that ritual performances in village communal houses were performed
by a large ensemble, which included the đàn đáy along with other string, wind, and per-
cussion instruments.
The stone stelae from the seventeenth century onward suggest that a sophisticated
system of music transmission and village ritual performance was organized according
to the giáo phường or “guild” system. These guilds were organized according to family
lineages, and each guild possessed the customary rights to perform at particular village
communal houses. The consensus among Vietnamese scholars is that the music guilds
from different districts performed at important festivals, which could last several days,
to honor village tutelary spirits, as well as at other ritual and lifecycle events (e.g., Bùi
Trọng Hiền 2006: 94). In return, the guilds received financial compensation for their
performances. Local music guilds owned the customary performance rights to perform
songs and dances at village communal houses, and many of the stelae record legal con-
tracts concerning the sale of performance rights between village communities and from
village communities to wealthy individuals.
Based on a close reading of legal contracts inscribed on twenty-three stone stelae
from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the historian Nhung Tuyet Tran (2012)
has explored the reasons why village guilds sold their communal performance rights.
Her argument is that they were sold as a survival strategy for local communities that
were strapped for cash due to the socioeconomic turmoil that resulted from the civil
warfare that was rife at the time. She argues further that the reason why ca trù became a
form of elite entertainment was that many local troupes had to sell their communal per-
formance rights to wealthy male scholars and officials because of financial difficulties.
In the sample of stelae Tran examined, the sale of customary rights by guilds to private
individuals was more common during the eighteenth century compared with the seven-
teenth, and she argues that this was a key reason why ca trù evolved from a large-scale
communal performance for all members of the village community to an elite form of
entertainment for rich officials and scholars in intimate private settings. Tran also points
out that it is likely that this change in performance context resulted in wealthy individu-
als acquiring female singers as servants who would have been expected to fulfill sexual
170 Barley Norton
services for their masters. Certainly, today, the term ả đào conjures up associations with
prostitution in elderly people’s minds.
In addition to Tran’s compelling argument that economic imperatives led to the rise of
ca trù as an elite form of private entertainment, developments in Vietnamese poetry—
particularly the rise of the poetic form hát nói—is also likely to have contributed to the
rise in popularity of intimate performances for the entertainment of scholars and offi-
cials.8 The hát nói poetic form, which in its standard form consists of eleven lines of
text, was the main medium of literary expression for the scholars who sponsored private
performances, and these poems were sung to a musical form bearing the same name. In
a survey of hát nói poems, Nguyễn Văn Ngọc (1932) divides the rich diversity of poems
he collected into the following main themes: ambition, patience, pessimism, hedonism,
nature, love, moral teachings, and irony/humor (see Addiss 1973). He concludes that the
underlying ethos behind the poems is an expression of liberal Daoist thought, which
went beyond the rigid codes of Confucian doctrine (Nguyễn Văn Ngọc 1932: XVI–
XVII). Today, famous poems by writers such as Nguyễn Bá Xuyến (1759–1822), Cao Bá
Quát (1808–1855), Nguyễn Công Trứ (1778–1859), and Dương Khuê (1836–1898) are seen
as an artistic pinnacle in the history of Vietnamese literature, and they are the mainstay
of contemporary performances in the hát ả đào style.
The Practice of Revival
In his book Musics of Vietnam, published in 1975, Pham Duy finishes a short sec-
tion on hát ả đào with the statement: “At the present time, hát ả đào is almost extinct”
(1975: 100). This statement is not evidenced, but it gives an indication that, by the mid
1970s, hát ả đào was no longer perceived to be a vibrant, living tradition. Although it
has been reported that President Hồ Chí Minh attended hát ả đào performances by the
singers Quách Thị Hồ and Nguyễn Thị Phúc in the Temple of Literature in Hanoi dur-
ing the 1962 lunar new year (Chu Hà 1980: 59), ca trù was no longer practiced regu-
larly and was essentially silenced in northern Vietnam after 1954. The end of the Second
Indochina War in April 1975, however, gave the eminent scholar Trần Văn Khê, who at
that time was living in France, an opportunity to make a visit to Hanoi in April 1976 to
make recordings of the singers Quách Thị Hồ and Nguyễn Thị Phúc accompanied by the
lutenist Đinh Khắc Ban.9 The recordings made by Trần Văn Khê, which were released on
the Auvidis-Unesco label in 1978, brought a limited amount of international attention to
Quách Thị Hồ (Trần Văn Khê 1991 [1978]).
Although the ca trù revival did not gain momentum until the 1990s, the first fragile
shoots of revival emerged after 1975, which was somewhat remarkable given the polit-
ical context in the aftermath of war. Despite Party opposition to ca trù in the previous
decades, there were a few advocates for revival within the state-controlled cultural
bureaucracy in the late 1970s and 1980s. Foremost among these was the musician and
scholar Nguyễn Xuân Khoát, who had been President of the Vietnamese Musicians’
Union from 1940 to 1942. Nguyễn Xuân Khoát made efforts to increase understand-
ing of ca trù through giving talks at conferences, universities, and schools, and by
broadcasting programs on the national Voice of Vietnam Radio (Trần Văn Khê
1997: 15; Nguyen Xuân Khoát 1980: 7). Along with other cultural officials, Nguyễn
Xuân Khoát also contributed to a book called Hát Cửa Đình Lỗ Khê. Following the
publication of this book in 1980, a film—Nghệ Thuật Ca Trù—was made in 1984; both
the book and the film concentrated on the hát cửa đình tradition in the village of Lỗ
Khê on the outskirts of Hanoi.10
The reunification of the country in the aftermath of war was marked by tight control
over cultural expression in an attempt to build a new socialist society. Unsurprisingly,
the small number of publications and broadcasts about ca trù during the late 1970s and
1980s were couched in Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, presumably in order to be accepted
by the Party-controlled cultural bureaus through which public performances and pub-
lications were approved. For instance, ca trù was praised for the way it contributed to
revolutionary communism, and performances often included new poems that praised
the Party (Chu Hà 1980; Ngô Linh Ngọc and Ngô Văn Phú 1987). The recordings made
by Trần Văn Khê in 1976 included Quách Thị Hồ singing a poem by Chu Hà that praised
the Party (see Trần Văn Khê 1991 [1978]), although the music itself was not “improved”
or “reformed” to suit the socialist agenda.
The hát cửa đình tradition, rather than the hát ả đào of the singing bars, was the main
focus for the initial revival efforts after 1975. To conform to the rhetoric of revolution-
ary socialism, the village tutelary spirits worshipped in hát cửa đình performances
are described as “heroes who fought against foreign invaders” (Chu Hà 1980: 29). The
on-screen narration by the scholar Ngô Linh Ngọc for the 1984 film Nghệ Thuật Ca Trù
also interprets the musical tradition in terms of the rhetoric of defending the country.
The film begins with a “musical form” (thể) called “Giáo Trống,” which can be glossed as
“Drum Prelude.” The text intoned for the “Drum Prelude” in the film is as follows:
And so it is!
Steady rain, favorable wind,
Calm water-well, clear river.
Having destroyed the army of ants and men,
Now with a knock on the door, I ask permission for the “Drum Prelude.”11
Following the performance of “Drum Prelude” and another piece “Giáo Hương”
(“Incense Prelude”), the film continues with Ngô Linh Ngọc commenting on the mean-
ing of the song text:
Most of the tutelary spirits of the village are famous historical dignitaries who did
“good work” (công) defeating enemies when they were alive. The words of the “Drum
Prelude” sung by the lead singer are therefore truly appropriate. . . . In the past, boys
played the bronze drum to chase away enemies. Hát cửa đình praises the feat of arms
of the heroic spirits so the large praise drum must be used.
172 Barley Norton
Following the “Drum Prelude,” the film features performances of some other pieces
from the distinctive hát cửa đình repertoire by the most revered elderly performers from
Hanoi and Lỗ Khê, all of whom except Phó Thị Kim Đức are now dead.12 Despite the
narrative of resistance to foreign aggression, the film is a valuable document that reveals
much about what was known about hát cửa đình in the early 1980s, and some contempo-
rary musicians have used it as a learning resource. It is important to note, however, that
the majority of the performers in the film were specialists in the hát ả đào style and had
not performed hát cửa đình extensively prior to 1954. It is therefore likely that some of
the performances in the film, especially those involving dance such as “Bỏ Bộ” and “Bài
Bông,” were reconstructed based on partial memories and information about hát cửa
đình song texts and performance practices gleaned from written sources.
Despite the making of the film Nghệ Thuật Ca Trù, public performances and broad-
casts of ca trù were still extremely rare in the late 1970s and 1980s, and no formal institu-
tions were set up for teaching or performing the tradition. Nonetheless, a small number
of young musicians were taught privately during the 1980s, and the singer Lê Thị Bạch
Vân has reported that twenty-eight teaching sessions were held for musicians from
state-run music troupes and the Voice of Vietnam Radio in the mid 1980s under the aus-
pices of the Hanoi Department of Culture and Information (Lê Thị Bạch Vân 2008: 262).
In the more liberal economic and cultural climate that has ensued from the introduc-
tion of the Renovation policy in 1986, prerevolutionary music genres that had previously
been discouraged or banned gradually began to re-emerge. This re-emergence was quite
slow: It was not until 1991 that the first ca trù organization, the Hanoi Ca Trù Club, was
established by Lê Thị Bạch Vân. When I attended the club in the summer of 1994, the
elderly lutenist Chu Văn Du usually performed, but, after his death at the end of 1994, Lê
Thị Bạch Vân found it increasingly difficult to find đàn đáy players. On some occasions,
she managed to find elderly musicians from rural areas to perform, but in 1995, when
I had the opportunity to attend the club again, performances were sometimes curtailed
because no lute players could be found.
Apart from the Hanoi Ca Trù Club, the other main group that was active in the
1990s was the Ca Trù Thái Hà Ensemble. This ensemble, which was established in 1993,
consists of members of one family. (See Example 8.02. ) The head of the Ensemble,
Nguyễn Văn Mùi, who follows in a line of five generations of ca trù musicians, was
instrumental in encouraging his children to master key repertoire (see Nguyễn Văn
Khuê 2008). During the 1980s, his two sons Nguyễn Văn Khuê and Nguyễn Mạnh Tiến
learned the đàn đáy with the lutenist Phó Đình Kỳ, and his daughter Nguyễn Thúy
Hòa studied singing with Quách Thị Hồ. The ensemble is the first ca trù group to have
toured abroad in Europe and Asia, and it continues to perform regularly in Vietnam and
abroad. After initially studying the đàn đáy with Chu Văn Du in 1994, I studied with the
Ca Trù Thái Hà Ensemble during several research trips during the mid and late 1990s
(see Norton 1996).
From this short overview, it should be evident that the fledgling revival from 1975 to
the late 1990s was primarily based on the enthusiasm and commitment of just a few
musicians with little state support. Since the late 1990s, however, there has been an
increase in revival activity, which has partly been due to the increasing involvement of
government organizations and international agencies in the lead-up to the UNESCO
nomination in 2009. Although the effects of ca trù’s successful inscription on UNESCO’s
Urgent Safeguarding List will continue to unfold in future years, in what follows I dis-
cuss the impact of the intensification of revival efforts since the turn of the millennium
and the initial reactions of the musical community to ca trù being granted “intangible
cultural heritage” status.
The revival strategy led by the Vietnamese Institute for Musicology has been to raise
the profile of ca trù by collecting information about musicians and the activities of ca trù
clubs, organizing conferences and publishing research, and arranging large-scale festi-
vals.13 These activities are also embedded in the six safeguarding measures proposed in
the UNESCO nomination file, which additionally includes measures to support musical
transmission, to restore architectural “vestiges” (di tích) connected to famous ca trù lin-
eages, and to increase awareness of the genre through workshops in schools and univer-
sities. The estimated expenditure for the safeguarding measures is more than fifty billion
Vietnamese đồng (equivalent to more than US$2.5 million). However, the musicians
that I spoke to in July 2010 and August 2012 said they had not seen any evidence that the
safeguarding measures had begun to be implemented. Indeed, the lack of state support
of ca trù activities since the nomination has caused many musicians to be extremely
sceptical of the grassroots benefits of the UNESCO inscription.
The issue of musical transmission is crucial for revival because very few musicians are
competent ca trù performers in Vietnam today. Despite the acknowledgment of this fact
in the UNESCO file, to date, the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture and Information has
spent funds on conferences and festivals, rather than on encouraging teaching. In 2002,
however, the Ford Foundation office in Hanoi funded an influential teaching program.
During this two-month program, consisting of forty teaching sessions, more than sixty
students from thirteen provinces across northern Vietnam were taught by the elderly
singer Nguyễn Thị Chúc and three members of the Ca Trù Thái Hà Ensemble. After the
training, some of the students returned to their local areas and set up clubs themselves,
and, according to the nomination file, more than twenty-two clubs had been established
by 2004. This expansion has meant that the “club” (câu lạc bộ) has become the main unit
of revival.14
Although the Ford Foundation teaching program had a tangible effect on increasing
the number of people engaged in practical learning and performance, the tutors were
acutely aware of the limitations and potential dangers of the program. Due to the high
student–teacher ratio, teaching was done in large groups, and students had to play in
unison together. This meant that students mainly learned fixed versions of phrases with
little variation or improvisation. When I discussed the program with members of the Ca
Trù Thái Hà Ensemble, they stressed that much more time was needed if the students
were to gain sufficient experience and knowledge to deviate from the fixed versions
they had learned. A documentary about the teaching program made by Vietnamese
Television (VTV) shows the students performing the musical form “Xẩm Huê Tình”
in unison with eleven drummers, twenty-eight singers, and thirteen đàn đáy players
174 Barley Norton
(see Example 8.03 ). Although this version of “Xẩm Huê Tình” served the purpose of
bringing the students together in a final performance, such a performance with multiple
instrumentalists and singers has no historical precedent. Usually, this song is performed
with just one lutenist, singer, and drummer, as illustrated by a 1935 recording and a more
recent performance by the Ca Trù Thái Hà Ensemble (see Examples 8.04 and 8.05 ).
The large group performance of “Xẩm Huê Tình” by more than fifty musicians trained
on the Ford Foundation program precludes the possibility of a flexible, improvised per-
formance style that is an important feature of the small ensemble performances, and
it shows how new teaching contexts can result in changes to performance practices.
Concerns have also been voiced that the tradition will be “deformed” (bị biến dạng) by
students with insufficient skill and knowledge setting up clubs and teaching others in
their local areas (Lê Thị Bạch Vân 2008: 269).
Since the growth in the number of clubs that followed the Ford Foundation teach-
ing program, few new ones have been established. One exception is the Ca Trù Thăng
Long Club established in 2006 by an instrumental tutor at the Academy of Music, Phạm
Thị Huệ. This club received funding from 2006 to 2008 from the Center of Educational
Exchange with Vietnam (a subsidiary of the American Council of Learned Societies)
to teach ca trù to a group of students from the Music Academy. Esbjörn Wettermark’s
detailed study of the club discusses Phạm Thị Huệ’s pragmatic approach to teaching,
which combines her experience as a tutor at the National Music Academy with tradi-
tional methods of “immersion and apprenticeship” (Wettermark 2010a: 83). The club
has become a prominent part of the contemporary ca trù revival because of its regular
performances involving large numbers of students, its aim to produce “professional”
musicians through a systematic program of teaching, and the considerable amount of
attention it has received from the media. But it has also courted considerable contro-
versy and criticism from within the ca trù community, not least because Phạm Thị Huệ
established the club and began to teach ca trù just one year after she began learning the
đàn đáy lute.15
In another interesting development, the Ca Trù Thăng Long Theater was set up in
2009 with Lê Thị Bạch Vân as artistic director, and this provoked a public spat about
the closeness of the theater’s name to the Ca Trù Thăng Long Club (Thăng Long is an
old name for Hanoi). Aiming to attract domestic and international tourists, the the-
ater staged ca trù performances at the Revolutionary Museum in Hanoi. The publicity
brochure made the ethos of the theater clear with its strapline: “Ca Tru—Vietnamese
quintessence—World Heritage. Let’s preserve and develop it the sustainable way!”
When I attended some performances shortly after it opened, audience numbers were
small, and it turned out that the project was short-lived, closing down after just a few
months.
A notable feature of the Ca Trù Thăng Long Club has been its commitment to recon-
struct hát cửa đình. The club’s monthly performances at a village communal house in
Hanoi typically feature renditions of hát cửa đình repertoire, including dance pieces
performed by groups of female students (see Example 8.06 ). Drawing on the diverse
instrumental skills of the Academy students in the club, Phạm Thị Huệ has also set up
a bát âm orchestra to perform. The bát âm orchestra is quite distinct from ca trù tradi-
tions, yet Phạm Thị Huệ deemed it suitable for club performances because of its connec-
tions with rituals held in village communal houses, and she wanted to include it to create
a more appealing, diverse event for audiences (see Wettermark 2010b). The issue of
audiences is an important one for the revival, as many ca trù artists are disappointed by
the level of appreciation shown by audiences; for a performance to be “inspired” (ngẫu
hứng), it is necessary for musicians to develop a rapport filled with “sentiment” (tình
cảm) with the audience (see Norton 2013).16
An emphasis on reconstructing hát cửa đình has also been evident in the festivals
organized by the Vietnamese Musicology Institute in the lead-up to the UNESCO
nomination. In revivalist discourse, hát cửa đình is understood as a pure, ancient tra-
dition, untainted by the negative associations of hát ả đào performances in singing
bars. The fact that some hát cửa đình pieces can also be performed with a large num-
ber of dancers—even though much of the detailed knowledge about hát cửa đình and
the dances has already been lost—also makes them suited to festival performances in
large, proscenium-arch theaters like the Hanoi Opera House (Figure 8.3). Dances that
imitate the royal court dances of Huế imperial court music nhã nhạc have also been
drawn on to devise new hát cửa quyền pieces that are presented as faithful to tradition.
What we see in the staging of hát cửa đình and hát cửa quyền dances at festivals is a
reconstruction, and in some respects a reinvention of tradition, in a way that is designed
to impress Vietnamese and international audiences with the value of ca trù as “world
heritage.” Such modern festivals can themselves be viewed as rituals that promote cul-
tural identity through symbolic representations of heritage (Cooley 2006). Given the
plan outlined in the file submitted to UNESCO to organize more ca trù festivals and the
fact that numerous other festivals have sprung up across Vietnam since the 1990s, the
festivalization of hát cửa đình looks set to continue in future years.17
Understandably, given the endangered state of ca trù, the primary focus of revival
efforts has been on reconstructing “traditional” practices. Since the 1990s, however, a
small number of musicians have participated in a disparate collection of musical proj-
ects that combine elements of ca trù with other musical styles. New musical projects
have included compositions, popular songs, and experimental video works that incor-
porate ca trù influences.18 The syncretic approach of such works is not supported by
traditionalists, but some within the ca trù community argue that change and devel-
opment is important if ca trù is to be a living tradition, rather than a reproduction of
“museum” pieces from the prerevolutionary past. Here, I will briefly discuss a collabo-
ration involving the Ca Trù Thái Hà Ensemble, which I documented in the film Hanoi
Eclipse: The Music of Dai Lam Linh (Norton 2010). In 2009, the group Đại Lâm Linh, led
by the pianist and songwriter Ngọc Đại and the two singers Thanh Lâm and Dung Linh,
recorded their debut album, and three of the songs on the album feature members of
the Ca Trù Thái Hà Ensemble. For the recording, the singer Nguyễn Thúy Hòa and the
lutenist Nguyễn Văn Khuê performed sections from the hát ả đào musical forms “Gửi
Thư” and “Tỳ Bà Hành,” and these were integrated into Ngọc Đại’s composed songs
(see Example 8.07 ). Although the vocal melodies sung by Nguyễn Thúy Hòa retained
176 Barley Norton
FIGURE 8.3 Reenactment of hát cửa quyền dance, based on Huế royal court dances, at the
“Ca Trù Singing of the Việt People” festival in the Hanoi Opera House in 2006. (Photograph
by Barley Norton.)
key aspects of the distinctive hát ả đào vocal style, she changed her vocal phrasing and
percussion rhythms on the phách to suit the musical context, and Nguyễn Văn Khuê
improvised new phrases on the đàn đáy lute. Nguyễn Thúy Hòa also spoke about how
she adopted a different attitude when performing in a new context. Reflecting on her
performances, she remarked: “When I first practiced with Ngọc Đại I sang in a strictly
traditional way. Then I listened to how the other musicians expressed their thoughts
and feelings. So I started to express my own feelings through the medium of ca trù”
(Nguyễn Thúy Hòa, personal communication, 2009). Postrevival projects like the col-
laboration with Đại Lâm Linh are indicative of the willingness of some ca trù musi-
cians to move beyond strict adherence to tradition and to develop ways of performing
that engage with new forms of musical expression. Although innovation and change is
largely absent from debates about the ca trù revival (Norton 2008), prominent ca trù
musicians have already shown interest in postrevival experimentation, and this has the
potential for new musical directions to be pursued in future years.
Conclusion
Discourse on cultural heritage that emphasizes the importance of cultural forms in

the construction of national identity can easily overshadow different points of view
and potentially limit the proliferation of diverse approaches to revival. The UNESCO
criteria for the recognition of intangible cultural heritage refer to the importance of
the participation and involvement of communities, groups, and individuals, which
seems to suggest collective agreement. Yet cultural heritage policy emanating from
international and state-run organizations raises thorny issues concerning owner-
ship, control, and stewardship of musical traditions (Titon 2009), and, in the case
of ca trù, the nomination to UNESCO seems to have contributed to tensions and
rivalry between groups of performers. Although most musicians I spoke to acknowl-
edge that UNESCO recognition raises prestige and status, some voices within ca trù
circles are wary of the sudden increase in attention stimulated by the nomination
and are critical of the progress that has been made in developing a viable musical
culture based on high levels of proficiency and a deep appreciation and understand-
ing of music, dance, and literature. Some performers and aficionados fear that ca trù
will be damaged if training programs are not properly executed and low standards
of performance become the norm. Another often-voiced issue is the need for appro-
priate venues to be established that are suitable for appreciating ca trù traditions,
in addition to the village communal houses that currently host some hát cửa đình
performances.
In the new climate of UNESCO-driven and state-led revivalism, there is concern in
ca trù circles that deep, sustained appreciation for the ritual, musical, and literary aes-
thetics will be overshadowed by the appropriation of ca trù as a cultural symbol for
domestic and international tourist consumption. A danger of the current revival is
that ca trù will become an empty vessel filled to the brim with nationalist sentiments
and imbued with heritage, but lacking in other possible meanings relating to the his-
torical ontologies of ca trù. The weight of cultural heritage threatens to limit ca trù’s
musical and ritual meanings, to define its contemporary social relevance in primarily
nationalistic terms, and to make it more difficult for a vital, innovative musical culture
to emerge.
The two forms of ca trù that have been the primary focus of revival are hát ả đào and
hát cửa đình, with the latter being particularly emphasized due to its connections with
village rituals that are conducive to reconstruction on the stage and at festivals. Reviving
other historical manifestations of ca trù is hampered by the fact that much knowledge
about performance practices has been lost. Nonetheless, there is scope for imaginative
revival projects that are informed by historical research on ca trù’s diverse ontologies
and for initiatives to forge new styles that do not aim to adhere to historical precedents.
Establishing a sustainable, diverse, and dynamic ca trù musical ecology in contempo-
rary Vietnamese society is a process that (a decade into the twenty-first century) is only
just beginning, and it is not going to be an easy task. Yet it is a task in which musicians,
clubs, and audiences are enthusiastically engaged. The challenge for the government
and international agencies that have shaped the revival process is to facilitate a system of
stewardship that encourages diversity and participation, rather than seeing ca trù solely
as a resource for bolstering national identity and promoting Vietnamese culture on the
national and international stage.
178 Barley Norton
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy
for several research grants that have facilitated trips to Vietnam. I would also like to
express my heartfelt thanks to Nguyễn Mạnh Tiến and the members of the Ca Trù Thái
Hà Ensemble for their long-standing help and inspiration.
Notes
1. See http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/ for information about UNESCO’s Convention for
the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
2. The ca trù nomination file submitted to UNESCO and the reports of the two external
examiners (myself and Gisa Jähnichen) can be downloaded from http://www.unesco.
org/culture/ich/doc/src/ITH-09-4.COM-CONF.209-14+Corr.-EN.pdf#exam00029. For
other information about the UNESCO nomination of “Ca trù singing” see: http://www.
unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00011&USL=00309.
3. Historically, ca trù traditions were mostly found in northern Vietnam including provinces
near the central city of Huế. Some ca trù musicians lived in the Republic of Vietnam in the
south from 1954 until the reunification of the country in 1975, but ca trù performances do
not seem to have been popular in the south during this period.
4. Hát ca công refers to special rituals that took place in temples dedicated to famous ca trù
lineages. Today, ca công temples can be found in Thanh Hóa province (see Bùi Trọng Hiền
2006; Vũ Nhật Thăng 2006). Hát ca công and hát cửa đình are sometimes referred as hát
thờ, which means “singing for worship.”
5. The poetic text in Vietnamese is: “Thọ bôi kể chục, ca trù điểm trăm. Mừng nay tiệc ca trù
thị yến.” See Nguyễn Xuân Diện (2007: 72). For further discussion see Nguyễn Đức Mậu
(2010: 129).
6. Nhung Tuyet Tran’s research points out that terms such as đình ca, đình môn, and đình hát
were used to refer to music and dance performances in village communal houses in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that the term ca trù does not seem to have been
common at that time (Tran 2012: 142).
7. Nguyễn Xuân Diện (2007: chapter 1) provides detailed lists of the historical sources on ca
trù housed at the Sino-Vietnamese Institute in Hanoi. See also Đặng Hoành Loan et al.
(2006).
8. The literature expert Nguyễn Đức Mậu, for instance, has argued that the hát nói poetic
form evolved in response to the demands of ca trù musical culture (see Nguyễn Đức Mậu
1998 and 2010).
9. Trần Văn Khê’s anecdotal account of his trip to Hanoi in 1976 provides a fascinating insight
into Quách Thị Hồ’s attitude toward the recordings (Trần Văn Khê 1997).
10. The film was directed by Ngô Đăng Tuất (1984). For a study of contemporary ca trù perfor-
mance in the village of Lỗ Khê, see Anisensel (2009).
11. The song text in Vietnamese is: “Ô là vậy! Mưa hòa, gió thuận. Bể lặng, sông trong. Đã diệt
xong lũ kiến đàn ông. Nay vỗ cửa tôi xin Giáo trống.” This is a standard text that predates
the Vietnamese-American conflict. The same text (with slight differences) is documented
by Đỗ Bằng Đoàn and Đỗ Trọng Huề (1962: 92).
12. The film Nghệ Thuật Ca Trù features performances by the singers Quách Thị Hồ, Phó Thị
Kim Đức, Nguyễn Thị Phúc, and Nguyễn Thị Hào, and the lutenists Nguyễn Thế Tuất, Phó
Đình Kỳ, Đình Khắc Ban, and Chu Văn Du.
13. State-run organizations have coordinated a series of conferences and festivals since the late
1990s (e.g., Ca Trù Cổ Đạm 1998, Hanoi Ca Trù Festival 2000, Ca Trù Thanh Hóa 2005, Ca
Trù Singing of the Việt People 2006).
14. Much like in English, the idea of a club in Vietnamese suggests a group of people who come
together to share and support a common interest.
15. In the spring of 2010, Phạm Thị Huệ also received criticism for changing her “club” into a
“guild” (giáo phường). This was a highly controversial move because the term giáo phường
has deep historical associations relating to the transmission of ca trù and the distinctive
styles of performance that were developed in different locales. Many in the ca trù com-
munity consider this to be an abuse of the term’s historical meanings (see Wettermark
2010b: 30).
16. The issue of audiences has been further highlighted by the fact that, in 2011, both the Ca
Trù Thăng Long Club and the Hanoi Ca Trù Club started to perform several times a week
for tourists in the old quarter in Hanoi. Although such performances provide an important
income stream for the clubs, the predominantly foreign tourists who attend these perfor-
mances have usually never heard ca trù before, so have little understanding of the musical
style and performance conventions.
17. Since the UNESCO inscription in 2009, two national ca trù festivals have been orga-
nized in Hanoi by the Vietnamese Musicology Institute (one in 2009 and one in 2011).
Apart from these two festivals, however, at the time of writing (2012), no tangible progress
has been made on implementing the safeguarding measures outlined in the UNESCO
nomination file.
18. Such experiments include ca trù-influenced popular songs like “Chiều Phủ Tây Hồ” by
the songwriter Phú Quang, which was performed by the popular singers Thanh Lâm and
Tùng Dương with accompaniment on the đàn đáy lute by Phạm Thị Huệ in 2009. The
lutenist Nguyễn Mạnh Tiến has also composed new works like “Luân Hồi” (2009), which
draws on ca trù instrumentation and musical material. In France, the jazz guitarist Nguyễn
Lê and the singer Hương Thanh have set the ca trù song “Xẩm Huê Tình” over a bass
line on the gimbri (Gnawan three-stringed lute) and a sampled Malay drum loop on their
album Moon and Wind: New Sounds from Vietnam (Nguyễn Lê and Hương Thanh 1999).
Other examples include a video art work by the Ho Chi Minh-based artist Như Huy called
“Memories” (2009) (see http://vimeo.com/28609113).
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——. 2008. “Phục Hồi Ca Trù: Những Vấn Đề và Thách Thức.” In Kỷ Yếu Hội Thảo Khoa Học
Quốc Tế: Hát Ca Trù Người Việt, 175–180. Hà Nội: Viên Âm Nhạc.
——. 2009. Songs for the Spirits: Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
——. 2013. “Engendering Emotion and the Environment in Vietnamese Music and Ritual.” In
Performing Gender, Place and Emotion, edited by Fiona Magowan and Louise Wrazen, 29–
59. Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press.
Pham Duy. 1975. Musics of Vietnam. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois
University Press.
Ruggles, D. Fairchild, and Helaine Silverman, eds. 2009. Intangible Heritage Embodied.
New York: Springer.
Smith, Laurajane, and Natsuko Akagawa, eds. 2009. Intangible Heritage. New York: Routledge.
Seeger, Anthony. 2008. “Theories Forged in the Crucible of Action: The Joys, Dangers, and
Potentials of Advocacy and Fieldwork.” In Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for
Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (2nd edition), edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy Cooley,
271–288. New York: Oxford University Press.
Titon, Jeff Todd. 2009. “Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint.” The World of
Music 51 (1): 119–137.
Tran, Nhung Tuyet. 2012. “The Commodification of Village Songs and Dances in Seventeenth
and Eighteenth-Century Vietnam.” In State, Society and the Market in Contemporary
Vietnam, edited by Hue Tam Ho-Tai and Mark Sidel, 141–157. New York: Routledge.
Trần Văn Khê. 1962. La Musique Vietnamienne Traditionnelle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
——. 1997. Tiểu Phẩm. Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh: Nhà Xuất Bản Trẻ.
Vietnamese Institute for Musicology. 2004. Traditional Music in Globalization Context.
Hanoi: Vietnamese Institute for Musicology.
Vũ Nhật Thăng. 2006. “Âm Nhạc Ca Trù.” In Đặc Khảo Ca Trù Việt Nam, edited by Đặng Hoành
Loan et al., 110–159. Hà Nội: Viện Âm Nhạc.
Weintraub, Andrew N., and Bell Yung. 2009. Music and Cultural Rights. Chicago and
Wettermark, Esbjörn. 2010a. “Thăng Long Ca Trù Club—New Ways for Old Music.” Finnish
Journal of Music Education 13 (1): 72–87.
——. 2010b. “Shifting Mindscapes in the Vietnamese Historical Consciousness and its Impact
on Music Revivalism: Ca Trù and the Thăng Long Ca Trù Club.” Master’s diss., Goldsmiths,
University of London.
Discs Cited
Nguyễn Lê and Hương Thanh. 1999. Moon and Wind: New Sounds From Vietnam. ACT 92692.
Trần Văn Khê. 1991 [1978]. Traditional Music: Ca Trù and Quan Họ of the Socialist Republic of
Vietnam. Auvidis-Unesco D8035.
Films Cited
Norton, Barley. 2010. Hanoi Eclipse: The Music of Dai Lam Linh. Boston: Documentary
Educational Resources.
Ngô Đăng Tuất. 1984. Nghệ Thuật Ca Trù. Film company unknown.
C HA P T E R 9
T H E H U N G A R IA N DA N C E
HOUSE MOVEMENT AND
R E V I VA L O F T R A N S Y LVA N IA N
S T R I N G B A N D M U S I C
C OL I N QU IG L EY
The Hungarian dance house movement (táncházmozgalom) is frequently listed among

the many music revivals that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Ronström
1998).1 The first meeting of what was to become this movement was held on May 6, 1972,
in Budapest: a social dance gathering among members of four professional folk dance
companies based in the capital. Although there were precedents that led to this gather-
ing, it clearly marked the beginning of a new phase in the history of Hungarians’ engage-
ment with their musical heritage (Frigyesi 1996). The dance house movement shares
the common components of music revivals generally: the presence of core revivalists,
revival informants, a revival discourse, followers, activities, and associated enterprises
(Livingston 1999: 71). The dance house movement is distinctive, however, for a number
of reasons. Prominent among them are its intimate connection to dance, its national and
yet interethnic and multistate character, its integration of activism and scholarship, and
its rather centralized institutionalization. In this chapter, I examine each of these dis-
tinctive features in turn, paying attention to their musical consequences.
Much has been written about the movement since its inception, including mani-
festos from its leaders, the opinions of cultural managers and commentators, analyses
of academics, and the recollections of its founders. Much historical documentation is
available, thanks to a reflective and at times nostalgic turn among its leaders, often occa-
sioned by various anniversary observances of that founding event. (Several sources are
referenced in this essay, but see also Halmos, Hoppál, and Halák [2012]; Sebő [2007];
Siklós [2006]; Táncházhöskora [DVD, 2007].) A wealth of ephemeral materials may be
accessed through the Dance House Archive, housed at the Hungarian Heritage House
(Hagyományok Háza).2 This chapter utilizes a variety of these resources, along with my
The Hungarian Dance House Movement 183
first-hand observations, conversations, and interviews beginning in Los Angeles in the

mid-1980s, continuing through fieldwork in Romania during 1997–1999, residence in
Budapest in 2006–2008, and participation in the fortieth-anniversary conference held
at the annual Dance House Festival (Táncháztalálkozó) in 2012.
On November 12, 2011, “The Táncház method: a Hungarian model for the trans-
mission of intangible cultural heritage” was inscribed in United Nations Educational,
Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s list of “programmes, projects and
activities for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage considered to best reflect
the principles and objectives of the convention” (see http://www.unesco.org/culture/
ich/en/Art18/00515). What began as an urban youth phenomenon had become institu-
tionalized and internationally recognized for its success. Although it is often referred to
as a “revival” in English, I will generally use the Hungarian language term “dance house
movement,” which is both broader in the scope of activities it might encompass and
more open in how it might characterize attitudes toward the music/dance practice at
its core.
Between these two events (the inaugural Budapest meeting of 1972 and the UNESCO
inscription of 2011) lie forty years of a movement that maintains its engagement with
musicians and dancers in rural Transylvania whose practice provided inspiration and
from whom the movement’s founders took their model for that first dance house gather-
ing. During those same years, the movement spawned a network of enthusiastic partici-
pants among Hungarians in all the surrounding countries, among diaspora Hungarians
in Western Europe and North America, and among non-Hungarians there, as well as in
Australia, New Zealand, South America, and Japan. This far-flung yet closely linked and
networked community of practice shares affinity for an aesthetic that refers itself to the
traditional music/dance idiom of the Carpathian Basin (Quigley 1998).
Béla Halmos’ essay “The Táncház Movement” (2000) is the most accessible general
and first-hand account in English. He identifies táncház as “a form of recreation not
for some homogeneous Transylvanian village community, but for the very heteroge-
neous urban populations of Hungary’s towns and cities”; that is, as a kind of folklor-
ism (Halmos 2000: 33). The musicians organize dance house events, and a dance house
band usually manages a weekly event. These events are held in the city’s cultural cen-
ters, and an entrance fee supports the use of the facility. The number of Budapest dance
houses grew from two weekly in 1974 to “one or two táncház every day of the week” in
the 1980s—a high level of activity that continued, with some decline, up to the time of
his writing in 2000. There were provincial towns with weekly or monthly meetings as
well, and “60 or 70 táncház orchestras,” to say nothing of the folk singers, the solo instru-
mentalists, and the dance instructors engaged in related activities across the country
(Halmos 2000: 39). According to Halmos, “since the fees do not cover the expenses, the
operation of practically every táncház depends on state subsidies” (Halmos 2000: 34). In
2012, however, a common complaint to be heard among the leaders in a variety of insti-
tutions promoting traditional Hungarian dance and music was that “there were simply
no grants to apply for,” a situation perhaps marking a new phase in the institutional sup-
port for táncház (Éva Héra, interview, April 12, 2012, Budapest).3
184 Colin Quigley
The fortieth-anniversary dance house “jubileum conference and exhibit” in 2012 took
stock of the movement’s current state. Elders of the movement fondly recalled their hal-
cyon days, celebrated their successes, and called for a continued commitment to the
core values of the movement. Representatives from Hungarian minority communities
in all the surrounding states reported on its steady growth among them, as did repre-
sentatives from Germany, Canada, and Japan (Halmos et al. 2012). The movement was
centrally led by participants from its founding days, supported by a number of state and
civil organizations, and serviced by a full battery of ancillary commercial enterprises.
The challenge faced by its many enthusiasts at this time was how they might continue in
a self-sustaining way in the face of mounting economic crisis.
A Music/Dance Revival
Although this chapter focuses on dance house as a music revival, it is simply not pos-
sible to ignore its dance components because it is public participatory dancing that most
distinguishes the dance house movement from earlier periods in Hungarian folk music
interest (Frigyesi 1996). The transformations in folk music performance practice that
the movement ushered in are directly due to the needs of its dancers. The following brief
history of the movement thus includes music and dance, introduces key participants,
and notes important changes that took place, all the while focusing on those aspects rel-
evant to its distinctive features.
In common with other folk dance groups, the folk dance performance ensembles that
incubated what became the dance house approach had, prior to the 1970s, rehearsed
and performed stage choreographies to composed folk music pieces written and played
by schooled musicians. Indeed, rehearsals were usually held with piano accompani-
ment. The choreographies used folk dance steps within a theatrical dance presentational
framework. Dancers performed largely in unison or in large groupings moving through
floor patterns designed as audience spectacle. There was little room for individuality
in the dancing, much less any improvisation. These choreographies were set to com-
posed suites of folkloric music played by large ensembles of professional musicians in
an orchestral manner; they could also be, and often were, rehearsed and performed to
recordings. This was a style well known throughout the Eastern block countries that
owed much to Soviet models.
The dance house approach originated with a few of these ensembles at the end of the
1960s. One in particular, the Bartók Ensemble, under the direction of Sándor Timár,
was particularly committed to this new way of dancing, and it was the members of
this ensemble who established the first dance houses in Budapest between 1972 and
1974. Two musicians from the Bartók Ensemble, Béla Halmos and Ferenc Sebő (who
both went on to play for the first dance house meetings), led a change in music perfor-
mance practice concomitant with the dance. They began learning to play in what could
be called a social-dance functional manner, in the context of a shift in that ensemble’s
choreographic approach and concomitant dance training methods. To dance in this

natural way, to use their language, it was necessary for the music to be played in a spon-
taneous manner rather than from composed scores. The live connection of music and
dance, with musician and dancer performing together, facilitates the dancer’s creative
expression within the structure and aesthetic of the participatory dance idiom. Timár,
both choreographer and director of the ensemble, discussed this “music problem” in an
interview (Abkarovits 2002: 136). He explained that the ensemble had been using musi-
cians who played Hungarian folk music in a rather stereotypical, urban “gypsy” manner
based on classic recordings heard on the radio, a common practice among ensembles
throughout the 1960s. As an alternative, the group’s pianists suggested that they create
an ensemble of accompanists made up of student musicians from the Bartók Béla music
school. These musicians were trained in the Bartók and Kodály style of folk music com-
position, and they created arrangements in this style and then performed the music with
stage choreographies, thus producing a Hungarian folk association between music and
dance that was perceived as being more authentic.
Between 1968 and 1970, several things came together to change this practice. Timár
recalled encountering village “tradition maintaining” dance groups in the framework of
festival events sponsored by the Folkculture Institute (Népmüvészet Intézet). These fes-
tivals were part of a system of competitions and awards that established the status of dif-
ferent ensembles (Maácz 1981). At one such event, Timár relates, the Bartók Ensemble
played their composed music for a choreographic presentation of Szatmár dances and
“the villagers [from there] began to dance freely, completely naturally, and were a great
success” (Abkarovits 2002: 137). In contrast to the village dancers’ freedom, however, the
ensemble’s performance seemed “mechanical” and more like Western European-style
ballet. Timár decided to try this “natural dancing” style with his ensemble. Although
they started with the Szatmár repertoire, which they had already been performing, they
soon turned their attention to the music/dance of the Transylvanian village of Szék/Sic,
where Timár’s colleague György Martin and others had collected both music and dance
(Martin 1982). I will return later to dance folklorist and scientist György Martin’s contri-
butions to this project, which were to prove profound for the movement as a whole.
The Szék repertoire was appealing for several reasons, not least because the existing
collections of its instrumental music made by László Lajtha (d. 1963) were among the few
available sources of traditional instrumental dance music at that time. Sebő and Halmos
were not alone in having recourse to Lajtha’s transcriptions: in the Transylvanian city
of Kolozsvár/Cluj-Napoca, young urban Hungarian intellectuals also attempted to use
these transcripts before making connections with the traditional players themselves.
In Kolozsvár, many young people from Szék sometimes gathered to dance in a square
by the post office; the local dance house founders met there and began to dance with
these youngsters. Timár recalled that Szék villagers in Budapest were easily identifiable
by their distinctive dress; seeking models for his dances, Timár brought these villagers
to the rehearsals.
In the years leading up to their involvement with the Bartók Ensemble, Sebő and
Halmos had been following their own trajectory. The two young musicians knew each
186 Colin Quigley
other from their days with the symphony orchestra of the Technical University where
they had been students. As a duo—as Halmos related—they performed a variety of
folk songs with guitar accompaniment. Halmos had become well known as “the guitar
boy” on a televised singing competition program; he didn’t win, but he made a strong
impression and was very popular with the audience, who voted weekly for their favor-
ites. In addition to singing less well-known songs, he experimented with traditional
accompaniment, having been a violin player since the age of seven. Sebő likewise was
experimenting at that time, setting Hungarian poetry to guitar accompaniment and
composing for avant-garde theater (Béla Halmos, interview, April 5, 2012, Budapest).
Whether Martin invited them to his home after hearing them or it was suggested to
them that they seek him out as a source for such music, all sources agree that during
1969–1970 Martin introduced Halmos and Sebő to his Szék collections of dance and
music and, together with folklorist Lajos Vargyas, provided access to the archive at the
Academy of Sciences. Martin (as Timár’s friend and colleague) then brought the young
musicians along to the Bartók Ensemble rehearsals and, according to Timár, “the first
time we used ‘living music’ for the dances, we were very happy! After that we invited
them and they became our musicians” (Abkarovits 2002: 137).
The Bartók, however, was not the only ensemble to make connections with vil-
lage performers. In fact, it was the Bihari group that instigated the first dance house;
its leader, Ferenc Novák, had not only been to Szék but had also written a thesis on its
“dance life” (Novák 2000). As for other choreographers of the time, however, what mat-
tered was the impressions they took from seeing village dancing and how they incor-
porated these impressions into their own artistic visions. For most choreographers, the
focus was on theater dance, and their engagement with village traditional dancing was
brief. Dancers in these ensembles similarly found their satisfaction through stage per-
formance, not through the freer style of dancing as performed in the villages. It was the
Bartók Ensemble that made its mission the discovery of live dancing to living music, its
practice, and its presentation on stage.
The original dance house repertoire thus drew from the village of Szék, in the Mezőség
region of Central Transylvania. The music/dance idiom of this region is performed in
suites of changing rhythms and choreographic forms that are generally of increasing
tempo (Lortat-Jacob 1994: 109). The musical repertoire consists of locally known pieces,
together with melodies of wide distribution. The suites are performed to suit dance pref-
erences as they evolved in particular communities. As a result, melodies are often, in
the first instance, known by dance title together with a village name, by musician, or by
dancer. Even within one small area of adjacent villages, the subtle rhythmic differences
between shared dances and their music can be significant.
The music is played by string ensembles led by a prímás, playing violin, often with
supporting melody players. Bass instruments, usually somewhat smaller than the full
size orchestral bass and sometimes more in the cello size range, provide the underlying
pulse, while a three-string kontra of viola size provides chordal accompaniment and a
powerful off-beat pulse, as well as more subtle rhythmic shadings. Thanks to the expres-
sive possibilities of these bowed instruments, the rhythms distinctive to particular
communities—and even, in the case of the men’s solo dancing, individual dancers—can
be fully articulated.4
In Béla Halmos’ view, the dance house could not have happened without this
Mezőség music and dance repertoire; it was different enough from műzene (art music)
and vendéglői cigányzene (urban restaurant Gypsy music) to be interesting, yet not too
“primitive” for modern ears, unlike some other Hungarian music played in Romania
(Abkarovits 2002: 12). The dance cycles of Mezőség and especially Szék were ideally
suited for adoption into the new dance house setting. Participants danced freely; the
close interaction of the turning figures was appealing to young couples, and the solo
dancing appealed to the young men. Although not much remarked on in all the writing
about the heady early days of the movement, personal conversations with participants
from that era, and even casual observation of the contemporary “folk pub” dancing that
accompanies dance house festivals, confirms that socializing among young men and
women lends the dancing energy and excitement. For participants this was and prob-
ably remains the most immediate source of motivation and satisfaction. And this is what
animated dancing in Szék as well, where dance house events were purely the domain of
the unmarried young adults.
The skills needed to be an effective prímás in the social setting had to be learned at
first-hand from its masters. So, whereas Halmos and Sebő were introduced to the music
through recordings collected in the field, as aspiring practitioners, they quickly turned
to traditional musicians themselves for instruction—at first in Hungary proper, to the
leading prímás of a Romanian minority community, but very soon thereafter to the
prímás in Szék and to other musicians in Romania. This paradoxical turn to sources
outside of Hungary helps to account for the recurrent and continuing concern over
the “Hungarianness” of the dance house repertoire, the distinctive feature to which
I now turn.
The Politics of Identity: Dance House

and Transylvania
The changing political context of dance house practice is inescapably part of its his-
tory and is the theme that has most engaged social-scientific interest in the movement.
From its earliest days, its possibly national character has been a bone of contention. Sebő
tells us that when he and the other Bartók Ensemble members established the second
dance house in Budapest, at the Fövárosi Művelődési Ház (Municipal Culture House),
the director was worried that it might be in some way “nationalist” and therefore risked
being sanctioned (Abkarovits 2002: 176). Eventually convinced otherwise, he supported
the new activity. Concern continued to be expressed over the possible nationalist char-
acter of dance house activities, although its political connotation changed over time. In
the 1970s, organizers were worried that authorities might see dance house music as an
188 Colin Quigley
expression of national sentiment, undesirable in that socialist period. In the 2000s, con-
cern shifted to its potential right-wing connotation.
As early as 1972, we find the question of whether the dance house is or is not, should
or should not be, national framed in a different but equally important way in a text by
Sándor Csoóri titled “Mi kell a külföldieknek” (with the sense here of “What do foreign-
ers expect”) (1972: 19–20). Commenting on the reception of a Bartók Ensemble perfor-
mance abroad, Csoóri recalled the multilingual and cultured foreign director who said
of the Szék music, “It’s Romanian!” About the performances of two groups composed
of Romanians from within Hungary, he commented, “It’s as if we weren’t in Hungary.”
Obviously, Csoóri continues, this foreigner could have known “nothing of Mezőség
or old Somogy dances” or he would have realized how Hungarian much of the music/
dance in Romanian Transylvania was (Csoóri 1972 quoted in Sebő 2007: 20).
Csoóri’s discussion conveys perfectly the entanglement of the dance house repertoire
with ethnic-national identification. Although members of the Bartók Ensemble lead-
ing the early dance houses were willing to incorporate dances of varied origin as long as
they shared the core aesthetic, in performance, such ensembles are framed as ethnic (or
national) in character. Csoóri’s well-justified response to the comments cited, in which
he asserts the commonalities of the Hungarian and Romanian repertoire, is, however,
itself incorporated into a nationalist frame through the legitimation of the Romanian
Hungarian performance as being no different from the clearly Hungarian “old Somogy.”
This kind of nationalized perception of repertoire is not only one-sided. I was told, with
some outrage, by the director of the prize-winning Someşul Napoca Romanian ensem-
ble from Kolozsvár/Cluj-Napoca that they had lost first place in an international com-
petition because a foreign adjudicator judged their dance to be Hungarian, rather than
properly Romanian.
Mary Taylor’s 2008 dissertation, “The Politics of Culture: Folk Critique and
Transformation of the State in Hungary,” is the most comprehensive investigation of the
dance house movement in these terms. She thoroughly documents its uneasy relation-
ship with state bodies and their ambiguous attitudes toward it. Despite the stigma of its
unofficial status and a perception of it as perhaps dangerously nationalistic, many cul-
tural managers supported the cause and “struggled for its validation.” She further docu-
ments internal debates in these state bodies that argued for the value of dance house’s
socialist “community building” dimensions (Taylor 2008: 135; 150–151). A possible con-
tributor to its continued ethnic-nationalist association—and, one must say, occasional
flirtation with nationalist sentiment—that Taylor does not explore is the consequence of
its turn to the Hungarian minority villages of Transylvania for inspiration, models, and
material.5 This direction brought with it a stronger association with Hungarian identity.
Certainly, in Romania, dance house was intimately bound up with the expression of a
minority Hungarian ethnic identity.
It has been noted that although there are sources from within Hungary that played an
important part in shaping the music and dance repertoire and practice at dance houses,
the bulk of it was taken largely from Transylvania, across the border, in Romania.
Although travel was possible between these two Warsaw Pact states, the focus on
Hungarians that collectors, both amateur and professional, brought with them was not
a happy one for Romanian authorities. Going to Romania was always something of an
adventure before 1990, and much subterfuge, trickery, and misdirection were required
to bring equipment into the villages and recordings back to Hungary (Laszlo Felföldi,
interview, April 4, 2012, Budapest). More important, changing attitudes and policies
toward this minority not only affected access but also the national connotation of its
practice.
Debate over the “Hungarianness” of the Mezőség repertoire in particular focuses
on the Romanian-Hungarian divide. Paradoxically, the degree of its “Gypsiness” is
less often raised, despite the fact that almost all the source musicians are Rom.6 On the
ground in Romania, knowledge of one another’s dances across ethnic lines in mixed vil-
lages seems common. The music, perhaps even more so than the dancing, is so mixed
as to constitute a shared repertoire from which it is nearly impossible to separate out its
different ethnic components (Pávai 1993).
In Transylvania: Remote Borderland (2001), László Kürti examines the important
place of Transylvania in the national imaginary of intellectuals in both Hungary and
Romania. Both, he argues, located referents for their national identity constructions
in this periphery, displacing them to a place where those at the centers of power did
not have to confront the complex realities of life but were free to imagine them as they
wished. Folklore was an important touchstone in this process, as, of course, it has been
throughout the history of European nationalisms.
The region of Central Transylvania is an area of mixed population and rather scat-
tered settlement. There are ethnically Hungarian-only villages, Romanian-only vil-
lages, and mixed villages with differing ratios of Hungarians and Romanians together
with Gypsies. Village musicians who play professionally—that is, for hire—are gener-
ally Rom, although there are non-Rom musicians as well, usually in ethnically mixed
ensembles. The instrumental dance repertoire of the region is thus quite varied and
largely shared. Precisely because it is the most uniform interethnic repertoire to be
found throughout Transylvania (Kelemen 1998: 25–26), the contingency of its putative
ethnicity is particularly apparent.
In contexts of everyday sociality, the ethnicity of music/dance need not necessarily be
marked as such.7 In many social situations of village life that call for music and dance,
the participants are largely of one ethnicity, and there is no need to foreground that
identity. It is unmarked and taken-for-granted. It is not the ethnicity of the musicians
or dancers that is the most relevant determinant of musical form and style but rather
the cohesiveness of the dance community. In a social setting, music/dance performance
enacts the social relations that animate the occasion and contribute to their transforma-
tion. Use of the well-known local repertoire facilitates the performance of individuality
and individual relationships through improvisation.
In such local settings, relatively free of the constraints that come with a require-
ment to enact or display ethnicity, this domain is open to changes in musical culture
brought about by the opening of the Romanian media markets. New instrumenta-
tion, new styles, and new repertoire are easily adopted within these social occasions.
190 Colin Quigley
The most common ensembles use electric keyboards, guitars, and drum kits to support
the prímás. This allows the usually younger backing players to perform popular music
genres in sets that alternate with the traditional dance suites. This domain of everyday,
ethnically unmarked music making proceeds according to its own dynamic, in principle
independent of the highly charged domain of public ethnic display and elite national-
izing discourse.
This sense of everyday ethnicity exists together with the highly charged ethnicity of
public discourse. The most obvious nationalizing and ethnicizing of music and dance
occur in the gross appropriation of such performance by political spokespeople. The rhet-
oric is often much the same, regardless of which group is being referenced. To paraphrase
a Gypsy party spokesman at a Romanian Gypsy Friendship Society-sponsored concert
held at the Hungarian Opera House in 1997: “This music tells us that we have culture!
That our culture has value! As much or more value than anybody else’s!” The complexities
of the repertoire, ethnic or otherwise, are simply ignored by such opportunistic politici-
zation. A political message is slapped onto the performance. The sentiments of a speaker
from a Romanian-Hungarian minority party, for example, recorded in 1998 at the perfor-
mance of a visiting Hungarian ensemble from Budapest in a small Hungarian majority
village, exemplify the impact that what Brubaker calls “homeland nationalism” can have
(Brubaker 1996). The appeal to the sense of a “Hungarian nation” extending beyond the
borders of the Hungarian state is clearly articulated by this politician, in phrases such
as “This is Hungarian dance without borders.” Together with language and song, he
continues, dance shows that where there is dance such as that being performed, “There
live Hungarians!” Meanwhile, at a competition for Transylvanian “Trio” ensembles that
I attended in Gherla in 1998, under the auspices of Romanian cultural authorities, the
presenter instructed the audience to applaud these “diamonds of our Romanian culture.”
During the socialist era in Romania (1947–1989), so much of the support for cultural
performance was controlled by the state through cultural institutions that were explic-
itly charged with the imposition of the state ideology that nationalized music and dance
practically replaced the social forms I have been discussing. As elsewhere in the eastern
bloc, much of this style emanated from the Soviet Union, often in the guise of musicians
and choreographers who came to teach locals their techniques for constructing such
folklorism. Managers of the culture houses, found in nearly every village and directed
by county branches of the national Center for Popular Arts (Centrul creatii populare),
facilitated the penetration of ideologically informed performance models into even the
smallest communities.
The expressly “national” repertoire of ensembles in Romania, however, was drawn
largely from the southern region of Wallachia. The Transylvanian repertoire was never
a state symbol of choice. The closest approximation of this is seen in the imposition of
the state aesthetic of political symbolism on it. This produces unison, stylized male solos
in dance, and “folk orchestra” arrangements in musical performance. The freedom and
individuality espoused in the dance house movement was thus more starkly opposed to
official norms in Transylvania than in Hungary, where the “new approach” was adopted
into folk dance stage choreographies generally by the late 1970s.
Although the system that supported the ensemble form rapidly collapsed after 1989
in both states, institutionalized celebrations, competitions, festivals, and interpersonal
networks persisted in both Hungary and Romania. After all, their organizers remained
the people who found value in the preservation and promotion of traditional arts, even
if they had been forced to work within the system. The aesthetic legacies of the pre-1989
policies persisted more strongly in Romania as a consequence of the dance house move-
ment’s influence in Hungary, once again reinforcing the opposition between them. This
point would not be so important if it were not for the pervasive appropriation of music/
dance into ethnic-nationalist discourse in Romania and, by implication, to some extent
in Hungary.
I have written elsewhere on the broader theme of the politicizing of musical heri-
tage and of this string band idiom in particular (see Quigley 2001 and 2012), arguing
that central Transylvania is a region where two established nationalizing ideologies
have long been in contention over a music/dance tradition shared among three eth-
nic groups: first, a Romanian majority with a national ideology supported by institu-
tionalized state policies; second, a Hungarian minority whose national ideology draws
from Hungary and its institutions; and third, a Gypsy/Roma marginal minority (that
is itself rather diverse) with an emergent transnational ideology now in search of rep-
resentations in music/dance and institutional frameworks for their presentation. Thus,
despite the often unmarked and certainly not contentious character of everyday inter-
ethnic relations among those whose music/dance culture inspired and was taken up by
the dance house movement, the movement itself is subject to a continual nationalizing
pressure.
The intrusion of national ideology into the domain of traditional music and dance
was not limited to the official and unofficial social life of villagers. The world of scholar-
ship was hardly immune. Again, I have written in more detail elsewhere on the politi-
cization of ethnochoreology in Transylvania from both Hungarian and Romanian
perspectives (Quigley 2008). Romanian ethnomusicologist Marin Marian-Bălaşa drew
attention to this phenomenon in ethnomusicology in a contentious issue of the jour-
nal European Meetings in Ethnomusicology titled “Transylvania: Music, Ethnicities, and
Discord” (2002). Fellow Romanian ethnomusicologist Speranţa Rădulescu has written
that the “unequivocal delimitation (of Romanian from Hungarian music) was stimu-
lated by the nationalist-communist regimes in Bucharest and Budapest whose concern
was to demonstrate the specificity, anteriority and/or superiority of their respective
music,” so that, until recently, scholarship has continually reinscribed nationalist inter-
pretations on this music. Rădulescu asserts in her notes to the 2002 release of Romanian
and Hungarian Music from Central Transylvania that, to the best of her knowledge,
“so far the music of Romanians and Hungarians has been presented only separately
on record and in volumes or articles” (Rădulescu 2002). An extensive series of ethno-
graphic recordings (totalling sixty-eight CDs) published in Hungary between 1998
and 2010 also made a strong move in the direction of publicly representing the multi-
ethnic character of Transylvanian instrumental dance music. (See further Heritage
of our Future XX–XXI, http://utolsoora.hu/en/final-hour.) Nevertheless, a strong
192 Colin Quigley
separation persists, as reflected in several failed attempts to institute an intereth-

nic dance house in the Transylvanian town of Kolozsvár (for example, see Könczei
2004: 65–69). Whereas at the village level repertoire is both mixed and shared, it has not
functioned as common ground in the more ethnically marked dance house movement
context. This domain is clearly Hungarian.
Although dance and music scholarship is implicated in the ideological manipulation
of Central Transylvanian music/dance, its contribution to the dance house movement
is more fundamental and based on its nonideological, scientifically analytical approach
to the material. I turn now to this crucially distinctive feature of the dance house move-
ment revival.
Interaction with Scholars
Both the quantity and quality of preexisting documentation and scientific investiga-
tion of traditional dance and music among Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin were
extraordinarily high by the time the dance house generation encountered it in 1970.
Hungary was and remains unusual in the degree of scientific attention paid to tradi-
tional music and dance, even within Eastern Europe, thanks to the powerful legacy of
Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967)—a legacy carried on by the
Hungarian Academy of Science’s Musicology Institute (MTA Zenetudomány Intézet).
Indeed, the work of publishing the complete definitive collection of Hungarian folk
song heritage envisioned by Bartók continues to this day (Domokos 2011; Paksa 2011).
In a similar manner, publication of the dance material of the Archive has continued over
generations, building on the foundational work of György Martin. The young musicians
and dancers who were to spearhead the movement, however, knew little of this musical
storehouse.
Among folk music scholars, a younger colleague of Bartók, László Lajtha, was to have
a particular impact on the dance house music through the legacy of his promotion of
folk music, his leadership in producing the Pátria recorded survey of Hungarian musical
heritage (this 1942 series was re-released in 2007 as part of a collection edited by Ferenc
Sebő), his scientific work at the Museum of Ethnography, and his work as an important
field collector in his own right. According to Halmos and others, the only “traditional
village” music that they knew at the start was what they had heard on the radio, mate-
rial that owed much to Lajtha from his influence as Director of Music for Hungarian
Radio (Pávai 2009). Sebő recalls that it was on a program broadcast by Balint Sarosi that
he first heard music from Szék and suggested to Halmos that they learn it (Abkarovits
2002: 176). So, although the first dance house movement musicians had no direct con-
tact with Lajtha, what they knew of “village” music was largely through his work.
As we have seen, the early catalyzers of the movement were in close contact with the
established folk music and dance researchers of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences,
who, by and large, were supportive and helpful to them. György Martin, a charismatic
and prodigious dance collector and scholar, provided the initial personal connections
that the would-be revivalists needed to make with living practitioners—the “sources”—
who became their teachers. But, more importantly, perhaps, and apropos of the scholarly
influence in the revival, Martin provided a more direct link to this scientific tradition by
sharing his analytical insights into the dance and musical life of the villages. The dance
house activists’ efforts were, from the start, informed by a sophisticated understanding
of dance morphology and structure. Martin’s analyses of dance were moreover closely
linked to that of their accompanying music. The teaching methods that Timár used in
the Bartók Ensemble and later made popular with a wide public were carefully designed
in collaboration with Martin to transmit the knowledge needed by dancers to perform
competently, even at an elementary level, in the improvisatory social manner (Martin
1983; Timár 1999). The success of the dance house in this regard is striking. Transmission
of the skills needed by instrumentalists was slower to be systematized.
Returning to the moment of catalysis in 1972, one can appreciate how crucial the sci-
entific input was to the success and future course of the movement. The emergence of
an approach to teaching would seem to mark a crucial moment in the development of
revivals generally. Once the idiom in question is transplanted into its new setting, so to
speak, the traditional processes of transmission within a community cease to operate
and replacements need to be found. Differences in the revival practice and that of the
sources quickly appear. Dance house, beginning with a sophisticated approach to the
transmission of music/dance as social practice, was particularly successful at training
the “disciples” who went on to recreate the practice elsewhere.
Furthermore, it was largely Martin’s appreciation for village dance practice on its own
terms, as a complex musical/movement system with its own integrity and aesthetics, that
launched the dance house movement down what people like Béla Halmos now called
“the right path” (Béla Halmos, interview, April 5, 2012, Budapest). We have seen that the
Bartók Ensemble became so central to the dance house movement in part because of the
attitudes of the other dance troupes’ artistic directors and choreographers. Martin, how-
ever, although being an accomplished dancer with experience in high-level folk dance
ensembles, dedicated himself to understanding the artistry of the villagers’ dancing.8 He
shared this attitude with Timár, and together they instilled it in the musicians and danc-
ers of that ensemble.
Following on from initial interactions among Martin, Timár, Sebő, and Halmos, there
has been a continuing exchange between the scientific and practical spheres of work.
Many of the movement’s most influential figures chose to pursue higher degrees in eth-
nography or musicology. Halmos completed his diploma work with a thorough and
detailed analysis of the repertoire and technique of Szék prímás István Adám “Icsán”
(Halmos 1982). Sebő earned a music academy degree and collaborated in the production
of scholarly works such as the Bartók folk song collection (Kovács and Sebő 1991). István
Pávai, a founder of the Transylvanian dance house, has worked extensively as a collec-
tor, cataloguer, and analyst. László Kelemen, a dance house musician from Transylvania
who studied ethnomusicology in Kolozsvár, went on to lead the Hungarian Heritage
House as its director. The list could go on, continuing with younger examples such as
194 Colin Quigley
Csongor Könczei (son of Transylvanian minority culture activist Ádám Könczei and
younger brother of Transylvanian dance leader Árpád Könczei), whose dissertation in
ethnography on the social networks of Kalotaszeg Gypsy musicians appeared in 2011.
For a long time, the Hungarian Academy of Science’s Musicology Institute eschewed
the topic of revival, except under the rubric of folklorism, and considered revival prac-
tice outside its institutional remit. It has, however, gradually come to encompass such
research. Many, if not most, of its members have first-hand dance house experience,
value the applied work of their colleagues in this domain, and lend what support they
can. A project to make high-quality amateur field recordings available through the
internet is but one example. The theoretical arguments needed to achieve the UNESCO
recognition were largely the responsibility of this cohort.
Institutionalization
In the 1970s, Mary Taylor argues, the Hungarian state cultural authorities had a stake
in the work of the stage ensembles and so tolerated the amateur and recreational dance
house on the side. The Institute for Culture was particularly active and influential in
relation to the dance house movement (Taylor 2008: 144). It supported publication of a
small journal for the Sebő club and organized a dance house leaders’ course in 1976. This
two-year course met monthly, as well as in intensive summer training camps; Timár,
Sebő, and Halmos were the chief instructors.
This position of tolerance and intermittent support continued into the 1980s, as the
movement gained in size and respectability. After the multiplication of Budapest regular
weekly dances managed by the bands, summer camps became the next form of dance
house institution. The Sebő club held the first in 1975 and 1976, in connection with folk
architecture survey work (both Sebő and Halmos had been Technical University archi-
tecture students at one time). 1976 marked the first official Cultural Institute-sponsored
leader training camp, at which some of the first organized teaching of the skills needed
to play for social dancing took place. The first camp for dancers in general was the 1981
Jászberény Camp. Several of the established dance house bands then followed suit by
sponsoring their own camps; the camp sponsored by the Téka Ensemble, for example,
ran successfully from 1985 to 1999 (Taylor 2008: 163–165).
In addition to those camps that emphasized teaching, learning, and participation, a
second major institution developed in these years: the annual Táncháztalálkozó (liter-
ally Dance House Meeting, but usually rendered as Dance House Festival). First held in
1981, by the mid-1990s it drew 25,000–30,000 people yearly. This large organizational
undertaking brought together several groups under the umbrella of the Dance House
Chamber. In 1990, this became the Dance House Guild, which, in addition to coordinat-
ing the production of the annual festival, began to publish the quarterly FolkMAGazin,
organize an annual dance house “season opener” in the autumn, and organize the
Budapest Folk Festival. Importantly for the development of dance house music, the
Guild began to release yearly CDs for which the dance house bands applied and com-
peted (Taylor 2008: 165–167; István Berán, interview, April 11, 2012, Budapest).
The final steps that Taylor documents are the establishment of the Hungarian Heritage
House in 2001. Its English language home page describes it as follows:
The Hungarian Heritage House is a national institution founded in 2001 by the

Secretary of State for the Ministry of Cultural Heritage with the purpose of pre-
serving and promoting Hungarian folk tradition. The HHH is comprised of three
units, each of which contributes to this aim in its own unique way. Founded in 1951,
the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble is devoted to collecting the folklore treasury of
the Carpathian Basin and presenting it on stage. The Ensemble’s repertoire encom-
passes all genres related to folk tradition: historical music, authentic folk music and
dance, as well as world music and traditional-based contemporary dance-shows. The
“László Lajtha” Folklore Documentation Center aims to make the vast and precious
collection [of the] Hungarian folk treasury available to all who [are] interested in
it. The Documentation Center is accessible on-line as well as in hard copies at the
Corvin tér seat of the HHH. The Applied Folk Arts Department organizes courses,
conferences, dance houses and play-houses, as well as inviting applications, publish-
ing music and dance CDs and DVDs and judging works of contemporary applied
folk art. (http://www.heritagehouse.hu/, accessed November 19, 2012)
Taylor comments on the importance that leaders of the new Heritage House placed on
its status as distinct from the Institute for Culture, which might well have housed the
new initiative. The founders of the Heritage House, according to Sebő, who was once
again among the institutional leaders, wanted the state to acknowledge the importance
of its distinct mission: whereas the Culture Ministry follows a philosophy of “cultiva-
tion,” the Hungarian Heritage House values “heritage” (Taylor 2008: 167–170).
In her account, Taylor emphasizes the continuity of Hungarian cultural manage-
ment. She is right to counterbalance the tendency to starkly oppose the socialist and
post-socialist periods that is concomitant with an interpretation of the dance house
movement as an oppositional, countercultural, and anti-authoritarian youth move-
ment of the early 1970s. She documents much continuity in the cultural management
of the dance house movement with earlier periods and institutions of Hungarian cul-
tural management. One striking image of this is the continuous occupation of the same
building on Corvín tér in Buda by a succession of cultural “ministries” up to and includ-
ing the current Hungarian Heritage House.
Nevertheless, significant changes were brought about by the political, economic, and
cultural upheavals that followed 1989. New strategies within the institutional framework
supporting Hungarian traditional music and dance had to be found in the newly capitalist
and privatized world. Several civil organizations took over various activities of the Cultural
Institute: the Muharay Confederation for village-based tradition-preserving groups, the
Martin Foundation for amateur adult folk dance ensembles, the confederation of children’s
folk dance groups, and the Dance House Guild were among the most important.
If in Hungary the immediate impact of economic change was a reduction of resources,
in Transylvania the power of entrepreneurial capitalism was unleashed—not always
196 Colin Quigley
successfully but, over the following fifteen years, by and large effectively. The collapse
of the state-run folk cultural support system was even more sudden and catastrophic in
Romania for longstanding institutions like the big dance ensembles. Very few of these
managed to survive the transition. But, at the same time, the immediate appearance of
the dance house week-long summer camps and the cultural tourism they brought began
to establish new systems of support. Over time, these originally Hungarian initiatives
were successfully copied by communities less closely tied to dance house practice.
Music Revival and the Dance House

Movement
Having characterized some of the distinctive features of the Dance House Movement,
we may now examine in more detail the music revival that it fostered. This music is well
represented in several recording series (see the Web Resources file on the companion
website for links to representative examples). The examples that follow serve to docu-
ment the development of the musical scene, its participants, and their music for the pur-
poses of the final part of my discussion.
The dance house movement created a public for its live music that is estimated by the
Dance House Association to be about 200,000 in Hungary alone. This audience sup-
ports a not insignificant cohort of musicians that has grown steadily from those based
first in Budapest, then throughout Hungary, Romania, and elsewhere in the Western
world. As we have seen, the direct links between this burgeoning scene and the village
musicians in Romania whose music was being revived were at first quite limited. During
the later 1970s and 1980s, amateur collecting and dance house tourism, as documented
by Taylor, increased significantly. Since the early 1990s, it has become relatively easy for
those joining this cohort to meet musicians from the families of traditional village musi-
cians in Transylvania. In the Kalatoszeg region in particular, dance events are held in
community halls and are attended by locals, dance ensemble groups, and tourist groups
such as the group of American “education abroad” students that I brought to a crowded
event there in 2006. But occasions where locals, Hungarians, and internationals mingle
can be found in any of the Romanian regions with a significant Hungarian population.
Likewise, younger musicians from these regions, as well as long-established favorites of
the movement, travel freely to play throughout Hungary and further afield. The sepa-
ration between dance house musicians and village musicians is no longer as clear as it
once was.
The international dance house music network, including musicians from all along
this spectrum, has evolved its current range of practice largely within the frame of glo-
balization processes. The Hungarian ethnoscape and an associated aesthetic affinity
network of practice provide the primary routes from local to global and back (Quigley
1998). Musicians who operate within this sphere of action are primarily amateurs
(nevertheless highly skilled and professional in that sense) who play regularly for both
dance house events and performance ensembles.
The history of Hungarian folk music recording is a long one, stretching back to the
earliest such examples in Europe, Béla Vikár’s 1895 recordings. The public commercial
distribution of such recordings was largely fostered by László Lajta, notably in the 1942
Pátria series mentioned earlier. The first commercially released recordings to focus
on musicians of the dance house movement itself were the Hungaraton series, Living
Hungarian Folk Music. Muzsikás released an album of Táncházi Muzsika in 1974, and
others of the first dance house bands soon followed suit. Hungaraton also released a
number of albums in the Magyarorszagi Táncháztalálkozó (Hungarian Dance House
Meeting) series in cooperation the Országos Közművelődési Kőzpont (National Center
for Public Culture and Education); after 1989, the project was taken over by the now inde-
pendent Culture Institute (Albert Mohácsy, interview, April 13, 2012, Budapest). These
albums, the first of which was released in 1982, were compilations featuring musicians
playing at the annual Táncháztalálkozó festival. The 1980s recordings hold few surprises
among the featured bands and singers: the compilation from the Seventh Dance-House
Meeting Festival in 1988, for example, includes Márta Sebesteyén, Téka, Kalamajka,
Méta, Varsanyi, and Kalman Balogh (Országos Közművelűdési Kűzpont 1988). The
1994 release of the Thirteenth Festival reveals a few changes (Magyar művelödési intézet
1994). English-language notes are prominent, and the selections include dance tunes
identified as “Rumanian” and several Balkan songs. The 1995 release continues these
trends, featuring more extensive notes for the tracks (Magyar művelödési intézet 1995).
The series was later taken over by the Heritage House and renamed Táncház Népzene
(Hungarian Dance House—Folk Music) to distinguish it from the Új Élő Népzene (New
Living Village Music) series produced by the Dance House Association, which had
become responsible for the organization of the festival. Both series employ a “jury of
professionals” to evaluate recordings submitted by applicants.
For the New Living Village Music recordings, fifteen to twenty groups are selected
from some fifty or sixty applications. When the series began, Berán (Director of the
Dance House Association) noted that it was much more difficult for bands to make their
own releases. So, this series gave “the young musicians the opportunity to record in
good studio conditions, hear criticism of their music, get used to the recording process.”
In other words, the purpose was to support the professional development of less experi-
enced dance house ensembles. What guides the judges’ selection? According to Berán,
“Authenticity is the direction preferred; this is not particularly the place for arrange-
ments and new paths, ideas, fusions” (István Berán, interview, April 11, 2012, Budapest).
Several of the first dance house bands in Budapest professionalized early on and have
become institutions of their own: Muzsikás is best known internationally, but this is
true for others as well, whose members are often active in other leadership roles. Márta
Sebestyén is best known in this regard, having achieved a high profile after her “lullaby”
was used in the film The English Patient (1996). Her identification with this genre was
indicated by the title of her 2000 release, World Star of World Music. In the process of
producing for this consumer market, these groups have given their music the polish and
198 Colin Quigley
precision demanded of this commodity. A comment in the notes to a four-CD com-

pilation of world music in Hungary—that one of the breakthrough recordings of this
type, Muzsikás’ “Hidegen Fujnak a Szélek” (Cold Blows the Wind), has the “tightness
of a rock song”—is telling in this regard (Marton 2007: 11). Once launched down this
career pathway, musicians and their ensembles tend to experiment in ethnic-fusion and
cross-genre projects: Sebestyén performing a Hungarian-Irish combination, for exam-
ple, and Muzsikás appearing with classical musicians such as the Takács Quartet and
pianist Jenő Jandó.
In Transylvania, the influx of dancers, listeners, learners, and enthusiasts has had an
impact on the course of musical life there. Some of the Gypsy source musicians have
found a new public through the dance house network, notable among them Sándor
Fodor “Neti” who toured extensively as a professional folk musician, often performing
with colleagues from the professional revival bands. Iconic source bands, such as the
Kodoba family from Magyarpalatka/Pălatca, are represented by numerous recordings,
but seem to have remained in a more “ethnographic” presentational idiom. The more
recently successful village-based Szászcsávás Band might be placed in somewhat the
same category, although they have tended to move away from an ethnographic pack-
aging strategy, as can be seen in the cover of their Live in Chicago album (2000). The
younger members of these bands, sons and nephews of the leading musicians, are now
taking their elders’ place as a new generation who perform the older repertoire but also
have a wider range of musical experience and flexibility.
Two musical groups who featured at the 2012 Dance House Festival show a con-
sequent blurring of the source versus revival musician dichotomy and illustrate the
penetration and integration of the revived dance house music into the ongoing
development of the idiom in the villages. The Zerkula Emlék Zenekár are a group of
young people from the small mountain valley of Gyimes, remote from major towns.
All attend high school or university in Transylvania. They had musical training in the
nearest town but apprenticed themselves to one of the great local musicians, blind
prímás János Zerkula. They began playing at home for children’s balls but have now
begun to perform further afield and in adult contexts. They acknowledge the support
they had over the years from Balázs Vizeli, a fine Hungarian dance house fiddler who
also learned from Zerkula. Two talented dance house dancers from Hungary, Ferenc
Sára and his wife Zsuzsanna Varga, also settled in Gyimes in the late 1990s and became
very active in supporting and encouraging dance and music tradition in the area (see
http://www.phantomranch.net/folkdanc/teachers/sara_fz.htm). A second group at the
2012 Festival was the Csűrös Banda, a group of younger musicians from the region of
Kalotaszeg. They all have family ties to well-known musical families in the region and
play together with István “Kicsi Csipás” Varga, who gets separate billing as a virtuoso
descended from a better-known musical “dynasty.” A short musical biography reveals
how his musical life has been intertwined with the dance house presence in Kalotaszeg
and, with access to education unavailable, to his teachers in traditional music from
the earlier generations (Kovalcsik 2008). A somewhat older mentor, László Lengyel
“Türei,” a native of the Kalotaszeg region and veteran of the Transylvanian dance house
movement, has been “helping the band from the very beginnings and made them
known throughout Transylvania, Hungary and elsewhere” (Henics 2012). Many of the
tracks of their 2012 CD release Csűrös Banda: Kalotaszegi Népzene (Village Music from
Kalotaszeg) show virtuosic technique and innovations in the arrangement of dance
suites geared to a listening audience, but the CD also includes a live recording from a
dance event.
The Új Pátria Final Hour series of CD recordings released by the Heritage House with
the Fonó and support from the European Union and Norway Fund offer insight into
what is happening among village musicians in Transylvania. “The first objective,” we
read in the liner notes, “was to try to record the complete repertoire of Transylvanian
instrumental folk music” (http://utolsoora.hu/en/final-hour), thus the selection of
musicians focused on village musicians. This choice tends to favor older musicians,
those who have less exposure to schooled playing, and ensembles that maintain what
could be called a participatory dance-accompaniment aesthetic.
One finds, in the musical developments accompanying the career paths of
Transylvanian string-band musicians, strong evidence that the dance house move-
ment has, if not revived a moribund idiom, at least contributed to its continued prac-
tice. Könczei’s study of Gypsy musicians in Kalotaszeg concludes that while one pattern
of musical life is ending, another is surely taking its place (Könczei 2011: 192–197, 219–
221). In particular, the dance house movement’s commitment to maintaining a close
dance-music connection that was founded on and sustained by the vision of the ethno-
choreology researchers has provided a place for a participatory dance-accompaniment
aesthetic among the diverse musical worlds into which Transylvanian string band music
has found its way. In present-day Budapest, however, the trend is for young bands of
dance house musicians (several of them offspring of the first generation of Budapest
dance house musicians) to be hired to play mainly for listening in pubs where dancing
only happens if one or two dancers in a good mood happen to show up; although there
are still “classic” dance houses for adults (with dance teaching) and live music function-
ing weekly at three different community centers and at the Fonó Music Hall (Sue Foy,
personal communication, May 19, 2012).
Critical writing on the dance house movement emphasizes some of the often
unacknowledged contradictions that plague music revival projects, among them
ethnic-nationalist associations, moribund institutionalization, loss of musical function-
ality, and conflicts among revivalists, academics, and sources. Analysis of their conse-
quences is seen to expose the ideology of revival for what it is. This chapter likewise has
addressed these issues as specific to the consequences of revival for Transylvanian string
band music. I am led, though, to a rather different conclusion. A sustained commitment
to the core participatory social-aesthetic experience that sparked the movement among
its founders and their success in creating a durable social institution, the dance house,
for its practice demonstrates the appropriateness of its UNESCO designation as a model
for the “safeguarding” of this music-dance idiom. The discontents of its social and cul-
tural positioning are of course inescapable. The persistence of its participants may, how-
ever, manage to sustain it. An often-heard comment first made by Sebő captures the
200 Colin Quigley
dance house movement attitude toward Transylvanian string band music: “We didn’t
save the music, the music saved us.”
Notes
1. I have chosen to use English versions or translations of common Hungarian titles and
terms throughout. Translations into English are my own. My thanks go to my family, many
colleagues, and those who have helped me in Romania and Hungary in particular.
2. My thanks to the archivist Bakó Katalin for her help in finding and sending me several
ephemeral sources.
3. Interviews were facilitated and conducted by Sue Foy, who also provided translations.
4. The details of this musical repertoire and its performance are thoroughly examined in
Virágvölgy and Felföldi (2000).
5. Taylor does note that the Transylvanian dance house movement “deserves a dissertation in
its own right” (Taylor 2008: 162). Könczei (2004) goes some way to answering this need.
6. On the paradoxical place of Rom musicians in the dance house movement, see Hooker
(2006).
7. On the concept of “everyday ethnicity,” see Brubaker (2006).
8. Martin’s great work in this domain can be found in his comprehensive study (2004) of one
dancer’s “dance knowledge.”
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Discs Cited
Csűrös Banda. 2012. Kalotaszegi Népzene /Village Music from Kalotaszeg. Compact disc. Magyar
Hagyományok Háza, Győr—Alapítvany.
Magyar művelödési intézet. 1994. Táncháztalálkozó ’94. 13th Hungarian Dance-House Meeting.
Cassette tape. MMi MK 001.
——. 1995. Táncháztalálkozó ’94. 14th Hungarian Dance-House Meeting. Cassette tape. MMi
MK 002.
Muzsikás Együttes. 1974. Táncházi Muzsika. Compact disc. Hungaraton HCD18037 197.
Országos Közmövelödési Központ. 1988. VII. Magyarországi táncház találkozó Antológia.
Cassette tape. Hungaraton MK 18152.
Romanian and Hungarian Music from Central Transylvania. 2002. Compact disc. Ethnophonie
CD 005.
Sebestyén, Márta. 2000. World Star of World Music. Compact disc. Hungaraton HCD 37979.
Sebő, Ferenc, ed. 2007. Pátria: Magyar népzenei gramofonfelvételek. (Gramophone recordings
of Hungarian folk music on 1 CD Rom: 1210 songs, sheet music, lyrics, photos and info.) CD
Rom. Budapest: Fonó Budai Zeneház-Fonó Music Hall FA-500–33.
Szászcsávás Band. 2000. Live in Chicago. Compact disc. Thermal Comfort CD.
Táncház höskora. 2007. DVD. Hagykományok Háza HH01.
A supplementary bibliography with recommendations for further reading and an anno-

tated guide to web resources (including extensive databases of archival recordings) can
be found on the companion website. (See Further Reading and Web Resources. )
PA R T I V
NAT IONA L
R E NA I S S A N C E A N D
P O STC OL ON IA L
FUTURES
C HA P T E R 10
NAT I O NA L P U R I T Y A N D
P O S T C O L O N IA L H Y B R I D I T Y
I N I N D IA’ S K AT H A K DA N C E
R E V I VA L
M A RG A R ET E . WA L K E R
In the course of the twentieth century, India moved decisively from British colony to
independent nation-state to emerge as one of the world’s global powerhouses. Through
these shifts in governance, the arts, and in particular the performing arts, have emerged
as international cultural markers, representing an energetic and creative new nation
with a magnificent and venerable past. Music and dance, however, exist within their
societal contexts, reflecting and reinforcing the values and norms surrounding them.
The adoption of certain performance genres as quintessentially Indian cultural treasures
therefore necessitated that they, like the emergent nation they would represent, adjust to
new circumstances, new patrons, and a new role. This process of artistic adjustment in
the mid-twentieth century is widely acknowledged as a cultural revival, a reclamation of
Indianness in the wake of centuries of occupation. Literature on music and dance com-
monly calls the period leading up to independence in 1947 a time of “cultural renais-
sance,” “regeneration” (Bhavani 1965: xvi), or even “resuscitation” (Singha and Massey
1967: 27), during which the arts were resurrected and rejuvenated (see also, among many
others, Banerji 1982; Sinha 2000; Vatsyayan 1974). Rescued from a supposed period of
decline due to foreign influence and control, dance in particular was seen as an ideal
representative of India’s ancient and Hindu past, offering a pure and essentially spiritual
way of connecting with cultural mores and traditions uncontaminated by West Asian or
European contact.
Yet, suggestions that aspects of the performing arts may have been reconstructed as
part of the revival process are still often met with little tolerance from performers them-
selves. When I began in the 1990s to study kathak, the classical dance of North India,
and was told that I was learning a dance of ancient temples and devotional practice, it
206 Margaret e. Walker
initially never occurred to me that this might not be so.1 As my research went on, how-
ever, I realized that all was not as it seemed, choreographically, historically, or socially,
and eventually built up substantial evidence supporting an alternate history that refuted
much of what is disseminated as the story of kathak dance (Walker 2014). My journey
from belief in the purity of the dance’s ancient roots to a type of shock and consequen-
tial righteous indignation about its potential inaccuracy is not unique. This disaffection
with supposed impurity of alleged ancient traditions can range from disappointment
to denial (as in the “defensive attitudes” experienced by Tamara Livingston in reaction
to her work on the Brazilian choro revival; see Livingston 1999: 78). In academia, it can
also result in a hesitation on the part of scholars to engage with this aspect of research
at all. One of the particular difficulties in accepting that the Indian classical performing
arts were reconstructed as they were reclaimed during the early twentieth century is that
so much of their identity rests on their being ancient and timeless and thus genuinely
“Indian.” Not only does the connection to ancient artistry offer a sense of confidence
in the art’s authenticity, the identification of the various genres of music and dance as
“classical” sets them apart from the modern and the innovative; to consider much of
what we are studying, as performers or scholars, as effectively “new” would mean having
to reassess the entire aesthetic framework. Furthermore, revivals, as Livingston points
out (1999: 68), have occupied an ambiguous position as legitimate areas of study until
recently, an observation particularly true in Indian musicology. Those of us prepared
to engage in critiquing the revised histories of Indian dance still feel a need to defend
our position, either by linking the critical voice to indigenous heterodox thinking
(Chakravorty 2008: 189–190), appealing to the reader’s observation of historical para-
dox (Walker 2004: 229), or drawing attention to the beauty of the dance, its “creative
potential beyond the imagined ritual fiction” (Lopez y Royo 2007: 173).
Once one moves beyond the perception that discussion of cultural change somehow
contributes to a denigration of the dances, however, the emergent issues offer reward-
ing avenues of enquiry. The shift from colonial to postcolonial nation and the effects
of modernity and globalization have affected Indian performing arts as they have pro-
foundly affected Indian society, and South Asian postcolonial scholars such as Bhabha
(1994), Gandhi (1998), and Gupt (2008) openly discuss India’s multiple transforma-
tions. There is also now a growing body of scholarly work on Indian music (including
Allen 2008; Bakhle 2005; Kippen 2006; Qureshi 1997; Subramanian 2006; Weidman
2006) and dance (for example, Chakravorty 2008; Lopez y Royo 2007; Meduri 2005 and
2008; Soneji 2004, 2008, and 2010) that offers substantial critical analysis regarding the
revival, its privileging of ancient origins, and its resultant revision of histories and iden-
tities in the performing arts. These studies move towards an approach that embraces
revival as part of an inevitable process of change that has always been an integral part of
each genre of music or dance’s character and charm. Accepting the normalcy of revival
may also lead to the acceptance of reconstruction as an “authentic” part of traditional
performance practice. Furthermore, the examination of revivals in postcolonial con-
texts such as twentieth-century India should offer insights into broader questions of cul-
tural change through the multiple societal shifts that accompanied the move to political
INDIA’S KATHAK DANCE REVIVAL 207
autonomy. Identifying what is uniquely Indian or what might be seen as characteristi-

cally postcolonial will potentially lead towards a fruitful comparison of revivals on a
global scale.
Colonial Past and National

Future: Revival and Restoration
Before moving on to any evaluation or possible expansion of revival theories, it is use-

ful to understand kathak’s particular revival in the context of Indian independence and
nationalism, and the nation-wide music and dance revival. The end of British imperial
rule in India and the accompanying cultural repossession took place after a complex his-
tory involving centuries of exchange and influence. Periods of Muslim rule in North and
central India began in the late 1100s and led to six hundred years of Indo-Islamic inte-
gration that gave rise to a rich syncretic culture with distinctive architecture (including
the famed Taj Mahal), literature, and music. The decline of centralized administrative
control in the 1700s, however, left a power void that the British were eventually to fill.
European presence in South Asia had evolved from the curiosity of explorers in the 1500s
to the ambitions of powerful trading companies who were by the 1700s vying for control
of the fabled “riches of the East.” British interests in India, originally centered in Kolkata
(Calcutta), expanded through the subcontinent in these years. Eighteenth-century rela-
tions between Indian rulers and the officials of the British East India Company were
mixed, with violent clashes and broken treaties contrasting with sincere exchanges of
refined behavior and mutual interest in trade. By the early 1800s, however, the policy of
“Orientalism,”2 which encouraged British administrators to learn Indian languages and
cultural norms, was giving way to a policy of “Anglicism,” which focused on teaching
English to Indians and recognized little of value in anything indigenous. In 1858, after
the First War of Independence (or Sepoy Mutiny), an act of British parliament shifted
political and military control of India from the Company to the British crown and
marked the beginning of the Imperial colonial government called the Raj.
But in the structure of the Raj lay the seeds of its eventual destruction. In order to
administer this part of the empire, especially after decades of Anglicism made knowl-
edge of Indian languages and customs rare, the British needed to create a layer of indig-
enous bureaucrats to mediate imperial control of the Indian population. Sent to Britain
for higher education, multilingual, and armed with both European and Indian intel-
lectual traditions, this increasingly empowered middle-class formed the basis of the
independence movement, Congress Party, and “quit India” campaigns. They also initi-
ated a gradual reclamation of Indian identity and sense of cultural pride that grew from
localized intellectual and artistic movements like the Bengali literary renaissance of
the 1800s to culminate in the founding of national institutions like the Museum and
Archeological Survey. Interestingly, the British Orientalists had left a tangible legacy
through their interest in ancient languages, architecture, and Hinduism, and signifi-
cant parts of the cultural restoration were built on these foundations. This substantial
past, wherein Sanskrit was easily as sophisticated as Classical Greek and the great epics
Mahabharata and Ramayana surpassed the Iliad and the Odyssey in length, revealed an
India that was the equal if not the superior of Europe. As ancient indigenous literature
was translated and published, sculptures and paintings were studied and displayed, and
palaces and ruins became protected monuments, a surge of interest in Indianness and
a subsequent sense of national dignity became a characteristic of the freedom-fighting
mood. Yet, the focus on antiquity, although providing nationalists with a culture to be
proud of, also contributed to a pro- or neo-Hindu philosophy and encouraged activ-
ists to evade the complex realities of colonial and postcolonial culture (Chatterjee 1993;
O’Shea 2006; Sen 2003).
The process of reclamation in the performing arts grew out of these political and
philosophical roots and took place in the fertile context of nation building. Just as
the larger cultural revival based itself on foundations of ancient, indigenous achieve-
ments, the performing arts needed also to link their contemporary manifestations to an
untainted Hindu past, one that was “pure, distinctive, and unaltered by colonial hybrid-
ity” (O’Shea 2006: 169). Artistic reformers explored a range of means including using
music and dance descriptions from the newly accessible Sanskrit treatises, adopting
movements and postures inspired by temple sculpture, and connecting existing practice
to elite Hindu devotional traditions. Yet, contemporary performance practice in both
North and South India presented realities that contradicted this vision of purity. To this
day in North India, most hereditary musicians with substantial lineages are Muslims,
a social fact that continues to compromise the ideals of indigenous Hindu tradition.
South Indian music and dance practices, although not supposedly influenced by West
Asian or Muslim culture, often have quite humble roots with little connection to elite
practice. Non-Brahman and indigenous Dravidian traditions in the south and Muslim
traditions of the north were thus both marginalized or subsumed into the national-
ist agenda (Kippen 2006; Qureshi 1997; O’Shea 2006; Soneji 2004). In addition to the
musicians’ class affiliations, the gender of most dancers also posed a problem for the
reformers. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the twin influences of Victorian prudery
and eventually Edwardian suffrage gave rise to a series of organizations and movements
advocating improvements to the position of women in Indian society. The “Wrongs of
Indian Womanhood” (originally the title of a publication by the wife of a British mis-
sionary) became a rallying point as both British and Indian reformers turned to the
plight of child brides, widows, and prostitutes. Hereditary female singers and dancers
were ranked among the latter, and became symbolic of the deterioration of the perform-
ing arts under occupation and colonialism. The reclamation of “pure” Indian arts, so
necessary in the process of rebuilding national esteem, could therefore not be accom-
plished without first removing or somehow controlling the “impure” in their contempo-
rary reality.
Chief among these impurities was the exotic spectacle of the “bayadères” or danc-
ing girls (Figure 10.1; Figure 10.01 on companion website ). These so-called “public”
FIGURE 10.1 “A Nautch” by Mrs Belnos. © British Library Board. From: Twenty four plates
illustrative of Hindoo and European manners in Bengal. London: Smith and Elder; James
Carpenter and Son (1832?). Shelfmark 1781.b.18.
women, now most often called devadasis (temple women) or tavayafs (courtesans), were
members of a variety of social groups in which the performing arts were both a liveli-
hood and a way of life. Although their sexual activities ranged from open prostitution
to discrete and monogamous relationships with a single patron, all hereditary women
performers occupied a liminal position in “respectable society.” As they by and large
did not marry, they could not be legitimate wives and mothers in the patriarchal social
structure, yet as they also could never be widowed, they and their performance practices
were often seen as auspicious (Lopez y Royo 2007; Soneji 2004). As performing art-
ists, these women were often renowned and played significant roles in the development
and preservation of both North and South Indian music and dance. Their artistic skill
and status, a societal position closer to the role of the geishas in Japan than anything
in contemporary Europe, were completely misunderstood by the British, who saw all
female entertainers as prostitutes. Using the term nautch, from the Hindi word nach
(dance), for all types of dances, and “nautch girl” for all classes and categories of female
performers, they essentialized performers and performances into one stereotypical and
disreputable social category (see further, among others, Bor 1986/1987; Post 1989; Rao
1990 and 1996).
This telescoping of several complex social layers of people and activities into one
homogeneous group facilitated its vilification and rejection. The “anti-nautch” move-
ment, which began at a public meeting in Madras (now Chennai) in 1893, combined the
forces of both British and Indian reformers and gained momentum across the country.
Political leaders and socialites were requested to cease their patronage of events where
dancing would be performed, and men were asked to take personal pledges that they
would never visit the establishments of courtesans. Hereditary female performers were
thus censored and eventually silenced. By the early decades of the twentieth century,
the refined world of the North Indian courtesan was almost gone, and the culture of
the South Indian devadasi was going underground. The most musically accomplished
hereditary female performing artists ceased dancing and became “amateur” singers.
Others found new places in society by marrying and retiring from performance. Yet
others slipped into poverty and prostitution. A final blow was dealt in 1947 when one
of the first Acts of the new Indian Parliament was the passing of the Devadasi Abolition
Bill banning the dedication of girls to temple service (see, among others, du Perron
2007; Forbes 1996; Maciszewski 2001; Rao 1996; Sundar 1995).
The same decades during which the hereditary female performers were pushed to the
margins of society saw the music and dance revival gain momentum. Indeed, it can be
argued that the revival of dance in particular was made possible in large part through the
disenfranchisement of the hereditary women. Acceptance by the educated, bourgeois
classes who both led India to independence and were also central players in the cultural
reclamation necessitated distancing the performing arts from this context. The move
away from the courtesan’s salon was further facilitated by the interest shown in Indian
performing arts by Western dancers like Anna Pavlova, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn.
This short period of choreographic exchange gave rise to the modernist European
genre of “Oriental Dance,” the original choreographies of Uday Shankar (Erdman 1995
and 1998), and a new performance context, the proscenium stage. Validated by atten-
tion and imitation from the West and performed in a context free from prior associa-
tions, dance was thus gentrified as it was revived, and the separation of dancing from
sexuality allowed it slowly to become a respectable pasttime and eventually a career
for middle-class girls and young women. The initiators and constructors of the music
revival were largely men, and included highly educated reformers like Rabindranath
Tagore, Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, and Vishnu Digambar Paluskar. The dance
revival, on the other hand, was largely the result of female effort and agitation, and the
establishment of dance training in institutions with formal curricula was by and large
the work of upper- and middle-class women (Meduri 2005; Walker 2010a).
The processes of institutionalization, gentrification, classicization, and varying
degrees of Sanskritization were generally characteristic of the revivals of all Indian
classical dance genres. In the context of what Janet O’Shea terms “neo-Hindu metro-
politan nationalism” (2008: 173), kathak, kathakali, bharatanatyam, manipuri and
eventually kuchipudi and odissi all moved onto the urban proscenium stage and into
schools offering formalized training. Through this shift, each dance’s choreographic
repertoire was modified through cleansing it of connections to the performing arts of
hereditary women or lower caste entertainers, emphasizing connections to Sanskrit
treatises, and creating new repertoire based on treatises, temple sculpture, and Hindu
ritual. Its presentation was then further adjusted in order to communicate effectively
from Western-style stages into large halls. The first institutions for teaching these new
traditional dances were set up by the revivalists themselves, most often to train perform-
ers for their own dance troupes. The choreographic material, musical aspects, and nec-
essary physical skills for performance were then organized into progressive curricula,
most often created by the female, non-hereditary reformers who founded the schools.
These curricula functioned both to train professional dancers and to legitimize the
dance by offering certification and graduation diplomas. This in turn contributed to
classicization through the adoption and dissemination of codified performance stan-
dards. Just as music festivals and conferences had played an important role in the slightly
earlier classicization of music (Allen 2008; Bakhle 2005), dance festivals and symposia
then continued the process set in motion by the schools and performance companies.
One final feature in the revival as a whole has been the construction of revised histories,
explanations that reinforce classicization by connecting current dances to the ancient
past while distancing them from lower castes, sexuality, or foreign influence.
It is limiting, however, and probably inadvisable, to attempt any further analysis of the
Indian dance revival depending on generalizations. The details of each dance genre’s his-
tory differ enough that one would need to insert constant qualifications. Furthermore,
research into the revisions that accompanied the dance revivals is emergent and ongo-
ing, with scholars such as Alessandra Lopez y Royo (2007), Avanti Meduri (2005 and
2008), Davesh Soneji (2004 and 2008), Janet O’Shea (2006, 2007, and 2008), and Pallabi
Chakravorty (2006 and 2008) producing thought-provoking and substantial work on a
variety of dance styles and contexts. I will now turn to my own research into the history
of kathak dance, which offers a particular case study through which to examine not only
the issues of tradition and authenticity that seem common to all revivals, but also ques-
tions of class, gender, and embodied authority that perhaps speak more specifically to
the Indian context.
Kathak: The Classical Dance of

North India
Kathak dance today is a virtuosic genre performed in professional productions by

highly trained dancers. Although the dance is in many ways more suited to smaller ven-
ues, most performances today by star dancers and musicians take place in large the-
aters and concert halls (Figure 10.2; Figure 10.02 on companion website ). The dance
is said to have originated as a solo form; learning the repertoire and dance items that
FIGURE 10.2 Birju Maharaj and musicians at the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s Golden Jubilee
Festival. © Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi, India.
make up the “traditional kathak solo” still comprises the majority of dancers’ training
and although kathak dance performances today more commonly present original cho-
reographies and group productions, these new works are still largely based on the solo
dance material. The kathak solo includes short and often quite vigorous dance composi-
tions closely related to the North Indian drumming repertoire, rhythmic footwork, and
dazzling sequences of swift spins executed on the left heel. This dynamic repertoire is
then contrasted with graceful, quite sensuous movements executed for the most part
in the upper body, hands, and arms. Enhanced by alluring glances and facial expres-
sions, these flowing gestures are used in the slow numbers that begin the presentation
and in narrative sections that illustrate poetry or tell stories. In a solo performance, the
dancer strings these individual sections and items together, gradually building in speed
and intensity. In the hands of a great dancer, the flow from one number to the next will
appear seamless and the gradual increase through the solo matches a similar progres-
sion of tempo in classical music performances, but the range of moods, movements, and
gestures still stands as witness to the dance’s syncretic origins.
As discussed above, kathak is one of six or seven Indian dances identified as “classi-
cal,” all of which moved onto the professional stage and into the public eye during the
first half of the twentieth century. This period between roughly 1920 and 1960 is the
revival or renaissance of Indian dance, when these dances underwent a process of clas-
sicization involving institutionalization and varying degrees of reconstruction. Kathak
seems to stand apart as it was by and large not re-choreographed as other “classical”
dances were and thus largely does not conform to the postures and gestures found in
treatises or sculptures. On the contrary, since it is the dance of North India, where elite
culture was formed in the courts of the imperial Mughals, kathak is in part the choreo-
graphic and aesthetic descendent of West and Central Asian cultural forms. Another
unique aspect is that the dance is historically associated with a caste of hereditary men,
rather than women, who are themselves called Kathaks, sharing their name and iden-
tity with the dance itself.3 Kathak did, like the other revived dances, become classicized
and institutionalized largely through the efforts of middle-class female reformers and
its history was (re)created in order to conform to the revival’s expectations of ancient-
ness and purity. Yet, in spite of kathak’s shift to large cities like Delhi and Mumbai in
the mid-twentieth century where it became part of the curricula of national music and
dance schools, authority over the style has by and large remained in the hands of the
Hindu clan who call themselves Kathaks. The widespread belief among dancers and
many scholars that kathak originated in the devotional story-telling activities of ancient
performers also called Kathaks, however, supports the revivalist agenda, distancing the
dance from its more immediate roots and connecting it with the ancient and Hindu past.
Multiple Roots, Multiple Histories
The connection of today’s North Indian dance with Vedic narrative traditions, while
typical of revivalist South Asian performing arts history, is rather difficult to verify.
Rather than the descendent of an ancient performance practice, as the revisionist nar-
rative claims, the dance now called kathak is much more probably one current mani-
festation of a process of ongoing artistic change and exchange that has been part of the
North Indian cultural landscape for hundreds, if not thousands of years. There does not
seem to be any single identifiable tradition or dance from the remote past that is the
clear ancestor of contemporary kathak, but rather a number of streams and contexts
with varying degrees of association. Descriptions of rhythmic footwork, spins, and
expressive gestures that are very likely the ancestors of today’s dance can be found in
treatises dating from as early as the 1200s, yet none of these dances are called kathak or
performed by people called Kathaks (Walker 2010b). It is only by the mid-nineteenth
century that the hereditary performers called Kathaks come into view and descriptions
of dances bearing quite close resemblance to today’s kathak appear.
A number of these emerge in the performance practice of the courtesans. As dis-
cussed above, the artistry of hereditary women singers and dancers was central to
Indian cultural continuity and their presentations as court performers or indepen-
dent artistes in their own salons contained unique repertoire and a distinctive style.
Certain items in kathak seem clearly descended from this context; perhaps the most
striking is the rendering of the evocative song genre thumri with fetching glances, ges-
tures, and mimetic dance, but a number of other repertoire items and many of kathak’s
characteristic postures can also be traced to the dance of hereditary women in past
centuries.4 Another related stream of influence comes from the hereditary male per-
formers who taught the women and provided rhythmic and melodic accompaniment
for their performances. These musical families, organized in biradaris or endogamous
clans, are usually identified as Mirasis, who are Muslim, or Kathaks, who are Hindu (see
Neuman 1980). Both the rhythmic compositions and footwork in kathak dance can be
connected to this heritage, although crossovers (for example, a young courtesan danc-
ing a rhythmic piece) must have been common. A third root of kathak dance comes
from the rural theatrical profession. Although not clearly described in the historical
record, many rural members of the Kathak biradari today are involved in various types
of presentations involving dramatic mixes of words, music, dance, and acting (Walker
2006). These range from devotional activities like kathavachan, expressive story-telling
enhanced through a mixture of song, gesture, and rhythmic movement, and Ram
Lila, the enacting of the story of the Hindu deity Ram, to secular theater genres like
Nautanki, in which men dress as women. Yet another type of devotional theatre, Ras
Lila, which presents stories and scenes of the Hindu deity Krishna’s childhood, con-
tains dance movements and sequences directly related to material in kathak dance.
The actors and musicians who currently perform Ras Lila do not claim to belong to
the hereditary Kathak clan, but there is some data in the literature that suggests that
they might (for example, Banerji 1982: 63; Natavar 1997: 147fn and 154). Many other folk
styles and genres share elements with kathak dance such as footwork or spins, which
indicates a relationship with a movement vocabulary characteristic of North Indian
performance at large rather than a unilinear descent from a single temple tradition.
In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a series of political and social
shifts combined to bring aspects and items from these various performance practices
together to form a single dance, eventually called kathak, in a process that culminated
with the genre’s legitimization through the revival. In particular, as hereditary women
and their performance contexts were marginalized through the anti-Nautch movement,
a gradual separation of music and dance took place. Courtesans who were able to pur-
sue careers in the new world of classical performing arts focused on singing and ceased
to dance or even gesture. In North India, their retirement from the world of dance left
their repertoire, movement vocabulary, and expressive gestures solely in the hands of
their accompanists, the hereditary Kathaks.
Yet, the Kathaks had effected a change of their own in the nineteenth century.
Upwardly mobile at least since the late 1700s, the Kathaks had by 1900 accomplished
what is called a caste shift. Such changes in status, usually precipitated by some kind of
economic gain, allow a part of a lower caste to dissociate itself from the rest of its original
group. With the adoption of a new name and thus a potential new identity, the emergent
group can then cultivate higher social standing, including adopting more refined behav-
iors, sophisticated ritual practices, and eventually a revised history that supports their
new place in society (Pandian 1995). Although it is difficult to pinpoint when the group
adopted the name “Kathak,” the Kathaks as a caste can be observed gradually climbing
through the categories of the British census reports. In one of the earliest surveys from
1832, the Kathaks are described as singing and dancing masters, and enumerated among
the humblest caste groups, the shudras (Princep 1832: 485). In 1872, they “affect to be high
caste” (Sherring 1974: 273–274), then by 1885 are identified as Brahmins whose ancestors
used to perform in temples (Nesfield 1885: 44–45). Today, the Kathak biradari is dis-
persed across north-central India and includes dancers, singers, musicians, and actors
who perform both secular and devotional folk theater. Their identity and status seems
as varied as their specializations: Some members of the biradari identify themselves as
Brahmins, while some do not; some call themselves “Kathaks” and others do not. Yet,
there is no controversy regarding the endogamous structure of the group at large, and
there is an interesting fluidity and interchange between the various performance pro-
ficiencies and the rural and urban groups when it comes to both musical training and
marriage. While there is nothing that conclusively or even vaguely connects the Kathak
biradari to ancient Vedic narrators of sacred books, its flexible nature has absorbed this
identity as smoothly as it adopted others through the past centuries.
Kathak: A Classical Dance
Thus by the early twentieth century, the “dance of the Kathaks” comprised a type of jux-
taposition of the footwork and rhythmic repertoire that was part of the male practice,
some of the theatrical traditions still practiced by parts of the biradari, and the expressive
dance-songs and graceful movements of courtesan performance. It was the revival that
would fuse them together. By the 1930s, a few last centers of private patronage existed,
but as music and dance were adopted as expressions of Indian pride and nationalism,
the future lay in Kolkata, Mumbai, and especially Delhi. As their previous livelihood
accompanying courtesans continued to decline, the hereditary Kathaks began migrat-
ing to large cities to take advantage of new opportunities. Elite female cultural reform-
ers like Nirmala Joshi and Sumitra Charat Ram established institutions like the Delhi
School for Hindustani Music and Dance, founded in 1936, and the Sriram Bharatiya
Kala Kendra, originally founded in 1949 as the Jhankar Music Circle, and hired heredi-
tary Kathak dancers to teach dance to young women from respectable families (Khokar
1998). These institutions and others that followed provided a fertile ground for another
series of exchanges as hereditary male musicians and dancers worked side by side teach-
ing this new generation of non-hereditary middle class male and female students. After
independence, the new Indian government provided scholarships to bring promis-
ing students to the new national arts institutions, thus facilitating the transmission of
these cultural treasures to the youth of the new nation. Institutionalized and validated,
the “dance of the Kathaks” thus became kathak dance, one of the classical dances of the
newly independent ancient nation.
The cultural revival in India had as much to do with linking to the ancient and Hindu
past as it did with reclaiming cultural practices marginalized or debased by the British.
Kathak dance, historically and physically, posed some problems. Its reputation linked
it to mujra, the dance-shows of the red-light districts, and its use of subtle gestures, a
swaying upper body, and inviting eye contact evoked the sensuous performances of
the courtesans. Furthermore, the Kathaks, who shifted from their role as teachers
and accompanists of the hereditary women to become teachers of the non-hereditary
women, remained the authorities of the dance, inextricably linked to it by name as
well as expertise. The revival of kathak and its positioning as a classical dance needed
therefore to be as complex as its origins. The repertoire, movement vocabulary, original
contexts, and the role of the Kathak community all had to be gentrified, yet also tied
together in a way that connected dance and dancers to a Sanskritized past.
The rhythmic or “pure dance” repertoire did not pose any particular problem socially,
although the question of its origins and secular nature needed to be addressed. The mate-
rial connected to courtesan performance, however, required a more creative approach.
Much too integral a part of the “dance of the Kathaks” to be omitted (and arguably too
attractive and substantial a dance style to be discarded), the suggestive dance songs and
their seductive movement vocabulary had to be distanced yet further from their original
context and intent. First of all, the movements themselves were curtailed. Instructions
in nineteenth century treatises tell the dancer to keep a constant, flowing movement
through her body; sixteen body parts including the buttocks, breasts, eyebrows, and
hands are to be kept in fluid motion (Khan 1884: 161). In the urban kathak classes of the
1940s and 1950s, however, the young female students were constantly admonished not
to move their hips while dancing, and the movements of the upper body became refined
into a subtle swaying called kasak-masak. The performance practice itself was also pur-
posefully modified. Whereas the courtesan performer would present her dance songs
while seated, singing and gesturing to her audience, then subsequently rise to dance,
the non-hereditary female performers of the twentieth century only danced and did
not sing, and some, like Dayamanti Joshi, made a point of never performing expres-
sive dance while seated as a courtesan would have (Lakshmi 2004). Furthermore, the
new setting in Western-style concert halls that separated performer and audience also
reinforced the dance’s gentrification by minimizing the effect of facial expressions and
alluring use of the eyes.
Although kathak did not generally adopt the “temple stage” and its symbolic connec-
tions to an ancient Hindu past as bharatanatyam did (Meduri 2008), its transformation
nevertheless included some Sanskritization. Early kathak performances in the 1930s
and 1940s were often group choreographies based on Hindu epics and mythologies.
Some, like those of Leila Sokhey (better known by her stage name, Madam Menaka),
used the repertoire in the hands of the male hereditary Kathaks (Joshi 1989), but many
other presentations, like those of Ram Gopal (Gopal 1957; Shah 2005) or the vast Ram
Lila programs at the Sriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra (Khokar 1998), freely mixed kathak
vocabulary with “Oriental” and other emergent dances. The older dances of both hered-
itary men and women were thus reinterpreted, rather than re-choreographed, and
Sanskritized through association with ancient literature rather than through imitation
of ancient sculptures or treatises. Furthermore, some of the scholarship students in the
1950s and 1960s were highly educated young women who were already experienced per-
formers. Faced with the somewhat jumbled assortment of dance styles cobbled together
as kathak, they set out, with the approval of both their hereditary teachers and the cul-
tural reformers, to organize its presentation both on stage and in the classroom. It was
Maya Rao, the first scholarship student of hereditary Kathak guru Shambhu Maharaj,
who established the order and progression of dances in the now “traditional” kathak
solo (Khokar 2004). She and Reba Vidyarthi, who came to Delhi soon after, both played
key roles in developing teaching material and curricula leading to exams and diplo-
mas, which in turn lent credibility to the institutions, the dancers, and the dance itself.
Moreover, Rao with her guru’s approval created new choreographies to Sanskrit verses.
These vandanas, shlokas, and stutis, named after the poetry and prayers they interpret,
are now considered some of the most “traditional” items in the kathak solo. Rao and
Vidyarthi also used Sanskrit terminology in their classes, applying the names of gestures
and postures from the third-century treatise Natyasastra to the hybrid dance they were
disseminating (Figure 10.3; Figure 10.03 on companion website ).
Yet, the culture-makers of the mid-twentieth century needed to do more than fuse
past and present on the stage and create a coherent pedagogy for the classroom. If
kathak were a substantial, classical dance (and there remained lingering controversy, as
expressed in Banerji 1942, that it perhaps was not), then it must have some roots, some
origin, that predated the Mughal courts and the courtesans’ salons. Some dancers, like
Maya Rao and her classmate Rina Singha (Singha and Massey 1967), immersed them-
selves in the libraries and archives of Delhi, searching the Sanskrit treatises for the dance
they were learning. Other post-independence writers, while admitting that there was
little in the treatises, nonetheless made a point of asserting that kathak dance’s essen-
tial character was Hindu and devotional, sometimes resulting in strings of conditional
phrases that attempted to link the dance with music, religion, and the temple:
If the dance suggested by the Keertanas [devotional songs] is constructed out of the
details given in them, it will be the classical dance that is Kathak. And if the Kathak
dance is to be viewed in the light of Vaishnavism, it will seem to be essentially a tem-
ple dance with Radha and Krishna as its principal deities.
(Vyas 1963: 7)
The suggestion that kathak originated as a temple dance fitted in nicely with the broader
template of the Indian dance revival and can, like the caste shift in the census reports,
be traced as it emerged in the mid-twentieth century literature (Walker 2004 and 2014).
Kathak, it is now stated, had its genesis not in the performances of courtesans, or rural
actors, but in the activities of the ancient Kathakas, “originally a caste of story-tellers and
rhapsodists who were attached to temples in certain regions of North India” (Khokar
1984: 132).
The received history thus traces kathak dance from its devotional birth in the Hindu
temple and the narrations of the Kathakas, through a shift to a more secular style as
it supposedly migrated to the Mughal courts sometime between 1500 and 1800. The
dance subsequently is said to have lost any remaining decency as it was adopted and
corrupted by the “nautch girls.” Finally, in the mid-nineteenth-century court of an
FIGURE 10.3 Reba Vidyarthi teaching at the Kathak Kendra, New Delhi in 1993. © Sangeet
Natak Akademi, New Delhi, India.
enlightened patron, a few hereditary male Kathaks (who were perhaps not surpris-
ingly the ancestors of the gurus teaching in Delhi) are claimed to have resurrected
the dance by returning it to its former devotional intent, although not necessarily its
original choreography (see, among many others, Khokar 1984; Singha and Massey
1967; Srivastava 2008). The link between dance and dancers (kathak and Kathaks)
itself became part of history, as searches through Sanskrit treatises and epics revealed
performers referred to as “Kathakas.” Since the word kathak is a cognate of the Hindi
word katha, which means a story or a tale, to call oneself a Kathak is thus to state
that one is a story-teller or narrator rather than a musician or dancer. Furthermore,
katha and its root word kath (to tell or to narrate) are derived from Sanskrit and the
Sanskrit noun Kathaka indicates a narrator or expounder of sacred tales and books.
This etymological relationship has provided both dancers and scholars with a way to
connect kathak dance with an ancient devotional past and simultaneously to distance
the Kathaks from other hereditary musicians and dancers (Walker 2010b). Although
a few authors point out that the connection between the ancient story-tellers and
present-day hereditary performers has never been substantiated (see Banerji 1982: 9),
generally the development of today’s kathak dance from this narrative beginning is
considered common knowledge with no need for further research or even references.
Yet, how could this ancient tradition be “revived”? Not only are whatever gestures
the “ancient Kathakas” might have used undocumented but a single performance
practice associated with people called Kathakas arguably never existed. What is
officially “authentic” or “pure” kathak dance is therefore left up to the authority of
the central families of hereditary Kathaks, who are today considered the owners of
the dance. These hereditary dancers, however, are as involved with creativity and
innovation as any non-hereditary dancer, and this has given rise to a situation in
which what is “authentic” is often simply what the family leaders say is authentic,
and what is “inauthentic” is merely that which conceivably threatens the hegemony.
Authenticity and purity, central to revivals of all sorts, thus rest on aural rather than
written authority and in some ways have become as hybrid and fluid as the identi-
ties of the hereditary dancers and the dance itself. The “revival” of kathak therefore
can be argued to be a process of colonial and postcolonial fusions rather than the
resurrection of a lost art form. Yet, the creation of a unilinear history to support the
revival and attendant telescoping of the past in support of “the practice’s timeless-
ness, unbroken historical continuity, and purity of expression” is characteristic of
other revivalist discourses (Livingston 1999: 69; see also Bohlman 1988) and is one of
several features shared with other revival cultures.
Caste, Class, and Shifting Centers

of Power
One of the most central of these shared features is the observation made by Livingston
that “music revivals are middle-class phenomena,” created and maintained by “mid-
dle class people in consumer capitalist and socialist societies” (Livingston 1999: 66).
Revivals ostensibly involve the rediscovery or reclamation of performance styles linked
not only to the past, but also to a sense of past purity, authenticity, and legitimacy. Yet, the
process of revival by necessity remakes the arts as they assume forms and manifestations
suitable to their new performance contexts. Thus, revival also involves the commodi-
fication and objectification of music and dance as these “pure and traditional” styles,
whether garnered from ancient documents or current rural practitioners, are gentri-
fied, formalized, and eventually standardized. The revived art forms are then reinforced
by dissemination through festivals, schools, recordings, publications, and eventual
government support with middle-class enthusiasts as primary creators and consumers
(Baumann 1996: 76–79). This is, of course, precisely what happened in the Indian cul-
tural revival where middle-class activists were the core of the nationalist movement and
its attendant cultural reclamation. Middle-class male reformers collected, transcribed,
and systematized the repertoire of hereditary musicians, while middle-class women
played key roles in the institutionalization and classicization of dance. Ongoing gov-
ernment patronage in the form of national institutions like the Sangeet Natak Akademi
has guaranteed the continuity of the revived performing arts as national treasures and
international symbols.
The Indian government’s essential role in the maintenance of the revived arts reflects
not only their cultural centrality in the nation’s identity, but also a status uncharacteristic of
most Euro-American revivals. The national performing arts of India, it has to be remem-
bered, are considered “classical” music and dance genres. While there are certainly govern-
ments of other nations that sponsor “folk” festivals or archives of traditional material, such
projects are generally separate from the funding of symphony orchestras or ballet schools.
Although in the movement of repertoire from hereditary to non-hereditary practitioners
and from former feudal centers to modern urban contexts, Indian music and dance under-
went an exchange similar to the process of “feeding music from the margins into the cen-
tre,” from “working-class people of very little means” to “urban and suburban middle-class
people with relatively greater education and more disposable income” as described by
Rosenberg (1993: 5), this is only part of the story in India. It is tempting to equate the “main-
stream versus authentic” paradigms that frame many folk revivals (see Livingston 1999)
to the opposition of colonizer and colonized, but in India, the revival became the main-
stream and indeed had that goal from its inception. After serving as “cultural opposition”
(Livingston 1999: 67) to the Raj, the classicized performing arts became the cultural center
of independent India and their revised histories became the country’s hegemonic narrative.
In the case of kathak, the practitioners themselves also moved from the margins to the
center, physically by migrating to the capital city of Delhi and other large urban locations,
and personally through their caste’s gentrification and Sanskritization. The Kathaks’ cur-
rent position as the authentic bearers of the dance tradition bearing their name is a type of
embodied authority that stands in some contrast to other standards of authenticity. What
is, or is not, kathak is defined by the leaders of the Kathak families and their own innova-
tive work quickly becomes “traditional” as it is disseminated. The Kathaks’ ownership of
the dance is further supported by the obedience and deference students are expected to
show to their gurus, and by the oral rather than textual dissemination and authority that
are characteristic of North Indian music and dance at large (Chakravorty 2008; Neuman
1986). Yet, the current stylistic hegemony is itself largely a product of colonial and postcolo-
nial social forces. The embodied authority of the Kathaks began with the caste shift, which
was facilitated by the British census reports and then finally validated by the revival as the
non-hereditary reformers sought to connect the dance of the Kathaks to a remote and devo-
tional past. These issues of caste and class with their shifts between margin and center thus
seem to go far beyond the characteristic oppositions of revival to contemporary culture,
which privilege tradition over modernity and historical purity over contemporary synthesis.
Conclusion: Thoughts on Postcolonial
Revivals
The dance revival in India thus shares many characteristics with other revival cul-
tures including middle-class participation, institutionalization, gentrification, and
commodification. It has also included the creation of a revised history that links the
reclaimed arts to an ancient, pure, and indigenous past, is strongly associated with
nationalism, and played an important role in building cultural pride and identity during
and after the struggle for independence from Britain. The Indian revival provided cul-
tural opposition to the Raj and supported the political opposition of the independence
movement. Yet, this “oppositional character . . . common to all revivals” (Livingston
1999: 97) swiftly disintegrates into multiple oppositions and hybrid dichotomies in the
postcolonial Indian context. Furthermore, in India the revival has become the main-
stream and in large part, through its claims of ancient, indigenous authenticity, has
become hegemonic. What was marginal is now central and this shift has comprised
people as well as artistic material. Although aspects like the caste shift and the various
attempts to link music and dance to treatises from thousands of years ago may seem
uniquely Indian, the larger issues of social mobility, boundary crossings, and shifts in
control are potentially representative of broader trends, particularly in postcolonial
revivals.
Cultural reclamation as part of freedom struggle and postcolonial nation building is
not only characteristic of India. In many postcolonial contexts, in addition to foster-
ing national identity and self-worth, the process of classicization also filled a defensive
role, providing a reconstructed cultural character “fortified against charges of barba-
rism and irrationality” (Chatterjee 1993: 127). This was effective in large part because the
philosophical roots of the revivals, including the construction of the nation-state and its
cultural canon, were based on the intellectual ideals of the European colonizers (Moro
2004). Orientalist visions of ancient, timeless cultures combined with Romantic notions
of nationhood were part of the intellectual world of Europe in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Although not all cultural reformers pursued educations in Europe
like the instigators of the Indian independence movement, blended ideas about high
culture, ancient purity, and national essence were widespread in those parts of the globe
under colonial control. Also, as European-style schooling was common within the
occupied countries themselves, the adoption of curricula, exams, and diplomas as the
arts were institutionalized was also due to the colonial context.
National reclamation, ancient roots, and classicized arts thus all need to be under-
stood within the multifaceted context of forced cultural exchange characteristic of post-
colonial societies. To claim that Indian music and dance were essentially untouched by
the British presence (as in Khokar 1998: 15) is as inaccurate as to argue that the revived
dances were simply the product of Orientalist and colonial influence. I have presented
kathak dance above, not as the inexorable heir to an ancient temple tradition as it is
claimed to be, but as a syncretic genre that fused into a single dance in the early decades
of the twentieth century and was subsequently authorized and classicized through its
adoption by the nationalist revival. The emergence of the “dance of the Kathaks” has
been a hybrid process, involving identity shifts and choreographic exchanges spanning
two centuries. This same period, between the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth cen-
turies, also saw the rise of the British Raj, the freedom struggle, independence in 1947,
and postcolonial nation building in the decades that followed. Postcolonial scholars like
Bhabha (1994), Chambers (1994), Gandhi (1998), and Roy (2007) have drawn attention
to the inevitable multinational collisions and resultant fusions that are part and par-
cel of colonial occupation and postcolonial resistance and rebuilding. In the struggle
for independence, however, the emphasis of racial and cultural difference becomes
as important to the colonized as it is to the colonizer. This articulation of difference,
according to Homi Bhabha, “is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize
cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation” (Bhabha 1994:
2). Precisely how various types of multicultural hybridities are authorized and under-
stood, however, is dependent on the historical moment that defines them. While in
today’s global and transnational world we often embrace the idea of syncretism as inclu-
sive and dynamic, in colonial contexts any publicly acknowledged blending would have
most likely led to a “contaminated or mongrel status” (López 2001: 5). For any builders of
national culture under the yoke of colonial domination, the inescapable hybridization
of the recent past needed to be denied or minimalized. In India this was done by con-
necting to a past that was both ancient and Hindu, thus purifying the present’s contami-
nated arts by removing any stain of foreign influence.
It is easy to place kathak’s hybrid elements in this framework. The identifiable cour-
tesan, Kathak, and Sanskrit performance items in kathak are the descendents of the
dance’s multiple roots, strung together into the “traditional kathak solo” through the
process of the revival. The Kathaks’ identity shift, although not entirely dependent on the
colonial setting, was documented by the colonizers and thus more easily legitimized in
the revised history. The removal of the hereditary women from legitimate performance
practice was, on the other hand, entirely due to colonial attitudes and social reforms.
The revival itself, while sharing characteristics with other revivals, cannot be removed
from the context of freedom-fighting and postcolonial periods as the intellectual inheri-
tance from Orientalist and Romantic scholars, political activism of the educated Indian
middle class, and national reclamation of identity and pride were all crucial factors in
the cultural reconstruction examined here.
The remaining question is whether the characteristics of the kathak dance revival,
most of which are broadly applicable to the Indian revival, can be accurately applied
to other postcolonial settings and even, in some way, enlighten us regarding revivals
as a global phenomenon. Certainly the issues of class, gentrification, and movement
between margins and center seem universal enough. The fluctuations between male and
female pre-eminence, on the other hand, beg for further research in the Euro-American
context. The importance of gender in the Indian context suggests that similar issues have
perhaps remained under the radar in many other examinations of revival. Seemingly
more characteristic of postcolonial revivals are classicization, upward mobility, and
in particular the replacement of the colonial cultural norm with the new indigenous
authenticity offered by the revival. The period of shifting power, the defining moment of
“historical transformation” offered through the colonial struggle and postcolonial tri-
umph, first arms then reinforces the intentions of the revival, giving it the potency to
become the new center and mainstream. Extensive opportunities for shifting identities,
perhaps unimaginable in more stable times, accompany the move to independence.
There is a temptation, however, to see the move from marginal to hegemonic, observ-
able in the kathak dance revival, as typical only of postcolonial settings and never vis-
ible in Euro-American contexts. Certainly one cannot claim that the Appalachian folk
revivals of Cecil Sharp and Maude Karpeles in the early 1900s, or the later, more popu-
larized folk movements in the 1950s or 1960s, led to a centralized canon of “classical”
performance art; we do still call them “folk” revivals, after all. Yet, the idea of finding
new meaning in the rediscovery of the performing arts of the past is strongly based
in nineteenth-century Europe. Not only were folk traditions being documented and
reclaimed for the future, but a simultaneous interest in the art music of prior centu-
ries began a revival of European music that led to the canon of the twentieth century’s
Western classical concert repertoire. Perhaps because this did not occur in the tumultu-
ous and politicized context of struggle for freedom from colonial oppression, it is easy to
ignore the impact it has had on our study, dissemination, and consumption of Western
art music (Applegate 2005).
Should revival and reconstruction then ever be seen as separate from the inevitable
process of musical and societal change? Revivalists often set themselves apart from what
they perceive to be mainstream, and certainly revivals in former colonies developed in
opposition to occupation and oppression. Yet, if it is not uncommon for post-revival
cultures to become the new center and the new norm, the process of cultural renais-
sance may well be more ordinary than any self-respecting revivalist would ever care
to admit. Furthermore, if revivals seem to be becoming more and more prevalent, the
impetus may well be grasped through understanding the motivation of revivalists in
postcolonial settings. Just as colonial hybridity made ideals of racial and cultural purity
a necessity, increasing global hybridity makes the “authentic” an increasingly desirable
entity. More and more often, the process of “othering” in Western cultures involves a
veneration of the seeming authenticity and cultural legitimacy of the other. Faced with
our own undeniable impurities and increasingly indefinable cultural identities, we turn
to seek validity in a recreated tradition within an imagined past. Thus, perhaps revivals
can only truly be understood as global phenomena, initiated most often in response to
the inevitable process of hybridization and a consequent need for elusive authenticity.
Paradoxically, it is in our search for the pure and the genuine within ourselves that we
only connect ourselves more closely to hybrid humanity.
Notes
1. Kathak is one of six or seven dances in India deemed “classical.” Bharatanatyam, kathakali,
kuchipuri, odissi, and manipuri are the other most accepted genres, although manipuri is
omitted from some lists. Other dances like mohini attam, sattirya, and chhau are some-
times included.
2. This is an older understanding of “Orientalism” that contrasts with Edward Said’s widely
disseminated 1978 book of the same name. Said’s redefinition of the term proposed that
what had largely been a scholarly field should be seen as the cultural arm of colonialism, an
essentialization of difference that made knowledge production part of the colonial power
structure. Said’s arguments offer valuable insight into the political foundations of colo-
nial scholarly interest and artistic creation, but it is also important to remain cognizant of
the historical meaning of the term. The “Orientalists” of eighteenth-century India were
scholars and administrators who had profound influences on the intellectual shape of both
revival and post-revival cultures (see also Niyogi 2006).
3. As the two meanings of the term kathak can lead to confusion, I am using kathak to refer to
the dance of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and Kathak to refer to the hereditary
clan of performing artists.
4. This material is documented in some detail both in European travel writings (see, for
example, Dyson 1978: 336–356) and in a number of treatises from the mid-nineteenth
century including Sarmaya-i Ishrat by Sadat Ali Khan, Madun-ul Musiqi by Mohammad
Karam Imam, and Saut-ul Mubarak by Wajid Ali Shah. For further information and analy-
sis, see Walker 2004, 2010a, and 2013.
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C HA P T E R 11
C H O R E O G R A P H I C R E V I VA L ,
E L I T E NAT I O NA L I S M ,
A N D P O S T C O L O N IA L
A P P R O P R IAT I O N I N S E N E G A L
H É L È N E N EV E U K R I NG E L BAC H
In the late 1930s, in the small town of Sébikotane in Senegal, the students who had come
from all over Francophone West Africa to the William Ponty School to be trained as
schoolteachers and colonial administrators prepared for the holidays with a task: They
had to go back to their “villages” and research their cultural “traditions.” The following
school year, they would have to stage plays to illustrate the stories they had been told.
One of these students was a young man from Guinea, Fodéba Keita, who showed talent
for music, drama, and poetry. By 1957, Keita was the artistic director of one of Africa’s
first professional dance troupes, the Ballets Africains. Soon to become the national
dance troupe of independent Guinea, Keita’s Ballets toured the world with musical plays
consciously created to revive the memory of pre-colonial Senegambia. Following tre-
mendous success in Paris in the early 1950s, the troupe was invited on a West Africa tour
in 1956–57, the high point of which was a series of performances in Dakar. The Dakarois
shows made a deep impression on the political and artistic elite of late colonial Senegal,
and were to have a major impact on the emergence of a regional genre of revival musical
theater best described as “neo-traditional” performance.
More than half a century later, the hundreds of dance troupes that have flourished
in Dakar and other Senegalese cities continue to draw inspiration from the Ballets
Africains and its codification of selected ceremonial practices from across the region.
These practices, dances and rhythms in particular, are marketed as a corpus of “tradi-
tions” echoing the memory of a glorified pre-colonial past. Though historical research
seldom enters the creative process, the invocation of tradition legitimizes what these
troupes do. This is a legacy of a time when, following Senegal’s independence in 1960,
President Léopold Sédar Senghor (hereafter “Sédar Senghor”) and the intellectual elite
CHOREOGRAPHIC REVIVAL AND NATIONALISM IN POSTCOLONIAL SENEGAL 229
in his entourage created a discourse on tradition to help establish their power both at
home and abroad. In the early twenty-first century, choreographers and experienced
performers continue to compete for the most authentic historical knowledge or the best
training in proper traditional rhythms. The neo-traditional choreographic genre, how-
ever, draws on West African musical theater as it was performed across West Africa,
Europe and the United States between the mid-1930s and the late 1960s. Was this a
revival movement? Who revived what, and what did the movement achieve?
Drawing on the Senegalese case, in this essay I suggest that the revival of perfor-
mance (dance, music, drama) was particularly powerful as a medium through which
post-colonial elites sought to legitimize their power, and imagine a future for the new
nation. This was done in large part by creating the illusion of continuity between the
pre-colonial past and the present. Indeed, the ways in which post-colonial regimes
have sought to establish their power by assuming control over a dominant version of
history is well documented (Appadurai 1986; Diouf 1992), but less well documented is
the role played by musical and choreographic theater in creating seductive versions of
history.
Revival, however, is never static, and as Livingston (1999:74) points out, “many reviv-
alists [ . . . ] change their stance over time.” It is not just that revivalists change, it is also
that the way in which revival movements develop often slips out of the control of those
who promoted it in the first place. From an anthropological perspective, it is precisely
the way in which different forms of power shift over time that matters. Studies of revival
or revitalization movements have had a tendency to focus on a single historical moment
or a group of individuals. Yet the gradual transformation of revival as its patrons
“changed their stance,” or as new generations enter the scene, is equally important.
But is it appropriate to speak of “revival” in this context? The term is not com-
monly used in studies of dance, even though many dance forms have been promoted
as the conscious revivals of past practices1. Yet ethnomusicologists and anthropolo-
gists studying revitalization movements have long recognized that such movements
always involved the creation of new cultural forms (Wallace 1956). Dance, like music,
exemplifies the creation of something new by virtue of the fact that it is different every
time it is performed. Changes in the bodies of dancers over time and generations intro-
duce an additional layer of change, and no choreographic element may travel through
time in its original form. Choreographic revival projects are therefore illuminating
instances of what it means to invoke the past while creating something new. Senegalese
neo-traditional performance may be qualified as a “revival” genre because its practitio-
ners consistently invoke an imagined past as a source of inspiration, and describe what
they do as a re-staging of “tradition”.
In the first part of this essay, I look at the development of Senegalese neo-traditional
performance in continuity with colonial school theater, and as element in the politics of
nation-building in postcolonial Senegal. In the second part, I move on to the appropria-
tion of the genre by Casamançais migrants as having inadvertently fostered the emer-
gence of a culturalist, separatist discourse in Senegal’s southernmost region. Ultimately,
in this essay I argue that revival is best studied diachronically, as a process.2
230 Hélène Neveu Kringelbach
Musical Theater in Senegal During the

Colonial Period
In this section, I chart the emergence of the modern theatrical genre that eventually pro-
vided an idiom for the construction of a revivalist discourse on the Casamance region.
Musical theater in Senegambia did not begin with French colonization. Modern the-
ater involving drama, music, and choreography largely developed on the basis of already
strong performing traditions.3 But it was during the colonial period that elements from
these diverse traditions were combined with European theater in a kind of artistic brico-
lage to form a codified expressive form. As suggested in the introduction, an important
turning point was the promotion of theater in colonial schools. Naturally, musical the-
ater was being made outside modern schools, too, as Karin Barber (2000) has shown in
brilliant detail with the emergence of traveling popular theater in the Yoruba-speaking
parts of Nigeria in the late colonial period.
In Senegal, it was the French authorities who made the conscious choice of includ-
ing theater in the training of African schoolteachers and administrators. Central to this
project was the Ecole Normale William Ponty4, which had been set up in Gorée in 1915
before being moved to Sébikotane, east of Dakar, in 1938. In 1935 Frenchman Charles
Béart, who was soon to become director, introduced the staging of plays to the curricu-
lum. The aim was to encourage the students to preserve a connection with rural life.
Indeed, while they epitomized the successful évolués5, there was also fear that they might
lose touch with the populations they would have to teach or administer. This was evi-
dent in Béart’s writings at the time:
Some of the students have asked the Director of the William Ponty School to lend
them the costumes made for the [end-of-year] party so that they may “play” during
the holidays. Tomorrow, as civil servants, they will meet their village brothers with
sympathy, they will study the art forms neglected for so long and they will return
them to their rightful place. It will be precious for those of us who care about Africa,
because we will know it better; it will be precious for those who will find comfort
from the minor worries of the profession in this unselfish and generous activity,—
the schoolteacher who will have discovered a new and enchanting legend or who
will have transcribed an old epic song will soon forget that he has quarreled with the
major’s interpreter.
(Béart 1937:14)6
The Ponty training probably exceeded French expectations in producing a local elite
of schoolteachers who were close to the populations they worked with. Foucher (2002)
says of the growing engagement of schoolteachers in politics after WWII that this was
due in part to their coverage of the territory and their good relations with the local
populations. They were even “mobilized by the local populations as intermediaries to
communicate with the colonial state, and, not infrequently, as counterweights to the
territorial administration” (Foucher 2002:148). This was an unexpected outcome of

the French colonial policy. Though there are contested interpretations of the role the-
ater played in this political awakening in the 1930s (Cohen 2012), and though the stu-
dent body at Ponty was heterogeneous in its political orientation, it is almost certain
that theater provided some of Francophone Africa’s future elites with opportunities to
express anti-colonial sentiments. This was done through imagining and staging the
lives of deceased resistance heroes. Bigolo, for example, was staged by a Ponty student
of Casamançais origin, Assane Seck, who later became a Minister of Foreign Affairs in
independent Senegal (Foucher 2002). After being demobilized from the French army in
1945, Seck studied in Paris, where he re-staged Bigolo with an amateur troupe of African
students (Sonar Senghor 2004). Colonial school theater, then, contained the seeds of
revival from the beginning. Imagining the past served to contest power in the present,
but in more subtle ways than through overt speech.
The Ponty plays were interspersed with musical interludes which the colonial admin-
istration perceived as innocuous folklore. Mbaye (2004) notes that the French staff con-
trolled and sometimes censured the plays, but this rarely affected the musical interludes.
French actor Henri Vidal, who had witnessed the play Téli Soma Oulé by Lompolo Koné,
echoed this view in a commentary written for colonial magazine Traits d’Union:
This is an exclusively folkloric play, which allows the incorporation of men and
women dancers who, as direct descendants of the legendary characters, will dance
what their grandparents danced in front of the glorious chiefs of their time.
(Vidal 1955:66 in Mbaye 2004)
The Ponty plays fostered the development of revival performance in Senegal later
on, but this happened through unexpected detours through Western Europe, North
America, and neighbouring Guinea. Indeed Ponty student Fodéba Keita, born in 1921
in the Maninka district of Siguiri in what was then the colony of French Guinea, was
to help transform this youth theater into national “heritage” throughout Francophone
West Africa. At Ponty between 1940 and 1943, Keita already displayed unusual musi-
cal and verbal skills: he composed poetry, sang, and played banjo in a student orches-
tra (Cohen 2012). In subsequent years, he taught in the colonial capital of Saint-Louis,
then returned to Guinea, where he worked as a schoolteacher and youth leader (Goerg
1989; Straker 2009). He soon made his way to Paris to study law (Cohen 2012), where he
socialized with a cohort of black students, including Sédar Senghor and other founders
of the international Negritude movement. Senegalese students who had moved into the-
ater, such as Assane Seck, Annette Mbaye d’Erneville, and Féral Benga, were also part of
the festivities. Benga had risen to fame earlier as one of Josephine Baker’s lead dancers at
the Folies Bergères, and in shows at prestigious venues like the Casino de Paris and the
Théâtre des Champs Elysées. By the time Keita arrived in Paris, Benga was staging shows
at the cabaret-restaurant he had opened in 1938. Sédar Senghor had arrived in Paris in
1928, at a time of excitement and experimentation in the theater world. Diaghilev had
brought his Ballets Russes to Paris following the Russian revolution, where they had
become the talk of the town with avant-garde choreographies. Theater and staged cho-
reography, then, reflected the struggle around the radical political changes that were
taking place throughout Europe, including the contested rise of communism. We do
not know whether future president Sédar Senghor saw these performances. Struggling
to make ends meet and deeply absorbed in his studies in the first half of the 1930s as
he was (Vaillant 2006), it is unlikely that he would have indulged in expensive theater
tickets. Nevertheless, this formed part of the intellectual milieu in which he forged his
ideas on the inextricable link between arts and politics, and these ideas would later lead
him to support musical and choreographic performance as an essential cornerstone in
nation-building.
It was in this highly politicized, cosmopolitan environment that Keita set up his
first musical troupe, le Théâtre Africain, in Paris in 1949 (Straker 2009). He had joined
forces with musician Facelli Kanté, whom he had probably met in Saint-Louis (Cohen
2012), and six former students from West Africa. He benefited from the support of
Sédar Senghor’s nephew, Maurice Sonar Senghor (hereafter “Sonar Senghor”), him-
self a former student who had given up his studies for a career in theater. Benga helped
with venues and contacts, and Keita’s skills as a stage director, combined with Kanté’s
music, produced almost immediate success. In the early 1950s, as the troupe began to
tour around Europe and North America under the new name of Les Ballets Africains
de Fodéba Keita, the choreographic and musical dimension gradually displaced spo-
ken dialogue (Straker 2009), most probably because this was more appealing to inter-
national audiences. The repertoire featured choreographed versions of ceremonial
practices and everyday movement styles from West Africa, with “special emphasis
on the Mandinka folklore of Guinea and Casamance” (Kaba 1976:202), tinged with a
Parisian touch. Profoundly influenced by the Negritude movement, Keita conceptual-
ized his artistic production as an exercise in cultural revival:
If it is true that any civilization worthy of this name must be capable of both “giving
and receiving,” it is in the interest of Africans to preserve that which has universal
value in their heritage, while borrowing from the outside world that which is nec-
essary to their current evolution. But may they refrain from letting themselves be
guided by mercantile interests, thus forgetting the social and utilitarian role of their
art. [ . . . ] May the Africa of tomorrow refrain from losing the secret of its dances and
songs! [ . . . ] May She [Africa] still know how to dance, because for Her this means
knowing how to live, and for a thousand years Her life has been one long dance with
innumerable figures, a true dance of life which constitutes her message today.
(Keita 1955:55–56)
The success of these first years led to the 1956–57 West African tour, at the invitation
of the Governor of French West Africa. This was a turning point during which the
Ballets recruited a new generation of young performers who were to replace the first
Paris-based students. At Guinea’s independence in 1958, the group was renamed Ballets
Africains de la République de Guinée and toured the world as the nation’s “cultural
ambassadors” under Kanté’s leadership. Keita was appointed Interior Minister in Sékou
Touré’s first government, and although Touré later turned against him,7 he played a large
part in designing Guinea’s cultural policy up to the “cultural revolution” launched by
Touré in 1968. This was also a time of growing rivalry between Touré and Sédar Senghor
over political and moral leadership in the region. But the artists in their entourage
knew each other well from the Parisian years, and there was therefore direct continuity
between the Ballets Africains and the creation of the National Ballet of Senegal in 1961, a
year after Independence and Sédar Senghor’s election as the nation’s first President. I will
now examine the role of neo-traditional performance in Senegalese cultural revival and
nationalist politics from 1960 onwards.
Revival, Nation-building, and the

Emergence of a Modern
Performing Profession
In Senegal as elsewhere in Africa in the decade following the independences, govern-

ing elites felt the urgency of gathering linguistically and culturally diverse populations
around the idea of a single nation. To establish a stable working state, they needed
people to “imagine” the new political entity to which they now belonged (Anderson
1983). Senegal’s cultural policy at the time was almost entirely dedicated to the
nation-building project and the concomitant strengthening of Sédar Senghor’s moral
authority. Alongside the visual arts, the performing arts became the flagship of this
policy. Drawing on her ethnography of music in postcolonial Tanzania, Askew (2002)
has argued convincingly that musical performance played a much bigger role in post-
colonial nation-building than Eurocentric theories of nationalism had done justice to.
The political uses of performance, however, have varied according to musical histo-
ries and according to the personal preferences of postcolonial leaders. In Senegal, the
involvement of musical and choreographic performance in the nation-building project
was heavily shaped by the rivalry between Sédar Senghor and Sékou Touré. Behind the
scenes, it was also shaped by the trajectories of individuals like Sonar Senghor, who had
been steeped in the cosmopolitan milieu of Parisian theater.
One of the major projects of the period was the creation of the National Theater,
which consisted of the National Ballet, the National Drama Troupe and the Traditional
Instrumental Ensemble. The Daniel Sorano Theater, a modern building inaugurated
in 1965 ahead of the 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts, would later house the three
troupes. Sonar Senghor, who had returned to Senegal in the late 1950s, was appointed
director. He and Keita remained friends, and by the early 1960s, the Ballets Africains
had performed in Dakar three times, lastly in March 1961 (Paris-Dakar 1961c). In 1959,
in this twilight period of French colonialism, future President Sédar Senghor wrote a
long commentary in the Socialist Party magazine L’Unité Africaine, in which he praised
Keita for his faithfulness to African rhythms and movement patterns. This was clearly an
opportunity for Sédar Senghor to articulate his ideas on “Black African dance”, which he
saw as embodying the “emotional” nature of African cultures:
Black African dances stay very close to the sources. They express dramas. For the
Black African, dance is the most natural way of expressing an idea, an emotion.
When taken by an emotion—joy or sadness, gratitude or indignation—the Black
African dances. Dance so different from European ballet. Nothing intellectual.
Neither pointe shoes nor straight lines nor elaborate arabesques or entrechats. These
are earth-bound dances, bare feet flat on the ground, pounding the ground without
either exhaustion or rest.
(Léopold Sédar Senghor, quoted in Sonar Senghor 2004:66)
Two years later, the creation of the Senegalese National Ballet was clearly designed to
outshine the Guinean troupe. Sédar Senghor believed he could win the upper hand over
Touré on his own turf, the arts. He had already built up a strong legitimacy as an intel-
lectual and a connoisseur of the arts by virtue of his engagement in the Negritude move-
ment, his poetry and a higher degree in French grammar. Though he was not much of
a dancer himself (Vaillant 2006:204), it is evident from Sédar Senghor’s poetry that he
regarded dance as a quintessential African art. His Prières aux Masques Africains ends
with an allusion to Africans as “people of the dance”: Nous sommes les hommes de la
danse, dont les pieds reprennent vigueur en frappant le sol dur (“We are the people of the
dance, whose feet regain strength by pounding on the hard ground”) (Senghor 1956).
In official discourse, the National Ballet was meant to recover the regional history,
and to celebrate the nation’s diversity. The idea of “performing” history was appealing
to local audiences used to the verbal art of praise-singers, or griots8 (géwël in Wolof),
whose performance traditionally centered around West African epics like the oral his-
tory of thirteenth-century Mande king Sunjata Keita, founder of the Mali Empire. In
practice, however, there was never a simple transposition of performing practices, past
or present, to the stage. The choreography was the product of Sonar Senghor’s theatri-
cal ideas, heavily shaped by his Parisian years, of the dances his young performers had
grown up with, and of the troupe’s creative work. Dancer Ousmane Noël Cissé, who was
with the Ballet in the late 1960s and throughout much of the 1970s, remembered a typi-
cal working day:
The day would start with a class taught by Sonar Senghor. Then every dancer, from
Dakar or from elsewhere, would take turns to teach the others some of the steps they
knew from home. Sonar Senghor would then select and re-arrange the moves into a
choreographic sequence. Later in the day, we’d rehearse for the shows.
(Ousmane Noël Cissé, interview, April 2011, Dakar)
This could not have been a simple work of historical recovery, since the dancers
were usually young and did not possess great knowledge of the region’s history. They
came from various Senegalese regions, but mainly Dakar (including members of the
long-established Cape Verdean community and students from the School of Arts),
as well as Casamance, the Louga region in central Senegal and the Sereer-speaking
Siin-Saalum south of Dakar. The diversity of the nation was thus de facto celebrated.
But there was also an implicit hierarchy among the different ethnicities. Following the
Ballets Africains, a substantial proportion of the dances were inspired by ceremonial
practices from Casamance, from where talented performers were recruited during
Sonar Senghor’s scouting trips. His first trip, in fact, had been paid for by French Director
of Information Services Pierre Fromentin a couple of years before Independence (Sonar
Senghor 2004:57). After 1961, the idea that the key to a new Senegalese theater was to be
found in the southern region was therefore in direct continuity with late colonial cul-
tural policy.
However, this was also because Casamance was perceived to be at the margins of a
nation dominated politically and economically by northern Wolof speakers. As a
forest-covered, wet tropical zone in a country made up mostly of dry savannah, and
being separated from northern Senegal by the Gambia, the southern region had already
suffered from a lack of easy access to the French colony’s coastal cities in the north.9
For nation-building to succeed, those linguistic minorities at the margins had to be
co-opted into the nationalist project and be imagined by the Wolof-speaking majority
as forming part of the nation. Something similar was happening in Guinea with the rise
of militant theater during the “demystification” campaigns of 1958–62 in Guinea’s forest
and northern coastal areas (McGovern 2004; Sarró 2009). Like in Guinea, the forest
areas were not only marginalized in the development of infrastructure, they were also
regarded as resisting modernization because Islam had not yet succeeded in displac-
ing traditional religious beliefs and practices. Emphasizing these practices in national
revival performance therefore served the double purpose of symbolically including
them in the nation-building project, while at the same time displaying the “backward-
ness” of their traditions. This implicitly pushed the idea that the model for a modern
future lay in northern Senegal’s strongly Muslim society. But unlike in Guinea, as we
shall see later, the Senegalese revival genre was later appropriated by urban migrants
from these very forest areas to serve their own purposes.
Meanwhile, how was the national revival genre constructed for the stage? The work
of the Senegalese Ballet had two main components: the first was a series of tableaux
that combined music, song, drama and choreography, with a conscious emphasis on
re-creating images of past Senegambian rural life, but without necessarily involving a
coherent narrative. The tableaux included such recent introductions to the region’s
musical repertoire as guitars and banjos. The backdrops were made of rural landscapes
painted in Paris (Paris-Dakar 1961b) and West African printed fabrics (Paris-Dakar
1961a), probably manufactured in Dakar by the Sotiba factory established in 1958. The
choreographic tableaux, in short, displayed a rather modern outlook.
By contrast, the work of revival was made most evident in the second component,
choreographic sequences in full-length plays staged by the National Theatre. In the
1960s the plays explicitly aimed at salvaging the nation’s historical memory from the
destructive influence of colonialism. Just as with the Ponty theater, this was very much
an imagined rural life. Urban life rarely appeared, and when it did, it was done in such
a way as to expose the moral ills city dwellers had inherited from French colonial-
ism: greed, corruption, and a taste for mimicking European lifestyles at the expense of
hard, honest work. Those who shaped Senegalese neo-traditional performance, there-
fore, unintentionally prolonged the colonial vision of rural Africa as timeless (Castaldi
2006). Past and present were collapsed in a single fantasy centered on the lives of
historical figures of the old Wolof kingdoms. The iconic play of the period is Cheikh
Aliou Ndao’s L’Exil d’Alboury (1967), which Sonar Senghor describes as “the first great
encounter of the Daniel Sorano Theater team with Senegalese epic theater” (2004:101).
His recollection of the play, which he helped to stage, illustrates the post-independence
emphasis on salvaging the past from the “lies” of the colonial period:
Following the enthusiasm that greeted this work, we can say that it has strength-
ened the rehabilitation of our national heroes initiated by Amadou Cissé Dia in Les
Derniers Jours de Lat Dior. Colonial biographers had distorted their faces to the point
of painting our authentic history as kinglets and other operetta characters. This was
the rehabilitation of the men who have made our country’s tradition, but also a cele-
bration of the virtues which have always guided our people: courage, a sense of honor.
(Sonar Senghor 2004:101–102)
Just as the Ponty theater had included musical sequences, the postcolonial plays often
included musical and choreographic interludes. There had been other urban dance
troupes since the 1950s, and common to all “ballets” at the time were recurring refer-
ences to the ceremonial practices of a distant, timeless past. Historical references to
collective farming with musical support from griots, or to the authority of the elders
over the youth, were contrasted with a negative portrayal of “witchcraft” and other
pre-Islamic beliefs. This contrast displayed one of the aims of the revival genre pro-
moted by the Senegalese state: to legitimize the power of educated, mainly Muslim
urban elites by showing the urban youth what to leave behind to transform Senegal into
a modern, yet morally strong nation. The local and regional competitions held on a reg-
ular basis in the presence of Youth Ministry officials provided many opportunities to
glorify the work of these troupes in the national printed press. Unsurprisingly, prizes
were often awarded for plays praising the hard work of rural farmers and fishermen,
their struggle with supernatural powers, or the moral superiority of pre-colonial kings
(e.g. Dakar-Matin 1961).
The early audiences were often the French-educated youth and the urban middle
class. Livingston (1999) suggests that revival movements are usually middle-class proj-
ects. This was certainly the case in Senegal, where, at least initially, the urban elite paid
to congregate in the cushioned seats of the National Theater, elegantly dressed in suits,
evening gowns and Senegalese festive dress, in one gesture showing off their taste for the
high arts and their commitment to the Senghor regime. If this strategy seems to have
worked well with the elite, at least in the first decade that followed independence, the
resonance of this theater with ordinary citizens is more difficult to assess. Sonar Senghor
(2004) writes at length about the National Theater’s efforts to popularize its work by
staging performances in workplaces and in Senegalese towns outside the capital, but
these very efforts betray the elitist character of the institution.
The National Theater did, however, foster the performing arts as an attractive profes-
sion for youths with the right skills. As opposed to the first generation of Ballets Africains
performers, by 1970 one no longer needed to be articulate in French to join the National
Ballet or one of the many Dakarois troupes that had multiplied in the 1960s. Recruitment
was not restricted to educated youths, even though much of the audience was urban and
educated. Whereas musicians and singers tended to come from griot families, dancers
came from more diverse backgrounds, including high-status families who were often
opposed to a dancing career. Opposition was especially strong in the families of Muslim
clerics. Yet from the 1970s onwards, neo-traditional performance attracted increasing
numbers of youths who sought an alternative route to “the good life”: a traveling lifestyle,
a stable income, and unrestricted opportunities to socialize with the other sex. For, in
addition to the pleasure of dancing, the National Theater represented the opportunity of
acquiring the status of a civil servant modeled on the state-employed status enjoyed by the
actors of the Comédie Française in Paris. There was also touring around the world several
months per year, and daily allowances on top of a very decent salary.
In addition to promoting images of rural Africa as timeless, the genre was a collage of
performing practices borrowed from different parts of the region, and therefore also “place-
less.” This way of using dances from various parts of West Africa as metonym, as small parts
signifying a coherent whole, is intensely visible in a 1954 book by photographer Michel
Huet and Fodéba Keita. Opening with a single verse from the poem by Sédar Senghor
mentioned earlier and a preface by Keita, Les Hommes de la Danse features photographs of
ceremonial life across West and Central Africa, all the way to Chad. But the captions con-
sist mainly of Keita and Huet’s poetic reflections on the role of dance in African rural life.
The bibliography at the end suggests an inspiration from the writings of known European
anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, colonial administrators, art critics and travel writers.
The book renders visible Keita’s and Senghor’s fantasy of a pan-African essence, a vision
that was at the heart of choreographic revival as it was conceived in the 1950s.
Paradoxically, the pan-African outlook in revival, by virtue of its openness and flex-
ibility, paved the way for the appropriation of the genre for alternative agendas. As we
will see, this flexibility enabled urban migrant troupes to construct their own version of
revival from the 1980s onwards, once the state had lost much of its capacity to control
cultural production.
Performance and the Emergence of

Casamançais Regionalism
As with so many nationwide projects throughout Africa after the independences, what
transformed the Senegalese cultural revival project was the economic downturn of the
1970s, following the first “oil crisis” in 1973. In 1981–1991, the first Structural Adjustment
Programmes (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
as a condition for the loans meant to prevent the country from complete economic col-
lapse were being implemented. Sédar Senghor passed on the presidency to his Prime
Minister, Abdou Diouf, in 1981, and Diouf ’s successive terms in office until the elec-
tion of Abdoulaye Wade in 2000 could be described as the governance of economic
austerity. Most importantly in relation to our theme, the neo-liberal agenda contained
in the “adjustment” did not make space for cultural and artistic state patronage on
the scale of the previous two decades (Diop 2004). The weakening of the state would
create resentment from those parts of Senegal whose economic development was cut
short by the new policies, and make space for Casamançais regionalism to flourish.
As we shall see, the revival theater of the 1960s and 1970s provided urban migrants
from Casamance with the tools to fill this growing regionalism with cultural contents.
In the process of appropriating this theater, Casamançais migrants transformed it into
a subtle, multifaceted, yet powerful revival movement. But rather than a consciously
planned strategy, I suggest that this happened as a gradual process over several genera-
tions of performers.
Given the history of school theater in the region, it is no coincidence that Casamançais
are over-represented in the Dakarois performing world. My own estimates in 2002–03
put the proportion at approximately one-third, whereas Casamance only represented
12.5 percent of the country’s population at the time (ANSD 2006). This is related to the
popularity of school theater in Casamance as early as the 1940s (Foucher 2002), fol-
lowing the appointment of Ponty-trained schoolteachers throughout the region. As a
result, many of the migrants who came to work in Dakar in growing numbers from the
1950s onwards already had first-hand experiences with theater. Over time, they empha-
sized the musical and choreographic dimension of theater, in part because this removed
the problem of the choice of language in dialogue-based plays, and in part because the
dances and rhythms which were being codified in neo-traditional ballets were regarded
as the most distinctively Casamançais elements in this youth theater.
As I hinted earlier, one of the most pressing challenges in post-independent
Senegal has been the integration of Casamance into the nation. Casamance is a lin-
guistically, culturally and religiously diverse area where Jola speakers are dominant
in Lower Casamance, in the Ziguinchor region. But the middle and upper parts of
the region, around Kolda and Velingara, are more diverse, and there Mandinka- and
Pulaar-speakers are in a majority. The region has suffered from a low-intensity separat-
ist conflict since 1982, launched by the MFDC (Mouvement des Forces Démocratiques
de Casamance) in Ziguinchor. By 1990, the movement had mobilized armed forces and
started a conflict, still to be resolved at the time of writing in 2012. Despite its claims
to stand for the whole of Casamance, the MFDC is mainly a Jola movement (Foucher
2002), an important point in relation to the representation of the region’s ethnicities in
Casamançais revival performance.
The idea of separatism in Casamance is not new, however: A movement named
MFDC had already been formed in 1949 in Sédhiou, but scholars of the region disagree
on whether or not the current MFDC is in direct continuity with the old one, as well
as on the movement’s root causes.10 One of the most common explanations is the mar-
ginalization of the region in the French colonial system, followed by the Senegalese
government’s neglect of its economic development. Though these factors have undoubt-
edly generated huge resentment, they do not, on their own, account for the rise of a
strong regionalist discourse and an armed rebellion. Drawing on Anderson’s (1983)
notion of imagined communities, Foucher (2002) argued that it was schooling and mas-
sive migration to Dakar that allowed a Casamançais, and particularly Jola, conscious-
ness to crystallize in Lower Casamance. These two latter factors also explain the rise
of Casamançais neo-traditional performance from the 1950s onwards, which points
to a strong link between schooling, migration, and regionalist revival as constructed
through performance.
By the 1950s, migrants from the Lower Casamance to Dakar were actively organizing
into hometown associations. Migrants from the rural settlement of Thionck Essyl, for
example, set up the ARTE (Association des Ressortissants de Thionck Essyl) in 1952. Now
considered a commune in its own right, with a population of more than 8,000 inhabit-
ants, Thionck Essyl is a wet-rice farming area, and mainly Muslim (De Jong 2002, 2007).
Thionck Essyl is also in the heartland of the separatist movement. According to an older
member whom I interviewed, by the late 1950s, the migrant association included young
men and women organized into two separate structures, each gathering members from
the different Thionck Essyl wards representing the families (identified by patrilineage)
considered to be indigenous to the settlement. Whereas many of the women worked as
house employees or stayed home with their children, the men worked as civil servants,
often in the police or the army, or as employees in the private sector.
Throughout the 1960s, the ARTE organized family ceremonies and other festivi-
ties in Dakar for Jola-speakers from all over Casamance. The most gifted performers
among them led dance events which included different styles depending on the con-
text and the participants: Jola bugarabu dances for family ceremonies, Cuban styles for
youth dance evenings. Those who had attended secondary school at the Lycée Djignabo
in Ziguinchor in the 1960s had already developed a passion for Cuban rhythms there.
Saliou Sambou, who was to become a prominent national politician and Governor
of Fatick, then Dakar much later, remembered these dances so vividly that he per-
formed an entire song by Johnny Pacheco during our interview in April 2011. Pacheco’s
Pachanga dance craze was all the rage in Ziguinchor and in Dakar in the 1960s, and
Sambou remembered his Saturday evenings at the Djignabo boarding school as
boys-only Cuban dances. When Sambou and others moved to Dakar to become uni-
versity students or state employees, the Jola-style Pachanga swung all the way to the
capital.
In Dakar in 1972, in the midst of the performing effervescence created by the
National Ballet and the other urban troupes, the ARTE decided to set up its own troupe,
Bakalama. Original plays were written by Sambou and other students from Thionck
Essyl, and those with dancing skills choreographed versions of the dances they had
been performing for Jola audiences. Several of the members had already done theater
at Thionck Essyl’s primary school. Just as the National Theater was staging the nation’s
past, so Bakalama would stage Jola history for much wider audiences. Sambou was
explicit about the aim of the new troupe:
The problems between Casamance and Senegal are fundamentally problems of

cultural misunderstanding. If the Senegalese knew us, they would like us. We need
to show who we are. We set up Bakalama at the time so that people would come to
understand us.
(Saliou Sambou, interview, April 2011, Dakar)
But what form did revival take in this regional genre? Men who belonged to the first
generation of performers say they knew many dances from village festivities, from their
time as initiates, and from attending women’s dances as children. Indeed according to
these men, before the male Jola initiation, a boy is not yet fully gendered, and as a child is
allowed to watch some of men’s as well as women’s secret rituals (cf. De Jong 2007 on the
male initiation in Thionck Essyl). The music included regional rhythms performed on
Jola drums, as well as some of the cherished Cuban styles played on modern instruments,
including a saxophone. By the early 1980s, the younger performers were the children of
the founders, and some of them had tried their hand at modern dance, American jazz, and
American street dances. They created new steps which integrated these movement styles
to the troupe’s Jola choreographies, and according to some of these performers, their cre-
ations are now regarded as “traditional.” The troupe performed in various public spaces
in Dakar, including school yards and during theater competitions. But it was important
to the group that they also performed in Thionck Essyl, where a substantial share of the
earnings was redirected. Not everyone was happy with the troupe’s work, however: Some
of the young men’s parents feared that their engagement with the troupe would compro-
mise their university education or wage-earning jobs, even more so because some of the
youths were also active in football teams. In addition to the distraction from education,
some of the families feared that the young women would become difficult to control. The
young migrants responded by demonstrating their loyalty to Jola “traditions.”
Over time, the Casamançais neo-traditional genre became less experimental and
more explicitly focused on Jola history and traditions. In Bakalama’s case, Cuban
rhythms and modern dance moves receded to the background to make space for dis-
tinctively Casamançais (mainly Jola and Mandinko) instruments and rhythms. The
movement style made increasing space for the characteristic Jola dances, in which both
legs alternate in a rapid and powerful stomp, feet flat, with the knees bent and the body
leaning forward to a 45-degree-angle. In this style, the arms are held away from the body
and, by contrast with the aerial style of the Wolof sabar, the energy appears directed to
the ground. In short, the themes, cultural practices, and movement styles reworked for
revival performance emphasized the Jola-ness of the genre.
Just as with the neo-traditional genre promoted by the National Theater, images of
the past were used to comment on the present. Also, the mode of secrecy cultivated
by people from Lower Casamance to maintain their distinctiveness within the nation
(De Jong 2007) was invoked as proof of the authenticity of this urban genre. The real
origin of Bakalama’s name, for example, became shrouded in mystique. According to
the most common contemporary explanation, bakalama means “calabash” in Jola. It
is an analogy with the calabash tree, with its strong core and with far-reaching roots,
and is meant to symbolize the members’ attachment to the hometown. But according
to another version, retold by one of the founders, the troupe was named after a griot
who used to come and entertain the Thionck Essyl youths as they worked in cassava
fields on Sundays. He used to carry a small calabash, and the name stuck, he said. Yet
other individuals have told me that no uninitiated person could know the real meaning
behind the troupe’s name. In a way which mirrors De Jong’s (2007) analysis of Jola ways
of being modern, secrecy is always assumed to form an important part of the troupe’s
cultural production.
Though the aesthetics of the plays have changed over time, the idea of revival still runs
through the repertoire in the form of a celebration of historical resistance heroes and
a selection of regional traditions. A closer look, however, points to a different kind of
revival from the national and pan-African performance that was originally promoted
by the state. Indeed while the National Theater staged epics on Wolof-speaking heroes
like Alboury Ndiaye in Cheikh Aliou Ndao’s play, the Casamançais plays placed regional
figures at the center of the region’s history. One of Bakalama’s most successful creations,
for example, was La Reine de Kabrousse, a play on Aline Sitoe Diatta, a Jola prophetess
whose cult was violently suppressed by the French in 1942. The choice of a Jola mar-
tyr, who has often been invoked by the separatist movement as embodying the region’s
historical refusal to accept any political or spiritual domination from either Europeans
or northern Senegalese (Foucher 2002), is significant here. The choice of a young Jola
woman as a heroic fighter for the autonomy of the Casamance region as a whole is also
a highly political choice, which legitimizes the version of history according to which
the Jola are the region’s real autochthones. The practices represented as “authentic” in
Casamançais plays are also, often, subtly portrayed as essentially Jola. Bakalama’s 1980
play Gambacc, for example, staged the inter-generational tensions that continue to affect
Jola male initiation in a context of Islamization, rising levels of formal education, and
migration.11 One of the key plays in the troupe’s repertoire is Kañaalen, named after a
Jola sorority of women who have had difficulties bearing many healthy children beyond
infancy.
By contrast with the fluid character of these practices in social life, there was active
selection and exclusion of elements for their stage versions. Songs and texts were thus
performed in Jola and in French, and the Wolof language was consciously excluded. In
fact, over time, the language problem was solved by removing spoken text altogether: In
a trajectory strikingly parallel to the Ballets Africains in the 1960s, choreography gradu-
ally displaced drama. But this also reflected a generational change in the troupe, and
the fact that with decreasing levels of education following the “adjustment” policies
mentioned earlier, by the 1990s many of the younger performers struggled with the
French texts from the plays written by students in the 1970s. Moreover, when the troupe
performed abroad in non-French speaking contexts, choreographic pieces were more
appealing than verbal plays.
Work in the rice fields, an important marker of Jola culture in Lower Casamance,
featured prominently, but groundnut cultivation was seldom alluded to, despite
the fact that groundnut farming had been widespread in the region since the 1930s
(Mark 1977). Some of Bakalama’s founders had even worked seasonally in groundnut
farms before coming to Dakar. But groundnut farming was associated either with the
Wolof-dominated Senegalese state or with Mandinko farmers. In the few plays when
groundnut farming appeared, therefore, as in Toumani Camara’s Manding Mousso, la
Révolte de la Femme Mandingue (The Rebellion of the Mandinko Woman), it was repre-
sented disparagingly, as a factor in the oppression of women. The implication was that,
as an experienced Bakalama performer told me, the rice field cultivation that is at the
heart of Jola economic and spiritual life was superior because men’s and women’s work
in the rice fields is complementary. Among the Mandinko, he explained, only women
own rice fields; men own groundnut fields, and are idle most of the time, he continued.
The implication, of course, is that societies who do not have the cultivation of rice as a
central structuring activity are less morally and spiritually fulfilled than those who do,
like the Jola. Islam did not appear explicitly in the performances either, despite the fact
that Thionck Essyl is mainly Muslim and that most of the troupe members over the years
have been Muslims. Practices perceived as essentially Jola, such as the male initiation,
have consistently been portrayed as timeless and untouched by world religions, despite
the incorporation of Islamic dimensions throughout the twentieth century (De Jong
2007; Thomas 1965).
Costumes, by contrast, have often been less the result of conscious choice than
they have reflected the multiple experiences traversing the lives of troupe members.
Costumes may be handed down from previous generations of performers, or designed
by urban tailors with little knowledge of Casamançais history. There are nevertheless
distinctive Jola elements. In Kañaalen as I saw it performed in Dakar in 2003 during the
Kaay Fecc international dance festival, the main character, a young woman who turned
to the sorority after getting married and failing to get pregnant, was seen on stage carry-
ing a calabash decorated with a hanging fringe of beads (see video example 11.1 ). This
is characteristic of the calabash carried by real-life añaalena, the sorority initiates, dur-
ing community-wide family ceremonies (see Figure 11.1). In other plays, women dancers
wore an indigo-cloth outfit and long necklaces of beads criss-crossing their chests (see
video examples 11.1 and 11.2 ), both being strongly associated with Jola female ceremo-
nies. But there are also older costumes inspired by the Guinean Ballets Africains, as well
as Mandinko and urban Senegalese styles.
Though Casamançais performers often present what they do as standing for a
single Casamançais identity, in continuity with the regionalist discourse, Jola per-
formance is subjected to much less aesthetic manipulation than rhythms and dances
from the region’s other linguistic groups, a point already noted by Peter Mark (1994)
FIGURE 11.1 Casamançais wedding in Dakar, January 2004. An añaalena wearing her beaded
calabash can be seen among the guests dancing behind a mask on stilts. Photograph by
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach.
in his fine ethnography of a performing arts festival in Mlomp, Lower Casamance,

in the early 1990s. When Bakalama performed a Mandinko piece called MBalia for
a Dakarois audience at the 2007 Kaay Fecc festival, for example, the choreography
featured Mandinko rhythms and the dancers wore light blue satin outfits of a modern
design; thigh-length tunics and wrap-around skirts for the women, tunics and baggy
trousers for the men. The general impression was that of a modern, urban Senegalese
style with inflections of Wolof elegance (the “shiny” aspect of the fabrics). When the
same piece was performed at the Thionck Essyl festival the same year, the performers
wore simpler batik-decorated outfits which gave the piece a rural, rather than urban,
feel. Such fluidity rarely applies to those elements of performance constructed as
distinctively Jola.
This visual collage was paralleled by a sonic impact on urban audiences who had
come to know Casamançais rhythms and instruments from the ceremonial practices
of their migrant neighbours. By the early 1980s, dozens of Casamançais troupes existed
in Dakar, and the popularity of their choreographic and musical production was such
that this was what most northern Senegalese knew about the region. Success during
tours abroad heightened the genre’s popularity back home. In short, the Casamançais
plays created during the decade leading up to a full-blown separatist movement in
the region differed from state-sponsored revival theater in that despite a visual col-
lage that made them appealing to national audiences, they celebrated distinctively
Casamançais, and often Jola, cultural practices. The genre’s success in Dakar and
other Senegalese cities has contributed to the articulation of a unified Jola identity, in
contrast to the heterogeneous character of Jola communities until the mid-twentieth

century. It has also reinforced the perception that the Jola were the original inhabitants
of at least parts of the Lower Casamance region, and that the neighboring populations
were “strangers”. There is indeed striking continuity between the culturalist discourse
of the MFDC separatist movement analyzed by Foucher (2002) and Casamançais
revival performance. This is evident in the contents of the plays and dances as well as
in the performers’ constant slippage between Jola identity and a broader Casamance
regional identity. Several authors working in the region have suggested that the fram-
ing of the MFDC as a regional rather than an ethnic movement served to legitimize the
separatist discourse in a state where ethnicity carried little political weight (Faye 1994;
Lambert 1998). In his analysis of the MFDC’s manifesto, Darbon (1985) also noted that
although the authors make a point of explaining the marginalization of the Casamance
as a whole, the references that permeate the text are Jola: Jola heroes, Jola movements
of rebellion, the destruction of forests, rice fields and fishing environments. He notes
that Mandinka- and Pulaar-speakers are never mentioned, even though they are in a
majority east of Ziguinchor. Similarly, when performers spoke to me about their work,
they used “Jola” and “Casamançais” interchangeably. Yet, the stories they bring to the
stage are first and foremost Jola stories associated with a very particular geographic
environment: the forest and wet-rice fields. Those linguistic groups perceived as not
indigenous to the forest areas, such as the Pulaar-speakers (Fulani) or the Mandinko,
are either absent, or represented in subtly unflattering ways and in choreographic tab-
leaux of everyday life rather than in historical or epic form. Revival performance by
Jola troupes in Dakar draws on a discourse of Jola autochthony and provides substance
to it at the same time.
But there is also a malleable side to the genre that makes it appealing to very diverse
audiences. On the one hand, it appeals to local audiences in the hometowns, and this is
important to the performers. Bakalama members have told me how moved they were
whenever they performed Kañaalen in Thionck Essyl, and women from the sorority
spontaneously joined in the songs. This was one of the reasons why it was important
to preserve rhythms people would recognize. On the other hand, Casamançais perfor-
mance has consistently engaged with Senegalese nationalist imagery, which is unsur-
prising given that it developed as an appropriation of nationalist theater. The plays, for
example, often use the narrative progression common in European classical ballet, which
also informed the work of the National Theater during the making of its repertoire in the
1960s: the setting of the scene and introduction of the characters, followed by drama,
and a joyful dénouement during which all the participants dance together. Casamançais
performers have often moved back and forth between the National Ballet and regional
troupes, and Bakalama has represented Senegal at folklore festivals abroad on several
occasions. A Wolof sabar programme was even introduced to the company’s repertoire
in the early 2000s. The best instance of the malleability of the genre is a type of perfor-
mance called animation, a choreographic sequence without a narrative, modelled on the
National Ballet’s tableaux (see Figures 11.2 and 11.3). An animation could be crafted at
short notice to suit the length of time available, the space and the audience. The various
FIGURE 11.2 Bakalama women dancers performing in Dakar, April 2003. Photograph by

FIGURE 11.3 Bakalama women dancers performing in Dakar, April 2011. Photograph by

elements of performance, from the dress to the spatial arrangements, instruments, songs
and costumes, were also put together in a flexible manner depending on the context.
Thus in April 2011, Bakalama performed an animation for the International Dance Day
held at one of the state-owned cultural centers in Dakar. The event had been sponsored
by the Ministry of Culture, and in a context of growing opposition to the Abdoulaye
Wade regime ahead of the 2012 presidential elections, Bakalama’s dominating presence
seemed to signal its allegiance to the Ministry. There was noticeable difference from ear-
lier animations I had seen by the group, however: in this tense political context, the Jola
character of the performance had been toned down through a choice of urban Senegalese
outfits (Figure 11.3), rather than the more distinctively Jola elements (the headdress in
particular) worn by the troupe on the exact same occasion in April 2003 (see Figure 11.2
and video example 11.2 ). Despite the urban, Wolof dress style, the movement style and
the rhythms were distinctively Jola, to the great enjoyment of a standing audience com-
posed of young performers from other urban troupes, media people and local residents.
In this politically sensitive context, the troupe momentarily broke down existing bound-
aries of ethnicity and political orientation through a skillful arrangement of elements of
performance. The enjoyment of audiences also contributes to the genre’s effectiveness
in important ways, and there are always moments when young audience members from
very diverse ethnicities feel compelled to join in for a brief spell of dancing (see video
example 11.2 ). Indeed it is largely the ability of Casamançais performance to engage
diverse audiences and interests in that makes it so powerful.
Conclusion: Transnational Mobility and

Revival
The final point I wish to make is that revival is a process that stretches not only in time,
but also in space. Revival movements are often fostered by the mobility of the actors,
and one needs to take their full trajectories into account to understand how revival
changes over time and space. In the present case, it is significant that Casamançais
neo-traditional performance emerged with massive migration to Dakar, and to a certain
extent also to Ziguinchor. Casamançais mobility within Senegal has been well docu-
mented by scholars of the region.12 What is less clear is what happens to the cultural
work of hometown associations when people continue to move further away from
Senegal. More research is needed to provide substantial answers to these questions.
As far as Bakalama is concerned, the troupe has been a transnational organization
since the mid-1990s at least, and increasingly so in the 2000s. There are now former
Bakalama performers settled across Europe, North America, and Australia. Yet the
troupe has retained its links with Thionck Essyl and its emphasis on Jola tradition. The
organizational form has shifted however, and the troupe is now able to present multiple
faces to the world. Inwardly, it remains an extension of the original troupe, and those
members who have managed to establish stable lives abroad help the Senegal-based
troupe to find touring and teaching opportunities in their countries of residence.
Outwardly, however, it appears more as a loose network of well-trained artists capable
of traveling across the various countries of residence to teach workshops in drumming
and dancing. This is facilitated by the use of the Internet, Facebook, and Youtube in par-
ticular. But does this affect the regionalist consciousness the genre has helped to foster?
In recent years, the regional character of the performers’ work abroad has in fact
become more explicit than it was when Casamançais performers started teaching and
performing away from Africa in the late 1970s and 1980s. During those years, following
the pan-African model described earlier, neo-traditional performance was marketed
as “African” or “West African” to audiences and students who often knew little about
these cultural forms. But the global resurgence of discourses of local belonging (Meyer
and Geschiere 1999) and the emergence of networks of European and American ama-
teurs has encouraged Casamançais performers to reassert their regional identity. This
is mainly done through dance and drumming workshops, described with ever more
regional specificity. This is evident, for example, in the way in which Bakalama members
living abroad present their artistic network and workshops:
Jamo Jamo Arts is a collection of professional artists, musicians and craftsmen who
aim to provide an excellent cultural experience at home and abroad. Led by Fodé
Mané in Australia, and his brother Landing Mané in the UK, we aim to educate,
entertain and inspire!!
We invite you to experience the energy and soul of Senegal with Jamo Jamo Arts.
Fodé Mané is a dynamic and inspirational teacher and performer of West African
drum and dance. Formerly a lead dancer, drummer and choreographer with the
award winning traditional performing arts troupe Bakalama of Thionck Essyl, based
in Dakar, he is renowned for his graceful and energetic style of dance, his exceptional
teaching abilities and his infectious smile. [ . . . ] With a repertoire of Guinean and
Senegalese rhythms, songs and dances, specialising in Bougarabou rhythms native
to the Casamance region and to his culture, he is an exceptionally talented artist with
a rich cultural tradition of dance and music.
(Jamo Jamo Arts Australia website 2009)
In many cases, it was only after performers had spent years abroad that they realized
how powerful the regional culture discourse could be within the growing global con-
cern for disappearing local worlds. Over time, the effect of successful Casamançais
performance abroad may have been a further strengthening of regional conscious-
ness back home. This is an essential factor in understanding the resurgence of region-
alism in all its complexity.
The choice by migrants from the Lower Casamance to Dakar in the 1960s and 1970s
to imagine and stage “tradition” came from the influence of colonial school theater and
Senghorian post-colonial cultural policy. What was being staged in theatrical and cho-
reographic form was a crafted collage of ceremonial dances from the region, combined
with epic narratives and autobiographical elements from the lives of the troupe mem-
bers. The plays and choreographic pieces of troupes like Bakalama contributed to cre-
ating representations of the Jola as the rightful and autochthonous inhabitants of the
region, and of Casamançais society as a diverse, yet bounded, timeless whole. What
started as youth theater gradually became the very image of regional culture, both in
Casamance and outside the region.
But why did performance encounter such success with migrants, and why did the
revival movement grow over time rather than dwindle? After all, the performers cur-
rently working with Casamançais troupes have never experienced colonial school
theater. Many are under 30, with no living memory of the Senghor years, and only lim-
ited experience of living in rural Casamance. Yet, Casamançais revival performance
is thriving, both in Dakar and among the Senegalese diaspora. The key to this, I sug-
gest, is to be found in performance’s ability to encapsulate a multiplicity of messages
(Askew 2002). This malleability helps us to understand why revival movements tend
to be performed rather than fixed in written or material form, even though text and
objects may well form an important part of the performance. In this case, creative per-
forming work has provided several generations of migrants with the social and sym-
bolic capital they needed to become successful and respected citizens in all the contexts
their lives traversed, from Casamance to Dakar and beyond. It has also enabled them to
pursue a regionalist agenda that was not fully explicit in the early days of the hometown
associations in Dakar. Unlike overt political action, performance has enabled the same
people to derive power from positioning themselves differently in different contexts.
Looking at revival movements over time and space also helps to challenge the notion
that revival movements necessarily involve a conscious strategy shared by all actors
from the beginning. Not all actors participate with the same degree of consciousness,
and much of what happens is conceptualized as revival in retrospect, once the move-
ment has gained momentum.
Notes
1. Among the best known examples of dance revival are a range of Indian classical dances
revived by Indian middle classes in the first half of the twentieth century, such as
Bharatanatyam (Meduri 2005).
2. This essay draws on material gathered over 18 months of fieldwork in Senegal, France,
and the United Kingdom between 2002 and 2011. Part of this research was generously
funded by an ESRC postdoctoral grant in 2005–06. While in Dakar, I followed several
neo-traditional dance troupes, had informal conversations with and conducted interviews
with performers, their families and audience members. I was also part of the organizing
team of the Kaay Fecc biennial dance festival in 2003 and 2007, which facilitated access to
dance troupes. The archival research was greatly facilitated by the digital newspaper data-
base “When States Use Culture” on Bob White’s webpage (www.atalaku.net).
3. See, for example, Labouret and Travélé (1928) on Koteba comedy theater in Mali, Diop
(1990) on traditional theater in Senegal, Samb (1975) on the mbànd traveling theater,
Charry (2000) on Mande music, or Kaba and Charry (2000) on the Mamaya music genre
in the Kankan region in Guinea.
4. For an excellent study on the role of the Ponty plays in the formation of an elite urban cul-
ture in Francophone West Africa, see Jezequel (1999).
5. The term referred to African individuals who were literate, educated in the French system,
wore European clothes and displayed modern lifestyles.
6. All quotations from French sources are my own translation.
7. Touré had Keita arrested for alleged complicity in plotting a coup in 1969. Keita was later
executed alongside several other former regime officials at the Camp Boiro military jail
which he had helped to establish.
8. In Wolof, Haalpulaar, and Mande societies, praise-singers (griots in French) belong to the
men-of-skill categories, alongside artisans. Their status in relation to the “freeborn” major-
ity is highly ambiguous.
9. During the colonial period, the “four communes” of Dakar, Rufisque, Saint-Louis, and
Gorée benefited from privileged access to French citizenship, education, and resources for
trade and economic development.
10. For a comprehensive review of the different approaches, see Foucher (2002).
11. See De Jong (2007) for an illuminating ethnography of the male initiation process in
Thionck Essyl as a way of incorporating modernity.
12. See, for example, Hamer (1981), Linares (1992, 2003), Lambert (2002), and Foucher (2002).
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C HA P T E R 12
REVIVED MUSICAL
P R AC T I C E S W I T H I N
U Z B E K I S TA N ’ S E VO LV I N G
NAT I O NA L P R O J E C T
TA N YA M E RC HA N T
In the realm of folk music, revival movements generally involve the self-conscious
performance of what is considered by practitioners to be old, historic, or traditional
music.1 Such projects are often connected to ideology; this is especially true when the
government motivates, sponsors, and controls the production of revived traditions.
What happens to state-revived music when that government changes? Such a question
is relevant throughout the former Soviet Union, but is especially salient in Uzbekistan,
where revivals that could be considered as grassroots (such as the Pokrovsky ensem-
ble in Ukraine and others like it)2 are markedly absent. Rather, there are two different
revived musical styles that are promulgated largely through state-run institutions in
Uzbekistan: “arranged folk music” and “traditional music.”
Both styles have roots that predate the foundation of the USSR in 1917 and had very
different trajectories during the Soviet period, despite shared presence in institutions
like state radio and television, music schools, and conservatories. The discourse sur-
rounding both styles has continually responded to shifts in state ideology, and this is
most noticeable during and after Uzbekistan’s transition from Soviet republic to inde-
pendent nation in 1991. Understanding the connections between revival moments and
nationalist ideology in Uzbekistan requires unpacking the changing narratives and the
interpersonal tensions that arise as musicians grapple with the institutional and ideo-
logical shifts of the post-Soviet era. Performers employ a variety of rhetorical strategies
to emphasize the continued relevance of their musical practices, and in doing so, beyond
simply justifying their need for a share of institutional resources, they reveal a great deal
about the importance that arranged folk music and traditional music have had within
Uzbekistan’s national project.
REVIVED MUSICAL PRACTICES WITHIN UZBEKISTAN’S NATIONAL PROJECT 253
This essay draws on over eighteen months’ worth of fieldwork conducted in

Uzbekistan’s capital city, Tashkent, from 2002 to 2009.3 It puts the two revival genres of
an’anaviy musiqasi (traditional music) and halq cholg’u musiqasi (people’s performance
music/arranged folk music) in dialogue in order to better understand the connection
between revival movements and nationalist ideology in Uzbekistan. To do so, it draws
on interviews with practitioners like Faizulla Karomatov (renowned musicologist),
Feruza Abdurahimova (director of the Sog’diana Folk Orchestra), Faruq Sodiqov (direc-
tor of the Tuxtasin Jalilov State Folk Orchestra), Malika Ziyeeva (dutarist and honored
artist of Uzbekistan), and Ro’zibi Hodjaeva (director of the Uzbek State Young Women’s
Dutar Ensemble), as well as other experiences while in the field. After a description of
the sound of these two musics and an account of their histories, this essay explores how
both musical styles are socially located within the same institutions, but draw on differ-
ent performance styles, pedagogical practices, and discourses to posit their importance
and relevance in post-independence Uzbekistan.
Musical Sounds of Arranged Folk Versus

Traditional Music
One of the most noticeable differences between arranged folk music and traditional
music is the sound of each style. Timbre, texture, and intonation differ significantly.
Arranged folk music is polyphonic, most often played using Western chord progres-
sions to create a sense of melody and accompaniment. Arranged folk music is played in
large symphonic ensembles of reconstructed instruments that have been modified to
conform to equal temperament.4 Folk orchestras in Uzbekistan are primarily comprised
of plucked lutes (dutars and rubabs) that are built in multiple sizes that mimic the violin
family of the Western symphonic orchestra. Multiple instrumentalists double on each
type of instrument, including prima, secunda, alt, tenor, and bass (corresponding to the
first and second violin sections, viola, cello, and bass). Such divisions are maintained
for the gijak (spike fiddle) section as well, though they often only have soprano and alto
versions. Other instruments in the ensemble include the nay (flute), chang (hammered
dulcimer), and a range of percussion instruments, each of which are not usually doubled
or converted into courses. This makes the timbral vocabulary of Uzbek folk orchestras
unique and fairly diverse, when compared to other Soviet-derived folk orchestras, like
the Russian ones that often feature balalaika, domra (both plucked strings), and accor-
dion (for more detail see Olson 2004). These orchestras perform folk or Western clas-
sical tunes that are arranged with harmonic accompaniment that often shifts between
tutti sections and those that foreground specific instrument families. Orchestras often
accompany choirs and vocal soloists as well.
Traditional music is also commonly played in ensemble format when performed in
institutions like the conservatory and the state radio stations. Theodore Levin notes
254 Tanya Merchant
that such focus on ensembles came from the Soviet period, and calls it “the grando-
mania of socialist culture” (Levin 1996b: 51). He presents this in contrast to the general
understanding that traditional music, especially the various maqom (modal art music)
traditions from the region, developed out of the court music that was primarily per-
formed solo or in very small chamber ensembles. The traditional music ensembles that
I observed in Tashkent generally included around a dozen performers and included
bowed fiddle (gijak), plucked lutes (dutar, Kashgar rubab, tanbur, and occasionally ‘ud),
hammered dulcimer (chang), and frame drum (doyra). In these traditional ensembles,
instruments are sometimes played in pairs, but rarely doubled further than that, and
melodies are performed in heterophonic style. Traditional instruments are not tuned to
equal temperament, though they do generally conform to the division of twelve notes
per octave. The resulting sound is often described as “shimmering,” as there are often
slightly different pitches voiced at the same time, since each instrumentalist performs
his/her melodic line with variation that is idiosyncratic to his/her instrument and indi-
vidual aesthetic. The timbre of such instruments are also more diverse, since the materi-
als diverge more than those of the folk orchestra, which uses primarily metal and nylon
strings for its instruments and involves a greater level of standardization. Traditional
instruments also use metal strings (e.g. tanbur, gijak) and nylon as well (e.g. Kashgar
rubab), but the silk strings of the dutar add a unique timbre to the ensemble. Indeed, the
dutar and tanbur are considered a matched pair (often described as masculine—tan-
bur and feminine—dutar) and those two plus the doyra frame drum comprise the most
basic traditional music ensemble. Vocal timbres, when employed in this style are more
strident than is typical in either Western art or pop musics. The singing style uses a very
wide range and involves the extension of the chest voice for the highest notes, which are
usually sung with the most volume and emotional intensity.5
Shared History, Shared Revival Tropes,

and Diverging Narratives
Along with the differences in musical sound, practitioners of arranged folk music tell
very different stories about their music when compared to those that traditional musi-
cians tell. Indeed, the kinds of language and terminology that musicians of each genre
employ highlight the different attitudes towards notions of history, modernity, and
national identity. This is especially true as those broader concepts intersect with ideas
of what is Asian, Uzbek, Eastern, Western, and European. Both traditional and arranged
folk music have consciously revived musical practices that are linked to Central Asian
practices throughout history; both also engage with Western notation and with notions
of musical literacy that align with European art music. Yet even as musicians who
perform in either genre acknowledge a shared history (discussed further in the next
section), at the same time they also set out clear markers of what differentiates their
respective style beyond the musical details. Many of the stories that musicians tell about
their musics center on nationalism, which is hardly surprising, given the pervasive and
prominent national project that has been ongoing since Uzbekistan gained indepen-
dence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Whether involved in arranged folk or traditional music, musicians acknowledge
shared historical roots in the folk and art musics of Uzbek and Tajik people before
Russian colonization. Their stories also tend to focus more on the Uzbekness of these
genres, rather than multi-ethnic and multi-religious contexts.6 Despite so much in
common, musicians generally focus their stories on the differences between the musi-
cal practices, with traditional musicians often discussing historical roots and long-held
traditions, while arranged folk musicians tell stories of modern music with academic
rigor that meets international musical standards (by which they are usually referring
to arranged folk music’s employment of Western tuning, harmonic language, and
notation systems). As such, ideology plays an important role in separating these two
revived musics: arranged folk music is presented as “academic,” and oriented toward
certain European aesthetics, while still acknowledging (and reifying) a basic grounding
in Uzbekness through the use of (reconstructed/modernized) Uzbek instruments, and
by performing Uzbek repertoire that has been arranged in symphonic style. Traditional
music, as it has been standardized and institutionalized in the state run media, schools,
universities, and the conservatory, is presented as preserving Uzbek national musi-
cal heritage and eschewing reconstruction and sonic markers of modernity. Even so,
many instruments have changed, and all performers of traditional music educated in
musical institutions are required to pass examinations in harmony and solfège, and to
read Western notation fluently. Even as traditional musicians engage with these prac-
tices that do not fit with the histories that they describe about their music, they are care-
ful to explain how the most important practices that tie them to this sense of historical
relevance still exist. Examples of these practices include learning repertoire via the
oral-imitative master-apprentice method, even if such methods are now supplemented
with notation, as well as the importance of maintaining traditional musical characteris-
tics (i.e., non-tempered intonation, heterophony, strident vocal timbres, and small per-
forming ensembles).
Tropes prevalent in current musical discourse surrounding both styles include
notions of traditional music’s “golden legacy,” ideas about modernization and con-
temporaneity, appeals to international and universal standards, and the importance of
musical literacy. As one might surmise, the practitioners of each style feel great loyalty
to their chosen mode of performance, making claims of the superiority of their chosen
style very common. While conducting fieldwork, I often heard musicians describe their
music as the most complex, as a “treasured pearl of the Uzbek people,” and as “priceless
valuables from ancient times.” In fact, practitioners of arranged folk music and tradi-
tional music both described their music to me as “by far the most complex, such that
any other genre of music is easy to learn, like a plaything.” Institutional boundaries and
interpersonal tensions often leave musicians feeling at odds with one another, since they
emphasize the differences between the two genres that share instrumentation, locality,
256 Tanya Merchant
and so much history. Performers employ these rhetorical strategies to emphasize their
relevance in the post-Soviet era; by doing so, they reveal much about the importance of
arranged folk and traditional music to Uzbekistan’s national project, made evident by
the prevalent national media presentations of musical practices that can be mapped to
Uzbek identity. Despite interpersonal and institutional tensions and divisions between
the two styles of traditional music and reconstructed folk music, both styles draw upon
ingrained notions of national heritage and pride to find contemporary value and mean-
ing in their music. While one style strives for modern and internationally savvy repre-
sentations of Uzbekness, and the other idealizes a pre-Soviet, pre-industrial golden past,
both are invested in re-creating an essentially Uzbek music that can contrast with other
musical styles that are well-known and well-respected in the region (such as Arabic
maqom, Western art music, or the folk orchestra traditions from other former Soviet
Republics). As such, both musical styles are responding to the cultural and institutional
charge that music represent and reify the separate national identity of Uzbekistan.
Historical Development
Shared Pre-Soviet History

Uzbek musical history is generally traced to music that was played in the courts of cities
on Silk Road trade routes as far back as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The court
music of that time is considered to be related to the maqom repertoires that centered
around the cities of Khiva (Khorezmian maqom), Bukhara (Shashmaqom), and those in
the Ferghana valley (Tashkent-Ferghana maqom). Although it is difficult to trace a con-
tinual performance practice to that time, scholars do trace traditional musical practice
back to manuscripts from the eighteenth century and performers in the nineteenth cen-
tury (Matyoqubov 2004, Levin 1984). In this sense, traditional music and arranged folk
music share a common history before the twentieth century (when various moderniza-
tion/reconstruction projects began). This history of the music that forms the basis of
each revival style is one of the primary ways in which both musical styles are presented
as valuable national practices. The following section will trace key moments and note
key figures in the diverging paths of arranged folk and traditional musics.
Reconstruction Projects: The Development of

Arranged Folk Music
The projects of reconstruction mark the split of the two styles from one another
(though even traditional musicians now prefer to use certain reconstructed versions
of instruments like the Kashgar rubab). The most well-known project to re-work
Uzbek traditional instruments was a large government-sponsored reconstruction
spearheaded in the 1930s by Ashot Petrosiants (1910–1978). Reconstruction proj-

ects, termed rekonstruktsiya (reconstruction) or modernizatsiya (modernization) in
the Russian language and zamonaviylashtirgan (contemporized or modernized) or
takomillashtirgan (developed or perfected) in the Uzbek language, occurred through-
out the republics of the Soviet Union in the 1930s.Vasiliy Andreev had created the
first of this type of project, which resulted in the creation of Russian folk orchestras
comprised of balalaikas, domras, (plucked fretted lutes) and bayans (accordions) in
the late nineteenth century, in the decades leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution in
1917 (Olson 2004: 16–17).
In the 1930s, folk orchestras comprising altered instruments that used equal-tempered
tuning systems and that were made of materials that could project on a concert stage
were created specifically to promote Soviet ideology throughout the newly founded
pan-ethnic nation. A vital aspect of this project was to support the notion of an
ethno-national identity that was supposed to map onto each of the separate Soviet
republics, all while uplifting the artistic capabilities of the folk. Musicologists Izaly
Zemtsovsky and Alma Kunanbaeva discuss the many government projects of the 1930s
in terms of their ideological importance:
The 1930s saw the beginning of “innovations” introduced into folklore as a response
to the appeal for “revolutionary men of culture” to take an active participation in
creating new forms of folklore, in developing a new folklore, and in cultivating
it . . . All-Union assemblies were held for folksingers to encourage them in all possible
ways, especially by presenting them with the highest State awards.
(Zemtsovsky and Kunanbaeva 1997: 11)
The creation of such folk orchestras from various republics was thus an important
political act. It created a common genre that could be showcased on concert stages in
pan-Soviet festivals and dekadas (10-year celebrations) to celebrate diversity with com-
mon musical vocabularies.
The development of this musical style was a key part of Soviet policy in the 1930s,
which sought to diminish the importance of class and to elevate the music of the peas-
ants in line with communist ideology. Historian Laura Olson notes this, saying:
According to official rhetoric [in the 1930s], socialism had been achieved and class no
longer existed as a legitimate category. However, one remnant of the pre-socialism
days was allowed to remain—nationality. Socialism now included the “brother-
hood of the peoples,” the idea that all (except the Russians) were equal. The Soviets
invested enormous time and energy into the production of national consciousness
among the citizenry.
(Olson 2004: 37)
The concept of one nationality/ethnicity per republic was highly problematic in

Uzbekistan, which (as mentioned above) has a long history of multi-ethnic and
258 Tanya Merchant
multi-religious musical culture (this is especially relevant as regards the heritage of

Central Asian maqom traditions like the Shashmaqom, which are shared by Uzbeks and
Tajiks and by Muslims and Jews). This importance placed on ethno-national identity
throughout the Soviet era has had long standing repercussions. For example, historian
Ronald Grigor Suny notes the continued problem of listing nationality in Soviet and
post-Soviet passports, saying
The practice of fixing nationality in each citizen’s internal passport on the basis of
parentage rendered an inherently liquid identity into a solid commitment to a single
ethnocultural group. Young people with parents who had different national designa-
tions on the their passports were forced to choose one or the other nationality, which
then became a claim to inclusion or an invitation to exclusion in a given republic.
(Suny 2001: 867)
Nonetheless, the nationalities policy that developed in the Soviet era has transformed into
a widely publicized national project in the post-Soviet era. This connection of Soviet cul-
tural and national policy with arranged folk music creates a difficult situation for musi-
cians who continue performing it with great enthusiasm in the post-Soviet era. However,
the emphasis on the Uzbek nature of such folk orchestras certainly aids the efforts for
such ensembles to maintain relevance to present-day national projects. Indeed, the strong
national identifiers associated with Soviet-era standardized versions of both arranged folk
music and traditional music continue to serve these genres in the present day.
Yunus Rajabi—Codifying and Standardizing Traditional Music

Although traditional music was largely absent from educational institutions in the
early- and mid-Soviet era, traditional music sounded throughout the country via
the state radio station.7 Renowned scholar-performer Yunus Rajabi (1897–1976)
founded a maqom/traditional music ensemble at the state radio station in 1927 and
led it for many years. The radio ensemble played versions of traditional music that
maintained its heterophonic performance style and that were played mostly on
non-reconstructed instruments (the Kashgar rubab mentioned above and the gijak
are the most visible exceptions). This radio ensemble became the primary vehicle for
the dissemination of traditional music in the Soviet period, and many of the most
famous traditional musicians performed and continue to perform in it (the state
radio station also had a folk orchestra associated with it, as well as ensembles that
performed Western art music). The traditional music ensemble at the state radio
(often called the radio maqom ensemble) provided a performance venue for the
music that Rajabi collected, codified, and standardized via his two famous collec-
tions: Shashmaqom vol. 1–6 and O’zbek Halq Musiqasi (Uzbek Folk Music) vol. 1–8
(1970–1976 and 1955–1959, respectively). These volumes contain versions of tradi-
tional repertoires from Bukhara in the case of the Shashmaqom, and from various
regions in Uzbekistan in the case of O’zbek Halq Musiqasi, that Rajabi collected and
transcribed into Western notation beginning in the 1930s. Both of these sets are now
considered standard versions of Uzbek traditional music and are often consulted by
faculty and other performers at the conservatory. It is difficult to quantify the level to
which he changed melodies as they were performed at the time, beyond the fact that
he created a single standard version that resulted from his transcriptions of multiple
performers’ versions of the pieces within the repertoires. It persists as the standard
version in Uzbekistan, and musicians are in constant dialogue with the Rajabi stan-
dard, even though many choose to play versions of the melodies that are significantly
different from the Rajabi transcriptions. Musicians usually cite the oral tradition and
the value of their teacher’s version (or a version that their teacher learned from a
master). As such, the major change in regard to the revival of maqom practices in
Uzbekistan is the engagement with a standard codified version.
Rajabi is considered the twentieth-century forefather of traditional musical prac-
tices as they exist in various state institutions, and is treated as a national hero for his
work preserving and performing what is presented in Uzbekistan as national traditional
music. His house has been converted into a museum, and his family is often described
as having a musical dynasty, since his son and grandsons are also well-respected musi-
cians. This renown is not just the result of the Soviet-era project to bolster separate
national identities within its republics. Indeed, Rajabi remains an important aspect
to Uzbekistan’s post-Soviet national project. The bi-annual maqom competition in
Tashkent is named in his honor and in 2001, when the city of Tashkent opened a new
metro line (the Yunusobod line), one of the stations was named after him. There is an
overt placement of Rajabi in the public sphere as an important historical figure, one who
helped the proliferation of Uzbek traditional culture.
Beyond the various efforts to honor him, Rajabi’s transcriptions of traditional music
and the recordings associated with them that he made with the maqom ensemble at the
state-run radio station are considered to be his most valuable legacy for the Uzbek peo-
ple. Many musicians have expressed their appreciation of these codified and standard-
ized collections, citing the convenience of not having to memorize a vast repertoire like
the Shashmaqom that is comprised of six large suites of music each in its own mode. This
process of preservation and standardization is of key importance to the revival of tra-
ditional music, especially considering the fetishization of musical literacy and of writ-
ten music in music educational institutions. Beyond the volumes’ status as important
objects that makes this tradition tangible, Rajabi’s transcriptions have become the stan-
dard by which soloists and ensemble in the traditional music department of the conser-
vatory are judged, and musicians are constantly engaged in dialogue with this legacy.
The State Conservatory

Beyond the state radio station and Yunus Rajabi’s ensembles, the Uzbek State
Conservatory is the flagship institution for Uzbek music. It is one of the primary sites
260 Tanya Merchant
where these revivals are enacted.8 The first conservatory in the Turkestan Republic
(the Russian colonial territory of Central Asia that existed until the 1930s and encom-
passed the region comprising what is now Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) was founded in Tashkent in 1918. It later closed and
was replaced by the opening of a conservatory founded by the Soviet government in
1936. This Turkiston People’s Conservatory (Turkiston Halq Konservatoriyasi) was
the first of four institutes of musical higher education opened in the early years of the
Soviet Union: 1919 saw the opening of conservatories in Samarqand (now in central
Uzbekistan) and Ferghana (in eastern Uzbekistan) and another opened in Bukhara
(also in central Uzbekistan) in 1920 (Odilov 29). These music schools included tradi-
tional music in their pedagogy, but that practice largely ceased around 1937 when the
reconstruction project gained prominence. Musicologist Faizulla Karomatov (1925–)
remembers this time, saying:
Until 1937 there was very strong traditional music [in Uzbekistan]. In general there
was only traditional music. In the ’20s, in 1926, there was a school of music system
opened in the provinces. The first school was national traditional performance
based. I was also part of that in the beginning. Then. . .after [World War II], slowly
[only] the arranged folk instruments that had been reconstructed [were left]. At that
point they called [traditional music] “backward,” and asked whether or not it was
still needed.
(Interview, July 21, 2005, Tashkent)
This description of traditional music as “backward” was a key aspect of Soviet cultural
policy and left traditional music in a very tenuous place.
Institutions (the state radio station and the conservatory especially) helped to codify
and make meaningful the split between arranged folk music and traditional music. The
Tashkent State Conservatory (renamed the Uzbek State Conservatory after indepen-
dence and referred to by musicians simply as “the conservatory”) was founded in 1937
and originally provided education only in Western art music. While teaching at both
institutions, Petrosiants officially founded the Uzbek Orchestra of Folk Instruments
at the Tashkent Musical Technicum and also created the department of arranged folk
music opened in what was then the Tashkent State Conservatory in 1949 (Sobirova and
Abdurahimova 1994: 36).
The state conservatory offered education in Western classical music and arranged
folk music to students, and most music schools and secondary level kollejs/uchilishs9
followed suit, keeping traditional music out of the educational system from 1937 until
the 1970s. However, that does not mean that traditional music did not receive atten-
tion or institutionalization from the Soviet government. Indeed, as mentioned earlier,
musicologists and musical folklorists like Yunus Rajabi set about transcribing and col-
lecting traditional repertoires, some of which provided material for arrangements
for orchestras and others of which became standardized models for the performance
of traditional music. Additionally, the radio maqom ensemble provided some confu-
sion for young performers who began studying music before traditional repertoires
were institutionalized into the conservatory. My teacher of traditional music and dutar,
Malika Ziyeeva, often told the story of beginning her studies at a music school in the
Ferghana valley on the Kashgar rubab. She would hear great masters like Yunus Rajabi
and Faxriddin Sodikov (who later became her teacher) playing in the maqom ensemble
on the radio and would wonder why the music that she was learning at the local music
school sounded so different (Ziyeeva, interview, June 15, 2005, Tashkent). The Kashgar
rubab was considered an ideal instrument to start girls on in Soviet-era music schools,
since it fit small hands well. (This contrasts with the traditional association of feminin-
ity with the dutar, the only non-percussion instrument that women played historically.)
Many of the women that I interviewed over the course of my research (who developed
careers as performers of either traditional or arranged folk music) began their studies on
the Kashgar rubab in Soviet music schools.
During Ziyeeva’s early childhood in the 1950s and ’60s (unbeknownst to her at the
time), there was a great push to include traditional music like that played by the radio
maqom ensemble in the pedagogy of the conservatory. Faizulla Karomatov spearheaded
this movement and spent a great deal of time pushing the director of the conserva-
tory, Muxatar Ashrafiy, on the subject and getting in arguments with Ashot Petrosiants
over the suitability of including traditional music in the state conservatory. Karomatov
remembers this time, discussing his early idea to include traditional music pedagogy in
the arranged folk music department:
I was thinking that the department of arranged folk instruments should combine
with traditional. . .The head of the department was Petrosiants. I began to talk to
him about the project. “It needs a change, if your program doesn’t change, it won’t
last,” I said . . . Two days later we’d meet again and he’d have returned to his original
thoughts. He’d say, “no, we’ll continue on our path.” Again I’d explain, and again
he’d soften . . . Finally he said “We will [have academic/ethnographic contact]
with folk musicians, that’s our work.” I said that folk musicians aren’t staying—
they’re disappearing [i.e. the traditional bearers are dying out] . . . When I under-
stood that [he wouldn’t budge], I decided to work on opening a department of
Eastern Music.
In this, Karomatov is describing his fight to make a place for the revival of traditional
music in a way that didn’t the involve significant changes to instruments or musical tex-
ture that occurred in folk orchestras. It is worth noting that Karomatov was originally
willing to try to find a space for both revived traditions under the auspices of the same
department, and that it was Petrosiants who resisted that unification. After arguing with
Petrosiants for inclusion in the arranged folk department and failing, Karomatov went
to Muxatar Ashrafiy, the director of the conservatory, and “invited” him to open a sepa-
rate department.
We opened the department ourselves. . . . I didn’t ask, I invited! “Do this.” I said,
“if not, I won’t come to the conservatory” (laughs). . . I invited the director of the
262 Tanya Merchant
conservatory. He wanted to create a small folklore expedition department. I said

“No! Not like that, you need to do it like this, and then I can come be a part of it.”
(Ibid.)
It is worth noting that it took someone of undeniable renown like Karomatov to push
this project through and make space for a second folk revival practice in the conser-
vatory. He was very clear that this project would not simply involve ethnographic col-
lection (and performance) of folklore but would instead focus on engagement with
maqom repertoires and related pieces academically and in terms of performance (in
fact, familiarity with other maqom-like traditions like Arabic maqam and Persian dast-
gah is encouraged in the traditional music department). Thus, in 1971, the department
opened amid much scandal (it was then known as Vostochnaya Muzyka Kafedra or the
Eastern Music Department and is now known as the An’anaviy Musiqa Fakulteti or the
Traditional Music Department). This system of two separate departments mirrors the
situation in the state radio station, which supports both a folk orchestra and a traditional
ensemble, as it has since the early Soviet period. With the conservatory mimicking the
same divisions, the current generation of musicians has never known anything other
than this institutionalized division between arranged folk music and traditional music.
The Post-Soviet Situation
The bulk of the state-sponsored ensembles and institutions in which arranged folk and
traditional musics are played were founded during the Soviet Period.10 The outlets for
learning and performing these styles were shaped in the Soviet era, as well as the rhetoric
surrounding each style. The shift from Soviet republic to independent nation required
some ideological negotiations, including a shift in focus for many cultural practices, so
that they could better support a national project focused on Uzbekistan’s independence.
The Golden Legacy
The focus of national pride changed with independence, from an emphasis on the
panopoly of ethno-national identities that were to serve the larger Soviet national-
ism (within this context, being overly nationalistic was a suspect stance), to a state
in which nationalism is framed as specifically (and ethnically) Uzbek, and it is dif-
ficult to imagine there being such a thing as too much nationalism. Despite the shifts
in national sentiments, much of the aesthetic presentation of both musical styles
remained constant for both traditional and arranged folk music. Indeed, both are
still marked by the Soviet valorization of ensemble work, written music and literacy,
and stage performance. While these aspects of musical performance and aesthetics
have remained largely constant, the rhetoric supporting their existence and value has
continued to adjust to the political situation. One of the major transitions in terms of
discourse has been the way that the national project thrust traditional music into the
spotlight after independence. The approach to nationalism in the Soviet era, as noted
by Tomoff (2004), was one of great suspicion. As such, although Soviet nationalities
policy from the 1930s onward focused on creating a separate national identity for
each republic, it was important that these national identities were always supportive
of a primary Soviet identity (similar to the way that monophonic folk tunes were
collected and arranged to perform in folk orchestras that represented both Uzbek
national identity and the larger Soviet folk orchestral context). An interview that
I conducted with Faizulla Karomatov and Malika Ziyeeva confirmed this sense of the
word in the Soviet Union as late as the 1970s:
FK : There was the department of folk instruments (laughs) yes, yes, yes, and they were
interested in closing [the Eastern Music Department]. I had nothing to say on the
subject, but then the director finally came out and everyone had put a black mark
on it, saying this is national, nationalist. . .
TM: National, this was something bad, right?
FK : Nationalist, as they called it, this was a big, big black [i.e. reprehensible] term.
M Z: But only in the Soviet period.
FK : Nationalist!
This interview is similar to comments made in many private conversations that I have
had with traditional musicians who performed during the Soviet era; many who
worked before the glasnost era were worried about being considered suspicious or
nationalist. Currently, traditional musicians speak a great deal about the value of their
music, not just in aesthetic terms, but also in terms of relevance to nationalism; nation-
alist is no longer an epithet, but a moniker of pride. Playing nationalist music during
the Soviet era made one suspect and dangerous, but in the post-Soviet era national-
ist musicians are celebrated for performing their valuable heritage. This heritage is
something not entirely tangible and always connected to pre-Russian times and with
an Uzbek essence, usually one that is carried through blood ties from generation to
generation. During an interview at one of my dutar lessons, Ziyeeva made the follow-
ing illustrative comment:
The most [basic] thing is in the blood, regardless. Traditions exist in the
blood . . . Whether you like it or not, they have a hold on you regardless. Because our
fathers and grandfathers said, regardless, it is in the blood.
(Interview, March 22, 2005, Tashkent)
This makes tradition something that is almost passive in its continuation and a national
identity one that cannot be escaped. The importance of heritage connection to musical
tradition in Uzbekistan is often mentioned in terms of the traditional master-apprentice
264 Tanya Merchant
system and also in terms of the music being “in the blood.” Once I gained enough pro-
ficiency on the dutar, many people began enquiring about Uzbek blood in my ances-
try. Many students in the traditional music department with whom I spoke mentioned
elderly relatives who may have played instruments or had enthusiasm for music, even
if those foremothers and forefathers were not musicians themselves, they contribute to
the notion of a blood heritage to this musical tradition.
Individual musicians as well as media representations often connect music, traditional
music specifically, to nationalist sentiments. In 2005, I interviewed two of Ziyeeva’s stu-
dents, Mehrihon Muminova and Ilyos Arabov, about the music that they played. The
conversation quickly turned to a discussion of music’s connection to national pride:
TM: This traditional music, is it necessary for society?

M M: Of course, of course; it is very necessary, for example . . ..
I A : It’s our nationalism.
TM: And what exactly is nationalism?
M M: Nationalism is, nationalism is Uzbekistan. For example, every nation state has
nationalism. For example, the culture of our people, that is nationalism. Our
priceless valuables from ancient times, those are nationalism.
(Interview, February 13, 2005, Tashkent)
This idea of priceless ancient valuables is very prevalent in media representations of

Uzbek traditions, especially those not connected with Soviet reconstruction projects
(even though traditional music was of course standardized and greatly affected by Soviet
projects). This idea of a pre-Soviet legacy has been very important to traditional music’s
rise in public acclaim. Ziyeeva’s students speak of their music with great pride and asso-
ciate it with other genres more associated with village culture than with the urban elite
of Silk Road cities. In the same interview quoted above, Ilyos Arabov made this com-
ment about national genres and music’s connection to nationalism:
So at our nationalism’s foundation, there is music. There are lullabies and yallalar
[folk songs], our lapar [singing and dancing genre], the yor yor we sing at weddings.
Then there is our style of playing—all of it at its basic level is music. The way people
sing at weddings with ohang [melodic style] is part of nationalism.
(Interview, February 13, 2005, Tashkent)
In this comment, it is clear that folk songs as well as melodic style are considered vital
for the expression of unique national character. As mentioned earlier, this national
character to traditional music is the result of a nationalizing project beginning in
the Soviet era and continuing in the post-independence era. These connections to an
ancient past are often somewhat tenuous, since it is difficult to connect many aspects
of performance practice to the pre-Soviet era. Indeed, traditional music is most
noticeably traditional in its stark contrast with folk orchestras, which display their
modern interactions explicitly.
The instruments used in traditional ensembles are much closer to historical versions
than their reconstructed counterparts, but they have also undergone changes in the
twentieth century, such as the use of nylon tied frets on various plucked lutes like the
dutar and tanbur that are made of material similar to fishing line rather than traditional
gut. It is worth noting that the dutar has maintained its silk strings in the traditional
version (the reconstructed versions use nylon strings), which is seen as a very impor-
tant tie to traditional practices, since nylon strings alter the timbre significantly (and
also allow performers to play with louder volume). As such, traditional musicians are
engaged deeply with modernity and in choosing which aspects of performance style
and instrument materials to alter and which to preserve. Although the national rheto-
ric depends on the presentation of maqom and traditional music as wholly rooted in
tradition, musicians are actively making choices about which aspects are flexible with-
out losing important ties to what is seen as traditional practice (instrumental and vocal
timbre is seen as highly important for both emotional expression and traditional sound
by maqom performers). During the Soviet period, traditional ensembles in institutions
grew larger, while still maintaining a heterophonic performance style. Instruments were
often doubled in these ensembles and solo vocalists were often replaced by choruses,
sometimes allowing groups of men and women to share a melodic line with an espe-
cially large tessitura. Further, the codification process that Rajabi engaged in (both by
publishing the transcriptions and recording his versions at the state radio) can be seen as
an important way in which this traditional music has sustained its revival practice with
modern/non-traditional methods. These methods are not often criticized, rather they
are often vaunted as highly practical and even vital to the continuation of the repertoire,
both by musicians interested in continuing an important national tradition and its sup-
porting government institutions and by the media interested in presenting Rajabi as a
national figure.
Modernizing Ancient Traditions

Traditional music is not the only genre to capitalize on the notion of ancient heri-
tage. Certainly, arranged folk music places a great deal of importance on Uzbek
music’s ancient traditions. However, most arranged folk musicians that I’ve spo-
ken with claim that simply preserving a tradition is insufficient. They describe the
music that they play in terms of modernizing traditions and making them relevant
to the contemporary situation. Founding director of the Sog’diana Folk Orchestra,
Feruza Abdurahimova, posited the importance of allowing music to develop and be
modern:
Even many of our musicologists and a few of our musicians look at us [i.e. arranged
folk musicians] like enemies. You understand me, right? You’ve noticed, right? They
say “there, they’ve ruined Uzbek music,” but it’s not so. I simply can’t agree with that.
Why? Because ancient traditions, of course they are our foundation, but at the same
266 Tanya Merchant
time we have such riches of musical instruments. To keep these ancient traditions
under locks, that means that we refuse to develop.
(Interview, January 4, 2005, Tashkent)
This is an especially interesting argument, when considering the roots of arranged folk
music in the Soviet Era. On the one hand, musicians have felt pressure to link their music
to a historical legacy, yet on the other hand, arranged folk music was developed dur-
ing a time when Soviet institutions valued innovation, modernity, and Western forms.
As such, a melding of the two ideologies occurs, and musicians represent arranged folk
music in a way that highlights the roots in Uzbek folk tunes and folk instruments, at the
same time that those instruments and musical roots are not kept static. This idea that old
or traditional musics need to develop and modernize is a main aspect of the adversarial
relationship between traditional music and arranged folk music. This notion also falls
back on Soviet era rhetoric surrounding the updating of “backward” musics (like the
music of the peasants and of non-European peoples). Indeed, the arranged folk musi-
cians with whom I spoke are often searching for ways to discuss the continued relevance
of their music in the post-Soviet era (some of which are discussed in the following sec-
tion). This is especially difficult, since framing the issue in terms of modernity harkens
back strongly to Soviet rhetoric.
This notion of modernizing tradition, however, does fit with some of the scholarly
work on folk revivals that note that revivals often are selective of how music is presented
on a concert stage. Eyerman and Jamison would probably frame arranged folk music as
still being part of a tradition, since they posit that: “a tradition, for us, is a process of con-
necting a selected or ‘usable’ past with the present—with ongoing, contemporary life”
(1998: 29). Both traditional music and arranged folk music engage in the selection of the
parts of history that are “usable.” Indeed, traditional musicians often trace their musical
traditions to master musicians in the courts of Bukhara, while ignoring musical histo-
ries of other classes. Beyond the selective use of history, Eyerman and Jamison’s descrip-
tion of tradition as a process rather than a static practice allows arranged folk music to
be viewed clearly as a revival practice. Arranged folk musicians describe their connec-
tions to tradition as a starting point for musical innovation, rather than as a valuable
legacy that must be preserved authentically. Even as arranged folk music can be viewed
within the framework of tradition as process, there are tangible differences between
the relatively natural development of genre as directed by its practitioners (as Eyerman
and Jamison describe) and the very explicit project to modernize a tradition, such as
occurred during the creation of folk orchestras in the Soviet era.
Scholars during the Soviet era placed great importance on the project of recon-
struction as a way of uplifting various peoples and their cultures into modernity.
S. Zakrzhevskaya’s quote about the importance of harmonizing Uzbek music is indica-
tive of that approach: “The problem of harmonization in Uzbekistan is extraordinarily
important, for harmony is tied to the formation of a modern Uzbek national musi-
cal style” (1968: 212). In this, the direct link between modernity and harmony (i.e.
Western-style harmony) is made explicit. Those who continue to find performing in or
listening to folk orchestras to be a fulfilling and meaningful experience appreciate par-

ticipating in such a well-defined modernizing project. Musicians and enthusiasts praise
arranged folk music that is marked by harmony and equal temperament as a way to par-
ticipate in the global modern.
However, as Abdurahimova noted above, many people are uncomfortable with such
ideologically motivated changes in musical structure and practice. Zemtsovsky and
Kunanbaeva describe the creation of folk music by the Soviet government as deeply con-
nected with a modernization process that created a sense of state control and led away
from authentic practices.
The Party waged a fierce campaign against old customs and traditions. New social-
ist festivals and ceremonies were continuously created and forced on people, with
accompanying music, songs, and instructions distributed all over the country. The
motto was, “new times—new songs—new customs—new traditions—new human
beings, the builders of communism.” In fact, it was a movement from genuine folk-
lore to, let us say, “trade-union folklore,” i.e., a new and artificial tradition organized
from above as a means of “improving” the style, texts, melodies, and musical instru-
ments, and aimed toward general unification, control, and administration.
(Zemtsovsky and Kunanbaeva 1997: 19)
This commentary illustrates the sentiment that Abdurahimova rails against: the idea
that reconstruction “ruined” Uzbek music. Indeed, many people feel that way, but the
people who continue to perform in folk orchestras and study reconstructed instruments
in schools and conservatories are actively creating a meaningful place for arranged folk
music in a post-Soviet context. Musicians who specialize in reconstructed instruments
maintain that innovation is vital for any living tradition and emphasize arranged folk
music's importance in the post-Soviet era in terms of international appeal and legibility,
because of its shared harmonic language with Western art music and other European
genres.
Internationalism/Universalism
In order for arranged folk music to continue to develop out of its perceived ideologi-
cal roots in Soviet political discourse, many musicians now discuss the priorities of the
genre in terms of striving to appeal to international audiences and reach a universal
standard of beauty (which is assumed to be one aligned with Western art music). In light
of this priority shift, goals of musical performance have changed in the post-Soviet era.
The desired audience is now comprised of citizens of Uzbekistan (whose national pride
is meant to be bolstered by receiving such performances) and international audiences,
who are said to receive performances of both genres as publicity for and education about
Uzbekistan’s valuable culture and rich history. This perceived shift toward the interna-
tional arena exists for both traditional and arranged folk musicians. Indeed, leading per-
formers of traditional music are very proud of their tours in Europe, the Middle East,
268 Tanya Merchant
and other former-Soviet republics; they often describe with pride their sold-out tours
and standing ovations received abroad.
Conductors of folk orchestras like Feruza Abdurahimova (of the Sog’diana Folk
Orchestra) and Faruq Sodiqov (of the Tuxtasin Jalilov State Folk Orchestra) ignore the
popular international tours of traditional musicians like Munojat Yulicheeva, Malika
Ziyeeva, and her students, and claim that a primary charge of their orchestras is to trans-
late Uzbek traditional legacy into an auditory language that non-Uzbeks can compre-
hend. Sodiqov made this point very explicitly in a 2005 interview, where he strongly
suggested that Westerners who were not specialists would not be interested in tradi-
tional music as more than exotica, since European audiences are only accustomed to
tempered tuning:
FS: You’re a musicologist—to you [traditional music] is interesting. It’s interesting

the first time, the second time, or you’re a specialist therefore you are doing it, so
traditional performance is [always] interesting to you. But the general listener
is interested the first time, but the second time, it already sounds like out of tune
playing, and it’s already uninteresting because the general listener’s ears are
adjusted to hearing tempered tuning. . .
TM: Now audiences are more interested in equal tempered things or in
traditional ones?
FS: In Uzbekistan, we have some of each kind [of audience]. . . But if you go to
European countries, all the strings are tempered, and there’s nothing traditional.
They say it’s out of tune.
(Interview, May 22, 2005, Tashkent)
This perception that European or Western audiences can’t appreciate Uzbek intonation
is a very common trope in the conversations of arranged folk players. They take pride
in the folk orchestra’s ability to play in equal temperament that allows them access to
the performance of European classical repertoire as well as the benefit of being able
to translate Uzbek folk music into a pitch collection that they see as internationally
valued. Feruza Abdurahimova echoed this sentiment when discussing performances
of her Sog’diana Orchestra, emphasizing the orchestra’s modernity and its “univer-
sal value” that could be understood by all: “[The folk orchestra] is the most universal
collective, which can converse with every country of the world and no one will con-
sider such a collective foreign or alien” (interview, January 4, 2005, Tashkent). (See
web Figure 12.1 for a photograph of Abdurahimova conducting the Sog’diana Folk
Orchestra.) This seems to shift the argument of the Soviet era about music in need of
equal temperament and harmony in order to transform from “backward” into mod-
ern, to music that still needs such transformation in order for international audiences
to appreciate it.
Abdurahimova continues to successfully court international attention for her
Sog’diana Folk Orchestra. Over the course of my fieldwork, I’ve seen her give concerts
in conjunction with consulates and embassies from Italy, France, and Korea. Usually
these concerts involve her orchestra performing a program comprised of compositions
and arranged folk tunes from the nation that has an embassy sponsoring the concert.
Such concerts are often attended by consular officials stationed in Tashkent, as well
as supporters of the folk orchestra, and are touted as opportunities for international
understanding and appreciation. During the opening remarks at the concert for the
Korean delegation, Abdurahimova made the following commentary that links both the
nationalist sentiment so prevalent in the arts in Uzbekistan and the positioning of folk
orchestras as agents for international understanding: “the first order of the orchestra is
to play Uzbek folk music, then music by Uzbek composers, and finally, music of other
peoples” (speech given at the Sog’diana Folk Orchestra Concert, April 7, 2005). Despite
words that prioritized Uzbek music, the concert offered primarily repertoire from the
third category, including an arrangement of the famous Korean folksong “Arirang” and
various compositions by Korean composers of Western art music. The concert for the
Italian delegation included works by Verdi and Puccini, and the concert for the French
delegation included works by Bizet and Saint-Saens. These concerts display the con-
nection between notions of modernity, of international value, and of the final issue
discussed in this essay, academic rigor and literacy. The competence with which folk
orchestral musicians can perform works from the Western canon is a source of great
pride and is taken as a sign that they are gramotnyj or musically literate. Although
there is currently a great deal of pride placed on national musics, in terms of both tra-
ditional and arranged folk music, to a great extent, musical literacy is still presented in
Western terms.
Academic/Literate Music
The notion of musical literacy is one that is very important to musicians in order to
legitimize their status as educated professionals. Performers of both traditional music
and arranged folk music take great pains to highlight their ability to read notation and
understand solfège and harmony.
Arranged folk music is especially embroiled in the discourse of academic status and
musical literacy. Most arranged folk musicians emphasize the academic nature of their
discipline and demonstrate this by performing music by European composers on their
instrument; by reading Western notation during performances; and by performing
complex solos with harmonic accompaniment. During my fieldwork, the most dramatic
illustration of the idea that arranged folk is an academic musical practice that differenti-
ates it from other music occurred in 2003, when I attended a concert in the large concert
hall of the conservatory. I sat down in my seat in the audience and a conservatory stu-
dent whom I did not recognize sat down beside me. “I know you! You play the dutar,” she
said to me, “you’re a student of Malika Ziyeeva.” I replied that yes, I was a dutar student
of Ziyeeva and that I had travelled from the United States to study Uzbek music. This
student was quite enthusiastic and mentioned that she too was a dutar player. When
I asked who her teacher was and why I hadn’t met her before, she replied that she studied
in a different department, in the akademik fakulteti (the academic department). At the
270 Tanya Merchant
time, I had never heard arranged folk music referred to as “academic” and was confused
by the term. I asked if she was a musicologist. No, she wasn’t a musicologist, she studied
dutar, but in the department that was academic where she learned harmony and studied
notation. I found this quite curious, since she was clearly evoking what she perceived
as a meaningful contrast with the traditional department. As my research continued,
I found further references to arranged folk music as academic that implied a contrast
with non-academic folk and traditional music.
Feruza Abdurahimova provided one of these references to academic style:
Our collective Sog’diana, this is an academic collective . . . it is a new contemporary

style, which was born in the twentieth century. Suddenly to perform harmony with
the ancient Uzbek instruments, of course it was a very complicated task for us.
(Interview, January 4, 2005, Tashkent)
Abdurahimova combines the discourse of academic playing with modernization and

contemporaneity. Faruq Sodiqov combined the same notions to describe the impor-
tance of Ashot Petrosiants’ project of reconstruction:
The playing style—it’s a different manner of performing. It needs to be aca-

demic. . .Petrosiants went down that path to academic performance; he went down a
new and very progressive road for his style of playing.
(Interview, May 22, 2005, Tashkent)
Both Sodiqov and Abdurahimova are staking their claim for the legitimacy of folk
orchestral performance as a modern academic pursuit. This framework of academic
status is deeply connected with the ability to perform the music of European com-
posers and such priorities have existed since the Soviet era. Theodore Levin noted a
similar emphasis on European composers in the conservatory during his research in
the 1970s, which he described as “the idolization of European masterpieces as a kind
of musical rite of passage in the training of young ethnic music performers” (Levin
1980: 154). This idolization pervades the conservatory as an institution, such that stu-
dents in all departments are taught to look to what is perceived as the universal value of
the Western canon.
Although students and faculty in the arranged folk music department are more
explicit about the value and priority placed on one’s facility in interpreting Western
notation, it is certainly a valued skill for traditional musicians as well. The authenticity
of one’s performance practice depends upon one’s lineage to great teachers who transmit
traditional music via oral-imitative methods (which they point out, is just as rigorous
and academic as learning from written music). However, in institutions like the con-
servatory and state radio, the ability to read a score is very much required. Students in
the conservatory (including those in the traditional music department) take courses in
Western harmony and solfège, and all are required to be fluent readers of Western nota-
tion. This is important even for traditional music students, since the standard versions
of traditional tunes are currently preserved in volumes like those by Rajabi that exist in
Western notation. Levin noted the importance of these volumes of notations in conser-
vatory pedagogy even in the 1970s and 80s:
The transcriptions [of the Shashmaqom] were in standard staff notation and pro-
vided a single melodic line that gave the core pitches of each song and tune. Details
of interpretation—dynamics, melodic ornamentation, tempo—were conveyed by
teachers during private lessons with such unerring exactitude that they may as well
have been inscribed in granite.
(Levin 1996b: 47)
Throughout my fieldwork, I found the standard transcriptions just as prevalent,

although most instructors seemed to encourage more flexibility in interpretation than
the situation that Levin described from his fieldwork. Students in private lessons and
in the conservatory’s traditional ensembles were often given photocopies of relevant
pieces from these volumes and told to look at them for reference and as a memory
aid. Repertoire in the traditional department is taught primarily via the oral imitative
method that is thought to hearken back to the master-apprentice tradition associated
with Central Asian maqom. Performances and jury examinations are given from mem-
ory in the traditional department, as opposed to those in the arranged folk department
where students often read off scores.
Despite the importance placed on musical literacy in the lessons and rehearsals that
I observed in the traditional music department, the previously mentioned photocopied
transcriptions were rarely referred to except to check on lyrical texts for vocal pieces.
One glaring exception to this trend happened while I was observing the freshman
maqom ensemble’s rehearsals as it prepared for the Yunus Rajabi Maqom Competition
in fall 2003. The ensemble was comprised of approximately a dozen freshman students
who majored in traditional music. One of the pieces that the ensemble was preparing
was “Muxamassi Nasrulloi,” a complex instrumental piece in buzruq, the first maqom of
the Shashmaqom’s six maqoms. The rhythmic mode for this piece is especially complex,
with one cycle comprising 32 beats. At one point during a rehearsal, one of the perform-
ers experienced a memory lapse that the director, gijakist Salohiddin Azizboev, noticed.
He had the students begin again and when that musician repeated his lapse, Azizboev
spoke very sternly and asked one of the students to pull out their photocopied scores.
He placed the score in front of the student and asked him to read it through. This was,
of course, further complicated by the fact that the students performed a version of the
piece that was not completely aligned with the version that Yunus Rajabi transcribed in
his volume. As the student struggled to resolve the conflict between the written version
and the version that group was rehearsing, Azizboev asked what the problem was and if
this student could read music. He went on to warn the entire ensemble that they needed
to read fluently, that they had such a bounty of riches preserved by Rajabi, and that they
no longer had to have the epic memories that their forefathers required. All along, he
was emphasizing the need for good music literacy and reading skills. This emphasis on
272 Tanya Merchant
literacy clashed with the bulk of traditional musicians’ musical education involving rote
learning and memorization.
Nonetheless, the valorization of written music is very much present in the traditional
music department and is one of the ways that traditional musicians posit their high sta-
tus as professional and educated performers. Indeed, Malika Ziyeeva emphasized that
her students could play anything that people in the department of arranged folk music,
or the department of popular music (estrada) were asked to do. She went on to empha-
size that all her students could read music and knew solfège, but were also very fluent
in the complex structures of maqom and that maqom was much more complex a sys-
tem, such that it rendered all other genres simple (interview, July 14, 2009, Tashkent).
With such overlap in training, but diverging practices and ideological stances (valo-
rizing modernization versus tradition, prioritizing written scores versus teaching lin-
eage in the oral tradition, and harmonic versus heterophonic textures), the lines of
tension between performers of arranged folk music and traditional music are highly
contested, despite their many shared practices. The divisions between the two genres
seem to be very much fueled by coexistence in state-run institutions like the conserva-
tory and the radio station, which places them in competition for resources within those
establishments.
Conclusion
Although the divisions between these two revival genres seem very well defined, there
are areas of connection and commonality. Despite divergent musical aesthetics, both
styles are involved in the larger practice of revival and musicians are engaging in these
revival practices as a way of performing meaningful, beautiful music, and also as a way
of participating in the larger national project. The tensions between practices using oral
imitative methods as opposed to written transmission seem trivial, when their larger
function is the same (i.e., when both provide their musical styles with a greater sense of
historical legacy and national relevance). Indeed, as much as one style focuses more on
notions of tradition and the other on notions of the modern, each style is negotiating
space for simultaneous engagement with both.
As such, there are musicians who wish to emphasize common ground and diffuse
perceived tensions between the two factions. Often, such musicians point out that the
general public does not delineate between reconstructed instruments and traditional
instruments; further, they often emphasize that traditional ensembles have incorpo-
rated the reconstructed instruments that they find useful, like the four-stringed gijak
and the reconstructed Kashgar rubab. Ro’zibi Hodjaeva is one of these who wish to
emphasize the utility of having knowledge of both traditions:
It’s necessary not to divorce the two [styles]. Traditional performance and [arranged]
folk style shouldn’t be separated from one another. Traditional performing style is
needed and folk style is also needed. If they say “you don’t mess with us and we don’t
mess with you,” they’ve already become enemies—this is my thought on the subject.
We don’t need adversarial relationships. We need . . . to learn from one another. We
need to take the things that we don’t know and need to give the things that they don’t
know. Performance needs to be rich; it needs to grow richer.
(Interview, August 5, 2009, Tashkent)
Hodjaeva, with whom I also studied dutar, sought to underscore the continuity of dutar
performance from traditions that predate the Soviet Union through to the variety of
performance styles in the post-Soviet era. (See web Figures 12.2 and 12.3 for compari-
son: photos of Hodjaeva playing the reconstructed tenor dutar versus Ziyeeva playing
the traditional dutar—note the different right hand position when playing, the slightly
different size of the instruments, the machine tuning pegs on the reconstructed dutar,
and the differently shaped sound holes .) Hodjaeva has consistently worked to find
new outlets for her music, including by teaching dutar at a Japanese cultural center. She
contextualizes the music that she plays and teaches within a narrative that includes tra-
ditional music and pre-Soviet history.
For Hodjaeva, Ziyeeva, Abdurahimova, and all the musicians with whom I interact,
the act of remembering various pasts is a contentious and emotional endeavor, one that
brings up the tensions between academic disciplines and performing styles. As Svetlana
Boym notes, “longing is universal, nostalgia can be divisive” (2001: xiii). The divisions
between folk orchestral musicians and traditional performers are often vast, mainly as a
result of the stories that they tell about their music.
It is not only arranged folk musicians who acknowledge the commonalities between
both practices. Although traditional musicians may be wary of having their music
co-opted by arranged folk musicians, many emphasize that they hold no enmity for
musicians who specialize in arranged folk music. They simply continue to experience
tensions related to the struggle to have their music accepted in state institutions. As
such, traditional musicians are also involved in a very modern project of presenting his-
torical music in contexts that didn’t exist when the music originated. Levin notes this,
saying that the Shashmaqom “is an elite music designed for an elite that no longer exists”
(Levin 1993: 56). Staged performance in concerts and weddings are now the primary
outlet for maqom and related traditional genres.
Especially when filtered through institutions and performed on the concert stage, tra-
ditional musicians are actively reinforcing notions of Uzbek history that are vital to the
current national project and to contemporary nostalgia for a non-Soviet Uzbek history.
They are actively presenting music that is considered old and historical as continuously
relevant even when not arranged. Music is so powerful within this national narrative
because of “the idea that folk music represents the true music of a nation [that] came
into being with the rise of the modern nation-state and the desire to identify national
characteristics of cultures” (Livingston 1999: 75). Both styles of music are implicated in
the creation of a pre-Soviet national narrative for which there is much nostalgia. This
274 Tanya Merchant
nostalgia and reimagining that arranged folk and traditional music engenders connects
with Svetlana Boym’s definition that
Nostalgia . . . is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.
Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s
own fantasy.
(Boym 2001: xiii)
This nostalgic remembering of the past is a vital aspect of both revival movements, as
they seek to find relevance for their practices within current contexts. It is not necessar-
ily important whether the history that performers and listeners of traditional music or
arranged folk music imagine is thoroughly accurate; it is important that both revived
folk musics provide a meaningful way to access a sense of history that has relevance
to performers’ lives and to their current post-Soviet and newly nationally independent
situation.
Notes
1. I take this definition from Tamara Livingston’s (1999) article, where she describes reviv-
alists as “align[ing] themselves with a particular historical lineage. . .[with] legitimacy
[that] is grounded in reference to authenticity and historical fidelity” (66), and from Neil
Rosenberg’s definition of revival as a twentieth-century phenomenon involving the pre-
sentation of new or renewed music as old (1993: 17–21). My consideration of Uzbek music
within a revival framework is also influenced by Chris Goertzen’s account of Norwegian
folk revivals, where he describes “more-or-less self-conscious revivals structured around
calendars of festivals . . . each ‘revives’ selected cultural goods in ways representing the
modern needs of those sponsoring the revival, needs that may change as one set of spon-
sors succeeds another” (1998: 99).
2. See Levin (1996a) and Olsen (2004) for accounts of the Pokrovsky Ensemble and others
throughout Russia and Ukraine.
3. Various organizations provided grants that funded my field research, including: the
American Councils for International Education, the Social Science Research Council,
Fulbright-Hays, UC Santa Cruz’s Committee on Research, and UC Santa Cruz’s Arts
Research Institute.
4. The term reconstructed was the most common used to describe the instruments employed
in folk orchestras and taught in the halq cholg’u departments in educational institutions.
The term is not favored by all, especially those who embrace the idea that constructing such
instruments with equal temperament and non-traditional materials is an important way to
allow Uzbek folk music to continue to grow and change. Such people often favor the term
modernized instead.
5. For examples of Uzbek/Tajik maqom, listen to At the Bazaar of Love (1997), Invisible
Face of the Beloved (2005), Tajikistan (1997), and Uzbekistan, Mâqâm Dugâh (2002).
(Unfortunately, there are no readily accessible commercial recordings of Uzbek arranged
folk orchestras.)
6. Traditional music’s importance within the project of maintaining separate ethno-national

identities between Soviet republics and later independent nations in the region is evidenced
by the focus on standardizing both an Uzbek and a Tajik version of the Shashmaqom (“six
modes,” a repertoire of court music associated with the city of Bukhara, traceable to the
fifteenth century), despite the bilingual, multicultural nature of the repertoire in practice.
Yunus Rajabi’s creation of the Uzbek version (and his resulting fame) is discussed later in
the essay. Boboqul Fayzullayev and other scholars were engaged in a similar codification/
standardization process version in the Tajik SSR that resulted in a five-volume collection
of the Shashmaqom with Tajik song texts, that represents the Tajik canon currently used
in Tajik institutions (Fayzullayev, et al. 1957-1967). Although the Fayzullayev and Rajabi
versions are similar in content and function, Fayzullayev does not seem to enjoy the same
renown in Tajikistan as Rajabi does in Uzbekistan, even though his volumes are as much in
use in Tajik institutions as Rajabi’s are in Uzbekistan. For an excellent account that traces
the history of Central Asian maqom and other urban musical practices, as well as unpack-
ing the shared nature of the tradition between Tajiks and Uzbeks, as well as Muslims and
Bukharan Jews, see Levin (1996b).
7. One primary exception to this lacuna was the traditional ensemble that Rajabi founded at
the Tashkent Musical Technicum in 1925, but which was short-lived due to the creation of
the conservatory and the importance placed on the reconstruction projects of the 1930s
(Odilov 1995: 34).
8. State-run musical institutions were the primary locales for revival practices, but tradi-
tional music and non-arranged folk music did continue outside of institutions to a certain
extent. Turgun Alimatov (1922–2008) is the most famous traditional musician of the twen-
tieth century who was educated outside of Soviet music education institutions. He was
largely self-taught, learning mostly by listening to musicians and copying them in private.
Levin (1996b) describes his musical history, including his role performing in the tradi-
tional ensemble associated with the Muqimiy Theater (56–69). He also taught lessons and
adjudicated traditional music competitions at the Uzbek State Conservatory, while I was
doing fieldwork there.
9. Kollej is the Uzbek word for the Russian term uchilish that refers to specialized high schools
attended often for two years either as a terminal degree or before continuing on to higher
education at a conservatory or institute.
10. There are a few exceptions, most notably the Sog’diana Folk Orchestra, which Feruza
Abdurahimova founded in the early years of Uzbek independence, with the orchestra’s
official debut in 1994. Sog’diana is a unique case also in that it began as a private enterprise
(virtually impossible in the Soviet era) and later gained state support.
References
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Goertzen, Chris. 1998. “The Norwegian Folk Revival and the Gammeldans Controversy.”
Ethnomusicology 42(1): 99–127.
Eyerman, Ron and Andrew Jamison. 1998. Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions
in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fayzullayev, Boboqul, Shokhnazar Sakhibov, and Fazliddin Shakhobov. 1957–1967.
Shashmakom, vols. 1-5, edited by Viktor Beliaev. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Muzyka.”
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and Central Asian Tradition.” Asian Music 12 (1): 149–158.
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1 and 2. Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University.
——. 1993. “The Reterritorialization of Culture in the New Central Asian States: A Report from
Uzbekistan.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 25: 51–59.
——. 1996a. “Dmitri Pokrovsky and the Russian Folk Music Revival Movement.” In Retuning
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Durham: Duke University Press.
——. 1996b. The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens
New York). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Rajabi, Yunus. 1955–1959. O’zbek Halq Musiqasi, vols. 1–8. Tashkent: O’zbekiston SSR Davlat
Nashriyoti.
——. 1970–1976. Shashamaqom, vols. 1–6. Tashkent: Gafur Gulom Nashriyoti.
Rosenberg, Neil, ed. 1993. Transforming Traditions: Folk Music Revivals Examined.
Sobirova, Sofiya and Feruza Abdurahimova. 1994. Ashot Petrosiants. Tashkent: Murabbiy.
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Journal of Modern History 73: 862–896.
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Professional’noj Muzyke.” In Ocherki Istorii Muzykal’noj Kul’tury Uzbekistana, edited by I.
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Discs Cited
At the Bazaar of Love. The Ilyas Malayev Ensemble. 1997. Shanachie. 64081.
Invisible Face of the Beloved: Classical Music of the Tajiks and Uzbeks. 2005. Music of Central
Asia, vol. 2. Smithsonian Folkways SFWCD40521.
Tajikistan: Maqâm Navâ. 1997. Ocora Records PID6541.
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W260111.
C HA P T E R 13
T WO R E V I VA L I S T
M O M E N T S I N I R A N IA N
C L A S S I C A L M U S I C
L AU DA N NO O SH I N
The social history of Iranian classical music in the twentieth century has been inexorably
shaped by Iran’s complex relationship with the outside world, particularly with Europe
and—post World War II—the United States. In this chapter, I focus on two periods of
recent Iranian history in order to explore notions of musical revival and their applicabil-
ity to Iran. A number of scholars have proposed theoretical models for understanding
the nature of musical revivalism and different kinds of revival. What is interesting in the
case of Iran is that the two historical “moments” that I examine—the first in the 1960s
and 1970s, the second following the 1979 Revolution—appear to represent the far ends
of a continuum perhaps most clearly set out by Max Peter Bauman in his discussion of
“conflicting models” of “purism (with a tendency towards stabilizing or even regressive
preservation) and of syncretism (with a tendency towards reinventing the past by eman-
cipatory creation to the point of breaking the local and regional frontiers” (1996: 80).
Although these two trajectories might seem diametrically opposed, both emerged
from essentially the same impulse: a reaction against the progressive encroachment of
Western music and culture in Iran during the twentieth century. For my discussion of
these two historical periods, I draw primarily on extant historical sources (including the
very few scholarly writings that address issues of revival in this tradition), as well as on
published and personal interviews with musicians and others. I conclude by considering
the postrevival implications for contemporary Iranian classical music practice.
Musical Modernizers: 1920s–1940s
The first period of revival discussed is that of the 1960s and 1970s, a time when the pro-
cesses of modernization and Westernization started by the first Pahlavi monarch, Reza
278 Laudan Nooshin
Shah (r. 1925–1941), gained increased momentum under the rule of his son, Mohammad
Reza Pahlavi (r. 1941–1979). Because it was primarily a reaction against these processes
that constituted one of the main drivers of the first revival, I begin by outlining some
of the earlier changes and the key figures who helped to bring them about. From the
early decades of the twentieth century, music was impacted first by the arrival of sound
recording and later by broadcasting, the establishment of formal public concerts, the
institutionalization of music education, the adoption of music notation, and the increas-
ing popularity of imported instruments such as piano and violin. Coinciding as such
changes did with the early attempts of the Pahlavi regime to forge a distinctly Iranian
form of modernity, such developments became imbued with what later came to be
termed qarbzadegi,1 an “intoxication” with the West and things Western.2
The most prominent musical “modernizer” of the first half of the twentieth century,
and perhaps the most controversial figure in Iranian music history, was Ali Naqi Vaziri
(1887–1979), a former army colonel who, in the period following World War I, traveled
abroad for the purpose of studying music, the first Iranian to do so. After several years
in France and Germany, Vaziri returned to Iran in 1923, the same year that Reza Pahlavi
assumed control as Prime Minister following the 1921 coup d’état. Many of the new ideas
that Vaziri brought with him from Europe resonated strongly with the hegemonic dis-
courses of the time that promoted the (rapid) transformation of Iran into a modern,
secular nation-state. Vaziri became immensely influential in musical circles in the 1930s
and 1940s, not least through his position as principal (from 1928) of the Madreseh-ye
Musik, the first music school in Iran (run under the auspices of the Ministry of
Education; this school became the Honarestan-e Ali-ye Musiqi conservatory in 1938).
Although not a central figure in the later discussion here, many of those who will be con-
sidered saw themselves as standing against the reforms set in train by Vaziri and his fol-
lowers, and it therefore seems pertinent to outline certain aspects of his work that came
to be viewed as particularly problematic in later decades. Essentially, Vaziri set about
modernizing Iranian music according to models he had encountered abroad: establish-
ing large ensembles of traditional instruments, composing pieces for those ensembles
in which Western functional harmony was applied to Iranian melodies, holding pub-
lic concerts where these and other pieces were performed, promoting the use of staff
notation and “modern” forms of music education, and so on.3 With the gradual rise of a
Western-oriented middle class (increasingly educated abroad), among whom Western
ideas and products were both fashionable and status symbols, Western music—and
Iranian music refashioned according to Western models—came to accrue significant
cultural capital. This was also the period when the Tehran Symphony Orchestra, the
first orchestra in Iran, was founded as the Municipality Symphony Orchestra in 1933 by
Gholamhossein Minbashian.
The significance of Vaziri’s work for the current discussion is that it was embedded
within a growing debate around the nature of modernity in Iran and the place of tradi-
tional values and culture within it. For Vaziri and his followers—including author and
musician Ruhollah Khaleqi, who wrote the first and perhaps still best-known history of
Iranian music (two volumes originally published in 1954 and 1956, respectively)—the
Two Revivalist Moments in Iranian Classical Music 279
future lay in following Western models in order to “improve” Iranian music, and they
drew on a number of discourses to articulate this position. Perhaps the most problematic
was the notion of musiqi-ye ‘elmi (“scientific music”), an expression used by Vaziri and
his associates to refer to Western (European classical) music. Hence, Western music was
“scientific” and Iranian music was its opposite—“unscientific” (qeyr-e ‘elmi), thus setting
up a polarized binary from which many things followed: everything that Western music
had—notation, large ensembles, harmony, and so on—was “scientific”; any music that
lacked these attributes was not. This “self-othering” of Iranian traditional music (at that
time generally known by the term musiqi-ye sonnati) was regularly invoked by musi-
cians and others and became so deeply embedded in local discourse that, even though
such terms later became largely discredited, one still comes across them. As with Reza
Shah, the verdict of history on Vaziri’s work is that he was a man of his time, a time when
government policies autocratically sought to position Iran on a trajectory of moderniza-
tion and Westernization, and he should be understood in that context.4
For the discussion that follows, the revivalism of the 1960s and 1970s can only be
understood relationally since it was principally concerned with reacting against the
kinds of reforms initiated by Vaziri and thereafter strongly promoted by the govern-
ment. Owe Ronström characterizes revival movements as being “engaged in struggles of
one kind or another” (1996: 9). Among the examples he gives, the first beautifully epito-
mizes the form of revivalism that emerged in Iran in the 1960s, particularly in relation to
moral aspects of the debate:
Fight against modernity. Tradition is often used as a natural opposition to moder-

nity. Modernity is seen as the distorting power, the agent of cultural entropy; tradi-
tion is history, stability, continuity. Often the struggle against modernity is expressed
as a moral obligation to save the world, country, region or whatever from cultural
demise and from unwanted change, or at least to change the direction of change into
a morally better path. The moral aspect is important in understanding the passion of
the fighters and the presence of so many “burning souls” within revival movements.
(Ronström 1996: 8–9)
In the battle against musical modernity, Vaziri became the embodiment of the modern-
izing “evil” against which revival moralizing was directed.
Among the many changes occurring at this time, perhaps the most significant was the
arrival of broadcasting in 1939 and the establishment of Radio Tehran, the programming
of which included a significant amount of music and which became available for the
first time to a mass audience, thus helping to shift traditional music out of its previously
elite circles. Vaziri assumed directorship of the Music Department at Radio Tehran in
1941 and, from this time onward, gathered together a group of musicians who became
closely associated with the radio; it is noteworthy that many of these were Vaziri’s own
pupils or associates. And it was this “radio generation” that the revivalists later became
particularly critical of, invoking discourses that represent variations on the “struggles”
described by Ronström, including the “fight against commercialization” and against
foreign incursions into national musical expression. For instance, former head of the
280 Laudan Nooshin
Music Department at the University of Tehran, Majid Kiani, comments on radio pro-
gramming during this period, claiming that the music did not adhere to the canonic
radif repertoire, but that musicians instead played freely (“be radif nemipardākhtand
va be soorat-e āzād minavākhtand”) (2004: 152).5 Kiani criticizes Radio Tehran for not
seeking to preserve (hefz) Iranian culture and for broadcasting music that is “pleasing to
the public” (āmeh pasand) and “non-Iranian” (qeyr-e Irāni), particularly that drawing
on Turkish and Arab influences. Thus, some musicians came to regard the radio as pro-
ducing a somewhat acculturated form of Iranian music, and, of course, it was this music
that was reaching the largest audience, many of whom were experiencing traditional
music for the first time. More broadly, alongside changes within the traditional music
culture, during the 1950s, Western music of various kinds became increasingly available
through the import of recordings (at this time, still on vinyl disc). The high symbolic
and cultural capital attached to such music, combined with a certain view that tradi-
tional music was increasingly incompatible with a modernizing nation, led to a decline
in interest in traditional music.
The First Revivalist Movement: Return to

the Qajar Ancestors
Revivals are a coming together, a convergence of various circumstances and personal

motivations centring on the fascinations and emulation of a music culturally and
historically distanced from the present. Music revivals are a product of both specific
historical circumstances as well as the general intellectual and social trends.
(Livingston 1999: 81)
What, then, were the main circumstances and motivations that led to the emergence
of the first revivalist movement in the mid 1960s? Some of these have been men-
tioned: the growing marginalization of traditional music at a time when the social and
political landscape was marked by the relentless march toward modernization and
Westernization; and, alongside this, the wide availability of mediated forms of music
(most obviously through the radio), increasingly viewed by some musicians as deviat-
ing from the “authentic” tradition. There was another important driver that I discuss
later: The influence of certain Western scholars and musicians who visited Iran from
the late 1950s and whose writings also became available in translation, most notably as
articles in the magazine Majaleh-ye Musik (Music Magazine). Many of these individuals
promoted a strongly preservationist agenda.
In the mid-1960s, then, a number of musicians became interested in researching
and promoting historical playing styles as a means of returning to an idealized, more
“authentic” past. And it was the pre-Pahlavi Qajar period (1785–1925) that became the
focus of such idealization, this particular period having been denigrated since the 1920s
as a symbol of regressive tradition and “backwardness” through the discourses of the

modernizing Pahlavis.6 This was the start of what music sociologist Mohammad Reza
Fayaz (one of the few Iranian scholars to have written critically about this period) calls
“the journey back to history . . . [as] one old technique after another was revived and
Qajar musicians experienced a renaissance” (1998: 103). And it was not just Qajar music,
but specifically the court repertoire of the period between c.1850 and 1900 which came
to be presented as the historically “pure” (asil) tradition. To be validated as asil, music’s
historical pedigree had to be traceable directly to the Qajar ancestors and a time before
the modernizing excesses of the Pahlavis. The paucity of historical records prior to this,
particularly between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, rendered other possible
(earlier) authentic pasts inaccessible—this was as far back a journey as the historical
record would permit. Talking to musicians and others about this period, sources are
divided on the question of whether this began as a deliberate turn to Qajar practice or
simply as an attempt to ground the music in less acculturated forms, thus leading to a
search for historical rootedness that inevitably found expression in earlier, “purer” (that
is, pre-Pahlavi) forms. Indeed, the extent to which local discourses explicitly framed
what was happening in terms of revival is unclear: It seems that the equivalent term,
ehyā, was not widely used (although some sources suggest that it was used by Dariouche
Safvate, regarded by many as the spiritual leader of the revival movement; one also finds
occasional references to bāz-sāzi [“reconstruction”/“rebuilding”]),7 and musicians
tended to explain their practice as a search for “authenticity” and “purity,” rather than
a return per se (Sasan Fatemi, personal communication, August 2012). Local discourses
will be considered further later.
The revivalists would perhaps not have gained such prominence without the frame-
work of institutional support within which they worked and from which they were
inseparable. The most important development in this regard was the founding, in 1970,
of the Markaz-e Hefz o Eshāeh-ye Musiqi-ye Irani (Center for the Preservation and
Propagation of Iranian Music, henceforth Markaz), a year after the establishment of
the first university Music Department in Iran, at the University of Tehran. The Markaz
operated under the auspices of the state-run Iranian Radio and Television Organization
and was intended to be a center of research and teaching through which the tradition
of Iranian classical music would be preserved. The co-founder and director until 1980
was Dariouche Safvate, and it was Safvate who became one of the primary figureheads
of the revival movement. The work of the Markaz nicely illustrates Livingston’s observa-
tion that “revivals almost always have a strong pedagogical component in order to pass
on the tradition in a controlled manner” (1999: 73), and it did this by gathering together
musicians not involved with the radio (and therefore not generally known to the pub-
lic) including, in the early years, such masters as Nur Ali Borumand (1905–1978), Said
Hormozi (1897–1976), Yusef Forutan (1891–1978), Asghar Bahari (1905–1995), Abdollah
Davami (1899–1980), and Mahmud Karimi (1927–1984). Promising young musicians,
many of whom were students at the University of Tehran, were invited to study at the
center, to carry out research, and later to teach there. This included several who went on
to become prominent musicians, including Mohammad Reza Lotfi (b. 1947), Hossein
282 Laudan Nooshin
Alizadeh (b. 1951), Parviz Meshkatian (1955–2009), Majid Kiani (b. 1941), Dariush Talai
(b. 1953), Jalal Zolfonoun (b. 1937), and Parisa (b. 1950). Significantly, as will be discussed
later, it was some of these very musicians who spearheaded the second revival of the
early 1980s. The Markaz became a magnet for those concerned with the preservation of
traditional music in Iran, since it gave young musicians direct access to some of the most
knowledgeable individuals of the older generation—described by Dariush Talai (Head
of the Music Department at the University of Tehran at the time of writing in 2012) as
“masters in possession of the heritage” (ostādān-e mirāsdār)—many of whom would not
under normal circumstances have agreed to teach at a public institution. The Markaz
was marked by its focus on tradition, and teaching therefore took place without nota-
tion, an approach that contrasted with other institutions at this time, most notably the
University of Tehran, where musical literacy was a requirement. The current director
(in 2012), Majid Kiani, describes the Markaz in the early days as being an environment
in which:
students would consult completely historical [kāmelan qadimi] sources and they
would play on the basis of those until that music would find continuity [with the
present; tadāvom paydā bokonand].
(Kiani 2004: 153)
The Center was well-resourced, housing an archive, rehearsal and recording facilities,
and an instrument-making section. Students were even provided with funding to enable
them to focus on their studies and research (Talai in Shahrnazdar 2004a: 19).8
As well as the institutional support provided by the Centre, the prestige of working
within a well-resourced, government-sponsored organization was an important factor
in the influence exercised by revivalist ideas. However, it should be noted that this influ-
ence was felt almost exclusively within the relatively closed circles of musicians rather
than among the general public. The latter continued to experience Iranian classical
music primarily through the “acculturated” media of radio (and, by the early 1970s, tele-
vision) and commercial recordings (mainly on cassette), including recordings of radio
programs such as the Golhā series.9 The older masters who taught at the Markaz gen-
erally shunned public musical life, preferring to follow traditional modes of amateur
connoisseurship. The activities of the Markaz rarely included public performances or
recording, but instead focused on education and research; recordings that were made
were largely for study purposes (Kiani 2004: 154). In hindsight, it becomes clear that
the Markaz played a dual role in those early days, one intended, the other not: first, as
a center for preserving the traditions of Iranian classical music from the acculturating
forces of modernity; and second, as an incubator for a new generation of innovators
who emerged into the public arena in the mid to late 1970s, before transforming the clas-
sical music in the 1980s.
A central feature of the return to Qajar “authenticity” was the increased attention
afforded to the canonic repertoire known as radif. This collection of several hundred
pieces arranged according to mode, memorized during training, and subsequently
forming the basis for improvised performance, was formalized by the Qajar court musi-
cians from the mid-nineteenth century onward, most likely drawing on earlier, less for-
malized collections of pieces and melodic fragments. Providing a framework for creative
performance and existing in variant forms, the radif took on a new (quasi-ideological)
role in the 1960s as a way of measuring musicians’ adherence to tradition, motivated
in part by the perception that knowledge of the radif was being lost. Moves were also
made at this time to standardize the radif, the most grandiose scheme being the gov-
ernment’s attempt to publish a definitive version of the repertoire, for which purpose a
committee of prominent musicians was appointed that was ultimately unable to reach
agreement.10 However, one particular version of the radif, that of Qajar court musician
Mirza Abdollah (1843–1918), did gain ascendancy, mostly through the teaching of Nur
Ali Borumand, who, through his positions at both the University of Tehran and the
Markaz, arguably became the most influential teacher at this time. It was largely through
Borumand’s efforts that the radif of Mirza Abdollah, as taught by himself, became
presented and promoted as the most authentic version of the repertoire.11 Somewhat
ironically, then, in setting himself up as a representative of the authentic premodern tra-
dition, Borumand was obliged to draw on the very modernizing processes of standard-
ization in order to validate this particular version of the radif over others, in contrast to
earlier practices in which different versions coexisted.12 This is a clear example of how
“revivals are both a reaction against and a product of modernity; that is, they partake of
the discourse of modernity even as they set themselves in opposition to certain manifes-
tations of modernity” (Livingston 1999: 81).
In the promotion of the radif and the emergence of a more rigid approach to the rep-
ertoire, we can clearly see the processes of objectification, commodification, and reifica-
tion that Ronström argues are central to revival movements: “We separate a piece of the
ever-changing flow of life and hold it up for ourselves as an object for appreciation, for
study and as a model for action” (1996: 11). As musicians became increasingly judged
on their connection with the past—implicitly understood as the Qajar past and dem-
onstrated through knowledge of and adherence to the radif—and as discourses around
notions of authenticity became increasingly moralistic, polarized binaries emerged in
which the work of earlier musicians such as Vaziri became discredited and branded as
“inauthentic.” In particular, the quality of esālat (“purity”) became associated with music
at this time and references to “traditional music” (musiqi-ye sonnati) were gradually
replaced by “pure” or “noble” music (musiqi-ye asil). “Purity” came to index “authentic-
ity” and a powerful discursive network emerged, eventually rendering these terms the
most value-laden concepts in Iranian music.13
By the late 1960s, concepts of “authenticity” and “purity” had become firmly embed-
ded in the discourses of Iranian music culture: To be authentic meant being in touch
with the music’s nineteenth-century roots, and music came to be judged on its rela-
tionship with this particular segment of the past. From this time onward, the “atmo-
sphere of Iranian music became full of the past” (Fayaz 1998: 104), and what Kiani calls
the “currency of purity” (nerkh-e esālat, 2004: 153) became the most valued aspect of
music. Performances, recordings, and publications were dominated by retrospection,
284 Laudan Nooshin
including the revival of old playing styles and the collection, reconstruction (bāz-sāzi-e
āsār-e qadimi, Kiani 2004: 153), and publication of old pieces. This nostalgia for the Qajar
past has continued through several decades, evidenced, for instance, in the prolifera-
tion of recordings entitled “in memory of . . .” (be yād-e . . .) in recent years. Nostalgia has
become an immensely marketable commodity; as Bigenho observes, “Nostalgia for any
kind of authenticity is a repetitive theme in questions of modernity” (2002: 167). Once
again, we can note a central irony: that whereas the preoccupation with “authenticity”
emerged in direct response to the rise of modernity, perceived loss of tradition, and so
on, and the resulting discourses positioned tradition and modernity as antithetical,
“the very categories of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ are themselves productions of moder-
nity,” thus highlighting one of the “paradoxes of modernity, the ways in which the ‘tra-
ditional’ takes on a profile precisely in relation to the ‘modern’ ” (Bigenho 2002: 165).14
Thus, although many musicians of the 1960s saw themselves as standing against moder-
nity, they drew on discourses that were very much part of modern thinking; indeed,
the music itself was arguably as much a product of the processes of modernization and
Westernization as that of Vaziri, so strongly criticized by traditionalists (see also Talai in
Shahrnazdar 2004a: 19).
In many ways, the appeal to Qajar practices and repertoires constituted a return-to-
roots form of revivalism familiar elsewhere: the reaction to a perceived loss of musical
traditions—specifically knowledge of the radif—and the desire to resurrect a musical
past with a strong focus on retrospection and nostalgia. According to Livingston, this is
the “centrepiece of music revivals, around which all else is secondary”:
In all musical revivals, the most important components for the formation of the aes-
thetic and ethical code are the ideas of historical continuity and organic purity of the
revived practice. The term “authentic” is most commonly employed to distinguish
the revived practice from other musics and to draw attention to its supposed “time
depth” . . . . In revivalist discourse, historical continuity is often used to imply authen-
ticity and vice versa. “Authentic” music is believed to have been passed on through
the generations outside of (or in spite of) mainstream markets.
Much of this characterization aligns nicely with the case of Iran in the 1960s and
1970s, despite the fact that, as noted, the term “revival” (ehyā) itself was not widely
used; and, indeed, “movement” is perhaps too strong a term for what was a rela-
tively small number of musicians, notwithstanding their immense influence. Fayaz
describes the “return to the fundamentals of purity” (bāzgasht be mavāzin-e asil,
1998: 96) as a search for a lost identity, and Talai similarly explains that there was a
strong sense among musicians of “something which had been lost [az dast ratfeh]
which needed to be regained [bāz-yāft] and rebuilt [bāz-sāzi shavad]” (personal
communication, August 2012). Certainly, an important element of the discourse
was preserving Iranian national identity in the face of incursions from abroad,
mostly from Europe and North America but also from neighboring Middle Eastern
countries. Musicians were no doubt influenced by the general preoccupation among

Iranian intellectuals for several decades previously with notions of nativism and
racial purity (see Boroujerdi 1996 and Manafzadeh 1999), the latter most starkly evi-
denced in Reza Shah’s alignment of (Aryan) Iran with Nazi Germany during World
War II, eventually leading to his removal from power by Allied forces. Parallels with
revival movements elsewhere can also be seen in the discourses used by contem-
porary musicians to talk about the role of the Markaz in the 1970s, including the
element of “struggle” highlighted by Ronström and discussed earlier. Consider the
following from an interview with Talai:
The Markaz defended music and informed people about real [vāqei] and pure/noble
[asil] music. It trained a generation of musicians who had aims, who believed in what
they were doing; and because of this at the time of the revolution, they could estab-
lish a better connection with so-called “events of the day” and music was able to play
an important role in this process.
(Quoted in Shahrnazdar 2004a: 20)
This was a battle in which “real” music was to be defended against its acculturated
Other (i.e., Vaziri et al.). And, like other revivals, this one was in part an appeal to a
largely constructed past. As Slobin notes, “it’s clear to many trained observers that
even when people seem to be reviving things, that is, exhuming them and breathing
life into them, what they get is something new” (1983: 37). Other than a few record-
ings of Qajar masters from the early twentieth century (generally of poor quality) that
students at the Markaz were able to study, the tangible historical evidence for revival-
ist claims is tenuous. Even in the case of the radif, against which so many appeals to
authenticity are made, there is no unbroken chain of transmission from the Qajar
court musicians to the mid-twentieth century. However, approaching this from a dif-
ferent perspective, and viewing revival as “an overt and explicit act of authentication”
(Bohlman 1988: 130), one can understand the “purity” movement as concerned not
so much with validating a Qajar past, but rather as appealing to that past in order to
validate new practices of the present.
The Influence of Western Musicologists
In exploring the various factors that led to the emergence of revivalist ideas in the 1960s,
it is interesting to consider the increasing number of foreign musicians and musicolo-
gists who visited Iran at this time and whose writings became available in translation.
Mohammad Reza Fayaz is one of the few scholars to have written about the influence
of these individuals on ideas about the preservation of Iranian music—ideas that were
quite new to Iran—arguing that they helped legitimate the stance of traditionalists. In
286 Laudan Nooshin
particular, he considers the work of French ethnomusicologist Alain Daniélou, who

visited Iran several times and who became known through translations of articles and
speeches published in Majaleh-ye Musik. For instance, a conference paper presented in
Venice in 1957, in which Daniélou appealed to the people of Asia to preserve their musi-
cal traditions and denigrated “hybrid” music (“hybrid” translated into Persian as dor-
ageh, lit. “two-blooded” or “mixed race”), was later published in Majaleh-ye Musik (issue
29). Daniélou also played a central role in the 1961 International Musical Congress,
which was held in Tehran and focused on issues of preservation.15 Fayaz examines the
impact in Iran of the conference and the resulting publications. In his summing-up
speech—published in Majaleh-ye Musik 54—Daniélou called on musicians to keep their
traditions pure, countering the arguments of those who accused traditionalists of ossi-
fying the music. One of the outcomes of the conference was a set of recommendations
to avoid “hybrid” music and promoting traditional methods of teaching. Daniélou was
not alone: Other musicians also visited Iran at this time and contributed to the discur-
sive trope according to which “Easterners” were spoiling their musical traditions whilst
“Westerners” tried to save those same traditions (Fayaz 1998: 96–97).
According to Fayaz, Daniélou’s ideas generated much debate in Iran, and he identi-
fies two broad responses. The first is exemplified by Ali Mohammad Rashid (a writer
for Majaleh-ye Musik), who, in an article in issue 32 (in response to the Venice paper
published in issue 29), suggested that some musicians objected to Daniélou’s assump-
tion that “development” in Iranian music would necessarily lead to “mixed race” music,
whilst others accused Westerners of seeking to hold back the development of Iranian
music and create a fossilized museum culture in order to maintain their oriental Others.
Many asked by what authority an outsider like Daniélou could make such recommen-
dations. Fayaz also reports on a roundtable discussion on the subject of acculturation,
which took place during the Shiraz Arts Festival in 1968, at which Iranian composer
Shahin Farhat argued that change is inevitable, against the views of ethnomusicologist
panel members Daniélou and Trần Văn Khê. On the other hand, there were local musi-
cians who supported the views of Daniélou and other foreign ethnomusicologists and
welcomed the attention given to what they saw as the plight of Iranian classical music.16
And it was just at the time when such debates were taking place that Nur Ali Borumand
and other “forgotten” musicians emerged onto the scene. I am not arguing here that eth-
nomusicologists such as Daniélou played a defining role, but that their presence was
one of a number of factors that helped foster conditions conducive to the nurturing of
revivalist thinking.
“The Pastness of the Present”
The discussion so far has suggested a number of reasons for the emergence of revival-
ist ideas in Iran in the 1960s and how these resonated with revival movements else-
where. In this section, I probe further into the notion of historical veracity, drawing
on Livingston’s observation that revival movements are often as much about creating
“a new ethos, musical style and aesthetic code in accordance with [their] revivalist
ideology and personal preferences” (1999: 70), as an “accurate” construction of the
past. Similarly, Bohlman notes that “revival relies heavily on new symbols masquer-
ading as the old” (1988: 131). Setting aside for the moment the question of why music
from the Qajar period should necessarily be “purer” than that of any other period
of Iranian music history, the fact is that there is little tangible evidence of Qajar per-
formance practices before the arrival of sound recording in Iran in the first decade
of the twentieth century; moreover, surviving recordings from this time bear little
relation to “traditionalist” performances of the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, the
revivalist idea that performance should adhere closely to the radif seems not to be
evidenced through early recordings but was largely a later construction. Comparison
with other revival movements may be illuminating. Consider, for instance, the
rather striking parallels between Iran in the 1960s and 1970s and the “Early Music
Movement” (or “Authentic Music Movement,” more recently Historically Informed
Performance [HIP]) in Europe and the United States: one finds the same moraliz-
ing and emotive debates, similar counterarguments about fossilization and the cre-
ation of a museum culture, and similar appeals to historical authority to authenticate
something that is thoroughly contemporary. Of particular relevance here is the
work of Richard Taruskin, who points to the close aesthetic and historical parallels
between the twentieth-century phenomenon of “authentic” performance and some-
thing apparently far removed from it: musical modernism, exemplified (he suggests)
most clearly through the music of Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971). As Taruskin observes,
Stravinsky had close personal links with some of the pioneers of the early music
movement, most notably (visionary/elder statesman/“prophet”) Arnold Dolmetsch,
and he argues that the musical sounds promoted as “authentic” had little to do with
historical accuracy and much to do with modernist aesthetics, in both composition
and performance. For Taruskin, so-called authentic performances of early music lie
firmly within the domain of modernity; from this perspective, one can understand
revival as “a process of traditionalisation that goes on in the present, to create sym-
bolic ties to the past, for reasons of the future” (Ronström 1996: 18), or what Taruskin
describes as “the pastness of the present and the presence of the past” (1988). As
Bohlman observes:
The past is consciously invoked to serve as a surrogate for the present . . . . The prac-
tice of constructing continuity by selectively choosing, and not infrequently selec-
tively inventing, the past is a particularly modern phenomenon.
(Bohlman 1988: 130)
Similarly, in Iran, what were arguably thoroughly contemporary musical practices in the
1960s and 1970s were validated through appeals to historical continuity.
Perhaps one of the most disturbing tropes to emerge at this time was that centered
around notions of racial purity, often expressed through metaphors of pure-bloodedness,
288 Laudan Nooshin
as seen both in the specific discourses of musicians and scholars and in the general
preoccupation with historical extraction and nativism. As noted earlier, for instance,
Daniélou’s “hybrid” was translated as dorageh (“mixed race,” lit. “two-blooded”), a
term used in a negative sense to refer to music that had lost its purity and thereby its
national and cultural identity. Indeed, terms such as dorageh have become part of a
well-established discursive network in which notions of purity, authenticity, and iden-
tity are indexically linked. Such linkages depend on an underlying and unquestioned
understanding that being pure blooded is a good thing for music, the opposite being
invoked through terms such as “bastard” (harāmzādeh) or “contaminated” (āloodeh,
Kiani 2004: 150). This position was voiced most polemically by Borumand, for example,
in the following extract from a speech presented at the 1968 Shiraz Arts Festival:
When we talk about a thoroughbred horse, we mean a horse whose mother and
father and entire genealogy is known—and is distinguished. Musiqi-ye asil is the
same.
(Quoted in Fayaz 1998: 103)17
This parallel between “pure” music and a thoroughbred horse is intriguing, invoking
as it does notions of good breeding and distinction. So naturalized and embedded did
such discourses become in Iran that even contemporary musicians who have distanced
themselves from the ideological rhetoric of authenticity continue to use them. For
instance, discussing a piece previously criticized by Kiani, Hossein Alizadeh validates
the music by referring to “the piece’s exact birth certificate” (shenāsnāmeh-ye daqiq-e
āsār), thereby indexing its history and pedigree (in Shahrnazdar 2004b: 216).18
In seeking to understand where such discourses come from, Livingston’s observa-
tion that “many revivalists seem to be in search of a personal authenticity in histori-
cal forms” (1999: 74) may prove particularly revealing if one explores the motivations
of those who spearheaded the cleansing of Iranian classical music from its purported
impurities. Indeed, one of the distinctive features of revival movements is “the cen-
tral role played by a few individuals” (1999: 70). Livingston suggests that “ ‘core reviv-
alists’ are not unlike the prophets and visionaries integral to Wallace’s 1956 model of
the cultural revitalization process who communicate their vision to, and organize,
a select group of converts” (1999: 70). Wallace’s pioneering work on “revitalization
movements” focuses on religious movements, but his writings are especially rel-
evant in understanding the central role of charismatic individuals in music reviv-
als, who often play a similar prophetic role and lead a small but committed core of
followers.19 In the case of Iran, the two central “visionaries” were the co-founders of
the Markaz: Dariouche Safvate, its first director, and Nur Ali Borumand, who can
easily be identified as “elder statesman/repository of traditional repertoire” (Slobin
1983: 39), the latter enshrined in the radif. Indeed, the religious analogy can be taken
further in the sense that the radif arguably acquired a status akin to a sacred text by
the late 1960s. Safvate was the more publicly influential and polemical of the two,
with his often outspoken views on musicians working at the radio and other fol-
lowers of Vaziri. Already in 1959, in a published interview entitled “Goftogoo dar
bareh-ye Dirigism-e Honari” (“Discussion About Dirigisme in Art”),20 Safvate was
advocating a new brand of centrally controlled management of music activities. This

kind of approach became strongly evident in later years, in his somewhat doctrinaire
directorship of the Markaz. Eventual differences between Safvate and Borumand
led to the latter’s departure from the Markaz in the mid-1970s. Borumand’s influ-
ence, however, was felt primarily through the large number of pupils who studied
with him, many of whom went on to become influential figures in their own right.
A closer focus on Borumand, and specifically on certain aspects of his biography,
may be illuminating in relation to some of the discourses reported above.
Born into an aristocratic family, Borumand was raised in a household frequented
by musicians, poets, and artists, and, at the age of twelve, he began studying tār
(long-necked plucked lute) with the renowned Qolam Hossein Darvish Khan (1872–
1926). In 1922, he was sent to Germany, where he attended secondary school and also
became familiar with European music, taking piano lessons for two years. While
studying medicine, Borumand continued to pursue his musical interests, but failing
eyesight and eventual blindness led to his return to Iran in 1938, from which time he
devoted himself entirely to Iranian music. Borumand spent the next thirty years liv-
ing a rather secluded life and continuing to study tār and setār. It wasn’t until the 1960s
that he emerged into public life, after being invited to advise on and participate in a
number of government-sponsored activities and—from the mid-1960s—to teach radif
at the University of Tehran’s Fine Arts Faculty (before the formal establishment of the
Music Department in 1969) and later at the Markaz. Borumand was not primarily a per-
former and was therefore little known to the general public; however, he became highly
regarded as a teacher, largely through his detailed knowledge of the radif, accumulated
through many years of study with several prominent masters. Borumand’s significance
lies largely in the fact that he studied with masters who were in direct receipt of Mirza
Abdollah’s radif (see During et al. 1991: 62; Nettl 1987: 142–143), his main teachers—
Esma’il Khan Qahremani and Haji Aqa Mohammad—being among the most highly
regarded of Mirza Abdollah’s pupils. In particular, as noted, many consider the radif
that Borumand studied intensively with Qahremani over a period of about twelve years
(During et al. 1991: 63) to be the version closest to Mirza Abdollah’s original, particularly
since the route of transmission through Qahremani and Borumand was not affected by
Darvish Khan’s attempts to popularize the tradition. As Fayaz observes:
Borumand had all the qualities to make him suited for this [leading the revival move-
ment]. Raised in an aristocratic and art-loving family, studied with the best masters
of the time; attachment to pre-Vaziri music and great knowledge of that; ability as a
performer and teacher . . . and good memory.
(Fayaz 1998: 95)
With its historical roots in the royal courts, Iranian classical music has long been asso-
ciated with privilege, authority, and power. Revivalists of the 1960s and 1970s effectively
sought to recreate a time before modernization and Westernization, before the 1906
Constitutional Revolution set in train the processes of disempowering royalty, a time
when the aristocratic order was in place, and with Iranian classical music firmly within
290 Laudan Nooshin
that order. Borumand’s analogies with horses and “pure blood” start to make sense when
one considers his own extraction and the fact that he was one of the last of a long tradi-
tion of the leisured aristocratic amateur musician before Iranian classical music moved
into the public domain and the realm of the middle classes and intellectuals. In his inci-
sive analysis of Borumand’s role at this time, Fayaz suggests that “for someone of noble
or aristocratic birth [asilzādeh], proving purity [esālat] as the most important value is
tantamount to proving himself ” (1998: 108), and he asks whether Borumand’s approach
to historical purity might be partly understood as a form of personal validation. While
such discussion highlights the potentially defining role of key individuals in any social
movement, and no matter what Borumand’s personal motivations might have been, it is
important to understand that his ideas became influential primarily because he was in a
position to promote them through his role as instructor of radif at both the University of
Tehran and the Markaz; no other musician had such a profound impact as a teacher in
the late 1960s and 1970s.
Returning to the work of Taruskin, there are some interesting conceptual parallels
between Borumand and Stravinsky that I believe are worth noting briefly. Borumand
may have encountered Stravinsky’s music during his time in Europe, but there is no evi-
dence that he was familiar with his writings. Still, there are some fascinating similarities
between these two musicians. As a self-appointed guardian of “pure” music and “objec-
tive” performance, Stravinsky adopted a quasi-ideological approach in his writings and
performances. His sharpest rhetoric was directed at the performer, who he believed
should be a transmitter of music with the minimum of interpretation, as set out in the
series of lectures that were later published as the Poetics of Music (first English-language
edition, 1947):
It is the conflict of these two principles—execution and interpretation—that is at the

root of all the errors, all the sins, all the misunderstandings that interpose themselves
between the musical work and the listener and prevent a faithful transmission of its
message.
(Quoted in Taruskin 1988: 181)
He continues by invoking similarly loaded terms such as “criminal assault,” “con-

science,” and “betrayal.” Such statements are strongly reminiscent of Borumand’s
views regarding the interpretive freedom of the performer and the sanctity of the
radif text. Like Stravinsky, Borumand’s ideal performer is a transmitter of what
already exists, with the minimum of interpretive intervention, and he regularly
commented negatively on the practice of improvisation. In light of these observa-
tions, it is interesting to note certain similarities between these two men in terms of
their social backgrounds and the possible implications for their views on music. For
instance, Taruskin discusses Stravinsky’s complaints, in relation to performances of
Bach’s music, about the “lack of understanding of the interpreter’s obligations, this
arrogant pride in numbers, this concupiscence of the many, [that] betray a complete
lack of musical education” (from Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music, quoted in Taruskin
1988: 182). Taruskin observes, “we need not . . . hire a psychologist to investigate what

the phrase ‘concupiscence of the many’ would have meant to a Russian aristocrat
uprooted by the Bolshevik revolution” (Taruskin 1988: 182). Likewise, Borumand was
from an aristocratic background (and indeed had close links with the Pahlavi royal
family) and lived through a period in which the aristocracy lost much of its power
in Iran. From this perspective, his somewhat doctrinaire position might be under-
stood as a more or less conscious act of reliving an archaic aristocratic status quo,
an ideologically driven preservation of the tradition for a musically informed elite.
Although the context is very different, the case of Borumand seems to illustrate well
the “view of revival as social elite” as discussed by Neil Rosenberg (in relation to the
American folk song revival movement of the 1950s and 1960s), “in which revival-
ists, in transforming traditions, represent the established political and social agendas
of the group from which they emerge” (1993: 19). Rosenberg contrasts this with the
“view of revival as social consensus,” which accords more closely with the post-1979
period to be discussed shortly. In this sense, the first revival aligns with yet another of
the “struggles” listed by Ronström—that of class (1996: 9).
Ultimately, I would suggest that the revivalism of the 1960s and 1970s was not
just about the music—I might venture to suggest not even about the music—but
was rather a means of validating a particular contemporary position arising from a
complex set of social and personal circumstances. Seeking to reclaim the notion of
“purity” from those who set themselves up as the “authenticity police” (pāsebān-e
sonnat va esālat, 1998: 100), Fayaz suggests that “[i]‌n truth, the direct result of
increased sensitivity to historical purity was a decreased concern with artistic
purity . . . the price paid for historical purity was to injure, change and even lose the
tradition” (Fayaz 1998: 106). Although relatively little research has been undertaken
on the reception of Iranian classical music during this (or any other) period, such
evidence as there is suggests that lay audiences in the 1970s were largely uninter-
ested in matters of historical veracity. According to Fayaz, many became alienated
by discourses of purity, and Iranian classical music became marginalized as audi-
ences dwindled (Fayaz 1998: 106); but perhaps that was the intention. At the same
time, however, what the purists regarded as “acculturated” radio programs, such as
the Golhā series, remained popular.
Postrevolutionary Renaissance: Revival
as Renewal
By the mid-1970s, there began a process of bifurcation led by the new generation of
graduate musicians, including several who had studied at the Markaz. Combining a
strict classical training with a widening of musical horizons, many of these musicians
began to question the pursuit of tradition for its own sake and started to create music
292 Laudan Nooshin
that resonated with and responded to contemporary issues and which extended the rep-
ertoire in new directions. As Livingston observes:
After a tradition has been “revived” the question always arises as to the balance
between “preservation” of the tradition (i.e. strict adherence to revivalist stylistic
parameters) and innovation, even innovation that is intended to win over a greater
audience for the tradition. Frequently this tension is responsible for the breakdown
of the revival.
This characterization nicely sums up the situation in Iran at this time; and indeed, the
tension between preservation and innovation remains a site of contestation. What is
interesting is that the first (“purist”) revival sowed the seeds for what was later to emerge
as another, very different kind of revival following the Revolution of 1979. Several clas-
sical music groups were formed at this time, and many of the changes were led by the
two most prominent: the Sheyda Ensemble, established in 1974 by Mohammad Reza
Shajarian and Parviz Meshkatian (and named after the prominent Constitutional
Period poet, Mirza Abbas Khan Sheida, or Sheida-ye-Esfahani 1873–1949); and the
Aref Ensemble, established in 1977 by Parviz Meshkatian, Hossein Alizadeh, and
Mohammad Reza Lotfi.
As with the first revival, a number of factors contributed to the second, perhaps the
most significant being the sociopolitical climate of the time, particularly in the lead up to
and aftermath of the Revolution of February 1979, an important aspect of which was the
assertion of national sovereignty after decades of external interference in Iran’s affairs.
The Revolution thus triggered a widespread “return to roots” interest in traditional
arts and culture, and, as part of this, Iranian classical music experienced an extraor-
dinary renaissance, attracting mass audiences for the first time in its history. Despite
the often crippling restrictions that artists faced under the new Islamic Republic, this
period is widely regarded as one of renewal, but of a kind that was very different from
that of the 1960s and 1970s, one closer to the “syncretic” end of Bauman’s continuum, in
which musicians seek to “reinvent[ing] the past by emancipatory creation to the point
of breaking the local and regional frontiers” (1996: 80). Further, Bauman’s observations
with regard to the Swiss situation are very apposite to Iran at a time when “the escape
into the utopia of the past was replaced by hope for a better future” (Bauman 1996: 80).
Alongside the general postrevolutionary fervor and the sense of entering a new era of
possibilities, there was a feeling of release among musicians, both from the moralizing
of traditionalists and from the previous regime’s kowtowing to the West. This was a time
of experimentation—experimentation that had started in the mid-1970s—as musicians
used new formal structures and new instrumental colors and drew on influences from
regional traditions, particularly from Kurdish music, since a number of prominent
classical musicians at this time were of Kurdish heritage. Kurdish influences included
the introduction of the daff frame drum (not hitherto used in the classical music) and
the widespread use of additive meters (5, 7, 13, and so on).21 It was also at this time that
instrumental music began to gain independence from the voice for the first time, largely
through the work of musicians such as Hossein Alizadeh (see Nooshin forthcoming).
The early to mid-1980s was certainly an extraordinary time for Iranian classical
music, as described by prominent vocalist Shahram Nazeri:
It was as if a nation that had been asleep for centuries had woken; as if a fire had been
lit in a reed-bed and each of these reeds, since they are burning, was obliged to think
about itself, its society, its history. People gradually became interested in their own
culture, because the reality is that for many years in Iran, there was a long period of
loss of identity [bihoviyyat].
(Interview, August 21, 1999, Tehran)
This grassroots “awakening” drew in many who had hitherto been largely excluded from
the classical tradition, including many women musicians and those from conservative
religious backgrounds whose participation in music was previously rare. As such, the
movement arguably brought about a gradual democratization of the tradition, in con-
trast with the strongly elitist nature of the first revival:
Even religious families started listening to the radio and television; cassettes came,
tape recorders came. Many families sent their sons and daughters, under the age of
twenty, to music lessons. For example, there was a cassette called Gol-e Sad Barg pub-
lished in 1363 [1984; a recording by Nazeri himself]. When it was published, believe
me, there was a revolution in setār, such a story [ye dāstāni shod], in the space of eight
or nine months, I’m not saying one million people, but something around this num-
ber came to participate in classes, girls and boys.
(Interview, August 21, 1999, Tehran)
I have written elsewhere about this period and the impact of the cultural policies of the new
Islamic government on music and other areas of artistic activity (Nooshin 2005: 235–245).22
In the early 1980s, there was little music on radio and television other than revolutionary
anthems and military music, certain types of music—most notably popular music—were
banned outright, and concerts more or less stopped. Yet, despite government restrictions,
cassette recordings (the main medium of music circulation) of Iranian classical music were
produced and distributed widely and were eagerly anticipated, in some cases becoming an
emotive focal point for the new mood of national and political consciousness. Indeed, Iranian
classical music assumed a dual anti-hegemonic symbolism at this time: first, in relation to
Western culture and second with respect to government restrictions on music making, par-
ticularly in the context of tensions in the early 1980s between, on the one hand, the politicized
pan-Islamic tendencies evident in government discourses and nationalist discourses on the
other. Classical music (and poetry) represented an important challenge to government dis-
courses at this time and, for many, provided an important means of affirming national identity.
This movement also had its visionaries, individuals such as Shajarian, Nazeri, and Alizadeh,
who, unlike those of the earlier revival, became well known to the public and, in some cases,
akin to national heroes. Most significantly, for the first time in many decades, musicians set
294 Laudan Nooshin
poetry that resonated with the historical moment, both from the same body of Medieval mys-
tical poetry traditionally set, but also drawing on the work of contemporary poets such as
Hooshang Ebtehaj (pen name Sayeh, lit. “shadow”), Javad Azar, Aslan Aslanian, and Mojtaba
Kashani. In this way, classical music found a social relevance that it had arguably not had since
the time of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. Significant recordings at this time included
a series of cassettes produced by the Chavosh Institute featuring prominent musicians such
as vocalists Shajarian and Nazeri and composer-instrumentalists Alizadeh, Mohammad Reza
Lotfi, Parviz Meshkatian, and members of the Kamkar family, among others.23
Although this discussion of the second revival is necessarily more cursory than that
of the first, there are some points to note. First, some of the key innovators of the second
revival were musicians who had studied at the Markaz with masters such as Borumand
and who, in the early 1980s, found themselves in a directly contradictory position to
those who continued the preservative work of the Markaz during this period. This was a
generation of socially engaged and broadly educated musicians trained in the traditional
repertoire but also attuned and responsive to the national mood. I would argue that they
could only have become the innovators that they did through their rigorous training and
in-depth knowledge of the radif gained at the Markaz; it was this that gave them the firm
foundation on which to create, or to “fly,” to use a metaphor of Shahram Nazeri’s:
In reality, the radifs came about so that a musician could place his foot on a firm basis
[bastar] from which to fly. Like an architect who wants to construct a building needs
a firm and correct foundation [pāyeh] . . . or like a light that guides you and doesn’t
allow you to deviate [monharef].
(Interview, April 23, 2010, Tehran)24
In an important sense, then, the first revival can be seen as having (inadvertently)
laid the groundwork for the second. The second important factor was the resurgence
of national consciousness that followed the Revolution and that led to a new social
receptiveness and audience for classical music. Whether the second revival could have
happened without either is debatable. What the two revival movements shared was a
concern with national identity and a rejection of Iran’s strong cultural (and political)
dependency on the West that marked the prerevolutionary period. Where they differed
was that the first appealed to the past to legitimate practices of the present, whereas the
second was determinedly forward-looking in its understanding of revival as renewal of
the tradition through creation. Further, the second revival became an important part of
the postrevolutionary social arena, in contrast to the first, which worked against the tide
of social change in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s.
Conclusion: Postrevival Bifurcation
Bauman describes the “escaping into the utopia of the past on the one hand and escaping
into the utopia of the future on the other” as “two sides of a Janus head” (1996: 80). What,
then, does the Janus-like nature of the two revival movements described in this chap-
ter—the first looking firmly to the past, the second to the future—tell us about musical
revivals and their ideological underpinnings? And what have the postrevival implica-
tions been for the trajectory of Iranian classical music since the 1980s? Although the
second revival grew out of conditions partly made possible by the first, I have hesitated
to frame the former as a postrevival manifestation because each revival phase emerged
from radically different social circumstances and with distinct discursive positionings.
Certainly, this raises questions about the notion of postrevivalism and how we under-
stand the relationships between revival moments. To some extent, the movement of the
1980s might be regarded as a reaction against the kind of adherence to radif orthodoxy
and notions of musical purity that prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s. And yet, there was
no explicit framing of the second revival in these terms at the time; indeed, the radif
remained firmly in place as the underlying basis of the music. Further, I have been
struck by the respectful tone with which those musicians who trained at the Markaz
talk about the work of the masters there in the early 1970s, even where their current
practice diametrically opposes the approach of that time. Since the 1980s, however,
the Iranian classical music scene has nonetheless been marked by a fairly clear divide
between musicians who somewhat trenchantly follow the path of the first revival and
those who see themselves as extending the work of the postrevolutionary period.25 In
this sense, we are currently in a period of postrevival, in which the continuing strands of
both movements are clearly evident in the schisms that mark Iran’s musical landscape;
indeed, the tension between them provides a space of public contestation, often aired
in the national and musical press, over competing “authenticities,” particularly in rela-
tion to role of the radif—either as a text to be adhered to more or less strictly or a source
that provides a starting point for creative practice and a form of personal authenticity
that is more to do with the spirit of the text than its letter. The first position is primar-
ily to be found in some of the more prominent educational establishments and in the
views of musicians such as Majid Kiani and Dariouche Safvate; one sees the second
both among those postrevolutionary pioneers mentioned earlier who have continued
their work over the past thirty years and among younger musicians who have, in recent
years, become increasingly confident in developing a voice that goes beyond orthodoxy,
and more recently even beyond the radif (see Nooshin forthcoming). If anything, these
two postrevival “strands” seem to be moving further apart, the one presenting itself as
the guardian of national heritage and identity, the other appealing to a rather different
understanding of nationhood and “Iranian-ness,” one that depends on the idea of tradi-
tion not so much as stasis but rather as something creative and organic. Whether these
very different manifestations of (post)revival can be reconciled, and what shape any
future post-postrevivalism might take, remains to be seen.
Notes
1. A term reportedly coined by University of Tehran philosopher, Ahmad Fardid, and the title
of a highly influential book by Jalal Al-e Ahmad, published in 1962 (English translation
296 Laudan Nooshin
1983) and subsequently banned under the Shah’s regime. Transliteration from Persian to
Roman script in this chapter follows conventionally accepted spellings of words where
applicable; elsewhere, I have sought to convey the sound of spoken (standard) Persian as
closely as possible.
2. For further discussion on the debate over modernity in Iran, see Milani (2003) and
Mirsepassi (2000).
3. For further discussion of Vaziri’s life and work, see Darvishi (1994, chapter 4), Khaleqi
(1983a,b), Milanloo (2011) and Nooshin (forthcoming, c hapter 3).
4. Similar processes were happening more or less concurrently in the new Turkish Republic
under the rule of another military officer, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (see Atabaki and Zürcher
2004). Vaziri continues to evoke strong views among Iranian musicians, some of whom
believe his reforms to have been ultimately damaging to Iranian music. See, for instance,
Alizadeh in Shahrnazdar (2004b: 23).
5. All translations from writings and interviews in Persian are by the current author.
6. Again, there are clear parallels with the rejection of Ottoman culture in Turkey after the
establishment of the Republic in 1923 under the leadership of Atatürk.
7. A term commonly used nowadays by musicians to talk about musical practices of the 1960s
and 1970s.
8. See Kiani (2004), Miller (1999: 37–56), and Talai (in Shahrnazdar 2004a: 18–19) for further
information on the history and activities of the Markaz. Sources give differing dates for the
establishment of the Markaz, but the most reliable indicate the Autumn of 1349 (1970) as
the correct date.
9. These highly popular music programs were broadcast on National Iranian Radio from 1956
to 1979. For further information, see the work of Jane Lewisohn, including http://www.
golha.co.uk and Lewisohn 2008.
10. The lavish volume eventually published by the government was compiled by Musa Ma’rufi
(see Barkeshli and Ma’rufi [1963]; also discussion in Nooshin forthcoming).
11. Kiani goes as far as to claim that Borumand was the only musician in receipt of Mirza
Abdollah’s radif as transmitted through Qahremani, with whom Borumand studied
(2004: 149). In contrast to such discourses of stability, Borumand himself is reported to
have told his pupils that he “corrected and improved” the radif as learned from Qahremani
before teaching it; other sources have suggested that he deleted recordings of Qahremani
to hide the fact that the radif taught by him was different from that of his master (Talai
in Shahrnazdar 2004a: 93). Either way, there is no extant notated or recorded version of
Mirza Abdollah’s original radif, nor of that taught by Qahremani. Outside Iran, Borumand
became known through the writings of two of his pupils, Bruno Nettl and Jean During.
12. Particular mention might be made here of another influential teacher, Ali Akbar Shahnazi
(1898–1985), grandson of prominent Qajar court musician Ali Akbar Farahani (1810–1855),
who taught a number of contemporary musicians, including Dariush Talai and Hossein
Alizadeh at the Honarestan-e Melli (secondary school) national music conservatory before
they went on to study with Borumand and others at the University and the Markaz. Talai
reports that it was through Shahnazi that he and his peers first became interested in the
radif, since no-one else at the Honarestan taught radif at this time, the general trend being
to play in the style of “radio musicians” (Dariush Talai, personal communication, August
2012). Shahnazi taught his own version of the radif, and his approach was reportedly much
less doctrinaire than that of Borumand.
13. Elsewhere, I have discussed the ideological issues surrounding the increasingly iconic
position and authority of the radif from the 1960s onward (Nooshin forthcoming). This
authority has recently been given added impetus internationally by the addition of the
radif (in 2009) to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO)’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. See
http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00011&RL=00279.
14. See also Ronström (1996: 17), who makes a similar point with reference to the work of
Norwegian folklorist Anne Eriksen and her proposition that “ ‘traditional folk culture’ is
in fact not a heritage from the past, but a product of modernity, an idea that has evolved
as a conscious point of opposition to modernity, and therefore an organic part of it
(Eriksen 1993).”
15. See Archer (1964). A number of speeches and papers from this conference have been pub-
lished in the Persian-language journal Mahoor Music Quarterly (established 1998).
16. Baumann also notes the role of cultural outsiders in promoting revival processes, referring
specifically to the case of Swiss Alpine traditions (1996: 74).
17. During also quotes from Borumand as follows: “Authentic music means the music that,
like everything else that is authentic, embodies qualities and is graced with a sound lineage”
(1991: 201, my emphasis).
18. Of course, it is not only in Iran that genetic metaphors have been used in relation to music.
Kartomi notes that “terms such as cross-fertilized, hybrid, creole, mestizo and mulatto
have sometimes been confused in their meanings with negative attitudes to illicit breeding
and interracial liaisons” (1981: 229), such that “pejorative expressions that seem to punish
the offspring for the ‘sins’ of the parents spring from or lead to a disrespect for the qualities
of the musical offspring” (228). There are fewer examples in which the genetic analogy is
deployed positively to refer to “ ‘hybrid strength’ [that] may work to the advantage of the
offspring” (229). One example can be found in contemporary Brazil, where metaphors of
musical “mixing” and “hybridity” are most often positively valenced—as something that
strengthens rather than weakens music—to the extent of symbolizing modern Brazilian
nationhood (see Moehn 2008: 171–172).
19. Slobin (1983: 38–39) gives several examples of revival movements initiated by, and revolv-
ing around, a small group of individuals, sometimes just one person.
20. See Rashidi (1959). I am grateful to Mohammad Reza Fayaz for bringing this article to my
attention.
21. For further discussion of the Kurdish influence on Iranian classical music at this time, see
During (1984: 21–22) and Simms and Koushkani (2012: 24).
22. See also During (1984) and Simms and Koushkani (2012).
23. The Chavosh recordings included two that featured female vocalists Hengameh Akhavan
and Sima Bina, with music by Lotfi. These were banned shortly after release because the use
of the solo female voice became prohibited soon after the revolution (except at all-female
concerts).
24. Ronström makes a similar point but using a different metaphor: “Traditions can func-
tion as a springboard for rapid cultural change. By conjuring stability and continuity, solid
groundwork is laid for radical modernization” (1996: 17).
25. The Markaz continues to operate, but under rather different circumstances. It has been
renamed Markaz-e Hefz o Pajoohesh-e Musiqi-ye Irani (Center for the Preservation of and
Research on Iranian Music).
298 Laudan Nooshin
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C HA P T E R 14
R E C L A I M I N G C H O C TAW
A N D C H I C K A S AW C U LT U R A L
IDENTIT Y THROUGH
M U S I C R E V I VA L
V IC TOR IA L I N D S AY L EV I N E
The revival of historic music and dance plays an integral role in reclaiming indige-
nous cultural identity. Like other First Peoples the world over, Native Americans have
endured acute pressure to relinquish their cultural identities, which are often expressed
most tangibly through performance. Constraints on Native American music and dance
imposed by European colonists beginning in the early seventeenth century posed a seri-
ous threat to the survival of indigenous cultures. The U.S. government intensified this
threat during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with oppressive policies including
forced relocation, bans on ceremonial performance, termination of tribal governments,
placement of Native children in boarding schools, and suppression of Native languages.
Native peoples responded to the threat with various strategies. Some resisted govern-
ment bans on performance by conducting sacred ceremonials in private locations or
on federal holidays, when restrictions were relaxed. Some adapted certain repertories
for performance venues vetted by the dominant society, such as Wild West shows, fairs,
or tourist exhibitions. Some adopted Euramerican genres, including Christian hymns
and fiddle tunes, indigenizing them through tribal musical and social processes. Some
made the conscious decision to put ritual repertories to sleep temporarily or to put
them away forever.1 By the 1940s, indigenous music and dance appeared to be in decline
among Native Americans, but improved economic conditions following World War II
gave rise to powerful social movements that had profound implications for American
Indian music.
Passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act ushered in a period of social activism that galva-
nized Native Americans. Empowered by the Civil Rights movement, Native peoples cre-
ated national activist organizations, including the American Indian Movement (AIM),
Reclaiming Choctaw and Chickasaw Cultural Identity 301
founded in 1968. Other Native activist organizations followed, known collectively as

the Red Power Movement. These groups focused public awareness on American Indian
social, cultural, educational, economic, and health issues, and, by the late 1970s, federal
Indian policy had undergone a sea change. New legislation reaffirmed Native American
self-determination and religious freedom, protecting the rights of Native peoples to
perform ritual songs and dances. Entitlement programs, such as the Indian Education
Act of 1972, supported the incorporation of Native content in school curricula, includ-
ing instruction in tribal performing arts. By the 1980s, the way had been paved for the
return and repatriation of Native cultural materials held by museums and other reposi-
tories. Repatriated materials included archival recordings of tribal songs that had been
collected on wax cylinders beginning in 1890 by ethnologists and comparative musi-
cologists such as Jesse Walter Fewkes, Alice Fletcher, and Frances Densmore. In this
milieu of changing legislation and public consciousness, revivals of Native American
music and dance emerged as one mode of social action that reclaims cultural identity,
expresses sovereignty, and transforms individuals and communities. The performance
of music and dance is also, of course, a pleasurable activity with its own internal rewards.
Native American music revivals share common characteristics with similar move-
ments among other peoples. These include inception by an individual or a core group,
reliance on source musicians and materials, specific revival ideologies, networks of indi-
viduals who constitute a revivalist community, organizations and festivals that nurture
the revival movement, and enterprises that commodify the revived tradition (Livingston
1999). Yet Native music revivals manifest these characteristics in distinctive ways. Native
music revivals are strongly localized and involve repertories still in collective, living, and
generational memory. Authority on traditional music resides in elders who have taken
an active role in ceremonial performance. Archival recordings, ethnographic reports,
historic photographs, and film may be consulted for corroboration, but are less inte-
gral to the revival process than collective, living, and generational memory, which are
considered to be the most legitimate sources of authenticity among Native Americans.
Native ways of constructing history connect tribal experience to concepts of ritual time,
which for many Native peoples is understood as having a spiraling, recursive contour.
Therefore, Native singers often understand music revival as part of cyclic historical pro-
cesses.2 Some repertories, especially those susceptible to recontextualization, may be
discontinued for a time and renewed years later. What opens a repertory to recontextu-
alization is its origin in a ritual whose spiritual ideology can be adapted or secularized
according to changes in material conditions (cf. Swan 1998: 65). Finally, Native peoples
are questioning who has the right to define Native cultural identity. Local communities
answer that in part through music revival, bringing back repertories that oppose main-
stream stereotypes. Native music revivals, therefore, emphasize social transformation,
self-definition, and reclamation of repertories suppressed through colonization.
Despite the significance of Native American music revivals since the 1970s, they
have escaped the notice of many ethnomusicologists. This chapter draws atten-
tion to such movements by comparing the Choctaw and Chickasaw music revivals in
Oklahoma. The Choctaw and Chickasaw are closely connected historically, culturally,
302 Victoria Lindsay Levine
geographically, and linguistically. The Choctaw revived communal songs and dances
(also called social dances) in 1975, during what could be considered the first wave of
Native American music revivals. The Choctaw repertory provided a foundation for the
Chickasaw revival, which began in 1992. Both groups reclaimed their communal songs
and dances as central components of cultural identity. In reclaiming this particular
repertory, the Choctaw and Chickasaw revived something that had already undergone
centuries of transformation. The repertory probably originated as part of the Green
Corn ceremony and its associated calendrical round, which both tribes appear to have
practiced until the mid-1700s. During the nineteenth century, the Choctaw blended
this repertory with songs and dances from other discontinued rituals, such as War and
Victory Dances, and recontextualized them for performance during the nighttime por-
tion of the Ballgame (also called stickball). By 1903, when the ancestors of one Choctaw
community arrived in Oklahoma, the communal songs and dances performed during
the Ballgame had come to symbolize interpersonal reconciliation and cultural renewal
(Levine 1997a). Additional research on Chickasaw music may uncover a similar his-
tory. In any case, the communal songs and dances, reclaimed by both groups through
revival, provide a potent expression of cultural longevity and survival. A comparison
of the revivals explores the origins, musical and social processes, and outcomes of each,
revealing the kinds of transformations that occurred. Following a brief history of the
Choctaw and Chickasaw, each revival is addressed in turn.
I should note that I use the term “revival” with considerable trepidation because it is
controversial among Choctaw and Chickasaw dancers in the early twenty-first century.
Some reject the term because it implies that they had lost their musical culture, whereas
it had only been put to sleep temporarily, to be reawakened by a later generation. One
dancer rejected the term because it does not adequately describe the strategy used to
reclaim the repertory. Lengthy discussion failed to yield a more satisfactory term, and
therefore I use “revival” here, while stressing the centrality of collective, living, and gen-
erational memory in reawakening and reclaiming indigenous performance repertories.
By contrast, members of the Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee used the terms
“revival” and “revitalization” interchangeably during the 1970s and 1980s.
A Brief History of the Oklahoma Choctaw

and Chickasaw
Much has been written about the history, culture, and contemporary economic success
of the Choctaw and Chickasaw (cf. Fitzgerald et al. 2006; Galloway 1995; Kidwell 2007;
Lambert 2007a; Morgan, Fitzgerald, and Anoatubby 2010); a summary provides the
backdrop for understanding their music revivals. The Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee
(Creek), Seminole, and Cherokee became known among Euramericans as the Five
Civilized Tribes because they lived in settled communities and practiced agriculture
at the time of contact in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As descendants of

Mississippian peoples (800–1500 C.E.), the Choctaw and Chickasaw speak mutually
intelligible dialects of Western Muskoghean and share an origin narrative. Each group
coalesced as a distinctive people during the 1600s; the Choctaw lived mainly in central
Mississippi, whereas the Chickasaw inhabited northeastern Mississippi. Both groups
developed extensive trade with Europeans during the 1700s, resulting in cultural
exchange and intermarriage. After the American Revolution, Protestant ministers
established missions and schools among the Choctaw and Chickasaw in order to pro-
mote assimilation while the United States aggressively pursued land cessions. Despite
their efforts to accommodate, in 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, forc-
ing the Choctaw and Chickasaw, along with most other southern tribes, into exile in
what was then Indian Territory, west of the Mississippi River. Some Choctaws remained
in the Southeast, and their descendants continue to live in Mississippi and Tennessee.
Those who underwent removal know that event as the Trail of Tears because of the dev-
astating hardship and loss of life they suffered during the journey.
The Choctaw and Chickasaw rebuilt their lives in Indian Territory by the late 1850s,
forming constitutional democracies and establishing schools and churches while
engaging in agriculture and other economic ventures. After the American Civil War,
the United States dissolved tribal governments in order to open Indian Territory to
white settlement; the Choctaw and Chickasaw lost control over their economic, politi-
cal, and social institutions for the second time in less than a century. Indian Territory
became the state of Oklahoma in 1907, and, following statehood, the Choctaw and
Chickasaw struggled economically and politically. However, after World War II, they
took advantage of emerging economic opportunities and the changing political climate
to strengthen tribal organization and development. An activist movement initiated by
Oklahoma Choctaw youth succeeded in repealing Choctaw termination legislation in
1970 and thereafter the United States restored the right of the Five Civilized Tribes to
elect their own chiefs (Lambert 2007a: 75).3 Thus began a new era of self-determination
and cultural self-definition for the Choctaw and Chickasaw.
With some 150,000 enrolled members, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma is the
third largest Indian tribe in the United States; the Chickasaw Nation has enrolled about
40,000 people. Members of both tribes live throughout the world, but most reside in
south-central and south-eastern Oklahoma. Both nations practice agriculture, and,
since the 1970s, have developed highly successful business enterprises including casi-
nos, family entertainment centers, travel plazas, hotels and motels, convenience stores,
and manufacturing. In addition, the Chickasaw own a chocolate factory, bank, and two
radio stations; the Choctaw own a shopping mall and horse-racing track and provide
management expertise for United States military bases (Clark 2009: 93–94 and 107–
108). In part because of their economic and political success, the dominant scholarly
narrative about Choctaw and Chickasaw culture is one of assimilation and acculturation
(Lambert 2007b: 283), yet a new generation of scholars who are themselves Choctaw
and Chickasaw are challenging that narrative (cf. Cobb 2000; Lambert 2007a,b).
These scholars address the importance of heritage activities and expressions of tribal
distinctiveness in the process of reclaiming Choctaw and Chickasaw cultural identity

since the 1970s. Extending their work, I hope to demonstrate some of the ways in which
music revivals have contributed to the process.
The Revival of Choctaw Communal Dance

Songs in Oklahoma
The extensive literature on the Choctaw notwithstanding, little published informa-

tion, and only a few sound recordings, document Choctaw music. The most impor-
tant early sources on Mississippi Choctaw musical instruments, song repertories,
dances, and performance contexts include Bushnell (1909), Swanton (1931), and
Densmore (1943); Draper described Mississippi Choctaw musical culture of the
1970s (1980, 1983, 2009). Research on Oklahoma Choctaw music began in the 1970s
(Howard 1978; Howard and Levine 1990; Levine 1993, 1997a,b, 2004; White Deer
1995). Archival recordings of Choctaw communal dance songs that are accessible to
the public include field tapes made by Densmore in the 1930s and by Howard in the
1960s and 1970s. These sources show that by the early twentieth century, Choctaw
musical life in both Mississippi and Oklahoma revolved around two traditional
repertories: songs to accompany communal dances performed at night following a
Ballgame, and Choctaw hymns for Christian worship. In addition, the Mississippi
Choctaw played a traditional repertory of fiddle tunes known as house dances or
fiddle dances, which have been revived in recent years (Chris Goertzen, personal
communication, 2012).
Although indigenous hymns continue to play a central role in Oklahoma Choctaw
musical life, I focus on the communal dance songs. Some Oklahoma Choctaws catego-
rize communal dance songs into several genres, including Jump Dances, Walk Dances,
Drunk Dances, War Dances, and animal dances. The latter category includes several dis-
crete genres, each with a distinctive choreography and musical style, such as the Duck
Dance or Snake Dance. Choctaws generally perform communal dance songs in call
and response, using a relatively relaxed and open method of vocal production. A male
leader sings the call; in most songs, both men and women dancers respond in moder-
ately blended unison, the women singing an octave higher. The songs generally feature
an octave range and employ a variety of iterative, sectional, and strophic forms. Most
song texts feature vocables, although Choctaw words occur in some songs. Until the
late 1930s, the Oklahoma Choctaw performed communal songs and dances as part of
the Ballgame. Multigenerational, intercommunity gatherings occurred at consecrated
ceremonial grounds where the Choctaw played stickball during the day, shared a feast,
and danced all night. Men took turns leading the songs and dances; they danced in a
counterclockwise circle, men alternating with women in the dance line. The song leader
played a pair of striking sticks to support the music’s pulse.
FIGURE 14.1 Buster Ned, Chairman of the Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee,

Ardmore, Oklahoma, 1975. (Photograph by Mac McGalliard. Courtesy of the McGalliard
Collection, Ardmore Public Library.)
In Oklahoma, the Choctaw discontinued the Ballgame and its nighttime dances by
the early 1940s, due to the social, economic, and political challenges the people faced as
a result of the dissolution of the tribal government, the effects of the Great Depression,
and subsequent out-migration. Buster Ned (1924–1992), who in 1937 witnessed the last
Choctaw dance at the Yellow Hill ceremonial ground, told the following story. One
night, he and his maternal grandfather, Logan Parker, saw a comet burning brightly in
the night sky. Parker interpreted this as an omen that war was imminent. He advised
the Choctaw to stop dancing so that the young people could spend time at home with
their families before being called to military duty (Buster Ned, interview, February 1,
1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). Parker had foreseen World War II, during which more than
44,000 Native American men and women served in the United States armed forces,
including many Choctaws, Chickasaws, and other Native people from Oklahoma.4
After a hiatus of some thirty years, various Choctaw communities in Oklahoma began
to revive communal songs and dances (Howard 1978). My focus here is the revival led by
Buster Ned (Figure 14.1), who narrated his biography, family history, and details about
the music revival during a series of interviews in 1983 and 1985 (Levine 1993, 2004). Born
and raised about twenty miles east of Ardmore, Ned spoke Choctaw as his first language
FIGURE 14.2 A Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee event held at the home of Buster
Ned near Ardmore, Oklahoma, November 1975. (Photograph by Mac McGalliard. Courtesy
of the McGalliard Collection, Ardmore Public Library.)
and participated in Ballgames at the Yellow Hill ceremonial ground. He attended an

Indian boarding school through the eighth grade, returning home to work as a day
laborer on neighboring cotton farms. Ned enlisted in the Army Air Corps during World
War II and joined the Marine Corps in 1950; after retiring from military service, he
worked as a civilian at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City. He retired again in 1973
and returned to the Ardmore area, moved into his grandfather’s house, and reconnected
with his community. In 1974, he attended a powwow in Ardmore that included an exhi-
bition of Choctaw dances, and Ned joined the dance. Later, the elder woman seated next
to him said, “Your grandpa used to [organize communal dances] all the time. If you do
it, I’ll come dance” (Buster Ned, interview, February 4, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). With
this encouragement, Ned formed the Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee and the
group held its first public gathering in June 1975 (Figure 14.2). The Heritage Committee
ultimately became an organizing body for hosting community events, and because one
of its goals was to educate the general public about the unique cultural identity of the
Choctaw and Chickasaw, it also became a performance troupe. Thus, the committee
recontextualized the communal songs and dances once again by creating new kinds of
events unconnected to Ballgames and having shorter durations with flexible scheduling.
Those at the core of the Heritage Committee included Choctaws who, like Ned,
had been born and raised near Ardmore. Their ancestors belonged to a kin-based
community that migrated to Ardmore from Mississippi in 1903 during the late remov-
als (Levine 2004). Ardmore is located within the Chickasaw Nation, and, until the
early 1940s, the Choctaws and Chickasaws in the area engaged in reciprocal ceremo-
nial ground visits, a customary social pattern among Native peoples from the Southeast
(Jackson 2003; see also Brown 2004; Waselkov 2004). White neighbors also partici-
pated in dances at Choctaw and Chickasaw ceremonial grounds. Ned explained that
when Chickasaws visited the Yellow Hill ceremonial ground, their men were invited
to lead Chickasaw dances, which were interspersed with Choctaw dances after mid-
night (Buster Ned, interview, January 25, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). The reverse
occurred when Choctaws visited the Chickasaw ceremonial ground, Twin Ponds
(near MacMillan, Oklahoma). Because of this history, the Heritage Committee’s core
group also included Chickasaws. Each of the core members had participated in com-
munal dances at the Choctaw and Chickasaw ceremonial grounds until the early 1940s,
but only a few men knew how to lead songs. Ned quickly discovered that his maternal
uncle, Adam Sampson (Figure 14.3), remembered more than ninety Choctaw songs, and
Sampson became the primary source musician for the group. A Chickasaw member,
Bienum Pickens, knew one Chickasaw song—the Garfish Dance—which he often led at
Heritage Committee performances. Beyond the core group, participants in the Heritage
Committee included members of other tribes, a Native Hawaiian, and some whites.
Thus, while the core revivalists consisted of Choctaws and Chickasaws, the wider mem-
bership was mixed, reflecting the social commingling at ceremonial dances during the
early twentieth century.
Ned’s revival ideology derived from his firm belief in the historical continuity of the
Ardmore Choctaw community and of Choctaw communal dance songs. He asserted
that the songs and dances had been given to the Choctaw by the Creator at the time
of creation. He explained that his grandfather had said, “There is one above us all, and
he’s the one that gave [the songs] to us as a way to rejoice in his honor and to praise
him,” adding that “these dances were handed down for generations” (Buster Ned, inter-
views, January 22, 1985 and February 12, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma).5 Ned held that
the songs and dances had not changed during his lifetime, nor had they changed since
his ancestors’ removal from Mississippi in 1903. This ideology of historical continuity
shaped the reconstruction of the Heritage Committee’s repertory. Ned also believed that
humans could not compose new songs for Choctaw communal dances, asserting that
“The Choctaws and Chickasaws have never tried to make new songs and never will;
if our songs are lost, they’re gone forever” (Buster Ned, interview, February 12, 1985,
Ardmore, Oklahoma). Furthermore, committee members resisted the impulse to revive
songs such as the Bear Dance, Turtle Dance, or Quail Dance whose melodies and texts
they could no longer perform spontaneously, even though it might have been possible
to reconstruct these and other songs through the use of archival materials. Although
Ned knew of publications on Mississippi Choctaw music, especially Bushnell (1909) and
Densmore (1943), he did not use these as source materials, nor did he refer to Densmore’s
archival recordings, which were not readily accessible at that time. Instead, he relied on
collective, generational memory and source musicians, especially his maternal uncle,
FIGURE 14.3 Adam Sampson, song leader for the Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee,
Ardmore, Oklahoma, 1976. (Photograph by MacMcGalliard. Courtesy of the McGalliard
Collection, Ardmore Public Library.)
Adam Sampson, whose living memory of the songs and dances performed until the
1940s constituted the Heritage Committee’s musical canon.
Sampson echoed Ned’s position, stating that all of the Heritage Committee’s songs
were the same as those performed until the 1940s (Adam Sampson, interview, February
12, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). Yet collaborative analysis of multiple recordings of the
same song revealed that when Sampson led, he varied each rendition within well-defined
parameters, never performing a song the same way twice. In the course of collaborative
analysis, Ned commented: “The Choctaws go every which way. It’s not a repetition, it’s
going in a new direction” (Buster Ned, interview, March 20, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma).
Ned’s personal repertory included a War Dance song he described as “off the wall”
because he adapted it from a song he had heard in Mississippi; he explained that he
shortened it and deleted the lexical text (Buster Ned, interview, March 13, 1985, Ardmore,
Oklahoma). Thus, although the core revivalists rejected the concept of new composi-
tion and did not attempt to revive songs no longer in living memory, they expressed
individual style and creativity through spontaneous variations and limited borrowing
from the Mississippi Choctaw repertory. Choctaw thought about the divine origin and
immutable nature of the communal dance songs appears to contradict musical practice,
but here ideology reflects the sacred foundation of the repertory, while musical practice
reflects the social mechanics of collective, participatory performance within a predomi-
nantly oral tradition.
Prior to 1940, the Ardmore Choctaw transmitted their repertory informally
through participation and imitation within ceremonial performances. By contrast,
the Heritage Committee used both formal and informal methods of instruction and
both primary and secondary orality. The Heritage Committee held private evening
dances, preceded by a covered dish supper, in order to teach the repertory through
participation and to strengthen community relationships. In addition, Ned and others
recorded cassette tapes of Heritage Committee performances to help new members
learn the songs. At some dances, Sampson sang a song that the next leader imitated
in an effort to learn it, and women drilled their husbands on the songs at home to
help them internalize the repertory (Buster Ned, interview, March 7, 1985, Ardmore,
Oklahoma). During the late 1970s, Ned and Sampson served as guest artists in the
Ardmore public schools, where they taught Choctaw songs and dances to ethnically
mixed classes. They developed a systematic pedagogy, teaching song lyrics first, fol-
lowed by the melodies. Ned made visual aids from construction paper to teach about
Choctaw designs and symbolism (Buster Ned, interview, March 28, 1985, Ardmore,
Oklahoma). Beyond cassette tapes, the Heritage Committee made two videos (1984
and 1985). Ned used the first video as an instructional tool when he served as a guest
lecturer in the Carmichael, California public schools during the mid-1980s. He dis-
tributed the second video to Heritage Committee members for personal use. Most
significantly, the Heritage Committee produced two long-playing vinyl discs dur-
ing the late 1970s, titled Choctaw-Chickasaw Dance Songs, Volumes I and II (Ned and
McCoy n.d.). Although their distribution was limited, the discs played a vital role
in local dissemination of Choctaw communal dance songs. It is hard to measure the
impact of the Heritage Committee’s transmission methods on Choctaw music, but
Choctaw-Chickasaw Dance Songs played an integral role in shaping the Chickasaw
music revival, to which I will return later.
The Heritage Committee modified several aspects of Choctaw performance prac-
tice. Ned and Sampson remembered that, in the past, the Choctaw accompanied com-
munal dance songs with a pair of striking sticks, but the Heritage Committee used a
double-headed hand drum instead because they preferred its sound. Although Ned
and Sampson disavowed intertribal influence, it seems likely that this, together with
non-Native expectations, may have affected their choice.6 Until the 1940s, Choctaw song
leaders in Oklahoma usually danced at the head of the line of dancers. The Heritage
Committee modified this practice by placing the song leader, who also played the drum,
in the center of the dance circle, while a different man led the dance line. Because he
was hard of hearing, placing Sampson in the middle of the dance circle enabled him
to see the dancers and therefore to time his calls appropriately. One dance, Stealing
Partners, permitted dancers to “steal” their partners from elsewhere in the dance line.
In the early days, only men stole women partners during this dance, but among the
Heritage Committee, women stole male partners as well. Enhancing women’s roles in
performance responded to their desire for more visible female agency in heritage activi-
ties, while the use of a hand drum, for example, marked the dances as Indian for diverse
audiences. Changes in performance practice therefore reflected practical considerations
along with broader social changes.
Loosely coordinated dance regalia played an important role in the Heritage
Committee’s revival. Old photographs show the Ardmore Choctaw dancing at the
Yellow Hill ceremonial ground in everyday clothes; the men wore cotton shirts, over-
alls, and store-bought shoes, while the women wore knee-length dresses in the style of
the time with low-heeled pumps. Some men knotted a large bandana around the neck.
Ned stated that during War Dances, men wore a leg rattle made of a terrapin carapace
filled with gravel (Buster Ned, interview, March 28, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma), but
this is not verified by early photographic evidence. Women sewed small bells onto their
dresses or tied bells onto their shoelaces. Ned explained that the leg rattles and bells sup-
ported the song’s pulse (Buster Ned, interview, March 28, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma).
Heritage Committee members felt that Choctaw dance regalia enhanced their perfor-
mances, although regalia was not required for participation (Buster Ned, interview,
March 28, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). By the 1980s, Choctaw women’s regalia included
a long, prairie-style dress in a solid color with ruffles at the hem and appliqué designs
in a contrasting color above the ruffles and on the yoke. Women wore a contrasting
apron over the dress as well as beaded collars (which are distinctively Choctaw), long
ribbons attached to their dresses at the nape of the neck, and flat shoes or moccasins.
Some women tied bells to their shoelaces. Men wore solid-colored shirts with appli-
qué designs, slacks or jeans, and a black felt hat with a beaded hat band and feather.
Song leaders, such as Ned and Sampson, wore cloth bandoliers (which are distinctively
Choctaw). Some wore clusters of bells at their sides, attached to their belts. The dancers
expressed considerable individuality through their outfits; for example, one man had
sequins sewn onto his shirt and slacks, while another wore a fringed shirt.7 Ned said
that Chickasaw members of the Heritage Committee borrowed their dress designs from
other Southeastern tribes, including the Choctaw and Seminole. Clearly, members of
the Heritage Committee used their outfits as visual emblems of Choctaw and Chickasaw
cultural identity.
The Heritage Committee nurtured relationships with neighboring Southeastern
Indians, which suggests that, beyond intergenerational bonding and community
building, regional exchange constituted an important aspect of the group’s revival
activities. Song texts indicate that, prior to removal, the Choctaw participated in com-
munal dances at the ceremonial grounds of other Southeastern tribes (Levine 1997b),
and until 1940 ceremonial ground visits occurred among the Choctaw and Chickasaw
near Ardmore. Continuing this pattern, the Heritage Committee received invitations
to perform for the Chickasaw Nation and to dance with the Absentee Shawnees and
Oklahoma Seminoles; in turn, a delegation of Seminoles participated in a private dance
held outdoors at Ned’s home. Heritage Committee members also connected with their
counterparts in the Mississippi homeland when they performed at the Mississippi
Choctaw Fair in 1977, 1978, and 1979.
The Heritage Committee frequently performed for diverse audiences between 1976
and 1985. Close to home, these occasions included family reunions, store openings, and
library events, but the Heritage Committee also appeared in larger venues, such as the
American Bicentennial celebration in Washington, D.C. (1976), the All Indian Fair in
Ardmore (1977), and a Five Tribes Intertribal Council meeting in McAllester (1982). At
these events, Ned served as master of ceremonies, speaking about Choctaw culture and
the meanings of individual dances. He encouraged audience participation, especially
in the Snake Dance, which closed each presentation. When the Heritage Committee
performed for an audience, they requested reimbursement for travel expenses, but the
remuneration usually did not cover costs; in other words, public appearances did not
produce income. As a voluntary organization, the Heritage Committee emphasized
community building through participation. Therefore, the group’s public performances
provided an opportunity to demonstrate Choctaw and Chickasaw culture and, at the
same time, to bridge ethnic and social boundaries through audience inclusion, unit-
ing people who might not otherwise interact socially because of differences in ethnicity,
occupation, or socioeconomic class.
Ned believed that the Heritage Committee transformed the way its members felt
about being Choctaw. He explained that “they knew the dances were there, but because
they had not been performed for so many years, the people had not adhered to [them]
as their heritage” (Buster Ned, interview, March 28, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). He
went on to say that the revival was especially meaningful for younger Choctaws, who
in many cases had not known that a Choctaw repertory existed. The knowledge that
the Choctaw, like other Native peoples, did indeed possess their own songs and dances
instilled a sense of cultural pride in Choctaw youth. However, Ned expressed concern
that young people exhibited little desire to learn Choctaw songs and dances, and also
stated that the communal dances were not perceived by all members of the Choctaw
Nation as a means of reinforcing cultural identity. Many Choctaw Christians, for exam-
ple, initially resisted the revival of traditional music and dance because they opposed a
return to the old ways, which they perceived as heathen and backward. This perception
had begun to change by the late twentieth century, and Choctaw Christians have come
to regard traditional music and dance as wholesome expressions of heritage and identity
because participants do not seek to displace Christianity.
The Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee remained active until the late 1980s,
when the group disbanded due to the illness and demise of its source musicians.
However, Ned and Sampson achieved iconic status within the Choctaw Nation, which
displays their portraits in the tribal headquarters, and their work continues to inspire
those interested in reclaiming Choctaw and Chickasaw cultural identity. Since the 1990s,
the Choctaw Nation has worked to maintain communal songs and dances. For example,
the tribe features performances of traditional music and dance at its annual Choctaw
Labor Day Festival in Tushka Homma. In 1995, enrolled members of the Choctaw
Nation who live in California founded the annual California Choctaw Gathering, at
which they perform communal songs and dances as part of a two-day program of heri-
tage activities and presentations. A large delegation of employees and officers from the
Choctaw Nation attends, including the chief, assistant chief, and members of the tribal
council. Furthermore, members of the Chickasaw Nation initiated their own music
revival soon after the Heritage Committee disbanded.
The Revival of Chickasaw Communal

Dance Songs in Oklahoma
If little written or recorded documentation exists for Choctaw musical culture, even less
is available for the Chickasaw, probably because early scholars considered them to be
assimilated and therefore not viable candidates for musicological research. Some infor-
mation on Chickasaw ethnography appeared in Speck (1907) and Swanton (1928/2006),
but no early sources on Chickasaw music exist, although Swanton lists song titles and
the number of songs in each genre, briefly describing choreography and performance
contexts. Cobb provides information on the concert music curriculum at the Bloomfield
Academy, a Chickasaw boarding school for women (Cobb 2000), and discussions of the
Chickasaw Garfish Dance appear in more recent literature (Hinson 2008; Jackson and
Levine 2002; Levine and Nettl 2011). To my knowledge, there are no archival record-
ings of Chickasaw communal dance songs available to the public, although some
field recordings exist of singers from other tribes performing Chickasaw songs.8 As
a whole, these sources suggest that, by the twentieth century, Chickasaw musical life
in Oklahoma involved songs to accompany ritual and communal dances, hymns for
Christian worship, and performance of Euramerican musical instruments and concert
repertories.
Information is not yet available on how Chickasaws categorize their communal
dance songs, but a compact disc recording produced by the Chickasaw Nation, titled
Chickasaw Social Songs and Stomp Dances (White Deer 1994), includes six songs shared
with the Heritage Committee’s repertory: Jump Dance, Stealing Partners, Drunk
Dance (titled “Drinkwater Dance”), War Dance, Duck Dance, and Garfish Dance.
Swanton listed the latter four of these dances, although he translated some titles dif-
ferently (Swanton 1928/2006: 85).9 In addition, Chickasaw Social Songs and Stomp
Dances contains three songs learned from neighboring Southeastern tribes: Friendship
Dance, Long Dance, and Stomp Dance. In contemporary Southeastern Indian musi-
cal culture, the Muscogee Long Dance is a cognate of the Cherokee Old Dance (Heth
1975, 1985; Howard 1984; Isaacs 1969, 1995). Since Swanton noted a Chickasaw Old
Dance (1928/2006), their adoption of the Long Dance has clear historical precedence.
As in Choctaw music, each Chickasaw dance has its own choreography and musi-
cal style, which is generally similar to that of the Choctaw. However, Chickasaw songs
also share components of Muscogee music, including the use of moderate vocal ten-
sion, glottal stops, and pitch-bending ornaments known among Southeastern tribes as
the “blues style.” Furthermore, Chickasaw leaders use a hand rattle to signal changes
in choreography, and women dancers wear leg rattles made of terrapin carapaces or
evaporated milk cans. By the early twentieth century, a multiday healing ritual known
as the Pashofa ceremony had become the most important venue for Chickasaw commu-
nal dances, although family histories indicate that some communities held communal
dances at consecrated ceremonial grounds until the 1940s.
The Chickasaw discontinued the Pashofa Dance and ceremonial ground events by
the early 1940s due to the same hardships the Choctaw and other Oklahoma Indians
faced at the time. Gary White Deer explained that “[My friend] would talk about old
Chickasaw dance grounds. . . and he explained why they quit dancing. He said that the
ceremonial ground started experiencing problems. People were getting drunk and so
forth, so they just walked away from it. All this happened just before World War II”
(Gary White Deer, interview, July 21, 2010, Sapulpa, Oklahoma). Then, in 1992, follow-
ing a resurgence of interest in Southeastern Indian cultures, the Chickasaw Nation was
invited to perform communal dances at a festival in Alabama. Yet, as the Chickasaw
anthropologist LaDonna Brown explained, “Nobody here knew the dances” (LaDonna
Brown, interview, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). By this time, the Chickasaw Nation
had developed the infrastructure necessary to support cultural revival (Morgan et al.
2010: 9); hence it established a dance troupe, sponsored and funded by the tribe, which
debuted in 1992 at the tribe’s annual meeting in Tishomingo. As in the Choctaw case, the
Chickasaw recontextualized communal songs and dances by creating new kinds of per-
formance events unconnected to the Ballgame or the Pashofa ceremony.
Members of the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe are employees of the Chickasaw
Nation who participate in the group voluntarily; roughly 150 people receive e-mail
announcements about Dance Troupe activities, but a core group of eight to twelve peo-
ple regularly rehearse. Members of the core group are enrolled in the Chickasaw Nation,
and their forebears took part in ceremonial ground activities until the 1940s. For exam-
ple, Judy Thomas stated that “my grandmother [and I] were walking around and she saw
a turtle shell. She picked it up and said, ‘we used to dance with these,’ and she started tell-
ing me about stomp dance. Later, I started going to the stomp dance and trying to dance”
(Judy Thomas, interview, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). The Chickasaw anthropologist
Meredith Johnson added: “My grandmother knew about it but it wasn’t part of how she
grew up. My dad’s mother was not Indian but she went to the Choctaw stomp dances
in Ardmore back in the thirties. So it’s interesting that it isn’t any part of my Chickasaw
background, but it’s my white grandma” (Meredith Johnson, interview, July 20, 2010,
Ada, Oklahoma). These observations reveal the deep connection to historic music and
dance created by generational memory among core members of the Chickasaw Nation
Dance Troupe.
The Chickasaw Nation hired Gary White Deer (b.1950), an internationally renowned
Choctaw artist and professor at Bacone College, to develop and lead its dance troupe.
White Deer, who was born in Idabel, Oklahoma, had begun to learn the Choctaw rep-
ertory during the 1970s. He first heard Choctaw songs as a student at Haskell Indian
Nations University, and later began to learn them through secondary orality with the
use of the Heritage Committee’s vinyl discs. He subsequently visited Buster Ned in
Ardmore, attended singing sessions with the Heritage Committee, and danced with
the Heritage Committee when they performed at intertribal powwows. Eventually,
Ned asked White Deer to lead dances. In the early 1990s, he expanded his knowledge of
communal dances through contact with Choctaw singers in Mississippi and Tennessee.
White Deer also visited Southeastern Indian ceremonial grounds in Oklahoma dur-
ing the 1970s and 1980s, where he learned how to lead Stomp Dances among the
Yuchi (Euchee), Muscogee, and Seminole. His extensive knowledge and experience
of Choctaw and other Southeastern Indian music, dance, ceremonial life, crafts, ritual
games, and apparel qualified him to guide the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe.
In the absence of Chickasaw source musicians or recordings, White Deer recon-
structed the repertory of Chickasaw communal songs and dances by combining com-
ponents of the Choctaw, Seminole, and Muscogee repertories with the one Chickasaw
song in living memory, the Garfish Dance (see Web Figure 14.01 ). He validated this
strategy through collective, generational memory, explaining that:
In the eighties, I went around with an old full-blood Chickasaw guy. He was very
knowledgeable. He didn’t know any songs, he didn’t know any dances, but he was
there when the Chickasaws last danced. [He] seemed to have a real Seminole sense of
what Chickasaw way was.
In other words, the Chickasaw elder sensed a strong affinity between Chickasaw and
Seminole musical and ceremonial life. White Deer continued:
Fast-forwarding to when the Chickasaws asked me to help them, I thought, Buster

Ned had told me the Chickasaws and Choctaws had danced with one another. They
were different dances, not the same. And the Chickasaws, they were in that turtle
shell-shaking tradition. We Choctaws were not. But Buster told me they shared
our dances. [We] didn’t own them. I thought, I’ll teach ‘em some Choctaw songs
and dances and then I’ll throw in the Garfish Dance. I told the dancers this is your
dance. The Yuchis and the Creeks, they have a version of this and they have a song
that sounds similar, but it’s not the same. So this is your dance, this one dance. And
I told them we’re gonna put all this other stuff around that dance and make it the
centerpiece.
(Gary White Deer, interview, July 21, 2010, Sapulpa, Oklahoma)
White Deer’s intercultural approach to reclaiming Chickasaw songs and dances may
cause outside observers to interpret this as an invented tradition, but core members of
the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe reject that perspective. White Deer remarked that
the Chickasaw repertory had not disappeared; it had been “put to sleep” by Chickasaw
traditionalists, to be reawakened by a future generation (Anonymous 1994: 1). Brown
added: “It’s something that we’ve always had, something we know is ours. As you look
back through the ages, you see that combination [of Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee,
and Seminole dances]. We know these are the songs and dances we did” (LaDonna
Brown, interview, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). Swanton’s 1928 list of Chickasaw
dances corroborates this viewpoint, since the list represents a composite of Chickasaw,
Choctaw, and other Southeastern repertories. The Chickasaw revival ideology, therefore,
is founded on concepts of the historical continuity of regional exchange, together with
the knowledge that the Chickasaw repertory of communal songs and dances has always
straddled that of the Choctaw and other Southeastern tribes. The salient point is that
unlike many romantic nationalist folk revivals in Europe and elsewhere, the Chickasaw
do not claim cultural purity for their revived repertory; instead, they embrace the mixed
heritage of the past. Brown further explained that “the Chickasaw elders who saw this
said it was how they remembered Chickasaw dances” (LaDonna Brown, interview, July
20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). Confirmation from elders that the reclaimed repertory accu-
rately represents the collective memory of songs and dances they themselves can no lon-
ger perform authenticates and legitimizes the Chickasaw music revival.
Like the Heritage Committee before them, members of the Chickasaw Nation Dance
Troupe transmit their repertory of songs and dances mainly through participation in
rehearsals and performances. When the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe originated,
White Deer asked a Seminole-Muscogee man to teach the Chickasaw men how to lead,
and he asked a Seminole woman to teach the Chickasaw women how to shake shells.
Therefore, learning the repertory initially involved collaboration with experienced cer-
emonial singers and dancers from neighboring Southeastern tribes. After White Deer
left the Chickasaw Nation for another job, new members of the group learned to lead
songs or shake shells through participation, direct instruction from established mem-
bers of the troupe, and the use of cassette tapes and Chickasaw Social Songs and Stomp
Dances. A video tape preserved at the Chickasaw Nation Library documents an early
performance by the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe.
Tightly coordinated regalia project a strong visual emblem of cultural identity
for members of the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe. Before their removal to Indian
Territory, Chickasaws dressed for ceremonial dances in the European or American
fashions of the day, amply ornamented with silver jewelry, buttons, hair combs, buck-
les, and bells (LaDonna Brown, interview, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). Furthermore,
White Deer remarked that “Buster [Ned] had told me he used to be able to spot those
Chickasaw women a long ways ’cause they wear a lot of ribbons” (Gary White Deer,
interview, July 21, 2010, Sapulpa, Oklahoma). In reconstructing their dance regalia, the
Chickasaw incorporated components of the apparel they have worn at various times
since the 1830s. The outfits are similar to Choctaw regalia, but, as in the past, Chickasaw
women wear an abundance of ribbons and silver accessories. White Deer explained: “I
designed those women’s accessories around the Choctaw women’s ensemble. But I didn’t
really Choctawize it too much. I didn’t want them to be too much like us” (July 21, 2010.).
His comment reveals the challenge of negotiating a distinct cultural identity while bor-
rowing material from other groups and underscores the Chickasaw revival strategy
of embracing their regional heritage. Twenty years after its founding, the Chickasaw
Nation Dance Troupe continued to adapt its regalia to ever-expanding intercultural
influences. Brown noted that by 2010, the color palette for women’s regalia included
highly saturated hues because they performed for diverse audiences conditioned to the
spectacular outfits worn by Plains-style powwow dancers. She commented that “lately
[powwow dancers] have gone to bright, neon colors, and as their regalia gets brighter
and more colorful, ours simply follows that trend” (LaDonna Brown, interview, July 20,
2010, Ada, Oklahoma).
The Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe, like its precursor the Choctaw-Chickasaw
Heritage Committee, fulfills a dual role. One role is performative: the Dance Troupe
demonstrates Chickasaw communal songs and dances at public exhibitions sponsored
by the Chickasaw Nation as well as at schools, tribal festivals, and multicultural events
throughout the United States, including the annual Intertribal Ceremonial in Gallup,
New Mexico. The Chickasaw Nation provides members of the Dance Troupe with regalia,
transportation, meals, and lodging for exhibition performances, although they receive
no additional stipends for performances. The Dance Troupe’s second role is participa-
tory: They attend community-focused stomp dances held at Kullihoma, the Chickasaw
Nation dance ground near Ada, where they perform collectively with other Chickasaws.
The Chickasaw Nation Cultural Resources Department advertises the Kullihoma stomp
dances and pays for the food served there. Unlike stomp dances held in conjunction with
Green Corn ceremonialism among other Southeastern tribes, dances at Kullihoma do
not have a ritual or ceremonial function. Instead, they enable Chickasaws of different
backgrounds and ages to share a meal, participate in a heritage activity, and socialize
within a Chickasaw setting. Therefore, in performative contexts, members of the Dance
Troupe enact Chickasaw cultural identity for an outside audience, whereas in partici-
patory contexts, they embody Chickasaw cultural identity for their own community.
Members of the Dance Troupe acknowledge the relevance of both activities, but some
prefer the participatory, Chickasaw-oriented events. For example, Brown remarked that
at certain kinds of exhibition performances, “you don’t get that open-mindedness, that
wanting to learn about Chickasaw culture. [The audience just] wants to see some Indians
dance” (LaDonna Brown, interview, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma).
The most significant outcome of the Chickasaw music revival, although it was initi-
ated and sponsored by the tribal government, is that the communal songs and dances
have been naturalized. In other words, since it was reclaimed in 1992, the repertory has
become established among a generation of Chickasaws who grew up seeing, hearing,
and participating in tribal songs and dances at home, at public events, and at Kullihoma.
For this generation, the reclaimed repertory constitutes an integral part of their heri-
tage, a heritage they have known from early childhood. Older Chickasaws who were
not raised with the tribal repertory have now seen and heard the songs and dances and
are aware of their place in Chickasaw history and culture, whether or not they choose
to participate. This shows how quickly and effectively the reclaimed repertory became
established among the Chickasaw, transforming concepts of social identity.
Members of the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe express a renewed sense of
Chickasaw cultural identity through performance. Brown, who joined the Chickasaw
Nation Dance Troupe soon after it formed, stated that learning Chickasaw songs and
dances “was like discovering who I was, where I fit into the Chickasaw community.
This is my heritage, this is my tradition. This is what everybody has been talking
about. It is more than just song and dance. It is who I am as a Chickasaw person”
(LaDonna Brown, interview, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). Her remarks emphasize
the profound impact the music revival has had on reshaping Chickasaw perceptions
of personal and collective identity. Thomas added: “It was like a part of me that wasn’t
there that I didn’t realize until I started. I can’t wait until my granddaughter is old
enough to dance. I’m going to make her a set of cans” (Judy Thomas, interview, July
20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma).
Other outcomes of the Chickasaw music revival include the reactivation of
Chickasaw ties to the Southeastern Indian ceremonial network in Oklahoma and
the incorporation of an iconic Chickasaw melody into a major symphonic work.
Some Chickasaws have begun to visit Seminole, Muscogee, and Yuchi ceremonial
grounds, where they participate in the stomp dances associated with Green Corn
ceremonialism. In this way, they are absorbing the belief system that was integral to
Chickasaw social and spiritual life in centuries past, while enjoying the fellowship
and inspiration derived from active involvement in twenty-first-century ceremonial
ground life. As the only surviving song from the historic Chickasaw repertory, the
Garfish Dance has come to symbolize the legacy of Chickasaw music. The Chickasaw
composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate quoted its lyrical introductory melody in
the first movement of his concerto for flute and orchestra, Tracing Mississippi, which
has been performed and recorded by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (Bise
2008), thereby introducing the Garfish Dance song to an entirely new, eclectic and
far-flung audience.
Yet the Chickasaw music revival is not without controversy. Some Chickasaws believe
that stomp dances should not take place at Kullihoma in the absence of sacred ritual.
Furthermore, Johnson stated that “we get some people saying that what the Dance
Troupe does is not the real culture, like there is a real culture” (Meredith Johnson, inter-
view, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). Her statement is especially revealing for the light
it sheds on the complexities and contradictions inherent in the process of reclaiming
Native American cultural identity. Particularly where indigenous culture has been sup-
pressed, members of a given tribe may hold opposing views on what constitutes tradi-
tion and heritage, which become entangled with the expectations and interpretations
imposed by outsiders. It is a challenge for many Native Americans to balance citizenship
in a modern industrial nation with the deeply human drive to retain distinctive cultural
identities, practices, and world views. Members of the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe
work toward achieving this balance, at least in part, through performance of communal
songs and dances.
Conclusion
The Choctaw and Chickasaw cases illustrate two approaches to reclaiming indigenous
cultural identity through music revival. Because of their close historic, geographic,
and cultural connections, it is not surprising that these revivals share similarities,
especially since one revival influenced the other. Both movements originated within
an established descent community with a well-documented history in a specific loca-
tion. Both movements developed during a time of political and social activism and
economic resurgence. Both movements represented deliberate, self-conscious efforts
to reclaim cultural traditions that had been suppressed by the forces of colonization.
Neither group sought to reinstate communal dances as relics of the past; rather, they
recontextualized the repertory as a means of performing indigenous identity while
acknowledging contemporary social and cultural realities. Finally, both groups used
music revival to oppose mainstream narratives of Choctaw and Chickasaw assimilation.
But the two revivals also contrast in striking ways. Whereas the Choctaw revival began
as a community-based, grassroots effort, the Chickasaw revival originated within the
tribal government. Tribal support has enabled the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe to
thrive despite changes in leadership and personnel, whereas the Heritage Committee
disbanded when its leaders declined. The Choctaw Nation now sponsors performances
of communal songs and dances, which, in light of the Chickasaw case, bodes well for the
continuation of the repertory.
Perhaps the most conspicuous contrast between the Choctaw and Chickasaw music
revivals involves the different strategies used to reclaim the two repertories. Because
Buster Ned had grown up with Choctaw ceremonial culture and had direct access to
Choctaw source musicians, most of the material he needed was close to hand, and
he imported outside influences only for specific purposes. He adapted a Mississippi
Choctaw War Dance song, for example, to express a connection to the Choctaw home-
land, whereas he adopted the intertribal hand drum to feature a Native instrument more
easily recognized by the general public. In the Chickasaw case, only one song survived
in living memory, and therefore White Deer had to import most of the repertory, along
with some pieces of regalia, from closely related tribes—a strategy that was nonethe-
less viewed as being in continuity with past practice. At the same time, he highlighted
quintessentially Chickasaw components, such as the Garfish Dance and characteristic
personal adornment, to distinguish them within the regional repertory. Despite their
different strategies, both groups authenticated and legitimized their revivals through
collective, living, or generational memory, and both groups asserted an overriding
narrative of historical continuity. Differing availability of source material therefore
determined each group’s specific strategy but not their processes of authentication or
perceptions of the past.
As their histories indicate, the Choctaw and Chickasaw have long confronted social,
cultural, and economic change through conscious and creative transformations. The
story of their music revivals, therefore, is less about loss than it is about finding ways to
reclaim cultural identity by integrating historic practice with contemporary experience.
Despite their economic and political success, the Choctaw and Chickasaw never relin-
quished their identities as Native Americans. When the time was right, they reasserted
those identities, reclaiming communal songs and dances as manifestations of cultural
sovereignty and self-definition. On the individual level, music revival mitigates the stark
juxtaposition between cultural identity and business or occupational identity. On the

community level, music revival encapsulates deep history while envisioning the future
through layers of embodied meaning. In this way, music revival contributes to both
individual and community transformation while communicating distinctive cultural
identities within a plural society.
Acknowledgments
I have presented information regarding the Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee’s

revival elsewhere (cf. Howard and Levine 1990; Levine 1993, 2004), but offer a fresh
interpretation here based on recent research on music revivals and on Choctaw and
Chickasaw history. I am deeply grateful to Caroline Bithell and Juniper Hill for their
insightful suggestions, encouragement, and patience, and to my research partners,
whose generous collaboration and friendship have made my work possible: LaDonna
Brown, Jason Jackson, Meredith Johnson, Claude Medford (deceased), Buster Ned
(deceased), Jim Rementer, Adam Sampson (deceased), Judy Thomas, Gary White Deer,
and Aaron Wilkins. I appreciate the research funds Colorado College has provided
through Jackson Fellowships, Faculty Research Grants, and the Christine S. Johnson
Professorship. Finally, I thank my children, Elizabeth and Scott Levine, who assisted
me in Oklahoma during the summers of 2010 and 2011, respectively; Tabetha Katz, who
transcribed the recorded interviews made in 2010; and my husband, Mark Levine, for
his enthusiastic support.
Notes
1. Putting a repertory to sleep implies that it can be revived at a later time, whereas putting it
away implies that there is no intention of reviving it at any time in the future. Some tribes
have made the conscious decision to put away certain repertories of songs and dances
because they were connected to rituals, social structures, and economic practices that were
unsustainable under colonization (Jackson 2004: 193; Swan 1998).
2. Native Americans also think of time in linear ways (Krech 2006) and therefore it would
be a mistake to suggest that all Native peoples perceive time as cyclic. Cyclic time is an
important concept for the Choctaw and other Southeastern peoples, but Choctaws have
also prophesied the end of time and the natural world (Mould 2004: 167, 173). The data pre-
sented here also suggest that the history of Choctaw and Chickasaw music is characterized
by the gradual shrinkage of the song and dance repertories.
3. Termination legislation, enacted in 1953 by Public Law 280, discontinued federal recogni-
tion of tribal sovereignty and withdrew financial support of assistance programs for Native
Americans living on reservations. Termination was intended to promote assimilation, but
it resulted in deeper poverty and diminished access to education and health care for many
Native people. Terminated tribes have fought to regain federal recognition, and some,
including the Choctaw, successfully resisted termination.
4. Logan Parker’s prophecy of World War II resonates with similar prophecies collected
among the Mississippi Choctaw (cf. Mould 2003, 2004).
5. The belief that the Choctaw received ritual knowledge, songs, and dances from the Creator
parallels the cosmology and beliefs of other Southeastern tribes (cf. Jackson 2004: 201).
6. The Mississippi Choctaw have long used Native-made drums inspired by European snare
drums in other contexts; there is also historical evidence that Choctaws used other kinds
of drums in the past, although not to accompany nighttime dances associated with the
Ballgame (Howard and Levine 1990: 22–27).
7. More detailed information on Choctaw national dress appears in Howard and Levine
(1990); see also Brescia and Reeves (1982).
8. I thank Jim Rementer (Bartlesville, Oklahoma) and Claude Medford (Natchitoches,
Louisiana) for bringing these recordings to my attention.
9. Swanton translates Itinsanali Hila as “dance in which they danced against each other,” but
the Ardmore Choctaw knew this as a variant of the War Dance. Swanton mentions the Tick
Dance, also called Walk Dance by the Ardmore Choctaw, and uses the title Drunken Man’s
Dance instead of Drunk Dance (Swanton 1928/2006: 85).
References
Anonymous. 1994. “Chickasaw Dancers ‘Awaken’ Cultural Traditions.” The Chickasaw Times
29 (8): 1, 24.
Brescia, Bill, and Carolyn Reeves. 1982. By the Work of Our Hands: Choctaw Material Culture.
Electronic resource distributed by ERIC Clearinghouse. Washington, DC: Office of
Elementary and Secondary Education Program.
Brown, James A. 2004. “Exchange and Interaction Until 1500.” In Handbook of North American
Indians, Volume 14: Southeast, edited by Raymond D. Fogelson, 677–685. Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Bushnell, David I., Jr. 1909. The Choctaw of Bayou Lacomb, St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana.
Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 48. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
Clark, Blue. 2009. Indian Tribes of Oklahoma: A Guide. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Cobb, Amanda J. 2000. Listening to Our Grandmothers’ Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for
Chickasaw Females, 1852–1949. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Densmore, Frances. 1943. Choctaw Music. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 136.
Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
Draper, David E. 1980. “Occasions for the Performance of Native Choctaw Music.” Selected
Reports in Ethnomusicology 3: 147–173.
——. 1983. “Breath in Music: Concept and Practice Among the Choctaw Indians.” Selected
Reports in Ethnomusicology 4: 285–300.
——. 2009. “Identity, Retention, and Survival: Contexts for the Performance of Native Choctaw
Music.” In Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America,
edited by Tara Browner, 67–91. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Fitzgerald, David G., Jeannie Barbour, Amanda Cobb, and Linda Hogan. 2006. Chickasaw:
Unconquered and Unconquerable. Ada, OK: Chickasaw Press.
Galloway, Patricia. 1995. Choctaw Genesis: 1500–1700. Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press.
Heth, Charlotte Anne Wilson. 1975. “The Stomp Dance Music of the Oklahoma Cherokee:
A Study of Contemporary Practice with Special Reference to the Illinois District Council
Ground.” PhD diss., University of California at Los Angeles.
Hinson, Joshua. 2008. “Naní kalló hilhá: The Chickasaw Hard Fish Dance.” The Journal of
Chickasaw History and Culture 11 (3): 56–62.
Howard, James H. 1978. “Oklahoma Choctaw Revive Native Dances.” Actes du XLIIe Congrès
International des Americanistes 5: 315–323.
——. 1984. Oklahoma Seminoles: Medicines, Magic, and Religion. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press.
Howard, James H., and Victoria Lindsay Levine. 1990. Choctaw Music and Dance.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Jackson, Jason Baird. 2003. Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance, Meaning, and Tradition in a
Contemporary American Indian Community. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
——. 2004. “Recontextualizing Revitalization: Cosmology and Cultural Stability in the Adop
tion of Peyotism among the Yuchi.” In Reassessing Revitalization Movements: Perspectives
from North America and the Pacific Islands, edited by Michael E. Harkin, 183–205. Lincoln
and London: University of Nebraska Press.
Jackson, Jason Baird, and Victoria Lindsay Levine. 2002. “Singing for Garfish: Music and
Woodland Communities in Eastern Oklahoma.” Ethnomusicology 46 (2): 284–306.
Kidwell, Clara Sue. 2007. The Choctaws in Oklahoma: From Tribe to Nation, 1855–1970.
Krech, Shepard, III. 2006. “Bringing Linear Time Back In.” Ethnohistory 53 (3): 567–593.
Lambert, Valerie. 2007a. Choctaw Nation: A Study of American Indian Resurgence.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
——. 2007b. “Political Protest, Conflict, and Tribal Nationalism: The Oklahoma Choctaws and
the Termination Crisis of 1959-1970.” American Indian Quarterly 31 (2): 283–309.
Levine, Victoria Lindsay. 1993. “Musical Revitalization Among the Choctaw.” American Music
11 (4): 391–411.
——. 1997a. “Music, Myth, and Medicine in the Choctaw Indian Ballgame.” In Enchanting
Powers: Music in the World’s Religions, edited by Lawrence Sullivan, 189–218.
Cambridge: Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions.
——. 1997b. “Text and Context in Choctaw Social Dance Songs.” Florida Anthropologist 50
(4): 183–187.
——. 2004. “Choctaw at Ardmore, Oklahoma.” In Handbook of North American Indians, Volume
14: Southeast, edited by Raymond D. Fogelson, 531–533. Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution.
Levine, Victoria Lindsay, and Bruno Nettl. 2011. “Strophic Form and Asymmetrical Repetition
in Four American Indian Songs.” In Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music,
edited by Michael Tenzer and John Roeder, 288–315. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(1): 66–85.
Morgan, Phillip Carroll, David G. Fitzgerald, and Bill Anoatubby. 2010. Chickasaw
Renaissance. Ada, OK: Chickasaw Press.
Mould, Tom. 2003. Choctaw Prophecy: A Legacy of the Future. Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press.
——. 2004. Choctaw Tales. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Speck, Frank G. 1907. “Notes on Chickasaw Ethnology and Folk-lore.” Journal of American
Folk-Lore 20: 50–58.
Swan, Daniel C. 1998. “Early Osage Peyotism.” The Plains Anthropologist 43 (163): 51–71.
Swanton, John R. 1928/2006. Chickasaw Society and Religion. Forty-second Annual Report to
the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. (Reprinted
by the University of Nebraska Press.)
——. 1931. Source Material for the Social and Ceremonial Life of the Choctaw Indians. Bureau of
American Ethnology Bulletin 103. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Waselkov, Gregory A. 2004. “Exchange and Interaction Since 1500.” In Handbook of North
American Indians, Volume 14: Southeast, edited by Raymond D. Fogelson, 686–696.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
White Deer, Gary. 1995. “Pretty Shellshaker.” In Remaining Ourselves: Music and Tribal
Memory, edited by Dayna Bowker Lee, 10–12. Oklahoma City: State Arts Council of
Oklahoma.
Discs Cited
Bise, Alan. 2008. San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Symphony Chorus: Works by Jerod
Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. Cleveland: Thunderbird Records, Inc. (CD recording)
Heth, Charlotte. 1985. Songs and Dances of the Eastern Indians from Medicine Spring and
Allegany. New York: New World Records. (CD recording)
Isaacs, Tony. 1969. Songs of the Muskogee Creek, Part 1. Taos, New Mexico: Indian House. (CD
recording)
——. 1995. Tallahasse Ceremonial Ground of the Mvskokee Nation. Taos, New Mexico: Indian
House. (CD recording)
Ned, Buster, and Dale McCoy. N.d. Choctaw-Chickasaw Dance Songs, Volumes I and II.
Oklahoma City: Sweetland Productions. (LP recordings)
White Deer, Gary. 1994. Chickasaw Social Songs and Stomp Dances. Oklahoma City: Chickasaw
Nation Cultural Resources. (CD recording)
An annotated guide to relevant websites and other online resources can be found on the
companion website. (See Web Resources .)
PA R T V
R E C OV E RY F ROM
WA R , DI S A ST E R ,
A N D C U LT U R A L
DE VA STAT ION
C HA P T E R 15
R E V I VA L I S T A RT I C U L AT I O N S
O F T R A D I T I O NA L M U S I C I N
WA R A N D P O S T WA R C R OAT IA
NA I L A C E R I BAŠIĆ
If traditional music revival is conceptualized as a movement arising from discontent

with the present situation and an aspiration for change, as a movement that finds both
justification and solution in referring to the past and that is predominantly politically
driven and guided by the intellectual elite, then Croatia can be identified as an exem-
plary country of revivals. Streams of revivals occurred throughout the twentieth cen-
tury, together with turbulent social and political upheavals. The Croatian folklore
scene of the early twenty-first century continues to bear legacies from former revivals
that occurred in the 1930s, 1950s, and 1960s, with the processes of safeguarding, reviv-
ing, and canonizing traditional music having been continuously present from 1930s
onward. Thus, the evolution of tradition, which has often been imagined as following a
“non-intentional, ingenuous course,” has become inseparable from revivalist articula-
tions; that is, these revivalist streams have made a tradition of themselves. It is, however,
possible to differentiate levels of persistence as regards revivalist efforts, their impor-
tance, and their ways of appropriating the past.
Here, I deal with developments in Croatia during the Homeland War (1991–1995) and
its aftermath (mostly up to the end of 1990s, but also into the new century), a period
featuring heightened levels of revivalist efforts. In addition to looking at publicly high-
lighted revivalist production, I focus on revivalist articulations at the grassroots level,
investigating them as a tool used by the common people to cope with war’s unsafeness
and destruction. I focus on how traditional music has been allied with different ideolo-
gies and significances related to nationalism, patriotism, home and safety, coping and
reconstruction, local identity and history, and shifting regional and ethnic portrayals.
I also address how traditional music has been performed through different presenta-
tional styles, ranging from the so-called authentic folklore to stylized folklore in activi-
ties of contemporary kulturno-umjetnička društva (“cultural-artistic societies,” hereafter
326 Naila Ceribašić
referred to by the acronym KUD), to traditional-pop fusions styles. Despite the influ-
ence of the war, the ethnographic material I present here has led me to conclude that
traditional Croatian music continues to move forward as a continuity of articulations
instead of as revivalist disjuncture.
Singing in the Template of National

Spiritual Revival
Already with the establishment of the first freely elected government in 1990, which
was soon to guide Croatia through independence from Yugoslavia, the notion of
“revival” (or “renewal,” in Croatian, obnova) gained a prominent position in public par-
lance,1 starting with President Franjo Tuđman’s call for a spiritual and moral revival of
the nation and combining with rituals of social retraditionalization. Spiritual revival
referred to the “revival of the Croatian national self-confidence,” the “commonality of
all Croatian citizens, irrespective of history and worldviews,” and to “the removal of all
ruinous divisions” (Tuđman 1990). In the field of music, “commonality” was manifested
in the creation of all-embracing homeland music, an important part of which were new
patriotic songs, in whose creation at the height of war in 1991–1992 almost every profes-
sional musician was involved, no matter the genres he or she was affiliated with. (For
more on different aspects of wartime music, see Pettan [1998].) In addition to new patri-
otic songs, the media space was altered by revival in two senses of the term: as a resur-
rection of the old repertoire of national and patriotic songs from the past, and as a strong
increase in the public visibility of already existing domains of tamburitza musicianship,
klapa singing, and church folk singing.2 Both of these forms of revival were promoted
as expressions of national identity, defining the important differences of Croatian tra-
dition as opposed to the forcefully imposed shared legacy of socialist Yugoslavia and
pro-Serbian militancy. Such expressions were recognized as being musically epitomized
in the variously termed genre of turbo folk, newly composed folk music or, simply, narod-
njaci (folkie music).3
The repertoire resurrected from the past encompassed patriotic songs composed in
the period of the Croatian National Revival (Rejuvenation) of the 1830s and 1840s until
World War II, songs that were mostly forgotten, existed outside of the public sphere, or
were forbidden under socialist Yugoslavia. The albums Hrvatska pjesmarica (Croatian
Songbook, 1989) and Hrvatska domovina (Croatian Homeland, 1990) by the tamburitza
band Zlatni dukati were groundbreaking editions of this sort. The point of their revival
was not to present a newly discovered ancient, unknown, or forgotten musical system,
but rather to demonstrate how the lyrics of these songs reflected the social and politi-
cal circumstances of their own times and their relevance to contemporary events. (See
video example 15.1 .)
REVIVALIST ARTICULATIONS IN WAR AND POSTWAR CROATIA 327
As for (canonized) traditional music, similarly and predictably, it was officially seen as
a means of protecting national self-consciousness. The 1992 address of Franjo Tuđman
at the opening ceremony of the leading Croatian folklore festival Međunarodna smotra
folklora (MSF) is illustrative in this respect:
This festival is the proof and testimony of autochthony, riches and fascinating beauty
of the thousand-year-old Croatian folk culture. It was so also in those days when
the Croatian people were under the boot of foreign rule, and is so now, the proof of
the existence of Croatian people, the proof that Croatian people stay faithful to their
roots, that they protect even in the most apparent way the wealth of their ancestors,
that all parts of Croatian people, here in the Croatian homeland and those strewn all
over the far-away world, form the unity that is manifested particularly in these cru-
cial days of the creation of the sovereign and free independent state of Croatia.4
Such reliance on historicism—on “the use of the past to imagine and construct the pres-
ent,” with historical records as its tools (cf. Bohlman 2004: 70)—predominated through-
out the 1990s. As regards revivalist activities, this focus on historicism can be recognized
as placing perhaps too much trust on historical records, sometimes to the point of taking
them for granted, literally. A telling example is the revival of the ceremonial decapitation
of an ox as part of the custom of kumpanjija during the church holiday of Gospa Snježna
(Our Lady of Snow), in Pupnat on the island of Korčula.5 With the help of a noted expert,
the inhabitants of Pupnat revived the decapitation ceremony in 1997, relying on data
about occasional decapitations in the past. This “most authentic,” word-for-word revival
earned for them distinction from other kumpanjijas on Korčula, where this bloody
part of the custom was not preserved. Such decapitations caused a huge public outcry
two years later, in 1999, overflowing—as shown in the analysis of Jasna Čapo Žmegač
(2000)—the narrow confines of a locally revived tradition and becoming a metaphor
for the ideological and political rifts opening between Croatian traditionalists and
modernists. For some, customs as they existed in the past are of unquestionable value
in themselves; local, ethnic, and religious identities were preserved through them, and,
consequently, they must be preserved or revived in modern times by literally following
their script from the past (cf. the example of Corsican archaeologists in Bithell [2006]).
This was the argument given by the people of Pupnat. For others, however, the value
of customs lies in their correspondence with contemporary sensibilities and interests;
merely preserving the forms of a tradition is not a valid argument. In this light, more-
over, only those customs that are humane, good, and valuable for people of today (and
for animals, too) should be brought forward from the past. (See video example 15.2 .)
This example is interesting to use as a paradigm for discussing a network of related
terms such as (the invention of) tradition (Phillips and Schochet 2004), selec-
tion of a community (Williams 1977), articulation (Clifford 2001, 2003), heritage
(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2002), and revival (Atkinson 2004; Baumann 1996; Livingston
1999; Ronström 1996; Rosenberg 1993). Here, however, I sum up only those elements
that acutely mark the Croatian concept of authenticity during the 1990s. These are the
elements of the untouchability of historical records (in general and especially as regards
pre-Yugoslav and pre-socialist records); of the disparate selection of the past (since his-
torical records show partial and at times even mutually opposite truths); of tradition as
a script (the beheading of an ox in this case), but not its functions and meanings; and of
expert involvement in a revival project. It is telling that these elements, epitomized by
the drastic example of decapitation, caused polemics at the end of the epoch marked by
Tuđman’s leadership (he died in 1999).
Musicking in the War? From Music for

Comforting to Music for Torturing in the
War Zone
Researchers of revival in the countries of the former socialist East, especially those
who speak from Western addresses, deal mostly with government-directed pro-
grams and pockets of resistance, whereas researchers of revival in the West deal
mostly with more grassroots cultural activities (cf., e.g., Rosenberg 1993; Slobin
1996). Such different foci undoubtedly follow matters on the ground, but might
overinflate the impression that human feelings and the needs of individuals are
reserved for revivals in the West, whereas the manipulations and pressures of power
systems are reserved for the East. According to Alberto Melucci, social movements
“are today more and more obviously located at precisely this border area between the
individual and the apparatuses of the system” (1996: 146). Individual identities and
experiences are, no doubt, socially constructed, but, at the same time, feelings, sen-
sations, and bodily movements create the deepest and most intimate parts of human
experience that culture can never entirely frame (151). Here I try to shed some light
on a niche of individual feelings and needs that seem to elude construction, espe-
cially in wartime, when we allow ourselves more readily—both in personal expe-
riences and while doing research—to make excursions into reflections on essence,
core, or nature.6
We are accustomed to thinking about music in terms of bright perspectives. For
Blacking, for instance, it is a “hard task . . . to love, and music is a skill that prepares
man for this most difficult task” (1976: 103). War testimonies from areas of the former
Yugoslavia affirm this in a certain way: When directly facing the dangers of war, people
generally did not, on their own, as individuals, reach for the music that they intimately
loved. For instance, when asked about the music he enjoyed during the war, one expelled
from the city of Vukovar told me in 1994:
You see, I’ll tell you one thing. I believe that you haven’t been in a war. In the war
through which we had passed, you didn’t have time to think about [music], you
wouldn’t get the slightest idea to listen to any song or anything else. Only people who
were doing only that would let it play, only people . . . whose profession that was and
who were given that task, who were working at that Radio Vukovar, to give [music]
along with the news, along with all that, [give] something little to people and to
upkeep them somewhat psychologically. However, in Vukovar itself, during the war
in Vukovar, believe me, the biggest music was grenades, airplanes, bullets of all kinds
and calibers and from them no music could be heard.
(Interview, Zagreb, June 20, 1994)
The syntagma “to upkeep them somewhat psychologically” relates to the comfort and
encouragement that music can provide even in wartime, which is congruous with
Lomax’s thesis that “from the point of view of its social function, the primary effect of
music is to give the listener a feeling of security” (2003 [1959]: 143). This applies mostly
to music produced “from above” (in the cited example, by Radio Vukovar), but this does
not mean that such music is not intimately felt or internalized. For instance, according
to the editor of the Yellow Submarine radio station in Osijek:
The people of Osijek used to say that the Yellow Submarine defeated the enemy’s
artillery with its words and its music. “There is nothing they can do to us, just let
them keep on firing.” Once we broadcast waltzes and invited our listeners to dance
in their cellars. We checked later and found they really had responded by dancing.
At the same time, the buildings were coming down around their heads. They really
believed that the cannons could not hurt them.
(Vrandečić 1993, cited in Hadžihusejnović-Valašek 1998: 172)
Patriotic songs especially—new, old, or revived—gave people in shelters encouragement

and solace. Many persons I spoke with affirmed this. Even more, certain songs positively
vibrated with specific identities and destinies. One woman expelled from Vukovar told
me in 1994:
The song “Ne dirajte mi ravnicu” touches me personally, today, and will always touch
me [“Leave my plains alone,” a song composed in the 1980s from the perspective of
the émigré experience, but transposed in 1991 into the experience of displaced per-
sons; Zlatni dukati launched it to become one of the most popular songs of the war
era], and I cannot help but to cry nowadays, whenever I hear that song. And all those
songs of ours about Slavonia [“the plains” mentioned in the song is a metaphor for
Slavonia region that stretches to Vukovar in the east], about home, it is normal that
we can think about it now and that they touch us and that emotions appear. But in
the basement [where she sheltered while Vukovar was under siege], we didn’t have
time—to let the emotions overwhelm us . . . We only listen to our songs nowadays.
Maybe that is the only thing that can connect us, maybe that is so because we believe
that this will tie us closer to our homes . . . everybody who can sing nicely and who
touches your soul.
(Interview, Zagreb, June 20, 1994)7
In the public sphere, the intimate dimension of music as solace is replaced by the dimen-
sion of defiance. The MSF festival in 1992 was, for instance, held under the motto “I’m
defiance,” “as an expression of resistance and moral strength of our people, regardless
of suffering and war” (Rajković et al. 1992). This same template for defiant singing that
was abundantly used in various official, politically driven circumstances was also used in
popular culture of the earlier Yugoslav period. So, in one scene in the film Bitka na Neretvi
(Battle of Neretva) from 1969 (Bulajić 2005), one of the most well-known Yugoslav mov-
ies about the partisan movement against German and Italian forces during World War
II, the partisan army and its wounded are under strong attack by tank fire, their situation
almost hopeless. When asked by a physician what to do (because “they are going to kill us
all”), the commander replies that they should sing (“without panic, give a song, a song”);
the wounded begin to sing the partisan song “Padaj silo i nepravdo” (“Fall oh force and
injustice”) accompanied by an accordion. It is an expression of defiance, resistance, and
strength, causing doubt among the enemy and encouraging partisan fighters to launch an
assault and successfully resist a militarily superior enemy. The generations that grew up
during the Yugoslav era absorbed such media images of music in war.
This brings us to music as used in communication between adversaries, both at the
frontlines and in captivity. Music is a lot more present in these places, judging from
personal testimonies, than in shelters and among refugees. But this is the dark side of
the tune, using music for terror and torture, for its “mercenary power” (Johnson and
Cloonan 2009: 4), a use that goes completely against the “pervasive and often tacit
assumption that popular music [and music in general] is inevitably personally and
socially therapeutic” (1). As the war went on, more frequent narratives emerged from
ex-prisoners describing how one form of torture to which they were submitted was to
listen without pause to songs or be forced to perform songs textually aligned with the
ideology of the torturer but musically formed in the style of narodnjaci (folkie) music.
At the same time, such songs were an integral part of other types of torture such as beat-
ings, rape, and forced sex among prisoners. The biggest reservoir of songs used for tor-
ture in prison camps and for terror at the frontlines were those revived from the Chetnik
and Ustasha nationalistic movements of World War II, both saturated in hatred toward
the opposed ethnicity, both musically formed on traditional templates, both using deca-
syllabic versification and new lyrics based on traditional models, and both employing
the communicative, interactive, and participatory aspects of music.
In his study of censorship of music in Afghanistan, John Baily stressed that “musical-
ity and music making appear to be fundamental aspects of what it means to be human,”
and that “a human society deprived of music is likely to become to some extent dehu-
manised” (2001: 44). How do we understand this in the contrasting contexts of the
described shortage of music as intimate support and comfort in times of trouble and the
quite vivid musicking in prison camps and at the frontlines? Deprivation of music can
doubtlessly be an indicator of an inhuman society, but music itself can be a tool of dehu-
manization. With music used in such a role, is it more appropriate to talk about aural
weapons instead? Or, is the relationship between music and humaneness short-lived,
reserved only for stable, happy, and wealthy societies, and incorrectly thought of as
universal? In other words, does the predominant lack of music as an intimate, individual
comfort in wartime—a situation that is said to reach the bottom of what it means to be
human—point to an idealized image of musicality and humaneness?
Whatever the case, the example of wartime Croatia indicates that both cultural pro-
duction from above and musical activities from below are characterized by the use of
templates from the past and the argument of continuity, combined with an aspiration for
an all-embracing homogenization. These provide people with a feeling of safety, which is
a fundamental human need, especially during the uncertainty of war. As Čorkalo Biruški
and Ajduković concluded in their research on the psychological profile of the trauma-
tized Vukovar community, differences in peaceful times are irrelevant, whereas “the time
of crisis demands simple and straightforward answers, because they are the way to estab-
lish safety as a basic human need”; in such times, “not only small [in the sense of Freud’s
narcissism of small differences], but every difference becomes huge” (2009: 10; emphasis
in original). In his pioneering text on revitalization movements, Anthony Wallace also
wrote of the need for safety as a foothold for revival; he wrote that the society under stress
undertakes emergency measures—such as switching to a revitalization mode—to pre-
serve the constancy of a minimally fluctuating, life-supporting matrix (1956: 265, 279).
Moving Beyond War Baggage in

Tradition-Based Popular Music After
the War
During the war, the plastic or nylon bag was “an inevitable spot in mass media reporting
on the refugees,” “a remnant of their property and remembrance,” “a symbol of torment
and loss which war reporters have obviously considered the strongest, and a point of
formulaic discourse of the war-exhausted media” (Prica 1993: 62). Refugees’ bags usually
contained documents, necessary clothes, and family photos, but sometimes also heri-
tage items such as folk costumes or musical instruments. In the words of the leader of a
postwar heritage revival project:
It comes as a surprise to find out how much was preserved by people who were
rushed out of their homes, in fear and [with] only [a]‌few bags of their belongings.
Their few saved possessions often contained national costumes. It was impressive to
find entire wardrobes filled with preserved garments in the newly restored homes of
returnees, whose houses had been either set on fire or plundered. Many families have
preserved that part of their heritage in various ways: some removed it in time [to] a
place of safety, others buried it. . . . It is interesting to note that, on return to their vil-
lages, displaced persons felt an urge to restore their heritage despite many unsolved
life problems.
(Vitez 1998: 6)
Regardless of the actual contents of these refugees’ bags, the bags themselves acted
as symbolic containers for reestablishing one’s own place under the sky after the war.
Generally speaking, everybody who experiences war brings with him or her “baggage.”
It labels all of us, regardless of whether one insists on remembering the questionable
values and wounds that war brought (as epitomized by the music of Marko Perković
Thompson, discussed below), whether one tries to turn the page and put the war behind
oneself as an unpleasant episode (as do the prevalent tamburitza bands, klapa groups,
and other musicians in the ethnomusic genre), or whether one wants to renew some
part of the cultural ties to one’s former homeland (as exemplified in the narodnjaci
scene, but also in certain genres of rock and pop music that do not have direct connec-
tions with folk music).
In examining media after the war, several scenes of tradition-based popular music
exist in parallel. An extremely popular folk-rock singer, Marko Perković Thompson
continues the right-wing nationalist narrative of the 1990s, using provocative Ustasha
and Nazi insignias at his concerts. Yet his expression, paradoxically, is close to narod-
njaci or turbo folk (which is generally understood as Balkan, Eastern, and/or Serbian,
and incompatible with Croatia’s alleged Western and European leanings). Although
Thompson’s concerts still fill the largest halls, heated discussions induced by his songs
and performances fill YouTube, dissecting the truths of the war, history, Ustashas and
Chetniks, and similar topics.8
Genres that during wartime occupied a large media space and served as official
self-understanding for Croats—tamburitza, klapa, and church music—lost such posi-
tion after the war. Indeed, church music, particularly Christmas songs and carols,
became an integral part of the repertoire of many local folklore groups, tamburitza
bands, klapa groups, and other tradition-based and tradition-inspired musicians, and
these capture a prominent space in the postwar public sphere and discography, includ-
ing major record labels. However, church music no longer epitomizes Croatia’s difference
from Orthodox religion and atheists (i.e., Serbian and socialist Yugoslav affiliations).
(See video e xample 15.3 .) Likewise, tamburitza bands returned to their north Croatian
and Pannonian roots, which include tamburitza musicianship from across state and
national borders (from northern Serbia to south-Slavic communities in the United States
and elsewhere). By the early 2000s, klapa singing occupied the position of the foremost
Croatian cultural product. It is, as its promoters believe, the most promising cultural
product in economic terms, tourism, and the international music industry, and has
been evoked as a national symbol in these contexts. The primary presumption about the
“revival,” “new flourishing,” “new youth,” or “renaissance” of the klapa “movement” in the
2000s is that it refers to an exceptional commercial success: concerts in the largest halls
and stadiums and a series of hits that do not fall from the popularity lists. The (re)cre-
ation of specific musical expressions—for example, the “new simplicity” of compositions
that rely on a simple homophonic texture as the structural origin of klapa singing—have
remained a secondary trend in the klapa domain.9
At the same time, postwar Croatia has been marked by the return of narodnjaci
music, which was, as noted earlier, expelled from the public space during the war. This
return stretched from clubs on the periphery of cities to the biggest concert halls and
was marked by the gradual return of Bosnian (from the mid-1990s) and later Serbian
musicians (since 2000s), as well as by the cooperation of Croatian musicians with
musicians from other post-Yugoslav countries. (The most well-known example of
such cooperation was Severina and Goran Bregović’s joint work on the Croatian song
for the European Song Contest in 2006; see Baker 2008.) The public space during the
entire postwar period has been marked by discussions of whether narodnjaci are sim-
ply imported to Croatia or whether they belong to its national musical identity. Thus,
depending on how they are defined, narodnjaci continue to be the nidus of both resent-
ment and appeal among Croats. It is telling that narodnjaci have never been spoken of as
“revival,” but as “return.” “Revival,” either as a term taken from English or as the Croatian
obnova, presumes a positively valued, “authentic,” ideologized past used as a tool in the
present, whereas “return” lacks such overtones. (See Figure 15.1.)
In the field of popular music, revival (the English term) appeared in the postwar
era primarily in connection with the ethnomusic (etno-glazba) scene, which emerged
in opposition both to narodnjaci (as in Serbia, cf. Čolović 2006: 5–6) and to the omni-
present commercialized tamburitza music. Ethnomusic is commercially less success-
ful than either. Its backbone is in the revitalization of old Croatian tunes presented in
modern arrangements with contemporary ways of singing and playing, contempo-
rary instrumentation, and an accompanying discourse on the ethics and aesthetics of
heritage. Starting in the mid-1990s, and working with limited materials from Croatia
and Croatian communities in neighboring countries, ethnomusicians extended their
sources of inspiration to include musical material from outside national borders. This
phenomenon dovetailed, to a certain extent, with the appearance of voluntary com-
munities or groupings devoted to other types of non-Croatian music, most obviously
Macedonian and Irish music. In such cases, however, the term “revival” is never used: it
is reserved to describe the “borrowing” of Croatian folk tunes for use in contemporary
settings. These folk tunes, which are available as written and audio documents from the
past or as part of the contemporary "authentic" and "stylized" folklore scenes, are per-
formed by ethnomusicians in modern venues such as urban clubs, diverse festivals, and
workshops, often with an alternative, student, human rights, and/or ecological slant.
The discographic production of ethnomusic brings further visibility and popularity to
such tunes. The tunes thus borrowed are mostly treated as fixed and immutable, but
are built on with new arrangements (sometimes using old, neglected instruments such
as bagpipes and dulcimer). Thus, traditional music is seen by many ethnomusicians as
simply a repository of tunes suitable for presentational performance (irrespective of
how immense, rich, and valuable they would label it). (See video example 15.4 .)
The branch of the ethnomusic movement found in the Istrian Peninsula is an impor-
tant exception to this model. Beginning as early as the 1980s, this movement was led
not only by efforts to revitalize disappearing Istrian tradition (understood, practiced,
and promoted as outstandingly multicultural and multiethnic), but by a belief in the
vividness and changeability of tradition (instead of perceiving it as a repository of fixed
tunes) and by a critical stance toward stereotypical presentational formats. One of the
FIGURE 15.1 Graffiti on a residential building from around 2007, photographed by the author
in Zagreb, March 2012, is illustrative of how important narodnjaci are as an issue throughout
Croatian society. This graffiti “slušajte sve samo cajke ne” instructs passersby to “listen to
everything, except cajke.” Cajke is a pejorative term for female singers in narodnjaci music,
and, in a broader sense, refers to the genre in general. Similarly, a nationwide radio station
that airs only domestic music and is by its name directed to folk (narod), nevertheless (or
perhaps precisely for these reasons) advertises itself with the slogan “Ne sviramo narodnjake”
(“we do not play narodnjaci”).
pioneers of Istrian ethnomusic, musician and ethnomusicologist Dario Marušić, char-

acterizes the Istrian revival of the 1980s and 1990s not only as opposition but as rebellion
against the mainstream (in keeping with Istria’s overall character during that period;
e.g., political opposition). Throughout their work, many Istrian musicians seek to erase
the line between traditional music and ethnomusic; they define tradition more in the
sense of its contemporaneousness and less in the sense of safeguarding the values of the
past; more in the sense of its variability, creativity, absence of fixed models, and the free-
dom it gives musicians to mix various patterns and less in the sense of canonized values.
Fidelity to tradition and creative freedom thus make an integral whole because freedom
in approaching traditional templates is understood as fidelity to tradition; that is, the
tradition is understood as a field that demands a creative approach (Baumann [1996]
called this relation toward tradition “syncretism,” differentiating it from purism; on a
comparable Finnish concept, see Hill [2009]). At the same time, Istrian musicians stress
the importance of informal performance venues that draw a soft line between perform-
ers and audience, young and old, beginners and experienced musicians (similar to “pub
sessions” in Irish music). These venues, more so than the usual festival presentations,
contribute to the preservation and vividness of Istrian music (both traditional and
tradition-based). (See video e xample 15.5 .)
Besides Istrian musicians, after the war, young musicians in their 20s and 30s
appeared throughout the country who understood revival as “looking backwards in
order to go forwards” (Guffey 2006: 8; see also Ronström 1996, Atkinson 2004). These
performers often retrieve from the past ancient instruments that very few know how to
build or play, as was the case in the 1990s with gajde and dude (variants of bagpipes in
northern Croatia) and lijerica (south Dalmatian three-stringed fiddle). The direction in
which they are taking their music lies in improving technique, style, and repertoire and
playing both traditional music and ethnomusic. Allen’s description of The New Lost City
Ramblers (2010: 300–301) could fully apply to the most outstanding of these musicians
because they occupy “an intermediate cultural space between regional . . . music and the
urban folk revival” (i.e., ethnomusic in Croatian terminology) and position themselves
“stylistically closer to the former, emulating, without slavishly duplicating, the instru-
mental and vocal music of their mentors who . . . grew up in rural . . . communities” (301).
(See video e xample 15.6 .)
Postwar Articulations of
Traditional Music
Two main concepts permeate the Croatian folklore scene—authenticity and styliza-
tion—and both are nurtured by organized folklore groups (KUDs). The basis of KUDs
that adhere to authenticity lies in the maintenance of an exclusively local or regional rep-
ertoire and in the conviction that safeguarding original forms taken from the past and
presenting them without modifications are of the highest value. Thus, the permanent
source of ambiguity in their work lies in the need to maintain values (templates, styles,
and approaches) from the past that are, at the same time, supposed to be expressions and
integral parts of contemporary local culture. Here, differences between past and present
are hidden through claims about their sameness. Regular rehersals function as a means of
effectively decreasing differences between past and present; the emulation of records from
the past helps to foster a sense of continuity or sameness, so that “sameness” becomes
not only a discourse but also, in a way, a reality of practice. The concept of stylization is,
in contrast, characterized by an intentional departure from the past, through an open,
unveiled aspiration to an artistic reworking of traditional material. In practice, it means
an orientation toward a superb reproduction of choreographies and music arrangements
sourced from a rural folklore heritage derived from different regions of Croatia (and, dur-
ing the Yugoslavia period, other republics). Stylization is prevalent among KUDs from
urban environments, whereas village KUDs adhere primarily to the concept of authentic-
ity. Although in reality there is a lot of back-and-forth flow between these two categories,
they still remain categorical principles of the public practice of folklore.10
The postwar period has been characterized by a significant increase in the number of
village KUDs, especially in war-stricken areas. This period has also been characterized
by a more inclusive concept of tradition in expert and governmental circles (especially
as regards the acknowledged bearers of tradition and their agency in defining it), com-
bined with the yearning of many KUDs to articulate music that would represent the very
specificity and distinctiveness of their communities and traditions. This distinctiveness
is enhanced by relying on the past, mostly through revived forms, genres, instruments
(e.g., the gajde and lijerica mentioned above), and performing styles, and less often on
revived ways of treating templates (as in the example of Istrian music) or reviving per-
forming contexts.
The reasons for the postwar upsurge of KUDs are complex and mutually connected.
First, the upsurge occurred in the social atmosphere of postwar material reconstruc-
tion. The implementation of that task was, from 1994 to 1999, the duty of the Ministry
of Development and Reconstruction (or “Revival”; in Croatian, it is the same word—
obnova; starting in 2003, the Ministry underwent several transformations, but all
retained the word obnova in the title). The Ministry would occasionally support cul-
tural projects such as, in 1998, the “Obnavljamo baštinu” project (literally, “We Revive
Heritage,” or, as officially translated into English, “Reconstructing Heritage”), started
by a group of experts who produced the Zagreb MSF festival, with the goal of restor-
ing folklore heritage in “heavily damaged places in which life is coming back after the
destruction of war” (Vitez 1998: 5). (See Figure 15.2.) The project included eleven such
villages in different regions of Croatia. According to the project leader, some of the
folklore groups
needed only a stimulus and encouragement, while others needed greater assis-
tance in searching for traditions which have died out, or have been partially or
completely forgotten. The experts provided help in finding documentation, in the
restoration of national costumes, as well as of the dancing and musical aspects of
their native culture, and also helped with the adaptation of these elements for stage
performances.
(Vitez 1998: 5)
Second, the upsurge of KUDs was helped by Tuđmanist rhetoric about folk tradition
being the protector of national self-consciousness, endurance, and distinctiveness from
the “other” (read, primarily, rebellious Serbs). People who suffered in the war could eas-
ily associate their traumatic experiences with that idea and find comfort and defiance in
reviving their heritage. In 1998, the president of a KUD from “Village A” near Knin illus-
trated that rationale well, explaining the motives that guided his group in their work. He
stressed that they would not give up, despite their village being completely destroyed
and their being forced out. They engaged women to reconstruct folk costumes (hav-
ing barely escaped with their lives, let alone possessions and costumes) and founded
in Zagreb, already at the beginning of their exile in 1992, their homeland cultural soci-
ety. This society started presenting their village’s heritage at performances throughout
Croatia, helping in this way to benefit spiritually, morally, and even materially their
FIGURE 15.2 Visual representation of the “Reconstructing Heritage” project (1998,
reproduced with permission of Međunarodna smotra folklora). This edited photo was
used in the festival booklet, posters, and exhibition that accompanied the festival,
as well as in the CD produced the following year.
soldiers at the first frontlines of the battlefield (conversation, Zagreb, July 22, 1998).11
This cultural society also started to document their heritage, which resulted in an excep-
tionally comprehensive folk song collection (published in 1995). Soon after returning to
their village following Operation Storm in 1995, they established their KUD. The presi-
dent of the KUD clearly saw his group’s actions as acts of defiance against their enemies
(whom he did not name, but clearly implied as the rebellious Serbs in the Knin area who
expelled these people from their village). These enemies, in his understanding, never
had any culture; through envy, they were attracted to the values and beauties of Village
A culture and the spiritual riches that the Croatian Catholic people of that area always
possessed, and this led to their desire to destroy Village A and its people (conversation,
Zagreb, July 22, 1998). But the people of Village A “wouldn’t give up.” One of the first
actions of their KUD was the revival of the custom of vučarenje (“wolf assembly”) as
a scenic performance, last practiced in the 1960s. The wolf is an embodiment of evil
because it kills the villagers’ sheep; therefore one who kills a wolf goes with his friends
from house to house through the village, carrying the dead wolf and singing the wolfer’s
song while the villagers give him gifts because he saved them from evil. The link between
vučarenje and the aftermath of war is, I believe, obvious. What is important to add, how-
ever, is that, contrary to the claims of the Village A representative, the cultural assets of
local Croats and Serbs—who in war became enemies—were, before then, shared, simi-
lar if not the same.
In other examples, the reasons for establishing KUDs and their activities were not so
much nationalistically grounded or directed against the proximate other, but were more
grounded in the aspiration of a community to (re)constitute itself through its tradi-
tion. Both cases can be determined as culturalization (i.e., “a stress on cultures in differ-
ence, with the implication that cultural activities are caught up in processes of differing”
[Bennett 2005: 68, emphasis in original]). This is a process that produces difference and
downplays exchanges among collectivities through cultural means, a situation in which
culture is posited as prime ground for explaining social and political dynamics (I dis-
cuss this more broadly in Ceribašić [2007]). But while during the war and the flourish-
ing of the nationalistic narrative, culturalization overwhelmingly referred to internally
uniform Croats in relation to other ethnic collectivities (in particular, Serbs), after the
war, in different political circumstances, culturalization was transposed to embrace dif-
ferences in intraethnic, regional, and local traditions and communities. Although the
aim of saving (safeguarding and/or reviving) a very local, indigenous tradition (which
in fact meant its rearticulation into representative heritage with clear-cut borders, i.e.,
a shift toward cultures in difference) also characterized the concepts of culturalization
from the 1930s and 1960s—and it can therefore be said that, in the postwar era, culture
was simply once again renewed—a clearly pronounced stress on cultures in difference
presents a new moment. This new concept doubtlessly owes its existence to politicized
wartime culturalization, but equally to intimate human encounter with the local world,
endangered, ravaged, or destroyed in the war.
For instance, KUD Grančica (Twig) from Đeletovci in eastern Slavonia acted for
its inhabitants, during the years of exile from November 1991 to October 1997, as their
virtual birthplace, testifying to the vitality of their community and tradition. It did so
by making the KUD’s performances a reason for assembling the people of the village
who were strewn across the whole of Croatia and by presenting programs based on
their narrow local repertoire and on local topics in song lyrics. Their first visit to the
village, made possible by the process of peaceful reintegration in the Danube region,
occurred on the day of the local patron saint in 1997. On that occasion, a Mass was said
in front of a demolished church, after which the people who gathered danced their kolo
(round-dance). As they said, they had dreamed for years of doing exactly this after their
return to the village—attend Mass and dance in their kolo. Several events from my visit
to the village of Đeletovci in February 1998 are etched into my memory. One member of
the KUD took us to her half-demolished house, seated us on improvised benches in the
yard, warned us to be careful where we walked because the property had not yet been
cleared of landmines, and then began talking about the beauties of her village’s tradi-
tion, utterly ignoring the rough reality of the place. Using the metaphor of a twig in their
KUD’s name, which grows into a strong tree, and intertwines with other twigs to form
a circle of communality, other members of the KUD talked enthusiastically about the
revival of Đeletovci and explained in detail the peculiarities of their music, dance, and
costumes in comparison to even the closest neighboring villages (e.g., the specifics of
the steps in their kolo dances). (See video example 15.7 .)
Browsing through the ethnomusicological literature, Baily’s view on music that “pro-
vides a range of therapeutic possibilities for those who have suffered the traumas of war-
fare, the direct exposure to military force, the loss of family members, the dislocation,
the uncertainty, the depression, the stress which occurs with prolonged experience of
brutality” (2001: 45) could be applied to Đeletovci (and to Village A as well). We can see
in the musical horizons of Đeletovci the elements of teleological judgment about which
Joshua Pilzer writes when referring to Korean singing style in the demilitarized zone,
stressing how “myriad musical forms enact teleological systems that pass through suf-
fering to its relief, suggesting that the varieties of human suffering are purposeful events
on a structured path towards an improved or even ideal state” (2003: 70). We can draw a
parallel with the musics of other (although less) stressful conditions, such as Liverpool
country music, which, according to Sara Cohen, “with its emphasis on kinship, com-
munity, and continuity” helps “to provide, perhaps, a resource to cope with, or a defense
against, the disruptions of the local world” (2005: 31). For the villagers of Đeletovci,
their music and dance are an effective resource for coping with the disruption of their
local world. Their music and dance are even more effective because they are happening
within a KUD, an organizational framework that helps people to nurture social connec-
tions in the community. Regular rehearsals, in addition to being devoted to practicing
the repertoire, customarily include communal informal eating, drinking, chatting, and
other forms of social exchange. In the same way, various local events organized by mem-
bers of the KUD and their travels to festivals and visits to other places, where they are
then hosted by other KUDs, additionally strengthen the feelings of a harmonious com-
munity epitomized by their KUD.
The KUD of Đeletovci was one of eleven KUDs included in the “Reconstructing
Heritage” project. Other projects, mostly those initiated from outside by experts or cul-
tural organizations (including international nongovernmental organizations [NGOs]),
did not, as a rule, aspire to strengthen or revive a very local heritage. The intention of
these projects was, nevertheless, to help recovery, to be therapeutic. In that way, the
project to help survivors of Srebrenica relied on sevdalinka because it was both a marker
of identity and had an emotional capacity for expressing (and thus overcoming) sadness
(Softić 2011: 173–175), and the project to help Bosnian refugees in Norway focused on a
general, popular repertoire of Bosnian and Norwegian tunes (Pettan 1996). In contrast
to these projects, the recovery of Bosnian society as charted by Western cultural devel-
opment initiatives completely circumvented traditional music due to its ethno-national
abuses and offered in its place “non-political local popular music and popular music
from abroad” (Haskell, in Helbig 2008: 53), in which Haskell recognizes neocolonial
implications.
In still other cases, the reasons for establishing KUDs and their activities were mostly
pragmatic. For instance, according to some prominent members of the KUD from
Cetingrad in the Kordun region of Karlovac County, before the war, the village’s inhab-
itants would meet during their free time in old, abandoned houses, to sing and dance
there accompanied by local musicians. This completely satisfied their cultural needs, so
they did not need to organize a KUD or participate in festivals. Such prewar gatherings
were completely destroyed during the war, and thus emerged an incentive to organize
a KUDs so that local authorities could acquire some space appropriate for gatherings
and also pay for its maintenance. Aside from that, future KUD members were guided by
the fact that only formally organized groups (not individuals or informal groups) could
apply for funds from the Ministry of Culture and the local municipal bodies intended to
support amateur cultural activities—and they needed new musical instruments because
they had lost their old instruments in the war. In addition, the ruinous force of the war
instilled in them a longing for ages past and a desire to pass their traditional values on to
the younger generation. In their case, however, unlike in Đeletovci, the latter motive was
secondary; the decisive factor was to ensure the space for gathering and the instruments
with which they would renew the prewar joy of informal musicking.
The war and the postwar period both have been characterized by a significant
upsurge in homeland12 and minority KUDs. The basis for the development of home-
land groups—town groups that, usually following the concept of authenticity, cultivate
the heritage of their more or less distant birthplaces—was migration, temporary or
permanent, caused by the war, and a new discourse on the Croatian dispersal (which,
as mentioned earlier, was marked by Tuđman’s call to the Croatian people—“here in
the Croatian homeland and those strewn all over the far-away world”). The upsurge
in minority groups occurred thanks to a new constitutional order that brought great
changes in the treatment of national minorities and, consequently, their cultures. In the
age of socialist Yugoslavia, in conformity with the politics of brotherhood and unity,
there were no KUDs with the ethnic marker of any of the constitutive nations of the
former Yugoslavia (Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Muslims/Bosniaks, Serbs,
Slovenes). In independent Croatia, however, all former constitutive nations, except

Croats, became minorities. These minorities founded their KUDs in the early 1990s,
forming a new, minority folklore scene together with other minority KUDs that also
established themselves at that time (Albanian, Austrian, and German in the early 1990s;
Bulgarian, Polish, and Russian in the 2000s) and with minority KUDs that were already
active during the time of the Yugoslavian state (Czech-Slovak, Italian, and Hungarian
from the 1940s; Ruthenian and Ukrainian from 1968; Romani from 1980; Jewish from
1989). I have written about the minority scene elsewhere (Ceribašić 2007), including
examples of revival. (See Figure 15.3.)
Classifying people on the basis of ethnicity or residence status and consequently
organizing them on their status as refugees, immigrants, or minorities, brought, in
itself, new articulations of tradition in terms of the agency and authority of communi-
ties and of KUDs as their symbolic or informal representatives. Communities (and their
KUDs) gained greater freedom to define their traditions in their own terms, without
reference to the canons of authenticity and stylization. In the case of the Roma com-
munity, for instance, the professionalism of the musicians was, for the most part, not a
discriminating factor in itself when Roma KUDs sought funding, as was the case with
majority KUDs. On the whole, the minority scene brought the challenge of a multiple
construction of authenticity—in question is not necessarily the “authenticity” of a cer-
tain local heritage (the mimesis of a certain local script), but rather the idea of authentic-
ity as defined by the particular performing ensemble, whose different backgrounds (e.g.,
different regional traditions that the ensemble’s members inherit from their countries
of origin, as is often the case in town ensembles) require a blending or middle ground
of “stylization.” Such stylization is actually authentic, corresponding to a direct expres-
sion of the ensemble’s profile. This more inclusive concept of tradition manifests in the
postwar era, although in smaller measure, in the whole public practice of folklore. For
instance, some city KUDs active within the concept of stylization, which canonically
has presumed a stylization based on examples from a rural heritage, reached instead for
examples of urban heritage, taking a novel view of the legitimacy of every heritage, espe-
cially “one’s own.” (See video examples 15.8 and 15.9 .)
The multiplicity of postwar articulations of traditional music, the aspirations of
local communities to express their distinctiveness and the distinctiveness of their
traditions, and the revivalist reaching for the past are best seen in the landscape of
folklore festivals, shaped in cooperation with KUDs as grassroots practitioners,
experts as producers, and governmental bodies as the main sources of funds. From
the mid-1990s, new specialized festivals and thematic programs within the exist-
ing large festivals appeared, as well as festivals and concert programs that promote
hybrid crossings between traditional and ethnomusic. These festivals present diverse
aspects of folklore traditions, including those unknown to wider audiences, formerly
marginalized to expert circles, or those that are newly revived. In so doing, to some
degree, they manage to avoid the previous stereotypical model and affirm cultural
diversity. Examining even a cursory list of such festivals is beyond the scope of this
chapter; but for our purposes here, it is important to recognize that these festivals—in
FIGURE 15.3 Eleventh Manifestation of the “Cultural Activities of National Minority in the

Republic of Croatia.” Photographed by the author in Zagreb, 9 November 2008. This was the
central multiminority festival from 1998 to 2008, held in the main concert hall in Zagreb. At
the end of the program, all participants returned to the stage for the final bow, accompanied
by the anthem of the European Union. The photograph depicts this moment. In 2009, the
Manifestation was temporarily canceled because of budget cuts.
addition to representing the revival of folklore by supporting its greater visibility and
mainstreaming it—initiated numerous revivals of (almost) forgotten examples of
repertoires, subgenres, performing styles, and varieties of instruments. As well, the
technology of reviving from the past or unknown present relies on the narratives of
the oldest members of local communities and frequently on historical records (audi-
tory records, which are frequently the case because of their increased availability,
or sheet music, especially when auditory records are missing). Such enterprises are
often jointly led by KUDs and professional ethnomusicologists or folklorists who
are, at the same time, festival producers, and who act most often on the basis of the
aspirations (or at least approval) of local communities hoping to constitute the very
distinctive item(s) of their heritage.
At the same time, some festivals or festival programs try to revive the participatory
and interactive qualities of folklore, instead of staging standard concert presentations.
The first in that respect was the MSF, with its workshops (which began in the 1980s),
followed in the postwar period by some festivals that intentionally tried to promote
the exchange of experiences and mutual informal playing and singing by participants
instead of being simply presentational events. Such an approach is most pronounced at

certain Istrian festivals (which, tellingly, are almost always called “meetings” instead of
“festivals”) and is visible as a series of informal musicking events held off stage, with var-
ious combinations of musicians and in direct interaction with the audience. (See video
example 15.10 .) Clearly, it is no coincidence that Istra, more than any other part of the
country, organizes such kinds of festivals, since this region is characterized by an under-
standing of tradition that appreciates freedom in approaching templates (instead of
using an already defined set of templates) and by its tourist orientation. Making it possi-
ble for the audience, or, more appropriately, the participants, to directly experience cer-
tain festival events carries a strong economic potential because tourism is increasingly
moving from passive consumption to active experience. However, this very element of
planned “spontaneous” or “folkloric” (implying authentic?) participation instead of pre-
sentation is, at the same time, very “unfolklore-like” because it is strongly influenced
by external forces and motives. In other words, is there a space for dualistic theoriz-
ing that posits folklore versus folklorism (or authentic folklore vs. “fakelore”), partici-
pation versus presentation, repetitive custom versus invented tradition, and tradition
versus heritage? When we present theoretical concepts without dichotomous or oppo-
sitional terms, as in the case of hybridity or revival, is there another half of the binary
that is missing, seemingly missing, or hidden? Clifford proposes a theory of articulation
(2001), which implies permanence of articulations alongside de- and rearticulations;
historical connections and disconnections; and the political hooking and unhooking of
particular elements or streams of revivals. Perhaps Clifford’s theory is the most capable
of capturing the duality of revival and revival’s oppositional shadow, an “untouched,
ingenuous nature,” and thus is the most apt description of the coexistence and interrela-
tion of seemingly oppositional revival streams in the Croatian war and postwar periods.
Continuity of Articulations Instead of

Revivalist Disjuncture
As can be seen in this chapter, the term “revival” (obnova) is, in Croatia, primarily
reserved for the articulation of one’s own local, indigenous tradition. Conversely, the
understanding of “revival” in English-speaking countries implies the volitional transfor-
mative articulation of a tradition by outsiders, often combined with making it accessible
to modern mass communications systems and commercially viable (cf., e.g., Rosenberg
1993). In Croatia, such articulations are described using other terms, such as stylization,
tradition-based popular music, or ethnomusic. Here, traditional music remains a sacred
zone of ideologized purity (which is commercially nonviable and externally funded).13
Indeed, numerous elements of wartime and postwar Croatia support this view. One
should also bear in mind the important, sometimes even key role of experts in revivalist
projects. As a rule, these experts are outsiders to the revived traditions and communities
to no less a degree than Western revivalists; however, an important difference is that,

in Croatia, experts do not take an active part in making music but function rather as
counselors, either as helpers (e.g., in providing historical material) and promoters (e.g.,
by producing festival programs) or by serving as (ethically questionable) interveners
in stylistic features of performances (e.g., by “de-choreographing” performances in
the domain of authentic folklore that have been choreographed under the influence of
stylization).
However, this is just part of the story. If revival is needed as an explanatory, analyti-
cal tool in scholarly writing, then obviously there should be a zone of (perhaps pure,
authentic, spontaneous, ingenuous, unselfconscious, folklore, customary, habitual, pre-
modern, primordial?) tradition and community in which both intentional, volitional
action and transformation are absent. Is there such a zone? Hardly so, if one examines
the phenomena discussed in this chapter. This notion of tradition presumes character-
istics that would seem by definition to differentiate it from revival. Yet the customary
Croatian syntagma of “safeguarding and/or reviving,” illustrated throughout this chap-
ter, indicates that these two spheres are not understood as separate or even contrasting
concepts. This I find as close to the intention of the editors of the Oxford Handbook of
Music Revival to view revival not only in terms of a temporary excursion from a smooth
evolution of tradition but also as an ongoing cyclical process with an awareness of the
aftermath of revivals—new infrastructures, styles, practices, communities, and value
systems that have grown out of revival movements. I agree even more closely with
Clifford’s notion of articulation, as already noted, because it does not imply that revival
is a disjuncture, an entirely “new” phenomenon, followed by a discreet postrevival stage.
Rather, it implies a “living tradition’s combined and uneven processes of continuity,
rupture, transformation, and revival” (Clifford 2001: 480), under the assumption that
“cultural forms will always be made, unmade, and remade” and that “communities can
and must reconfigure themselves, drawing selectively on remembered pasts” (Clifford
2003: 89). In this chapter, I have tried to illuminate the question that Clifford also
emphasizes as relevant: namely, whether and how communities “convince and coerce
insiders and outsiders, often in power-charged, unequal situations, to accept the auton-
omy of a ‘we’ ” (2001: 479)—the autonomy (or at least the authority for self-definition,
as formulated earlier) of an ethnic, national, and local, individual and collective, more
official or more grassroots “we” as articulated in diverse musical fields and genres in
war-charged, war-baggaged situations.
This task of convincing and coercing is achieved through the argument of preserv-
ing tradition and maintaining continuity with the past. The key element around which
self-identified revival movements (whether under the title of the Croatian obnova or
the English revival) are structured in wartime and postwar Croatia is the articulation
of the present out of the past. Thus, as is evident in the title of one of the topics of a con-
ference held in 2000 in Croatia (Ivancich Dunin and Zebec 2001), the reconstructive
component of revivals has precedence over the revitalizing one. The past is appropriated
in different ways. It can be appropriated to serve as historical rootedness, a stronghold
and justification for the present regime. The wartime uses of old-time patriotic songs,
tamburitza, klapa, and church music are examples of such articulations of the past,
articulations that are close to Williams’ hegemonic sense of tradition: “a deliberately
selective and connecting process which offers a historical and cultural ratification of a
contemporary order” (1977: 116). Next, the past can be appropriated in terms of support,
safety, and comfort, as a golden age or a resource to be used to cope with the disruptions
of one’s own, known world, as exemplified in the sections on musicking in the war and
postwar articulations of traditional music. In this view, the articulation of the past does
not aspire to establish history; rather, it moves on heritage terrain, between Nora’s lieu
de mémoire and milieu de mémoire (1989). Finally, the past can be articulated through
resources that prompt or even require creative reworking, the very autonomy of a “we,”
as a number of musicians at the crossroads of the traditional and ethnomusic scenes
indicate (especially Istrian musicians, musicians in the ethnic minority scene, and oth-
ers). In this view, not at all paradoxically, the past is not “a world apart” (Nora 1989: 17) or
“a foreign country” (Lowenthal 1985), but an essential part of the self. In that domain
also we can speak in greatest measure about alternative approaches to the mainstream,
which is one of the key elements in some definitions of revival (e.g., Livingston 1999).
However, in spite of its various articulations, the past is not only a question of choice
and imagination; we are all beings of the past, of memory and history, inseparable from
the historically imposed constraints that make both a “we” and an “I,” our identities and
experiences. In times of peril, be it war, conflict, or disaster, we are even more so.
Notes
1. The Croatian term obnova is etymologically closer to renewal (nov meaning new), whereas
the closest etymological equivalent to revival (i.e., more precisely, to “reviving” as a noun)
is oživljavanje (živ meaning living, live, alive). However, due to language usage (since
oživljavanje is a more general and less directed term, whereas obnova connotes a kind of
action or project), it is more appropriate to translate obnova as revival. It is obnova that is
the key term used in this chapter.
2. Tambura, a type of long-necked, plucked lute, was brought to the Balkans by Ottoman
incursions and adopted in eastern Croatia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries. Tamburitza ensembles were first formed in the mid-nineteenth century, consisting
of the same type of instruments, but differing in size, shape, tuning, and function in the
ensemble. They served as the leading musical symbol of the national or state commu-
nity during the twentieth century, a position acquired by a combination of political uses
of music, professionalization, and mediaization, as well as their firmly established roots
in traditional musical practices, particularly in northern regions of Croatia. In contrast,
klapa singing, a style of multipart homophonic singing by a group of four to eight (tradi-
tionally male) singers, is typical of the southern region of Dalmatia. Its modern develop-
ment started with the establishment of the Festival of Dalmatian Klapas in Omiš (in 1967),
gradually expanding its range over previous gender, regional, and also aesthetic boundar-
ies. The boom in popularity and promotion happened during the war and, especially, the
postwar period, so that, from the 2000s on, klapa singing has been an integral part of the
nationwide popular music scene.
3. Narodnjaci is a general term, with pejorative overtones, for the genre of newly composed
folk music, a major genre of Yugoslav popular music up to the end of the 1980s, as well as for
the successive genre of turbo folk, promoted in the war years by Serbian media. So, with the
outset of the war, narodnjaci (aka, newly composed folk music alias turbo folk) completely
disappeared from the media and public space in Croatia. It has been officially understood
as Balkan, Eastern, Serbian music incompatible with Croatia’s alleged Westernness and
Europeanness (cf. Baker 2010; for more on this complex and variously termed music see
Rasmussen 2007).
4. Video recording stored in the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, IEF
video 208/11c.
5. In a narrower sense, kumpanija (kumpanjija) is a chain dance with swords, performed by
male societies (which are also called kumpanija) in Blato, Čara, Pupnat, Smokvica, and
Žrnovo on the island of Korčula. In the past, the dance was a part of a larger and more
complex custom connected with carnival time and/or local patron saints’ days.
6. According to Carolyn Nordstrom, author of the Shadows of War, “there is an image of
war that has stuck in my mind for nearly two decades. It seems to point toward some deep
understanding, something that stands just outside of conscious grasp or maybe beyond
intellectual thought to a more profound conception of . . . what? Not just war, but some-
thing that tugs at the heart of what it means to be human” (2004: 5).
7. The author of “Ne dirajte mi ravnicu” is Miroslav Škoro, since the late 1980s and early 1990s
one of the leading and the most prolific artists on the scene of tamburitza music. His web-
sites are http://skoro.hr and http://www.miroslav-skoro.nl.eu.org. A search for Miroslav
Škoro on YouTube brings about 4,000 results (accessed July 15, 2012).
8. His website is http://www.thompson.hr. A search for Marko Perković Thompson on
YouTube brings about 3,700 results (accessed July 15, 2012).
9. As for tamburitza music, a lot of material can be found on the Croatian-based website
http://www.tambura.com.hr, the Serbian-based http://tamburica.org, and the U.S.-
based http://www.tamburitza.org. For klapa singing, the leading website is http://www.
naklapskinacin.hr. Both domains are represented on YouTube by tens of thousands of
recordings.
10. There is no space here to depict in more detail the Croatian variant of these internation-
ally widespread concepts and processes. For the literature in English, see Ceribašić (1998)
and Ceribašić and Ćaleta (2010). The professional ensemble Lado impersonates the main
model of know-how in folklore stylization (http://www.lado.hr; its channel on YouTube is
http://www.youtube.com/user/ladoansambl). For performing practice within the concept
of authenticity, see the MSF website, one of its main promoters (http://www.msf.hr; its
channel on YouTube is http://www.youtube.com/user/dantos10).
11. Audio recording stored in the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, IEF
CD 363/8.
12. The Croatian noun is zavičaj, German Heimat; the English “homeland” is an approxima-
tion. It is not quite appropriate, even more so because Croatian domovina (which is close
but not equivalent to German Vaterland) is here also translated as “homeland” (e.g., it is
domovina in the cited Tuđman’s speech).
13. Differences between these revival genres also manifest in copyright issues. In particular,
traditional music belongs to the public domain and cannot be protected under the owner-
ship of a certain local community. In its elaborated (expropriated) form, however, it can
indeed be protected as the authored work of individuals, as is the case with authors in the
field of stylized folklore, ethnomusic, etc.
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C HA P T E R 16
C U LT U R A L R E S C U E A N D
M U S I C A L R E V I VA L A M O N G
T H E N I C A R AG UA N G A R I F U NA
A N N E M A R I E G A L L AU G H E R
In his introduction to Reassessing Revitalization Movements, Michael Harkin

(2004: xxvii) observes that “the sine qua non of revitalization movements” seems to
be that “they are defined in the dialogic space between cultures.” Taking this observa-
tion as a point of departure, this essay looks at revitalization among the Garifuna peo-
ple of Nicaragua and the dialogic spaces that have emerged in this movement through
Garifuna interlocutions with Nicaraguan African-descended Creoles.1
The Garifuna (sometimes glossed as “people of the cassava”) are one of six officially
recognized population groups inhabiting Nicaragua’s Autonomous Atlantic Caribbean
Coast region. Like their diasporic ethnic peers in other parts of Central America and
the United States, the Nicaraguan Garifuna today claim a combined African and
Amerindian ancestry, a heritage reflected in their former colonial designation as Black
Caribs.2 Their history with Creoles on the coast has been long, complicated, and deeply
intertwined. As revealed in their revitalization narratives, and as corroborated by
Creole voices also at times, Creoles are seen as at least partly responsible for what the
Nicaraguan Garifuna now assess as devastating cultural loss.3
As a result of complex and often contradictory processes of discrimination and assimi-
lation, unfolding initially in the context of the coast’s experience of British colonialism and
later under the continued anglo-machinations of a U.S. enclave economy, the Nicaraguan
Garifuna were largely subsumed into the Creole population. Incorporation into this
English Creole-speaking group, one which as a result of its Protestant anglo-affinities
enjoyed a relatively elevated position on the coast’s ethnolinguistic hierarchy (Gordon
1998), was seen originally as a means to increase Garifuna chances for material survival
and social betterment. Toward the end of the 1970s, however, as more and more Garifuna
Afrocreolized, it seemed to some scholars (Davidson 1980), as it did to a number of
Garifuna themselves, that Garifuna identity in Nicaragua would soon disappear.
CULTURAL RESCUE AND REVIVAL AMONG THE NICARAGUAN GARIFUNA 351
One of the goals of revitalization has been to halt the Afrocreolization process.
Garifunas involved in the movement want their own separate identity back, an iden-
tity they sometimes label, in accord with their diasporic counterparts, “black autoch-
thony,” “black indigeneity,” or “Garifuna indigeneity” (Anderson 2009; Brondo 2006).
They also want the freedom to express this identity openly as well as the capacity to
assert themselves as a living, not a dying culture. While their population remains small,4
and while they consider themselves still vulnerable and at risk, more individuals have
been stepping forward to reclaim a Garifuna identification, thus supporting the view
that Garifuna culture is very much alive. As movement leader, Frank Lopez, sized
it up enthusiastically in one of my fieldwork interviews, “Now everybody wants to be
Garifuna!” (interview, Orinoco, June 23, 2002).5
At the same time that they want to strengthen their distinct self-image, however,
Nicaraguan Garifuna revitalizers also want to sort out their historical entanglements
with Creoles. Rather than carry the burden of blaming Creoles for their identity loss,
but without wanting to forget the part played by the group in the process, they have also
included reconciliation and cooperation with Creoles among their revitalization objec-
tives. The hope is that both groups might work together—and it is a hope shared by all
coastal or costeño populations engaged in the ongoing struggle for regional autonomy—
to challenge mestizo hegemony in the country,6 dismantle the lingering verticalism of
the coast’s hierarchical social structure, and replace it with a set of intraregional rela-
tionships that are more equitable, horizontal, and intercultural. Interculturality is a term
common to the discourse of many contemporary indigenous and African-descended
movements throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. As defined by social move-
ment scholar Arturo Escobar (2008: 14), and in language at least partially resonant with
that of Harkin above, it is “a project, that of bringing about effective dialogue of cultures
in contexts of power.”
But how is effective dialogue achieved? In the Nicaraguan Garifuna-Creole case,
some of it is, of course, accomplished through language. This is particularly so in mutu-
ally attended community development meetings, classrooms, and nongovernmental
organization (NGO) workshops where revitalization and related issues of autonomy
and mestizo national dominance are debated and discussed. But as I aim to illustrate,
another channel through which dialogue occurs effectively between Garifunas and
Creoles is music. Garifuna musical performance—especially that centered around the
revival of expressions understood as traditional—is both a productively contentious as
well as collaborative arena in which Garifunas can explore not only their own past and
present identities but also their past and present relationships with Creoles. Talk about
and reflection upon music are also useful means for both groups to find ways to address
these matters.
The essay has four sections. In the first, I outline some general characteristics
of contemporary Garifuna revitalization, attending especially to features it shares
with other early twenty-first century Latin American and Caribbean indigenous
and African-descended movements. In the second, I provide an account of the fac-
tors, including Afrocreolization, Garifuna revitalizers attribute to their cultural loss.
352 Annemarie Gallaugher
The third section I devote to an analysis of the revitalization trajectory, following its
course from its beginnings in the early 1980s through to the early 2000s, a time of sig-
nificant change for the movement. I note how, in response to different shaping influ-
ences (events, personages, institutions, and other movements), relationships between
Garifunas and Creoles altered in these decades, shifting back and forth between poles of
conflict and accord.
The early 2000s were significant for Garifuna revitalization in a number of ways. Of
special importance, however, was the formal drawing up of a set of movement objec-
tives by an officially organized body of revitalists. Included among these objectives were
three dedicated specifically to the issue of Garifuna-Creole relationships and the steps
Garifunas might follow to make these relationships more intercultural. Drawing on
interview excerpts and other ethnographic data, I use the fourth section of the essay to
consider the impact of Garifuna music-making and debates about music on the achieve-
ment of these goals.
Cultural Rescue, Difference, Life,

Resurgence
The Nicaraguan Garifuna credit the Sandinista revolutionary government (1979–1990)

as having been the initial catalyst behind their revitalization efforts. Drawing on dis-
course inherited from Sandinista ideology, they refer to their revitalization process as
cultural rescue or, in Spanish, rescate cultural. Some observers have objected to the term,
perceiving that it carries passive and paternalistic connotations of the Garifuna as help-
less victims waiting to be saved. However, when we consider that the etymology of the
word rescue includes a linguistic strand meaning “to shake”—as in to “shake free” or
“liberate”—a much more active image appears.
Garifuna rescuers have indeed been active in this sense. In the process of rescu-
ing their Garifunaness, they have been shaking off the mantle of Afrocreolization.
They have also been shaking off a history of colonial, neocolonial, and since the
1990s, neoliberal oppression. In the context of the dügü, the centerpiece ritual of their
Catholic-inflected Amerindian/African vernacular religious practice, Garifunas par-
take in activities meant to shake off troublesome ancestral or other recalcitrant spir-
its. In music and dance-making contexts, particularly those in which the fast-paced
traditional punta and the equally fast-paced but modern tradition, punta rock, are
featured, they emphasize rapid shaking of the hips as an important focal point of the
choreography.
I will look at other meanings of the term cultural rescue, particularly those cultivated
within the Sandinsta revolutionary vision, in section three. Now, however, I will highlight
the work of two authors, Arturo Escobar (2008) and Maximilian Forte (2006), whose
landmark insights into indigenous and African-descended movements in Colombia and
the wider Caribbean, respectively, are particularly helpful for deepening our understand-
ing of what Nicaraguan Garifuna are striving toward in their rescue struggles.
In its current configuration, the Nicaraguan Garifuna cultural rescue movement can
be situated within the broad framework of attempts by many Latin American indig-
enous and African-descended groups to construct at a grassroots level what Escobar
(2008) refers to as “territories of difference.” These undertakings (the Zapatistas in
Mexico and the Kichwa in Ecuador are perhaps the most well-known examples) have
been directed frequently toward the achievement of various types of autonomy and
self-governance arrangements with the mestizo-led state. They have also been aimed
at the creation and implementation of comprehensive and alternative ethnodevelop-
ment or development-with-identity agendas in which—in contrast to older top-down,
Western, and capitalist-centric approaches—cultural identity concerns are respected
and understood as being just as crucial for the participants involved as those of an eco-
nomic and material nature.
Within these mobilizations “from below,” a massively complex range of issues has
been tackled. Much energy has been devoted to land claims, collective rights, control
and protection of natural resources, poverty reduction, technology access, bilingual and
intercultural education, gender relations, and child protection, as well as to the restora-
tion of traditional knowledges, customs, sacred beliefs, and expressive-communicative
forms such as music and dance. Ultimately, what is at stake here is, to borrow Escobar’s
assessment, “the definition of life itself, in particular the defense of . . . the cosmovisiones
(worldviews) of the black and indigenous groups” (2008: 2). Echoing this view, Victor
Obando Sancho (1999: 53) describes cultural rescue for the Nicaraguan Garifuna as
their “Life Plan.”
As if life itself were not enough, complicating the picture even further is the fact that
these movements have not taken place in isolation. Instead, numerous cross-boundary
ties and alliances have been involved. Some of these have been formed at local, regional,
and/or national levels. Nicaraguan Garifuna rescuers, for example, have allied with
neighboring Creoles for black solidarity purposes and with Creoles and other coste-
ños for purposes of advancing Atlantic Coast regional autonomy. Often, transnational
and diasporic associations are additionally at play. Such is the case, for instance, when
the Nicaraguan Garifuna declare themselves members of a transnational diasporic
Garifuna nation. NGOs, international aid and advocacy groups, and global bodies such
as the United Nations may also be part of a given movement’s connective tissue. For
the Garifuna, a significant (although not necessarily untroubled) global connection has
been that established with the 2001 UNESCO Proclamation of Garifuna culture as one
of the “oral and intangible masterpieces of humanity.” Finally, taking into account the
importance of the cosmovision concept, we should also consider here the linkages indig-
enous and African-descended movements often affirm with the supernatural world.
As a result of these many complex webs of interaction, akin certainly to Harkin’s dia-
logic spaces, studies of these movements (authored or coauthored increasingly by move-
ment participants themselves) have come to be inscribed with a politics of complexity
and multiplicity. Their analyses, propelled in large part by the search for alternative (e.g.,
postcapitalist/anticapitalist/noncapitalist) modernities, proceed from an acknowledg-

ment of multiple issues, multiple actors, multiple scales of action, multiple relations
of power, and often, multiple actants (spiritual deities, animals, objects, sounds). One
effective statement for imaging the immensity of the task involved comes from the
Escobar volume, introduced by its publishers as part of a series of works that (along
with the movements themselves, I would stress) “envision more lasting and just ways of
being-in-place and being-in-networks with a diversity of humans and other living and
non-living beings” (2008: n. p.).
Also helping us gain perspective on these movements is Forte’s (2006) edited collec-
tion on indigenous resurgence. For Forte, indigenous resurgence is in many respects a
critique against a long-term tendency by dominant groups, including Western ethnog-
raphers, to construct indigenous peoples as if they “have been ever vanishing, almost as
if disappearance was their predetermined historical role” (p. 1). Focusing on indigenous
peoples in the Caribbean in particular, but in ways entirely relevant to the Nicaraguan
Garifuna, Forte argues that rather than being headed toward extinction (a story, he
notes, the West has told itself to prop up its own superior self-image), what indigenous
peoples have really been doing is struggling for survival and the production and repro-
duction of their identities. As he states with indigenous co-author Bharath Hernandez
in reference to the Carib community in Trinidad:
. . . a resurgent Carib identification process renders the ongoing quest for a Carib
identity the same as the identity itself . . . . Being a Carib . . . is struggling to be a Carib.
(Bharath Hernandez and Forte 2006: 127)
Recognition of such agency and such effort has been continually denied indigenous peo-
ples, however, with the entrenchment of certain Western representational and rhetori-
cal patterns. One such pattern, Forte (2006: 9) notes, has been “salvage ethnography,”
i.e., ethnography motivated by paternalistic urges to document cultures and traditions
before their supposedly inevitable demise. Another pattern has been what Forte sees as
“fruitless debates” about what is essential versus what is constructed, what is invented as
opposed to what is authentic or non-invented, what is primordial versus what is instru-
mental, and what counts as cultural change versus what is cultural loss (pp. 4–5). Still
another pattern has been orthodox and colonizing practices of “putting lines through
whole peoples,” using the myth of indigenous extinction to bolster beliefs that capital-
ism “rules” (p. 2). Forte points out that there is a different model to follow, one involv-
ing “a shift from writing about indigenous peoples in a state of decline, facing a future
of assimilation, to perspectives on indigenous peoples engaged in resistance, facing a
future of resurgence” (p. 2).
Cautioning lest any overly celebratory attitude set in, Forte then identifies five
developments that, in the two or so decades preceding his publication, have served
to invigorate indigenous resurgence such that it cannot be viewed as a “mere rep-
etition of the past” (p. 13). These five developments are (and I quote much of Forte’s
description of them verbatim here): (1) the development of ideologies of renewal
and autonomy; (2) the emergence of strong activist leaders; (3) the formation of new
or revamped organizations plus their transnationalization via international media,
regional gatherings, and the Internet; (4) nationalism and nation-building projects
resulting in new indigenous entanglements with the wider society and provoking
various reinterpretations of the folk roots of the nation; and (5) demographic resur-
gence through the phenomenon that finds more individuals self-identifying as indig-
enous (pp. 13–14).
All of the above features and developments can be found operating in the present-day
Nicaraguan Garifuna case. What Escobar and Forte leave out, however, is any discus-
sion, beyond a few passing references, of musical activity. This is an omission typical of
most studies of Latin American indigenous and African-descended movements and it
is an unfortunate one, given that music-making is cited so often by movement protago-
nists as crucial to the health, sustainability, and effectiveness of their enterprise, as well
as crucial to their very sense of who they are, where they have come from, and where
they are going. The following statement reflects this strong sense of connection between
music and resurgent identity for the Garifuna:
A Garifuna who does not dance, who does not sing, or who does not like the drum is
not a Garifuna. The Garifunas carry song and dance in their blood. This is our cus-
tom. And likewise the custom of our forefathers.
(Idiáquez 1994: 104, quoting the words of an interviewee)
During my fieldwork, I often heard this statement reiterated in various forms. Part
of my motivation for this essay, then, has been to think about how scholars of Latin
American and Caribbean indigenous and African-descended social movements might
be convinced to include music and musical revitalization among the central themes (in
Escobar’s case: place, capital, nature, development, identity, networks) they address.
On the other hand, my developing acquaintance with the vast literature on indigenous
and African-descended revitalization in this part of the world also prompts me to con-
sider how scholars of musical revival and revitalization—most of whom have focused
on Euro-American settings—might benefit from the understandings of revitalization
processes the authors of this literature make available. What follows is a modest attempt
to push in both directions.
Cultural Loss and Afrocreolization
The story of the Nicaraguan Garifuna begins in the middle 1800s with their tem-
porary migration as part-time laborers from Honduras and Belize into the then
British-protected but mestizo-contested Atlantic Caribbean Coast, a Protestant (pri-
marily Moravian) region populated in the north by indigenous Miskitu peoples and
in the south by indigenous groups as well as African-descended Creoles. By century’s
end, a number of Garifuna-speaking Catholic families had settled permanently into

small subsistence farming and fishing villages in the south’s Pearl Lagoon Basin area
(Davidson 1980). Somewhat later, finding their subsistence livelihoods challenged by
the influx of U.S. extraction industries and pressures to adapt to a cash economy (a sign
of “progress” endorsed by the 1894 Reincorporation of the coast by Nicaraguan mestizo
nationalists), they also took up residence in Bluefields, the port city that is now the capi-
tal of the southern autonomous region.
As Garifunas tell it, almost as soon as they put down roots, they were subject to severe
marginalization and discrimination, not least because of their professed Catholicism
in a largely Protestant jurisdiction. Hostility was directed toward them from several
sources. However, in what is perhaps its most immediate and complicated form, it
came in particular from Afro-Creoles. In some cases, tension between the two groups
emerged because they were each other’s labor competition. In other cases, however,
animosity was unleashed toward the Garifuna by Creoles who, under the expeditious
manipulations of British colonial administrators, had come to renounce their own
blackness and think of themselves as English and superior.
Although in many cases Creoles shared phenotypical features with the Garifuna
and knew that certain of their historical and lived experiences were similar, many of
them tended to reject the group outright. They referred to them derogatorily as indios
(Indians) or Caribs and denigrated them publicly for their seemingly strange behaviors
and habits. As one community member recalled, “[We] suffered a lot of scorn and were
distrusted. Some laughed at our language and our customs. Others looked upon us as if
we were bad spirits that had come to do evil” (quoted in Idiáquez 1994: 174).
Echoing similar sentiments, Rosita Davis, a schoolteacher in the largest Garifuna vil-
lage of Orinoco, explained to me how Creoles used to mock members of her grand-
mother’s generation, calling them names if they acted differently or spoke the Garifuna
language. The result, Davis said, was that, “All those things started to carry down the
prestige of the people, and they started to be ashamed” (interview, Orinoco, June
21, 2002).
The Garifuna had many difficulties adjusting to such maltreatment. Because of their
small numbers and the fact they had become almost completely cut off from Garifuna
outside of Nicaragua, and also because of the daily survival needs that forced them to
interact regularly with neighboring costeño groups, including Creoles, they found them-
selves facing a serious identity crisis. At risk of almost complete exclusion, they could
no longer easily maintain, at least not openly, the distinctive language, spirit-based reli-
gious practices, and other cultural markers that made up a large part of their separate
and customary Garifuna identity.
As an adaptive response, Nicaraguan Garifuna began deliberately to sublimate their
Garifunaness. They inserted themselves and were inserted, in turn, into the coast’s
Afro-Creole culture. The subsumption process carried on to such an extent that,
although there were exceptions, by the 1970s, most were passing themselves off or being
passed off by others as Creoles. They had stopped speaking Garifuna, even among them-
selves, and had acquired English Creole speech patterns instead. Some had renounced
Catholicism and converted to Protestant forms of worship. They also began to replace,
or in some cases hide, many of their vernacular ritual practices. They were especially
concerned with covering up post-mortem rites and the iconic dügü curing ritual,
referred to locally in Nicaragua as the walagallo (Suco Campos 1987). With the force
of Afrocreolization, Garifuna cultural loss was also felt in such domains as vernacular
health and ethnomedicinal practices, foodways, ways of dress, social values, and com-
munity, family, and political arrangements.
Musically, the Nicaraguan Garifuna also experienced a decline. The process had
certainly already begun before they arrived in the country, but as Afrocreolization
took hold, it escalated. Whether out of shame or for sheer strategic survival purposes,
Garifunas put away the instruments—garawoun (drums), sisira (gourd rattle), and wad-
abágei (conch shell trumpet)—that, along with the newer hicatee-back (turtle shell per-
cussion), so strongly identify them today. Instead of their own sacred huguléndi ritual
music and semi-sacred abeimahani, arumuhani, and hüngühüngü forms, they sang
Christian hymns. Instead of their secular punta, paranda, gunjei, and wanaragua expres-
sions, they participated in the mento, calypso, dance orchestra, marching band, country
and western, and later, soca and reggae styles that typified Creole musical tastes. During
the annual carnival-type May Festival held each spring in Bluefields, Garifunas danced
in street comparsas to maypole music, the mento-related Creole form often considered
the sonic emblem of the Nicaraguan Atlantic Caribbean Coast. (See the Glossary on
the companion website for further detail about the instruments and genres mentioned
in this essay. The website also includes a Discography, Webography, and Filmography
along with Suggestions for Further Reading on the Garifuna in Nicaragua, as well as in
the wider diaspora. )
Thus, whatever remnants there might have been of Garifunaness in the country in the
early decades of the twentieth century, by the middle decades, these remnants had been
effectively denied, suppressed or, as some Garifuna rescuers describe it, “put to sleep”
(Isabel Estrada, interview, Bluefields, June 4, 2002).
The Cultural Rescue Trajectory and the

Shaping of Garifuna-Creole Relations
A major turning point came in 1979 when, under the leadership of a young Daniel
Ortega and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), the Sandinista Revolution
triumphed in Nicaragua, ending over four decades of U.S.-backed Somoza family dic-
tatorship (1933–1979). Through the cultural and economic recovery programs set up by
the FSLN as part of its national reconstruction project, the Garifuna found an opportu-
nity to turn their perceived cultural losses around. As they engaged in the recovery pro-
cess promoted by Sandinistas under the rubric cultural rescue, they began to step out
from under the cloak of Afrocreolization, reassert their distinct identity, and reclassify
themselves ethnically as Garifuna. Capturing the impact of that historical moment and
its continued legacy for the group, rescue leader Isabel Estrada reflects:
We consider that this Garifuna ethnic group was abandoned. For more than fifty
years we were abandoned. We were just lost. We didn’t know what we were until after
the Frente Sandinista came over. They visited the communities and helped us recog-
nize that we are Garifunas. And now, actually, you can enjoy, you can see the expres-
sion, the different dancing, the drumming, the conch shell, and different things
around us. And all of those were lost for more than fifty years. So we have a great
reason to strengthen ourselves and who we are. The ones who helped open our eyes
and recognize who we are were the Frente Sandinista.
(Interview, Bluefields, June 4, 2002)
Although the term cultural rescue was undoubtedly in use in Latin America before
the Sandinistas appropriated it, they nevertheless shaped its meaning in unique ways.
Understood as both concept and practice, rescue found resonance with broad sectors
of the Nicaraguan populace. On a nation-wide scale, it connoted freedom from Somoza
repression and U.S. cultural imperialism. At local levels, it signified a diverse range of
activities, including, for example, the reintroduction of indigenous medicinal prac-
tices, the return to folk artesanal production, the rediscovery of past artistic and musical
forms, emancipation of women, and sexual liberation for youth (Craven 2002; 1989).
Rescue was also used in a specialized way with reference to the Sandinista revolution-
aries themselves who were encouraged to rescue their best virtues (e.g., sacrifice, fra-
ternity, humility, simplicity) and spread them among “the people” (Hodges 1986: 257).
Additionally, through associations with progressive liberation theology, one of the most
significant influences on Sandinista thought, rescue was also linked to Catholic ideas of
redemption and resurrection.
Craven (2002) underscores the point that, contrary to some understandings, in no
way was rescue to be interpreted in a passive sense. Nicaraguans were not to sit idly by
as helpless victims waiting for the heroic actions of their leaders. As Brazilian literacy
educator and revolutionary supporter Paulo Freire had advised, they were not to be
treated as “objects which must be saved from a burning building” (quoted in Craven
2002: 54). Rather, the emphasis was on a dynamic and dialogic rescue-making—and
thus revolutionary-making—process. The process was to be one in which all citi-
zens participated critically and consciously and one which unfolded through strug-
gle and action. Everyone was to learn from each other in a spirit of reciprocity and
“unity-in-diversity.” Contention and uncertainty would undoubtedly ensue from
the range of viewpoints that would emerge, but the struggle for identity, place, and
belonging among competing voices and identities would be taken as normal and thus
would be welcomed as something that would strengthen, not weaken, the movement.
Defending this position, Uruguayan intellectual Eduardo Galeano wrote that the
goal of the revolution should be to “rescue the multiplicity of life with all its conflicts”
(quoted in Craven 1989: 44).
Sandinista ideology, with its promises of participatory democracy, freedom, and res-
cue appealed to the Garifuna, the majority of whom became committed FSLN members
or supporters (Perry 1991). As Rosita Davis recalled to me, “That was the time when
everybody was free to express themselves, the way they wanted” (interview, Orinoco,
June 21, 2002). Garifunas welcomed the many opportunities (including scholarships
and cultural exchanges with Garifunas in Belize and Honduras) afforded them by the
FSLN government and were receptive, as were Creoles and other costeños initially,
toward Sandinista teachings that preserving, reviving, and revitalizing their distinctive
cultural identities could be the road to their liberation and future advancement.
Garifunas were also drawn to Sandinista conceptions of music. For Sandinistas,
music was “a weapon” and “a defense” against oppression, cultural invasion, and injus-
tice. It was a way of negotiating conflict and of expressing la mística, i.e., revolutionary
morality and the combination of love, mystery, and magic connecting all of humanity
in struggle. Music was also understood by the FSLN as a means to expand a Nicaraguan
national revolutionary consciousness (Scruggs 1999).
A second important impetus for Garifuna rescue efforts in the initial stages was the
appearance on the coast of several Garifuna individuals from Belize and Honduras.
Among them was the late Andy Palacio (winner of the 2007 WOMEX world music
award for his 2007 album Wátina), who came to the region in the early 1980s to work as
a youth volunteer in the Sandinista literacy campaign. Once in the village of Orinoco,
he recognized, apparently to his astonishment, people who shared his own Garifuna
background.
Several of my interviewees recalled how Palacio was an inspiring presence as he spoke
to the Nicaraguan community about the strong ethnic revival getting underway among
Garifunas in Belize. Where the Sandinistas had “helped open people’s eyes,” to reiterate
Isabel Estrada’s words above, Palacio was able to provide a concrete living example of
how cultural liberation and renovation might actually be achieved. He rekindled inter-
est in many aspects of Garifuna culture and ethnicity, especially the language, the dügü,
and above all, the music. According to Freeland (1995: 193), Palacio had made plans to
bring a trained team from Belize to assist the Nicaraguan Garifuna in rescuing their
culture, but the eruption of the counterrevolutionary or contra war in 1983 did not allow
him to realize his plans.
The contra war was a bleak moment in Garifuna-Creole relations. Throughout its
duration (1983–1987), Garifunas remained largely loyal to the Sandinsta cause. Some
Creoles, particularly those who through Rastafarianism and other black pride move-
ments had come to embrace a progressive black consciousness, also declared Sandinista
loyalties. Most Creoles, however, who like the majority of costeños and particularly the
Miskitu took pride in their anglo-affinities, began to develop anti-Sandinsta sentiments.
Perceiving that the FSLN was not going to respond to their demands for territory and
ethnic recognition as readily or as comprehensively as they had anticipated, they began
to see the Sandinistas as cut from the same hispanic cloth as the western or Pacific mes-
tizos before them who historically had threatened their anglo-sensibilities. As a result
of this increasing mestizo mistrust, fueled by the anti-revolutionary rhetoric of the U.S.
Reagan administration as well as the local Moravian Church, many joined the Miskitu
and took up arms (Hale 1994).
As the FSLN and, by extension, Garifuna conflict with militant Miskitu and Creole
groups deepened, the Sandinista government was forced to reroute much of its cultur-
ally designated budget into defense spending. Garifuna and other rescue programs were
thus pared down considerably. The Sandinistas began to worry about a possible breakup
of the country, one that, conceivably, could result in the coast’s secession. Eventually,
in an effort to restore peace, a series of consultations were launched in which the
FSLN tried to better understand and accommodate the demands of their adversaries.
As a follow up to the consultation process, in 1987, the Sandinista government passed
the Autonomy Law, a legislative gesture that served as a third important stimulus for
Garifuna cultural rescue.
Under the autonomy legislation, the coast’s six main population groups (mestizo,
Miskitu, Sumu-Mayangna, Rama, Creole, and Garifuna) were now recognized officially
as distinct. They were awarded a set of autonomy rights, including rights to ancestral
lands, natural resources, customary laws, languages, spiritual beliefs, and cultural tradi-
tions. Costeños began to look forward once again to the chance they would now have to
live out their lives, not under the control of dictatorial mestizo authorities or in keep-
ing with what they saw as the FSLN’s originally misguided left-political popular class
designations but according to their unique ethnic and indigenous identities. Such a
reconfiguration of national and regional relationships seemed to have ushered in an era
of costeño pride and empowerment. In this positive climate, the Garifuna community
proceeded in their rescue plans with renewed vigor and confidence. Cultural exchange
programs were resumed, tensions with Creoles were placated, and an atmosphere of
cultural and musical vibrancy prevailed.
Unfortunately, in the years that followed, the Autonomy Law remained more of
a paper-thin promise than an effective policy instrument (Dennis 2000). In the 1990
national elections, although the Garifuna community voted strongly in favor of the
Sandinistas—by now perceived as the guardians of Garifuna culture—the FSLN was
defeated. The loss of Sandinista power meant a serious decline in funding and support
for cultural rescue endeavors. Incoming and subsequent neoliberal administrations
with their structural adjustment programs dismantled or simply let fall to ruin the social
services provisions and cultural funding initiatives that the Sandinistas had established.
By the middle 1990s, most of the political, social, and cultural gains made under the
Sandinistas, if they had not been entirely undone, had lost most of their momentum.
Cultural rescue was all but aborted, regional autonomy plans collapsed, and NGO proj-
ects failed. The Garifuna community became destabilized and disenchanted. According
to a contemporary assessment offered by Freeland (1995), Garifunas were once more
being shunned by other costeños and, as a result, could not find work. Moreover, there
were few NGOs left in the region that were able to offer them aid or assistance. Freeland
was pessimistic as she reported on the cultural uncertainty, ambivalence, and doubt
as well as the deteriorating economic and material conditions that were putting the
Garifuna at risk once again.
Notably, Freeland also recognized the way the Creole sector was implicated in the
Garifuna situation. She warned that Creoles needed to be careful of becoming so caught
up in their own internal (black versus English) factionalizing that they lost conscious-
ness of “the whole multi-ethnic complex” on the coast and, particularly, of the Garifuna
who had had to endure so much Creole discrimination. Finally, Freeland ended her
piece with a fervent appeal to autonomy, identifying it as “the best guarantee of Creole
and Garifuna minority rights” (1995: 198).
Freeland was not alone in her views. Convinced of the deleterious effects of the neo-
liberal turn on the coast, a group of costeño intellectuals and academics from various
ethnic backgrounds had been convening together with the aim of founding a regional
university that would help reinvigorate the autonomy process and reactivate cultural
rescue. In 1994, the University of the Autonomous Regions of the Atlantic Caribbean
Coast of Nicaragua (URACCAN) was inaugurated.
URACCAN made a commitment to coastal autonomy one of its main focal points.
To build the autonomy regime, it would provide the coast’s ethnic and indigenous com-
munities with educational outreach and would assist them with development projects
designed to integrate cultural and economic dimensions. Drawing largely on Sandinista
revolutionary philosophy, URACCAN saw cultural development and economic devel-
opment as inseparable.
The Garifuna were one of the first beneficiaries of the URACCAN mandate. In 1995,
a team of researcher activists met with the community and began to plan a formal
five-year project with them. The project included modules geared toward local com-
munity management as well as to the restoration of small-scale fishing and agricultural
production. It also included a strong ideological component such that regional auton-
omy concerns were to be paramount. Thus, participants were called upon to “promote a
multiethnic and pluricultural culture in the region that contributes to the consolidation
of national unity in the framework of diversity” (Obando Sancho 1999: 49).
While there were a number of stumbling blocks, significant outcomes were neverthe-
less achieved. One was the formation of a URACCAN-based Garifuna drum-and-dance
ensemble that quickly gained popularity in Bluefields and beyond. Second was the emer-
gence of a strong cultural rescue leadership with a renewed commitment to keeping
the rescue vision alive. The initiative of some of these leaders resulted in the establish-
ment of the main Garifuna rescuing body, the Nicaraguan Afro-Garifuna Organization
(OAGANIC).
When the five-year URACCAN project ended, the Garifuna were again in a
potentially uncertain position. However, by this time, a second generation of res-
cue leaders and activists was emerging. Born during the revolutionary and war years,
well-socialized in the cultural rescue culture, and aware increasingly of the growing
upsurge of indigenous and African-descended movements throughout Latin America,
these young individuals were ready and willing to take up the rescue torch. A number
of them were university students; some had been key participants in the URACCAN
project. One of them, Kensy Sambola, had recently become OAGANIC’s president. This
young woman—a daughter of rescue leader Franz Sambola, himself a son of Orinoco’s
founder and a grandson of one of the first Garifuna settlers in Nicaragua—saw the end
of the URACCAN project not as a loss but as an opportunity for OAGANIC to leave the
URACCAN fold. In her view, OAGANIC had been started “among the Garifuna people,
for the Garifuna people.” Although she greatly appreciated many of the developments
of the five-year joint undertaking, she said, it was time for URACCAN and others to
recognize that, “the people want to do things for themselves” (interview, Bluefields, June
3, 2002).
Doing things for themselves meant, in part, ensuring organizational autonomy for
OAGANIC. It also meant allowing Garifuna people, rather than non-Garifunas, to take
on responsibility for the leading organizational roles. Despite its intentions to adopt a
backseat accompaniment position, the URACCAN project had nevertheless continued
to place Creoles, mestizos, and foreigners at the helm. OAGANIC saw a need to break
this power barrier.
Having thus asserted their independence, what things did the Garifuna want to do?
OAGANIC’s new mission and vision statement identified a set of twelve wide-ranging
objectives, reflecting many of the types of ethnodevelopment issues spelled out in the
first section of this essay. One objective, for example, spoke to the need for development
plans supported by national and foreign organizations and directed toward the Garifuna
community’s “social, economic, and political wellbeing.” Another was dedicated to “the
rescue and conservation of the ecological balance.” A third targeted “human rights for
men and women,” while a fourth focused on “the protection and defense of children.”
The three OAGANIC objectives with which I am most concerned, however, are those
that addressed Garifuna-Creole relations. These objectives were stated as follows:
(1) Promote the integral development of the black communities: the Garifunas and
Creoles of Nicaragua
(2) Carry out actions intended to rescue, conserve, and strengthen the cultural val-
ues of the Garifunas and other members of black ethnicity in Nicaragua
(3) Move toward the training and organization of the Garifuna and Creole commu-
nities to be incorporated into the national effort.
As these objectives indicate, Garifuna rescuers had realized at this stage in their res-
cue process that sorting out and improving their historically uneasy relationships with
Creoles should be among their priorities. They had ascertained that an approach toward
Creoles that was more explicitly collaborative, inclusive, and intercultural would be
helpful as they proceeded with the next leg of their rescue journey.
Music-making and discussion about music were placed clearly as key elements in cul-
tivating this approach. They were understood as part of the promotional tasks referred
to in Objective 1. They were also seen as among the actions and values referred to in
Objective 2. And, they were recognized as part of the training and organization cited
in Objective 3. At the same time, however, music-making and discussion about music
had reflexive roles to play. By this, I mean that they served as mechanisms for keeping a
check on the extent to which OAGANIC’s objectives for Garifuna-Creole intercultural-
ity were or were not being realized.
Dialogic Spaces: Garifunas, Creoles, Music

. . . so nowadays, Creole people want to be Garifuna. Creole people say, “I am
Garifuna,” because that drumming, that African beat, went through all of our blood.
And not just Creole people—mestizo, too. I feel good [about that]. I feel proud. My
self-esteem starts lifting higher. People have started looking on us nicely.
(Vernon Ramos, interview, Bluefields, July 30, 2002)
I’m a Garifuna and that I have in my blood! Wherever I am, I am Garifuna. I mean,
the comparsa is a black people’s dance. I’m a black, but I never present myself as a
Creole. I present myself as a Garifuna. So, well, I’m not saying I’m not interested
in the comparsa. But I have more feelings for my culture, my Garifuna, than the
comparsa.
(Cheryl Watson, interview, Bluefields, July 12, 2002)
These words, spoken by two young adult members of Ruguma—a drum-and-dance

ensemble sponsored by the Nicaraguan Afro-Garifuna Organization—draw us imme-
diately into the dialogic space between Garifunas and Creoles, particularly as that
space is both constituted and shaped by music-making and talk about music. There
are some interesting differences, however, in the ways the two speakers, both of whom
self-identify as Garifuna, position their ethnocultural, racial, and musical identities
with respect to Creole culture.
For Vernon Ramos, Garifuna music, particularly the “African beat” of its drums, is
a point of connection for the two groups. Ramos suggests that Creoles, and even the
Nicaraguan mestizo majority, identify with Garifunas through their music and look
on them favorably because of it. Such recognition instills in him a sense of pride and
increased self-esteem. Cheryl Watson, on the other hand, while acknowledging the
identity she, as a black person, shares with Creoles, seems to emphasize more the dis-
tance between the two cultures. Although she explains that she is not disinterested in
Creole musical forms—represented here by the comparsa—her greatest affection is
reserved clearly for her Garifuna “blood.”
As seen throughout this essay, this theme of relative Garifuna-Creole attachment ver-
sus detachment, at times interwoven with references to mestizos or other populations, is
a central one in Garifuna cultural rescue discourse generally. One place this theme oper-
ates in a music-related sense is in the way the sonic and instrumental features of par-
ticular Garifuna genres are interpreted. Traditional punta, for example, is understood by
most rescuers as the genre through which Garifunas can best claim their exclusivity. Its
acoustic timbres and “natural” instruments (wood-and-skin drums, gourd rattles, etc.)
are often cited as evidence of the special ecological value Garifunas place on nature and
the land, a value often perceived as lacking among Creoles and mestizos. Additionally,
because of its heavy drum-and-percussion emphasis, rapid-fire articulations, and fast
tempos, some rescuers and listeners interpret traditional punta as “aggressive” and
“warrior-like,” meant to keep Garifunas together while keeping others at bay. Punta
rock, on the other hand, with its electric and electronic instruments, incorporation of
North and Latin American popular music influences, and use of lyrics in English and
Spanish as well as Garifuna, is seen as decidedly more inclusive. Reaching across ethnic
boundaries, punta rock creates sonic alliances while inviting social ones to take shape.
Another manifestation of the Creole-Garifuna attachment versus detachment theme
is in the way membership is constituted inside performing groups and in the respective
ideologies to which the groups subscribe. In the four formally organized groups I spent
time with in Bluefields, separation from or integration with Creoles (and others) was
a recurrent talking point. As I got to know the groups better, it seemed to me that they
represented points of wider community divergence about this issue along what might
be called an ethnicity continuum. At one end was Ruguma. Ruguma, named for a tra-
ditional tool used to strain cassava and a symbol of Garifuna unity, took the approach
that until cultural rescue was more secure, Garifunas should concentrate on cultivating
a deep knowledge of Garifuna music and dance traditions by themselves, without inter-
ference from outsiders. Thus they adopted a “Garifunas only” policy and a strict notion
of tradition, i.e., no punta rock allowed.
Next was Black Arisin,’ a group sponsored by the Center for the Development of
Human, Civil, and Autonomy Rights (CEDEHCA). While this group also focused
on a strictly traditional repertoire, it had a mandate from CEDEHCA to ensure, as its
name suggests, that both Garifunas and Creoles could be counted among its members.
According to its leader, Clarence Gonzalez, Black Arisin’ was started in order to give
Garifuna and Creole youth an opportunity to interact and learn from each other. It was a
way “to get Creole people involved, so they wouldn’t feel left out” (interview, Bluefields,
June 3, 2002).
The third group on the continuum was Garifuna Power. This was the group which had
formed under the auspices of the above-described URACCAN project. Garifuna Power
had from its inception been even more inclusive, welcoming people of any ethnicity to
join. This group had also been more musically and performatively adventurous from the
start, incorporating punta rock rhythms enthusiastically and emphasizing the sexuality
of the dances. Fourth was a very recently organized group founded by a former member
of a professional folkloric ballet company from western Nicaragua. The Regional Dance
Group, as it was being tentatively called, included Garifuna members and worked with
conventionally traditional Garifuna music. However, as its name indicates, it was more
regionally oriented, seeking to represent all costeño identities in its membership and
repertoire.
Certainly, there were a number of tensions between and among these groups and
they often argued about the image of Garifuna culture as well as the level of authen-
ticity that each one was or was not projecting. But at the same time and for a variety
of personal and economic reasons, various members from each of the groups floated
among the others. However, when they did so, I noticed, they easily revised their
performance practices, ethnicity definitions, and authenticity concerns to suit their
new environment. It seemed to me they were thus acting out the advice that Vernon
Ramos told me he tried to impart to young dancers and to all young Garifunas: “Be
multiple!”
During my fieldwork, I was struck in particular by what, in my interpretation,
appeared to be a recurrent pattern of identity shift in a number of performance events
I attended. While these events seemed to start out on an integrated Creole-Garifuna
note, by the end they had been transformed into assertions of Garifuna difference. For
example, in an outdoor, pre-Garifuna Day party I went to at the home of rescue leader
Isabel Estrada,7 I observed how Garifuna identity became more pronounced over the
course of the party’s duration. In the late afternoon and early evening as guests began
to arrive and gather in the yard, there was a decidedly Creole atmosphere as old and
new soca and reggae hits were churned out non-stop from the home sound system. This
Creole ambience continued on into sunset when the hostess then rounded up children
and adult party-goers alike to play a few rounds of the West Indian song-and-ring game,
“Brown Girl in the Ring.” Eventually, however, as night set in and a huge bonfire was
lit (a custom enjoyed especially by Garifunas, I was told), several drummers and per-
cussionists appeared with their garawoun, sisira, hicatee-back, and wadabágei. As lively
punta music and dancing ensued, the party space metamorphosed dramatically into a
place of Garifuna excitement and belonging.
A similar metamorphosis occurred at a May Festival I attended in Bluefields. For most
of the day, the performances on the festival’s main stage featured Creole maypole or reg-
gae music, while in the streets neighborhood groups held their comparsa competitions.
The atmosphere was pleasant enough, but perhaps a little low key. Toward the end of the
evening, however, a different set of sounds filled the air as Garifuna Power took to the
stage. As the drummers and percussionists began to pound out the distinctive rhythms,
three young female dancers began to punta their way energetically across the platform.
The tempo of the music and dancing increased to an almost frenetic pace and the audi-
ence cheered exuberantly. In this case, a characteristically Creole event had been turned,
at least temporarily, into a celebration of Garifunaness.
I witnessed what I understood as similar identity shifts in other settings: an Anglican
church service; the rehearsals of performing groups; nightclub gatherings; and at-home
sing-a-longs. Each situation seemed to involve, through a perceptible change in music,
a process of de-Creolizing and becoming Garifuna. What was also noticeable, however,
was that the Creoles in attendance at these events tended to move to the sidelines when
the change occurred. Except for some intermittent participation, people who identified
themselves as Creoles never “became Garifuna” musically.
These scenarios seem to offer a number of insights relevant to the OAGANIC objec-
tives stated above. First, the fact that Creoles did not remove themselves from the
performance settings when Garifuna music ensued, but stayed on to observe the activ-
ities with a show of respect and approval, seems to be a good indication that a more
positive attitude on the part of Creoles toward Garifunas has emerged. The fact that the
Garifunas in question felt comfortable in expressing their traditions openly and without
shame in front of Creole onlookers is also a positive sign.
However, I do not think it can be said that there was any real “integral development”
(Objective 1) occurring. Neither was there much demonstration of “shared cultural val-
ues” (Objective 2), beyond, perhaps, the value placed on music itself. There was a clear
Garifuna performer/Creole spectator division of the performance space, and the musi-
cal/performance shifts were always one-way: Only Garifunas moved musically from
being Creole to being Garifuna. Except for those few individuals who participated inter-
mittently, Creoles never made this change. Such a transformation, I think, would have
indicated a greater level of integration and value sharing.
Different Creole interviewees suggested different reasons for this musical distanc-
ing. Dorothy Wilson, known for her research on maypole music and her view that may-
pole’s origins are English as opposed to African, commented that while it was good to
see Garifunas feeling confident and reviving their culture, it is possible that Creoles did
not join in because they objected to Garifunas promoting punta as a Garifuna tradition.
Contrary to popular Garifuna assertions, Wilson maintains that punta was originally a
Creole form. In her opinion, punta had been appropriated by Garifunas and the way they
danced it was “not the real punta.” This fact, she said, plus the emphasis some Garifuna
performers placed on sexuality, might explain why Creoles did not dance with Garifunas.
Dance teacher and choreographer Amanda Jiminez interpreted the gap as having
originated more from the Garifuna side:
What I really think is that the Garifuna identify themselves differently from the
Creole. The Creole mixed themselves. The Garifuna are very proud of being more
pure, keeping their own bloodline. They have around twenty years that they have
tried to rescue their traditions, and they have focused on the punta . . . . I suppose
somewhere or other, they have danced the maypole. But punta is so much more
aggressive. It has very provocative movements. So I suppose the Garifuna decided
to identify themselves with that to difference themselves from the Creoles, to have
something more unique.
(Interview, Bluefields, July 27, 2002)
Jiminez also mentioned the perception among some Creoles that Garifunas would not
approve if they tried to dance their traditions. As a case in point, she spoke of a staged
performance of a walagallo ceremony presented in the late 1980s in Managua’s Ruben
Darío Theatre by the national folkloric ballet company Macehuatl. Jiminez explained
that even though from their perspective the non-Garifuna professionals responsible
for this production had meant it as a tribute to Garifuna culture and had found it an
exhilarating and beautiful experience, reaction from the Garifuna community was
negative. The community thought that those who had been involved in “folklorizing”
and “artifying” their ritual were trying to prove their own superiority. Thus, Jiminez
said, even though Creoles might have wanted to show solidarity with and friendship
toward Garifunas by dancing their dances and participating in their music, they
sometimes felt that they could not do so lest Garifunas accuse them of elitism, a criti-
cism that would thus lump them with the mestizo majority. As my Garifuna inter-
viewees made clear, having their traditions appropriated and folklorized by Creoles
and mestizos was not how they envisaged Garifuna and Creole communities being (as
per OAGANIC Objective 3) “incorporated into the national effort.”
Appropriations by western mestizos of costeño cultural forms were also a troubling
issue for some Creoles. For example, Father Terence Charles, a Catholic priest of Creole
background and a strong supporter of Garifuna cultural rescue, spoke of how “the peo-
ple from Managua” (i.e., mestizos) had some years ago started dancing maypole—in his
view, “the real Nicaraguan Creole music” and a music not of English but of black influ-
ence. They had then gone on to commercialize it and so, he said, the tradition had lost
its value. He expressed concern that the same thing would happen to Garifuna music:
Just like people who wear dreadlocks and are not Rastafarian, people [from
Managua] will dance punta because it is in style, not because they are conscious of,
“This is part of my identity. This is part of my culture.” If a next dance comes up,
attractive like the punta, they will dance it and forget about the punta.
(Interview, Bluefields, May 18, 2000)
Compounding these concerns about mestizo attitudes was the sense that there could be
no truly progressive dialogue about any of them. My interviewees felt that, if questioned,
mestizos would always have a justification for their behaviors. Even though autonomy
had been granted to the coast years ago and even though pronouncements of a more
inclusive mestizo multiculturalism had become part of the neoliberal national order, as
far as most Creoles and Garifunas could see, Nicaragua was still being imagined in the
western side of the country as a homogenous mestizo nation. Thus positive views toward
mestizos like that expressed in the quotation at the beginning of this section were rare.
There were other hesitancies and ambivalences voiced by Creoles about participating
in Garifuna music. Father Charles noted that while many Creoles expressed approval
and even admiration for the Garifunas’ cultural rescue efforts, they also admitted to
feelings of jealousy and sadness at times. According to Father Charles, Creoles felt that
Nicaraguan Garifunas had developed an identity much stronger than their own and
lamented the fact that they had let their own identity weaken. Father Charles spoke
of how Creoles had let maypole fall into decline and had opted instead for “imported”
musics such as reggae, soca, and country and western. This situation was, he pointed
out, obviously advantageous for Garifuna musical rescue. But, he noted too, that at the
same time as Garifunas might benefit from a cultural recession among Creoles, as a
strongly resistant black people, who, purportedly, had never been enslaved, they could
also be a source of inspiration and a model:
. . . well, the Garifunas are part of the black people. But there are differences culturally.
They have their language. They have a stronger identity than we do. Our own is not
clear. It has been disappearing . . . . The Garifuna community, from what I know, they
never experienced slavery. They had the opportunity to develop their identity and
their culture because they are a people of strong resistance. Even though when they
came here in the past and lost their language, they kept certain things of their cul-
ture holding strong. They lost their language because they had to survive. Everybody
spoke English and, if they wanted to get a job, they had to know English. But many
other things are still strong there yet.
For their part, Garifunas were not oblivious to the kinds of mixed feelings that
Creoles often held toward them. They realized that underneath overt expressions
of positive support, there could also be hidden and not-so-hidden layers of discom-
fort. Some Garifuna cultural rescuers were uneasy with this situation and its nega-
tive implications for the hoped-for integral development of Garifunas and Creoles.
They wanted to find ways to deal with the problem sensitively and proactively. I have
already noted how the performing group Black Arisin’ expressly followed a man-
date to include Creoles in its membership. But there were other instances involving
music that I thought could be taken, at least in part, as gestures of Garifuna generos-
ity toward Creoles and of a desire to create a spirit of interethnic cooperation and
interculturality.
In a documentary about the walagallo ritual aired on national television, the
well-known costeño reggae song “Black History, Black Culture” (Soul Vibrations 1991)
was chosen as the opening theme music. The use of this song rather than one from the
Garifuna repertoire suggested to me a display of Garifuna black solidarity, particularly
with the progressive black Creole cause on the coast. This cause has been mobilized in
large part through politically oriented reggae, and, to some degree, associations with
Rastafarianism. Of course, a more skeptical interpretation might see the choice of “Black
History, Black Culture” as a form of Garifuna opportunism, i.e., as Garifunas seeking to
elevate their status by appropriating a music with a wider popular appeal than their own.
Another example of Garifuna goodwill toward Creoles seems present in at least two
of their performance genres choreographed for presentation on the formal stage. For
example, both the conga (a dance drama) and the Negra (a dance set to a poem) involve
reenactments of the experience of African slaves. Although a proud claim of many
Garifunas is that they were never enslaved, these genres and their messages of libera-
tion and empowerment are intended as an expression of empathy and solidarity with
blacks who were. According to Amanda Jiminez, the conga is intended as “a way that the
Garifunas have, as a black people, of protesting against the ill-treatment that the slaves
received from the masters” (interview, Bluefields, July 27, 2002). The Negra, on the other
hand is:
. . . . a call to value yourself as a black person and [to understand] that despite what-
ever mistreatment you have received in the past, you must put it aside, it will just
serve as an experience . . . . The last statement [of the poem] is a confirmation that you
must never be ashamed of your race and says, “If I was to be born again, black I would
like to be again.” It’s very beautiful . . . . It is a call that you must never be ashamed of
who you are, and even though you have limitations, you can always prosper.
Finally, as they pursue OAGANIC’s objectives of Garifuna-Creole integral develop-

ment, shared cultural values, and incorporation into the Nicaraguan nation, Garifunas
have a particular advantage: They can always draw on an expanded notion of Garifuna
music and their capacity for flexible musicality, or “being multiple,” to enhance their
relationships with Creoles. Should their assertions of Garifuna difference become prob-
lematic or alienating for Creoles at any time, they can readily reintegrate by switching
musical codes and enjoying soca, reggae, maypole, and all the other well-loved Creole
forms. After all, I was told, these are Garifuna traditions too.
Conclusion
On the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, Garifunas were at one time slated to disappear. This
has not happened. What has happened instead is a long-term revitalization movement
aimed at survival and resurgence. Like other similar contemporary indigenous and
African-descended movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, characterized as
they often are with highly ambitious ethnodevelopment agendas as well as strong hopes
for achieving new and alternative ways of being in and making sense of the world, the
struggle for Nicaraguan Garifuna cultural rescue has been complex and multifaceted. Its
particular trajectory has unfolded through a history marked by discrimination, assimi-
lation, national revolution, armed conflict, neoliberal pressures, and postrevolutionary
battles for costeño regional autonomy.
One defining feature of the project and a main concern of this essay has been the dia-
logic spaces between Garifunas and costeño Afro-Creoles that have arisen in its wake.
Relationships between the two groups have variously strained and softened over the
years as both have tried to find ways to come to terms with their own separate cultural
identities as well as their complicated historical intertwinements. Garifuna rescuers
continue to recognize Creoles as significant perpetrators in their experience of cultural
loss. However, they have sought to work with Creoles in order to establish a more effec-
tive intercultural dialogue. The objectives dedicated specifically to Garifuna-Creole
relations by OAGANIC, the main organizing body for Garifuna cultural rescue on the
coast, articulate several propositions for what that work might look like.
As I have tried to convey, musical work forms an important part of the picture.
Examination of this musical work, be it music-making itself or dialogue about music,
reveals a number of points of tension and disagreement and suggests that OAGANIC’s
objectives may need some rethinking or revision. But what is important is that the two
groups do at least confront each other musically and they do maintain an open and
frank debate about their ethnomusical differences. They are, to paraphrase the words of
Eduardo Galeano quoted earlier, rescuing the multiplicity of life, and, I would add, the
musicality of life, in all its conflicts.
Notes
1. This essay is based on research conducted for the author’s Ph.D. dissertation (Gallaugher
2008). Fieldwork consisting of extensive interviews, informal conversations, participant
and non-participant observation, and media analysis took place during six periodic visits
to Nicaragua between 1999 and 2002.
2. The Black Caribs are believed to have originated through the mixture of Carib/Arawak
peoples and shipwrecked or escaped African slaves. Their ethnogenesis as a distinct, slav-
ery resistant ethnic group on the island of St. Vincent in the seventeenth century, their
military alliances with French Catholic colonial powers against the British, their even-
tual deportation by the British to Central America in 1797, and subsequent dispersal along
the eastern seaboards of what are today Honduras and Belize is a story well-circulated in
anthropological texts. See, for example, the seminal work by Gonzalez (1988).
3. It should be pointed out here that while Creoles are recognized officially as African descen-
dants, they may also self-identify as having a mixture of heritages, including British,
Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, and indigenous. Thus the category Creole, like all other
categories named in this essay, including Garifuna, may be interpreted variously. Such
complexities, involving intersecting but also shifting constructions of race, ethnicity, class,
nation, and more recently, diaspora are part of the social fabric throughout Latin America
and the Caribbean. See, for example, Wade (2010).
4. As of the 2005 census, the total population was 3, 271 (López and Koskinen 2009: 8).
5. I use real names in the case of well-known public figures or lesser-known public figures
previously identified in news media or scholarly publications (e.g., Obando Sancho 1999).
In all other cases, I use pseudonyms.
6. Here, mestizo refers to people of primarily mixed indigenous and Spanish descent.
Often racialized as white, mestizos are generally the most powerful group in most
Spanish-speaking nations of Latin America.
7. Garifuna Day is an annual ethnicity celebration day and is held throughout the diaspora.
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C HA P T E R 17
T O WA R D A M E T H O D O L O G Y
FOR RESEARCH INTO THE
R E V I VA L O F M U S I C A L L I F E
A F T E R WA R , NAT U R A L
DI S AST E R , BA N S ON A L L
MUSIC, OR NEGLECT
M A RG A R ET KA RTOM I
This chapter discusses revivals of the musical arts in societies suffering or recovering
from musical decline or deprivation as a result of war, natural disaster, enforced bans
on all music, or neglect, focusing on case studies from the early 2000s. The genres in
question include traditional, folk, and classical music, bardic singing, dance, musical
theater, and the commercially distributed popular and media arts. After briefly review-
ing the ethnomusicological literature on such revivals in a few areas of the world, the
chapter will focus on two main case studies, with additional reference to one subsid-
iary case. The first case study will be the post-tsunami, postconflict revivals in Aceh,
based on my fieldtrips to the province in 1982, 2003, and annually from 2005 to 2010
(Kartomi 2014). This will be followed by a short discussion of the parallel situation in
post-tsunami, postwar Sri Lanka. The other main case study will be Afghanistan, where
efforts have been made in the cities of Kabul and Herat to restore and revive musical
life as the country copes with its continuing war and the effects of the Tālibān’s bans on
all music making and listening; here I draw mainly on studies by John Baily, Veronica
Doubleday, Lorraine Sakata, and Ahmed Sarmast. The chapter concludes with an out-
line of a preliminary methodology for research into musical revivals after major catas-
trophes, bans, or neglect.
The term “revival” is used here in the sense of the restoration or revitalization of a
musical tradition that has severely declined or even virtually died out due to the fact that
REVIVAL OF MUSICAL LIFE AFTER WAR, DISASTER, BANS, OR NEGLECT 373
its people have had to devote most of their energy to coping with disasters and emer-
gencies. The serious decline of a society’s music culture that results can easily be rec-
ognized when it becomes apparent that few or no master performers or teachers of the
traditional music culture have survived to pass on the tradition to the next generation.
The decline also becomes apparent when a considerable proportion of the population
is traumatized by a disaster and is in need of therapy, including therapy through the
revival of the music culture.
A Review of the Literature
Ever since the birth of the discipline of ethnomusicology in the 1950s, scholars have
emphasized the need to research the uses and functions of music in society as well as the
history and styles of the musical genres themselves. However, the uses and functions of
music in societies in the process of recovering from war, natural disaster, punitive bans
on all musical life, or neglect have largely been overlooked. Much of the existing revival
literature emphasizes the part played by, and meanings ascribed to, revived genres,
styles, or practices in connection with sociopolitical movements. Ethnographic research
into revivals of the performing arts in periods of reconstruction and peace maintenance
constitutes relatively new research territory, in need of a new methodology.
Why have music revivals of this kind been neglected? One reason is that it is usually
difficult for scholars to obtain permission to do fieldwork in postdisaster situations, for
the authorities naturally do not want to be distracted by visitors as they try to amelio-
rate mass suffering and rebuild societies in extremely difficult conditions. Moreover, the
authorities may be loath to allow visiting researchers to observe their inadequate relief
efforts, especially in poverty-stricken areas where resources are limited. Natural disas-
ters seem frequently to occur among communities who suffer not only from grinding
poverty but also from conflict between insurgents and established forces, as in Haiti,
which has been judged the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Musical and
material revivals in impoverished communities can be slow indeed compared to richer
communities, where revival is normally speedy, as in the case of solace offered by musi-
cians in the aftermath of the Australian bush fires in 2008.
In the early 2000s, a group of applied ethnomusicologists published papers on the
effects of war on music in several areas of the world, including the cultural and physi-
cal survival of the Croats and Serbs in Croatia (e.g. Pettan 1998) and musical revivals
among socially marginalized and disadvantaged groups, such as Romani musicians in
Kosovo (Pettan 2011) and Canada’s First Nation peoples (Harrison 2008). In 2007, some
members of the group presented papers at the first conference of the newly formed Study
Group for Applied Ethnomusicology of the International Council for Traditional Music.
The group defines “applied ethnomusicology” as “research guided by principles of social
responsibility, which extends beyond the usual academic goal of broadening and deepen-
ing knowledge and understanding toward solving concrete problems,” and this includes
374 Margaret Kartomi
studies of postdisaster revivals (Pettan, personal communication, July 10, 2008). Some
members aim to make objective studies while others see themselves as activist scholars
who work for the implementation of strategies to assist recovery after a war or natural
disaster, including among marginalized and neglected groups (Pettan 2010).
In 2002, an ethnographic study of the experiences of male and female
soldier-musicians in an Australian military band appeared, containing an account of
how contemporary Australians constructed meaning from the commemorative military
music played on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the World War I landing in Gallipoli
(Bannister 2002). In 2005, a number of scholars presented their war- and revival-related
research at the annual Society of Ethnomusicology conference, addressing its keynote
theme, “war, peace and reconciliation.” Another scholar wrote one of the first articles on
the preservation and revival of music in a refugee population (McDonald 2010).
While music research into postconflict situations is still relatively rare, there is even
less published literature on natural disaster situations, such as the 7.0 magnitude earth-
quake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, leveled its capital, Port-au-Prince, and
killed well over two hundred thousand people. Conference papers were presented at
the Society of Ethnomusicology conference on the Hurricane Katrina, which hit New
Orleans on August 28, 2005, killing more than eighteen hundred.
Studies of the use of music therapy for trauma relief in war and peace, including for
former combatants, is in its early stages. Only one author has studied musical revivals in
Aceh after the 2005 peace accord (Kartomi 2010). A recent study was devoted to the role
of women artists and ex-combatants during postwar psychological therapy treatments
and periods of reconstruction (Uning 2009). An earlier study focused on small children
as victims of trauma in other areas of the world (Gilbert 1996). Another study dealt with
music-psychological therapy provided to treat ex-combatants and widows in Aceh or
children who were victims of trauma (Vignato 2009). Brief reference was also made to
the effects of Hurricane Katrina on a family jazz funeral and parade scheduling in New
Orleans (Sakakeeny 2010: 1, 25).
Publications by ethnomusicologists John Baily (2009) and Ahmed Sarmast (2006)
have focused on the revival and rebuilding of music culture in Afghanistan, and NGO
leaders have discussed concrete measures to rebuild music education and performance,
including the establishment of a new primary and secondary music school in Kabul and
various other projects carried out by the Aga Khan projects and the establishment of the
Afghanistan National Institute of Music.
Several features distinguished the Acehnese situation from other revival scenarios.
Most significant among these were the massive efforts needed to reconstruct housing,
roads, bridges, and other infrastructure in order to allow daily life—including artistic
and ceremonial activity—to continue as before; the need for emotional therapy in the
face of mass trauma; the help of government, aid agencies, and NGOs to reestablish an
education system and facilitate transmission of the arts for children and adults under
extreme conditions of destruction of environment; and the freedom from curfews
and other restrictions so that the people could hold family ceremonies, celebrations,
rehearsals, and performances again. The case studies that follow focus on ways in which
postdisaster societies attempt to revive their artistic activity after neglecting it due to war
or natural disaster, including improving the quality of performances by re-establishing
regular classes and rehearsals.
Case Study 1: Revival of Musical Life

in Aceh
This case study is in two parts: aspects of the revival of musical life in Aceh after the 2004
tsunami and aspects of the revival after the armed conflict ended with the 2005 peace
accord.
Post-tsunami Aceh
For almost three decades before the great Indian Ocean tsunami struck Aceh’s west
and north coasts on December 26, 2004, the province was in a state of armed conflict
between the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka) and the Indonesian state
military. The tsunami, which caused whole populations of many villages to disappear,
compounded the victims’ severe war weariness, trauma, and social and artistic depriva-
tion. After an earthquake that measured 9.3 on the Richter scale, the tsunami unleashed
a wall of water three stories high that traveled a fifth of the way around the earth at speeds
of six hundred kilometers per hour (Hume 2009: 17). The worst affected area was Aceh,
where an estimated 167,736 Indonesians—mostly Acehnese—died, including almost a
third of the population of the capital, Banda Aceh, two-thirds of whom were female and
21.1 percent of whom were under ten years of age (Rofi 2006: 340–350). When the tsu-
nami struck, the men were mainly fishing at sea or working in the fields, and the women
were at home looking after children and the elderly (ibid.). Almost a thousand regis-
tered artists died, and the personnel and equipment of scores of art troupes and schools
were wiped out.1 Thousands of men and women were widowed and thousands of chil-
dren orphaned (Vignato 2009: 3).
Following the tsunami, international governments, NGOs, and individuals pledged
more than $7 billion (US) in aid for the relief and revival effort. For the first time in
decades, Aceh opened its borders to foreign expertise, and sixteen thousand foreign
personnel entered the formerly closed province. Barracks and tent cities were estab-
lished to house the four hundred thousand homeless, who were suffering from a state
of shock, bewilderment, and grief and were barely able to function. Apart from the
mammoth task of rebuilding immense areas that the tsunami had razed to the ground,
survivors had to grapple with the economic collapse, social breakdown, and psychologi-
cal traumatization resulting from both the tsunami and the separatist conflict with the
Indonesian government.
When the international and national aid eventually began to be made available, it
was distributed unevenly and often failed to reach the very poor and needy, including
most of the one thousand or so registered artists. Very few of the performing art groups
and schools received any aid, so they had to start again from scratch, replenishing their
membership with novice artists and replacing their lost musical instruments, costumes,
and rehearsal spaces with anything they could find. Some children and teen survivors
in the camps could join classes in music, dance, and art offered as therapy by local
Acehnese artists employed by NGOs. In the beachside village of Lampnuk, the whole
community was wiped out, but in Lokna one ratôh duek (sitting dance) performer sur-
vived, and by assuming the responsibilities of the former troupe leader, he showed how
the arts and adat (traditional customs) could be saved. He and others discovered modes
of self-help through which individuals and communities could alleviate their trauma
through music, dance, the bardic arts, filmmaking, and government-organized arts fes-
tivals and competitions.2
Immediately after the tsunami struck, the national and provincial government and
private television and radio stations began to broadcast news about the disaster inter-
spersed with heartrending Acehnese laments and other recorded music. This was part
of a nationwide effort to secure private donations to help the survivors and revive their
spirits. Some of the broadcasts were aired virtually nonstop, continuing for weeks, or
in the case of the Acehnese-owned channel Metro TV, for months. For example, the
west-coast Acehnese singers Marzuki Hassan of the Jakarta Arts Institute (Institut
Kesenian Jakarta) sang the tragic, high-pitched west-coast laments (ratôk; B.I., ratap)
on television. Aceh’s most famous pop singer, Rafly, created and performed new songs
that expressed sympathy for the tsunami survivors, especially the many orphaned chil-
dren. Given the emergency, which demanded an immediate musical response, he also
recycled existing songs; the “Tsunami Orphan Song,” for example, was an adaptation
of his song about orphans from the war (see Atjeh Loen Sayang, 2007). A song sung
on the media by the pop singer Sherina Munaf, titled “Indonesia Menangis” (Indonesia
weeps), expressed the widely felt view propagated by some religious leaders that the
tsunami was God’s punishment for the Acehnese people’s sins, including the killings in
the war. Others consoled themselves by remembering an Acehnese proverb: “It is heart-
breaking to lose our children, but it would be disastrous to lose our adat [custom, set of
cultural practices] which is our anchor in all things.” They were determined not to let the
tsunami destroy their culture.
Troupes of dancer-musicians in Indonesia and overseas were mobilized to perform
Acehnese and highlander Gayo sitting dances, ratôh duek, meuseukat, and saman, to
raise money for the hundreds of thousands of victims. Both professional and amateur
artists took part in the continuing efforts made in the years that followed to alleviate the
trauma of the tsunami survivors through music.
Some stories of the resilience of the people of several coastal villages devastated by the
tsunami are told in films such as Nyanyian Tsunami (Tsunami song), which was made by
CV Layarkaca Intervision in 2006 (Komoditi Production House with Studio Kampung
Mulia). Composers of the songs, including the evocative “Tsunami Song,” which was
accompanied by a simulated Western orchestra, were Jamal Abdullah and Maulana

Akbar, and the editors and filmmakers were Maulana and Afeed Afifuddin, assisted by
a group of musicians named De Atjehers (The Acehnese, in Dutch). The film project
was supported by the daily newspaper Serambi Indonesia, the Caritas Czecho agency
in Lamno, and the traditional art troupe Talo, and included interviews by journalists
from Regional Asia and USAid. The film portrays the self-doubt of the inhabitants of
the seaside village of Pudong (in Kecamatan Lhong, Aceh Besar) as they attempted to
restore the practices of their local artistic heritage following the death of eight hundred
of their nine hundred households. Before the tsunami, the village had specialized in per-
formances of an Acehnese version of the Sufi musical genre dabôh; however, the tsu-
nami claimed all but one of the troupe members. The survivor was a shy young man who
courageously decided to teach himself the most difficult role in the genre—a religiously
inspired awl-dancer. Eventually, he taught some young men to perform the various roles
with him, and he re-formed the troupe, serving as its leader.
The film also shows a bard (tukang hikayat) in the same village singing an excerpt
from a legendary hikayat (epic poem) and inserting stirring episodes in his perfor-
mance to revive the will to live (semangat) of the villagers after the terror of the tsu-
nami and to encourage one of them to take on the role of troupe leader. The bard drew
attention to a legend told on Aceh’s offshore island Simeulu about the Krakatoa eruption
and tsunami in 1883. As he knew, the islanders’ knowledge of the story had saved many
Simeulu inhabitants from death during the 2004 tsunami because they knew that they
should flee from the coast up to higher land. This story underlines the importance of the
people maintaining and nurturing their knowledge of their folk stories and wisdom to
teach successive generations.
Another film that illustrates post-tsunami, arts-led resilience, Meusare-sare (Working
together), was made by National Geographic in 2005. In the Malay-speaking seaside
village of Cokna in Aceh Jaya, a man named Teungku Sofyan, who had lost his wife
and children to the waves, overcame his trauma by reviving his wife’s dance troupe and
teaching a new generation of young singer-dancers to perform Cokna’s main heritage
genre, ratôh taloe (literally, “net-weaving song-dance”). In this performance, a row of
boys or girls sit close together and sing secular texts interspersed with Islamic phrases
such as “Assalamulaikum” (peace be with you) while dancing and performing body
percussion techniques, including clapping and beating their thighs and shoulders in
repeated rhythmic motifs, after which they weave a piece of rope into a fishing net. They
then kneel up on their lower legs and sing about the Prophet’s birth, to the accompa-
niment of an oboe (seuruné kalée), cylindrical drums (geundrang), and frame drums
(rapa’i).
One of the aims of this film was to show how the traditional musical arts can help a
team of newly arrived foreign aid workers communicate with a traumatized local com-
munity. Members of the NGO Aloe gained the trust of the people in its chosen village
by first learning from them about their artistic and cultural activities. This raised the
people’s determination to find ways to restore their livelihoods, enabled them to work
together with NGO members to improve their farming and fishing pond techniques,
and helped maintain their hope for full recovery. The film shows them performing
their sitting (duek) song-dances with stirring body percussion (ratôh duek); a bamboo
flute (serdam) player accompanying tragic footage about the fate of the many orphaned
children; and an Acehnese oboe, double-headed drum, and frame-drum ensemble
accompanying some traditional standing and stepping dances. Some scenes are accom-
panied by newly composed music “with a Muslim flavor” (yang bernafaskan Islam),
which is obtained by using Arab-sounding tonal materials. Other scenes are accompa-
nied by Acehnese pop music played by an electronically simulated Western symphony
orchestra.
Some of the NGOs that employed traditional artists to perform for, and teach the
arts to, tsunami victims commissioned instrument makers, especially frame-drum
builders, to make replacement instruments. These NGOs also employed seam-
stresses to make and embroider new dance costumes for depleted troupes in some
villages. Some foreign governments offered aid that assisted an arts-led recovery.
Aid from the Turkish government reconstructed a village that was wiped out by the
tsunami, providing a mosque and new music and dance rehearsal and classroom
space among the new houses for homeless families. However, in most rebuilt vil-
lages provision was not made for buildings that could be used for rehearsals and
classes, which severely limited the return to normal music making and dance classes
for young artists.
Professional assessors of the temporary housing camps constructed with assistance
from the community development agency Plan Australia had noted that many of the
150,000 children in the camps were suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, block-
ing their memories of the tsunami, changing their behavior dramatically so as not to
have to deal with others, and preferring to be alone.3 As local Acehnese and foreign
teachers in UNICEF’s twenty-one child centers testified, the more than eighteen hun-
dred children who were separated from one parent or lost both parents in the raging
tsunami waters wrestled with unimaginable trauma in the following months and years.
The centers, which were mostly set up in refugee camp tents by local and foreign vol-
unteer staff, looked after three thousand children, including tsunami and war orphans.
Arts therapy exercises worked in many cases. The children were given opportunities to
improvise and perform music and dance, including Acehnese ratôh duek, meuseukat,
and rodat sitting song-dances with frame-drum playing, and to tell stories and draw
freely, often choosing to write about or draw the tsunami or their deceased parents
(Leila Bukhari Daud, personal communication, July 25, 2008). According to the prov-
ince’s child protection officer for UNICEF, Frederic Sizaret, the children’s resilience was
high—but, he said, “You wonder what they are repressing. . . and they are going to need
help later on. Their long-term future is uncertain, given the rudimentary child welfare
system and the lack of a formal foster care program and trained social workers” (Jerome
and Rubin 2005: 1).4
As time passed, however, “the children’s dark days became fewer,” as a number of
anecdotes have shown (Jerome and Rubin 2005: 1). One of these, related personally to
the author, tells of a group of boys in Lampnuk benefiting from song-dance therapy.
Each group was taught to perform a partly improvised ratèb duek song-dance with
Muslim texts. Kneeling close together in a row, the boys swayed back and forth while
the song leader improvised texts such as “Allah Akbar” (Allah is great) and “Laillaailalo”
(There is no God but God), to which the group responded by singing the same texts in
chorus to a well-known Acehnese melody, sometimes with Acehnese body percussion
(clapping, thigh-slapping, etc.) (Leila Bukhari Daud, personal communication, July
25, 2008).
Thousands of artists who lost their livelihoods due to the tsunami tried to reestablish
troupes and schools, and they participated in the tsunami commemorations and the pro-
liferating government-run artistic events and festivals. New politically acceptable texts
were set to former well-known underground song melodies, both traditional and com-
mercial/popular, and these were popularized through recording sales and media outlets;
international pop songs also increased their market share.
In most cases, groups that were able to continue to operate were those attached to
the offices of the governor or bupati (district heads). Some of them had the resources
to create or redevelop new art works in response to the conflict and the tsunami—one
example being the Perang Sabi (Holy War) dance that was redeveloped by the governor’s
sanggar Meuligo (Meuligo performance group) in Banda Aceh—and to perform at such
functions as official tsunami memorial services.
Another way of dealing with tsunami trauma has been for the government to hold
annual commemorative ceremonies (Peringatan Tsunami Resmi) on December 26 at
the mass graveyards (Kuburan Massal) in the seaside village of Ulele and the inland
cemetery just outside Banda Aceh in Kecamatan Lamburu, usually in the presence of
the governor and other government officials, as well as at Meulaboh and elsewhere. At
the first annual commemoration, an orphan choir sang regional Acehnese songs and
Rafly’s “Lagu Tsunami Aneuk Yatim” (Tsunami orphan song). Rafly also sang a tradi-
tional west-coast lament between the prayers, Qu’ran reading, and speeches. Born in
Tapaktuan, he has a powerful, high-pitched singing voice that is typical of the loudly
carrying jantan (masculine) voices of fishermen at sea as they call the wind on Aceh’s
southwest coast. At the second commemoration, the Acehnese musicians Mahrisal
Rubi and Edy Erwinsyah released the song “Bersama Kita Bisa” (Together we can do
it!), which, through a synthesis of Acehnese and jazz styles, highlighted the key role of
volunteers in the recovery of affected areas.
Many health professionals and aid workers reported widespread psychological
trauma associated with the tsunami, the war, or both combined. This was compounded
by the traditional belief in many affected regions that a body must be buried by a family
relative combined with the fact that in many cases after the tsunami no body remained
to be buried. Some Indonesian and foreign NGOs used conventional music, dance, and
art therapy in the enormous task of aiding the recovery of the survivors of conflict and/
or tsunami trauma, especially in the displaced persons’ camps, and increasingly became
involved in providing services to survivors of the conflict and for peace advocacy work.
However, national economic and political conditions have directly influenced “the
availability of the requisite support for music therapy services, thereby determining who
will receive music therapy” (Wang Feng Ng 2005: 1), and the great majority of direct and
indirect victims of Aceh’s war and tsunami failed to receive any arts therapy at all.
Postwar Aceh after the 2005 Peace Agreement

As has been mentioned, at the time the tsunami struck the people of Aceh were still
engaged in a seemingly endless conflict that had begun in 1976. The amount of time and
energy spent on music, dance, and the bardic arts had been greatly reduced, especially
throughout the rural areas, because of the fighting and frequent curfews, though official
government performance troupes kept the traditional and newly created musical arts
alive. However, international pressure after the tsunami and a measure of war weari-
ness brought the two sides together, and they signed the Helsinki Peace Agreement in
August 2005.
The peace accord abolished the curfews and brought enormous relief and joy to the
common people, who could at last hold their life event and other celebrations, includ-
ing many that had had to be postponed. Thousands of artists gained employment by
establishing or reopening their dance and music schools, and troupes of artists began to
perform again. Texts of separatist songs that had been banned were recycled with new
texts that conformed to the new state of peace, and these were performed on the media.
In 2008, the government held its fifth All-Aceh Arts Festival, and hundreds of artists
from across the province took part.
In early 2009, the government’s Planning Body for National Development launched its
Program for the Socialization of Peace and Reintegration of Aceh. This “aimed to revive the
people’s energy for the growth and development of Acehnese culture, which had almost
died out during the harsh conditions of the decades-long conflict and the following disas-
ter” (Anon. 2008). The Program included a new peace song competition for poets and
composers. The winning songs, which had texts on themes that would help maintain the
peace, combined traditional Acehnese and Acehnese pop attributes and were performed
by leading Acehnese musicians in Banda Aceh and the Acehnese diaspora in Jakarta.
Recordings of the performances were assembled in the album AMAN Album Dame Aceh
(Album of peace songs; 2008) and distributed on CD, cassette, video, and ringtone.
One song, “Tajaga Damée” (Watch Over the Peace), begins, bardic-style, in free meter
and then launches into a characteristically modern-Acehnese, hexatonic melody in a
minor key, with alternating normal and lowered tone 2 in the harmonic scale to give it
an Acehnese-Arab feel, accompanied on frame drums (rapa’i) and oboe (seuruné kalée).
Its text, set in classical Acehnese pantun rhyming quatrains, draws attention to the new
peace after a “crazy period.” Presenting an impossible image of “a midday robbery in the
sky,” it expresses the people’s joyful amazement that peace has come at last. Another new
peace song was “Aman Duniaku Aman” (Secure, my world is secure), which was sung
on the CD by Aceh’s best known female singer in the Jakarta diaspora, Nyak Ina Raseuki
Ubiet, accompanied by a seuruné kalée, and with a choral refrain in thirds, as is typical of
some Acehnese folk songs.
In summary, the musical revival after the tsunami was only made possible by the
negotiations to end the armed conflict, which had sapped the energies and will of the
people to practice their traditional arts and develop new artistic ideas and directions.
Case Study 2: Revival of Musical Life in

Sri Lanka
Like Aceh, Sri Lanka not only was ravaged by decades of military conflict between gov-
ernment forces and a separatist movement, represented by the Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam, but was also devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, which killed
thirty-five thousand Sri Lankans and displaced around six hundred thousand, bringing
in $3 billion in aid. The experience of the tsunami in Sri Lanka, unlike Aceh, was not
soon followed up by a peace accord, though the government of Norway tried to broker
a peace deal in 2002–2008. The fighting continued until the government won military
victory in 2009.
The conflict—estimated by the United Nations to have killed up to one hundred thou-
sand people between 1983 and 2009 and to have displaced hundreds of thousands more
to camps for displaced people—was marked by a cultural movement, both at home
and in the diaspora. This included a repertoire of songs on the Tamil Eelam liberation
theme, including rap songs in English and Tamil that were accessible on the internet.
Most were heroic, stirring songs in Carnatic-Eelam vocal style, set in a minor mode with
drum accompaniment, including “Viduthalai Eelam Song” and “Tigers Song Forever in
Tamileelam,” which were presented in films and on video, mp3, and YouTube.
Sri Lanka’s postwar situation is more complex than Aceh’s, in that the Sinhala-Tamil
ethnic conflict remains, despite the end of physical hostilities. After peace was declared
in 2009, the Sinhala majority were happy that they could safely resume their family cele-
brations with performances and their children could more safely go to school and receive
training in music and dance (Anupama Ranawana 2010). However, the Tamils, who still
needed to spend much of their energy on the immediate relief of physical suffering and
the supply of food and housing, with some languishing in camps and detention centers,
took the view that the revival of their music culture was a secondary priority.
Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan government had to face the massive task of winning the
peace and the trust of the minority Tamils in their attempted postconflict reconstruc-
tion and reconciliation and finding a political solution to the long-standing grievances
that had made them take up arms in the first place. Human rights groups claim that free-
dom of expression has been under heavy attack by the current Sri Lankan government,
while others argue that despite this, the prospects for a durable peace are better than in
other war-torn states such as Afghanistan. Until the political and constitutional reforms
are carried out, a spontaneous revival of artistic activity among the Tamils is unlikely
to occur.
Case Study 3: Revival of Musical Life in

Afghanistan
We now turn to a country that is still in a state of war—Afghanistan, where prospects for
a lasting peace are, at the time of writing, deemed slim indeed. As we know, the practice
of the musical arts usually declines in societies when they are at war. However, there are
a few exceptions in warring areas where a whole city may feel relatively secure due to the
presence of an occupying military force, as in the case of Afghanistan’s two largest cities,
Kabul and Herat. Despite the continuing war in Afghanistan, substantial efforts have
been made to revive the rich traditions of Afghan vocal and instrumental music in those
cities.
Beginning in 1996, the Tālibān—a Hanafi Islamist political-military movement—
took control of most parts of the country. The previous two decades of civil war had
already devastated Afghanistan’s infrastructure and economy, and the pro-Soviet
Afghan government of 1980–1995 had begun to implement restrictive cultural policies
as the mullahs tried to forge a new national identity.
In the Tālibān’s five years of power (1996–2001), they enforced one of the most
extreme interpretations of Sharia law in the Muslim world. Among their edicts, osten-
sibly based on quotations from the hadiths (writings and traditions of the Prophet’s fol-
lowers), there was a ban not only on commercial popular music but also on traditional
genres such as the revered sung Persian poems (ghazal) with instrumental accompani-
ment performed at weddings and births (Lorraine Sakata, personal communication,
June 20, 2006).5 Exceptions were, however, made for the Tālibān’s own tarana chants,
and the daireh frame drum was exempted in some instances. The Tālibān also closed
the archives of traditional Afghan folk songs at Kabul Radio. Not surprisingly, many
musicians feared that the neglect and the prohibitions would cause some forms of
the music culture to disappear, indeed that a whole generation of children would be
deprived of musical education and the opportunity to carry on Afghanistan’s musical
heritage.
Broken cassettes were nailed to the posts at the entrances to refugee camps to remind
everyone that music was not allowed, even listening to it on the radio, while professional
musicians found it expedient to keep their identities secret (John Baily, personal com-
munication, October 30, 2004). There was also a decree forbidding women to work or to
be educated from the age of eight, and female singers were banned from performing on
radio and television.
The effects of decades of war and the lack of local security in many areas had seriously
deleterious effects on music making. After the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, most mem-
bers of the Tālibān fled to neighboring Pakistan, where they regrouped as an insurgency
movement against the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The number of foreign troops
in Afghanistan increased steadily after 2001, reaching more than one hundred thousand
in 2009.
Steps toward instituting a revival of music began in the first few hours of the Tālibān’s
withdrawal from Kabul in 2001, when the radio started broadcasting songs by male
Afghan singers whose performances had been recorded and stored in the Kabul Radio
archive. The interim Afghan government removed the complete ban on music, yet until
2004 the restriction on female singing on radio and television remained in place as some
members of parliament again tried to outlaw female singing. In areas that are militarily
secure, women still sing and dance at weddings, though due to war weariness and lack
of opportunity the number of women who still know how to perform is decreasing sig-
nificantly (Veronica Doubleday, personal communication, October 30, 2004).6 To date
the musical revival has been patchy and intermittent, severely hampered by circum-
stances reflecting the history of the destruction of musical life in the area (Baily 2009).
Afghanistan has never included the arts in its general education curriculum.
During a visit to his home city of Kabul in 2004, the Afghan ethnomusicologist
Ahmad Sarmast observed that war and the antimusic policy of the Tālibān had virtu-
ally eliminated Afghan music and music education. He noted that the rich archive of
traditional Afghan music recordings at Kabul Radio was in a state of neglect and disre-
pair after it was closed, that the male—and especially the female—vocal culture was in
disarray, and that no one was left who could play Afghanistan’s important traditional
instruments. He feared that a whole generation of children would be deprived of a musi-
cal education and the opportunity to continue the practice of Afghanistan’s musical
heritage. Although conditions had improved radically since the collapse of the Tālibān
in 2001, musicians had no rights, and qualified music teachers were very hard to find.
Realizing that the rich musical tradition was in danger of being lost altogether, Sarmast
approached the government with a report on his field work (Sarmast 2010) carried out
under the auspices of the Revival of Afghan Music and a proposed National Strategy for
Music Education.7 This would eventually operate from primary through secondary and
to tertiary levels, and would include traditional, modern, tribal, and orchestral music.
Sarmast proposed that a nationwide system of music schools be established and lob-
bied the government to create an environment that would encourage more musicians to
return to Kabul and practice their profession in safety.
He also worked to open a school in Kabul that would provide Afghan and Western
music education for war orphans as a form of musical therapy. With concrete assistance
from many countries (including governmental and private support from Germany and
Australia), the Afghanistan Institute of Music (ANIM) opened in Kabul in 2008, with
Sarmast at its head. Under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, ANIM is providing
both a general education and musical training in Afghan and Western classical tradi-
tions for boys and girls starting at age ten. They may continue their studies for a decade
and graduate with a diploma based on standards developed in association with the
National College of Music in London.
Sarmast has found support for ANIM from around the globe, beginning with the
World Bank. However, given the continuing war and the urgent needs for clean water,
housing, electricity, and medical care, he has continually encountered difficulties in
trying to convince potential donors that ANIM is important. On his fund-raising
expeditions, he therefore cites reports by the World Bank and UNESCO that credit
music education with the reduction of poverty, arguing for the need to provide train-
ing and a sustainable future for the large number of orphans—an estimated seventy
thousand in Kabul alone and six hundred thousand across Afghanistan (Lambers
2010)—who are vulnerable to being kidnapped for forced labor, prostitution, or drug
smuggling. Indeed, half of ANIM’s three hundred students are disadvantaged children,
many of whom have become sole providers for their families by selling small items in
the streets; ANIM pays a monthly stipend to the guardians of each student to compen-
sate for their loss of income.
Another of Sarmast’s major problems was attracting qualified teachers to work at
ANIM. Those he found included musicians who had taken refuge in mountain caves in
Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, and some Hindustani musicians from northern India
whose forebears had introduced classical music to the Afghan court in the 1860s. He
accumulated musical instruments and scores by soliciting donations from European
and Australian tertiary institutions and music companies. He argues that while ANIM
may be a small contribution, it represents an enormous shift in attitudes since the time
the Tālibān were in charge, and that it could continue to have the power to change soci-
ety and revive the vibrant musical culture that Afghanistan once had.
In his Strategy, Sarmast stressed the urgency of rebuilding Afghanistan’s music infra-
structure. He recommended that maximal advantage be taken of the Music Initiative of
the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Afghanistan, which aims to preserve the intangible
and tangible cultural heritage of Afghanistan, focusing on Kabul, Herat, and Almaty,
and on the launching of the Ustâd-Shâgird Music Training Program in Kabul and Herat
in 2003. The Aga Khan Trust and other NGOs had been working to restore musical
performance and the craft of instrument making in certain communities, as political
efforts were being made to establish Afghan self-rule. They not only focused on restor-
ing opportunities to train professional performers of classical music and bardic sing-
ing but also provided musical education for children. The aim was to build up educated
audiences for the next generation of musicians, on the assumption that the music would
not survive unless it was performed within supportive communities.
In 2006, another group of ustads (master musicians) in the old city of Herat aimed
to raise performance standards by teaching groups of students selected on the basis of
merit who could only stay on the course by passing regular tests. In the beginning they
taught male students only, but eventually they sought out and enrolled a few females who
could continue the rich tradition of female solo and group singing (Doubleday 2005).
The initial effort made to teach the basics of the traditional music to children was
located at the Kokil Music College in Almaty, led by the College’s director, Abdulhamid
Raimbergenov. The Aga Khan Music Initiative supplied hundreds of musical instru-
ments, some electronic textbooks, and video training guides for nationwide use by
the children, who when grown up would constitute informed audiences and commu-
nities in which music could thrive. The next stage of ANIM’s development included
training for musically talented students who could become professional performers
of Khazak traditional music through the Murager (Heritage) program. The Ministries
of Education and Culture in Kazakhstan officially recognized Murager’s activities

in 2004.
The Aga Khan Music Initiative also participated in the Historic Cities Program,
whose mission is to conserve and rehabilitate the historic quarters of the old city of
Kabul, including a sixteenth-century royal Mughal garden. This Program included
the Koch-e-Kharabat school, where many classical Afghan ghazal and other songs are
believed to have originated, and which had long been associated with the teaching and
performance of Kabuli-style art music. Due to the unstable situation, the school virtually
ceased to operate after 1989, with most musicians fleeing into exile and the remainder
losing their homes and neighborhoods in 1992–1993. In the early 2000s, however, some
returned to Kabul, and the Music Initiative engaged six ustads to teach at the premises
of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture as part of the Music Initiative’s Ustâd-Shâgird Music
Training Program, launched in 2003.
Conclusions and Research Methodology
What can be learned from the foregoing case studies about the nature of revivals of
musical life and the methods of researching them? Each situation that induces a musi-
cal revival to occur possesses some distinctive attributes, based on its unique local cul-
ture and its musicians’ and dancers’ responses to the particular reasons necessitating
the revival, such as a natural disaster or a war. For the people in a culture to be able
to revive their performing arts after a major disaster, they need help to overcome their
emotional problems and trauma, as well as receiving government and corporate assis-
tance to rebuild their homes and the roads, bridges, and other infrastructure on which
they depend. Researchers who try to conduct fieldwork in a society after a disaster need
either to find ways to help in the reconstruction or to stay away lest they contribute
further to the chaos. Thus, each research project into a particular case of postdisaster
revival requires a partly different research methodology.
For example, the revivals after the tsunami in Aceh differed from the revivals after the
peace agreement. The Acehnese experience of the tsunami resulted in a revival of the
traditional laments and associated music and dance and in the organization of annual
commemoration ceremonies that therapeutically enabled survivors to cope with their
shock, grief, and bewilderment. It also led the Acehnese to introspectively re-examine
their existing military stalemate, a process that helped them end the war. The revival of
musical life after the peace accord less than a year later expressed their feelings of relief
and joy as they resumed family life, their children’s general and musical education, their
life event ceremonies, and the government-run festivals and competitions.
Unlike the Acehnese, the Sri Lankans did not find a way to end the war soon after
their experience of the tsunami tragedy, but they responded in part by reviving some old
melodies and composing new ones set to new texts about the horror and grief brought
by the tsunami that helped overcome their trauma. After the war ended, the Sinhala
gladly resumed their family celebrations with the traditional performances of music and
dance, unlike many of the Tamils, who in 2011 were still living in camps and detention
centers and showed few signs that they were psychologically ready to revive their musi-
cal culture.
In warring Afghanistan, revivals of traditional music and dance have occurred in
some safe havens that assist orphans and other children, as well as adults, to gain ther-
apeutic solace through music and that encourage the revival of musical life through
family celebrations in both rural and urban areas. Due to the efforts of individuals,
NGOs, and multilateral governments, music schools at the primary, secondary, and
tertiary level are being established, and the holdings of the Radio Kabul archive are
being conserved. In the neighboring peaceful Central Asian republics, by contrast,
revivals of some long-neglected genres of traditional music and dance are being led
by private and government agencies, with burgeoning social consequences in these
countries themselves and with increasing exposure and appreciation among foreign
audiences.
The case studies presented in this chapter have the following implications for research
methodology (where relevant):
First, the type of disaster or neglect that is being recovered from needs to be analyzed,
together with its causes.
Second, data needs to be gathered about the uses made of old repertoire and the devel-
opment of new creations in the process of the revival.
Third, research needs to be conducted into any efforts made to build up the morale
of the survivors via the arts, especially the most vulnerable and traumatized of
all—children, former child soldiers, women, ex-combatants, political prisoners,
refugees, and internally displaced people.
Fourth, investigations are needed into any efforts made to develop an arts education
system for all social classes (especially the underprivileged), and to establish
long-term educational institutions for arts training of children and teenagers.
Fifth, the foregoing case studies suggest that the revival of musical life as a strong
cultural voice in a society that has been weakened by war, natural disaster, reli-
gious bans on all music, or neglect is likely to be successful if well-planned strate-
gies, such as peace maintenance campaigns, are implemented by governments,
NGOs, local private or commercial bodies, artistic leaders, and individual artists.
Research into these bodies, indeed into all the stakeholders, needs to be made to
see whether and how they can collaborate with each other to rebuild the artistic
infrastructure.
Sixth, researchers need to examine efforts made to detraumatize and reintegrate victims
of war fatigue into society and the workplace, including ex-combatant men and
women, widowed spouses and orphans, and members of any government-run,
arts-led campaign that is launched to maintain the peace and provide therapeu-
tic arts-based programs to ameliorate the physical and psychological sufferings of
the victims. Indeed, a peace accord that ends a lengthy war, especially a guerrilla
war, may have a limited chance of success unless the respective government orga-
nizes such a campaign—able to help prevent ex-combatants from slipping back
into their old habits and resuming fighting, as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka did
following the 2004 tsunami and the several subsequent efforts to stop the war. As
has been noted, a relatively successful government campaign for reconciliation
and reconstruction was carried out in Aceh in 2008, involving hundreds of art-
ists who created and presented appropriate songs, dances, films, and other forms
of artistic expression for use in schools and places of worship, at public events, in
commercial arts outlets, and by the media.
Seventh, in order to understand how a society in revival mode is coping with the
trauma and social disruption caused by war, natural disaster, enforced bans on all
music, or neglect, scholars also need to compare the cultures of performance with
any relevant past revivals, whether at home or abroad. In other words, researchers
need to observe and analyze the amount of energy that the whole society in the
postdisaster or postneglect period now devotes to the performing arts compared
to the predisaster periods or periods of neglect. They need to observe any increase
or decrease in the rate of family celebrations in villages and suburbs, festivals,
and government art functions. In addition, they need to assess whether and how
aspects of musical life that have been damaged by the disasters are being amelio-
rated or corrected, how artists may be adapting existing items of music, dance,
theater, and film to the new situation, how they may have learned to externalize
and express their traumatic experiences in new artistic creations or by developing
old works, and how they may even have changed direction entirely in the process
of revival and revitalization.
Notes
1. Personal communications from Ibu Cut Asiah, head of an arts school and troupe
in Meulaboh; Ibu Bupati Aceh Besar Leila Daud in Jantho; and Dr. Syam, head of the
Department of Education and Culture in Meulaboh (2008).
2. This account is based largely on personal testimonies, 2005–2009.
3. Children suffering from posttraumatic disorder learnt to heal through a unique play and
art therapy approach to treatment developed by the child-centered community develop-
ment agency Plan Australia, in partnership with the Indonesian Psychological Association
(Himpunan Psikologi Indonesia; HIMPSI). Using songs, games, drawing, and role-playing,
the therapy helped children relax so that they could start to understand and accept what
had happened and move forward, socially and emotionally. Volunteer trainees, many of
whom were camp residents themselves and therefore had a special understanding of the
children, were specially trained with HIMPSI to decide what needed to be done to rebuild
the children’s lives and helped train the next team of volunteers in psychosocial trauma
counselling. Plan Australia provided ongoing support for the children after moving to
their newly constructed villages.
4. The policy was to try to connect the children with family members, but there were some
unscrupulous child operators. International adoption is banned. Only one Indonesian
university trains social workers (Jerome and Rubin 2005).
5. Sakata was head of a project to preserve Radio Afghanistan’s Archives.
6. Doubleday acted as coperformer and producer of the CD Afghanistan—Women Musicians
of Herat (2002).
7. Revival of Afghan Music is a project of the Monash Asia Institute and the Sir Zelman
Cowen School of Music at Monash University, Melbourne.
8. SSPDA stands for Sustainable Peace and Development in Aceh; BAPPENAS stands for
Badan Perencanaan dan Pembangunan Nasional (National Planning and Development
Body).
References
Anon. 2008. “Terms of Reference Album Lagu-lagu Perdamaian Aceh.” Typescript with AMAN
Album Dame Aceh [Album of Songs for Peace in Aceh]. SSPDA-BAPPENAS 2.
Anupama Ranawana. 2010. “Re-imagining Sri Lanka Post-War.” http://groundviews.
org/2010/05/23/re-imagining-sri-lanka-post-war.
Baily, John. 2001. “Can You Stop the Birds Singing?” The Censorship of Music in Afghanistan.
Copenhagen: Freemuse. http://www.freemuse.org.
——. 2004. “Music Censorship in Afghanistan before and after the Taliban.” In Shoot the Singer!
Music Censorship Today, edited by Marie Korpe, 19–28. London: Zed Books.
——. 2009. “Rebuilding Kabul’s Art Music Culture in the Post-Taliban Era.” In Musik in
Fremdwahrnehmung, edited by Michael Schramm, 125–136. Bonn: Militärmusikdienst der
Bundeswehr.
Bannister, Roland. 2002. “How Are We to Write Our Music History? Perspectives on the
Historiography of Military Music.” Musicology Australia 25 (1): 1–20.
Doubleday, Veronica. 2005. Liner notes to Abdul Wahab Madadi, Veronica Doubleday, and
John Baily, Sweet Nomad Girl: Folk Music from Afghanistan. MetierWorld MW 360–01.
Gilbert, Martin. 1996. The Boys Triumph over Adversity: The Story of 732 Young Concentration
Camp Survivors. London: Orion.
Harrison, Klisala. 2008. “Heart of the City: Music of Community Change in Vancouver, British
Columbia’s Downtown Eastside.” Ph.D. diss., York University, Toronto.
Hume, Tim. 2009. “Back from the Brink: The Remarkable Recovery of Aceh.” Age (Melbourne),
December 26: 17–18.
Jerome, Richard, and Courtney Rubin. 2005. “The Children of the Tsunami.” Archive 63 (23)
(June 13). http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20147894,00.html.
Kartomi, Margaret. 2010. “Toward a Methodology of War and Peace Studies in
Ethnomusicology: The Case of Aceh, 1976–2009.” Ethnomusicology 54 (3): 452–483.
——. 2014. “Responses to War and Tsunami Trauma through the Musical Arts in Aceh, 2005–
2012.” Wacana Seni Journal of Arts Discourse 13.
Lambers, William. 2010. “Food with Education Is the Key to Afghanistan’s Future.” http://blog-
critics.org/culture/article/food-with-education-is-the-key/.
McDonald, D. 2010. “Music, Folklore, and Nationalism among Palestinian Refugees in Amman,
Jordan (2003–2005).” Bloomington, IN: EVIA Digital Archive.
Pettan, Svanibor, ed. 1998. Music, Politics, and War: Views from Croatia. Zagreb: Institute of
Ethnology and Folklore Research.
——, 2010. “Applied Ethnomusicology: Bridging Research and Action.” Music and Arts in
Action 2 (2): 90–93.
——, 2011. “Encounter with ‘The Others from Within’: The Case of Gypsy Musicians in Former
Yugoslavia.” In Roots Music, edited by Mark DeWitt, 459–478. Aldershot, England: Ashgate.
Rofi, Abdur. 2006. “Tsunami Mortality and Displacement in Aceh, Indonesia.” Disaster 30
(3): 340–350.
Sakakeeny, Matt. 2010. “‘Under the Bridge’: An Orientation to Soundscapes in New Orleans.”
Sarmast, Ahmed. 2006. “Music in Afghanistan Today: A Report on Fieldwork Conducted in
Late 2005.” http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/mai/files/2012/07/Afghan-Music-Report.pdf.
Uning, Dara Meutia. 2009. “Female Ex-combatants’ Reintegration into Post-conflict
Aceh: Women at the Periphery.” Paper presented at the International Conference on Aceh
and Indian Ocean Studies II, Banda Aceh, February 23–24.
Vignato, Silvia. 2009. “Different Orphans: An Ethnography of Children in Aceh.” Paper pre-
sented at the International Conference on Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies II, Banda Aceh,
February 23–24.
Ng, Wang Feng. 2005. “Music Therapy, War Trauma, and Peace: A Singaporean Perspective.”
Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy 5 (3). https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/
article/view/231/175.
Discs Cited
Afghanistan—Women Musicians of Herat. 2002. Produced by Veronica Doubleday. UNESCO
Traditional Music of the World Collection. Naïve.
AMAN Album Dame Aceh [Album of Songs for Peace in Aceh]. 2008. SSPDA-BAPPENAS 2.
Rafly. 2007. Atjeh Loen Sayang: Rafly Special Edition. VCD, Menara Millennium Record.
Films Cited
CV Layarkaca Intervision. 2006. Nyanyian Tsunami—Tsunami Song. Komoditi Production
House, with assistance from Studio Kampung Mulia.
National Geographic. 2005. Meusare-sare—Working Together.
PA R T V I
I N N OVAT ION S A N D
T R A N SF OR M AT ION S
C HA P T E R 18
I N N O VAT I O N A N D C U LT U R A L
AC T I V I S M T H R O U G H T H E
R E I M AG I N E D PA S T S O F
F I N N I S H M U S I C R E V I VA L S
J U N I PE R H I L L
Music-cultures inevitably undergo many cycles of change. Some of these transforma-

tions may be indirect results of larger social processes—for example, in Finland, impe-
rialism, religious proselytization, migration, urbanization, industrialization, and mass
media led to declines in many folk music practices and to popularization of new musi-
cal styles. Other transformations are the direct result of intentional strategies to con-
trol change, such as Finland’s nationalist movement and numerous revival endeavors.
Revival efforts, as a conscious response to change, may, in some cases, “forc[e]‌a con-
servative, regressive pattern on a cultural form that had always changed and developed”
(Baumann 1996: 3). In other words, in some instances, a revival movement may be one
of humankind’s strategies through which “stasis and purity are asserted . . . against his-
torical forces of movement and contamination” (Clifford 1997: 7). However, despite the
rhetoric and pretense of preserving or restoring the old, revivals almost always end up
transforming that which is revived and creating something new (see Rosenberg 1993;
Slobin 1983: 37). Indeed, Livingston asserts that one of the primary purposes of a revival
movement is “to serve as cultural opposition and as an alternative to mainstream cul-
ture” (1999: 68), and Wallace maintains that revitalization movements are a deliberate,
organized, conscious effort to construct a more satisfying culture and to establish a new
cultural system (1956: 265). I view revival movements as a form of cultural activism that
uses elements from the past to legitimate change—change comprising not only rever-
sion to past practices, but innovation. In this essay, I examine cycles of revival activities
in Finnish folk music to illustrate how the past is reimagined in new ways to innovate
and create sociocultural and artistic alternatives in the present.
394 Juniper Hill
Borrowing from the past can be useful in a number of ways. It provides inspiration
and source materials. It allows activists to wield historical continuity as a means of gen-
erating legitimacy, authority, and support as they depart from contemporary norms. It
allows change to be disguised as conservativism and preservation—which is why the
term revival, though not an accurate or literal description of the process, may be useful
for maintaining the perception of re-creating the past. When elements from the past
are borrowed, they are chosen selectively. This is partly of necessity—particularly in
the case of orally transmitted musical traditions before recording technology, docu-
mentation is extremely incomplete, necessitating extensive invention and imagina-
tion. The selective lens through which the past is viewed and represented may also be
strategically focused in order to support the agenda of the activists, as well as shaped
by contemporary aesthetics and value systems—thus we see the past reimagined and
rerepresented in many different ways by different groups in different, or even the same,
time periods.
As elements of past musical traditions are invoked and put to use in the present,
they are decontextualized from their original music-cultures and recontextualized
into new sociocultural settings. Decontextualization can provide many freedoms—
freedom from original communal and cultural constraints, freedom to ignore cer-
tain aspects of the tradition that do not suit contemporary tastes or needs, as well
as freedom to reinvent and imagine (or borrow from abroad) what has been lost to
history. At the same time, the process of recontextualization brings new demands. If
revivalist-activists want to obtain the legitimacy and authority necessary for achieving
public acceptance and governmental or institutional support for the cultural and musi-
cal changes they introduce, they may need to establish authenticity. Furthermore, when
revived traditions are introduced into new cultural contexts, they are often taken up by
performers who are relative outsiders to the tradition; even if they are from the same
ethnicity or nationality, they are often from a different geographical region, social class,
or time period. This outsider status creates the need—particularly for “outsiders” wish-
ing to become bearers and innovators of the tradition—for legitimacy, which may be
asserted by establishing authenticity. Authenticity, though often naturalized and essen-
tialized, is a means of judging a performance or performer based on a set of selective
criteria determined by revivalists, scholars, or members of the community in which
the revival occurs. These criteria are ideals and may be product oriented (as in text,
melody, style, instrumentation, dress, etc.) or process oriented (as in lifestyle, transmis-
sion methods, and improvisation practices). In any case, these ideals and authenticity
criteria are strategically transformed with each revival cycle, each time the past is rei-
magined. If successful, the activist activities that draw on the past for inspiration and
legitimacy may result in the establishment of a new subculture, cultural movement, or
cultural alternative.
In Finland, there have been numerous large-scale and smaller-scale revival activi-
ties, each invoking and reimagining the past in a slightly different way and each
resulting in new cultural streams. The most influential revival endeavors from the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the Romantic Nationalist and Public
INNOVATION AND ACTIVISM THROUGH REIMAGINED PASTS IN FINLAND 395
Enlightenment movements. The Romantic Nationalist revival of Finnish mythol-

ogy from epic songs was used to bolster a burgeoning national identity and spur a
new nationalist art and literature movement, while the Public Enlightenment move-
ment’s revival of “beautified” folk dancing was part of a strategy to “civilize” the
Finnish people. Examples from the second half of the twentieth century abound. The
Folk Music Movement beginning in 1968 was a primarily rural amateur revival of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiddle and accordion dance music (pelimanni
music), which helped to rejuvenate depressed rural economies and led to so much
grassroots music-making that Laitinen (2003b) dubbed it the “great therapeutic pro-
cess.” Also beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s, a burgeoning interest in so-called
ancient folk music traditions led to experimentation with sung oral poetry and
ancient instruments, such as small kanteles (zithers), jouhikko (bowed lute), and var-
ious shepherd flutes and horns, resulting in much new research, the development
and refinement of modernized versions of these instruments, and a strain of experi-
mental folk musicians interested in “the ancient as avant-garde.” Developing out of
(and at times reacting against) these multiple layers of revival activities, the 1980s
saw the successful entrance of contemporary folk music bands on the international
world music market and the establishment of the Folk Music Department at the pres-
tigious Sibelius Academy, offering the first tertiary-level professional training in folk
music. This department instigated many processes, including: the revival of several
traditions that had been lost and not yet revived; the re-revival of traditions accord-
ing to ideals and values that differed from previous revivals; and the development
of nykykansanmusiikki, or “contemporary folk music,” which includes newly com-
posed, improvised, and arranged music as well as a folk music avant-garde.
Most of these revival activities are now, in the early twenty-first century, in a post-
revival state (though newer small counter-revivals are still afoot). The Romantic
Nationalist movement achieved its nation-building goals, and its artistic products
have firmly established places in public school curricula, national museums, and the
public imagination. Amateur folk musicians across the country continue to partici-
pate in a plethora of folk festivals and civic folk musician organizations. Professional
contemporary folk musicians develop their individual artistry with state and institu-
tional support.
Since Finland’s folk music revival activities are too rich and numerous for me to
discuss them all in detail in this short essay, I will focus on three case studies: (1) the
Romantic Nationalist use of narrative folk song; (2) the amateur folk music revival of
pelimanni music; and (3) the use of ancient music by academy musicians to create per-
sonally expressive, experimental, or avant-garde folk music. These three revivals rep-
resent different historical eras and different activist agendas, yet each illustrates the
manipulation of the past for creating change in the present, and each has left a legacy
that can be seen and heard in Finland today. For each of these cases, I will illustrate the
revivalists’ activist goals, the ways they selectively appropriated and reimagined the past
according to specific ideals (and new designations of authenticity), and the cultural and
musical changes and innovations they effected.
396 Juniper Hill
The Romantic Nationalist Transformation

of Epic Songs
One of the most profound and powerful re-presentations of the past to shape the future
occurred during the Romantic Nationalist movement. Finland was under Swedish rule
from the twelfth century until 1809, and then under Russian rule until finally achiev-
ing independence in 1917. During the period of Russian rule, the czar wanted Finns to
develop an identity independent of Swedes so that the Finns would not side with Sweden
in border disputes and thereby serve as a more effective buffer between Russia and the
Swedish empire. Thus encouraged by the czar, and further inspired by the ideology of
Herder and the Romantic Nationalist movements sweeping through Europe, Romantic
Nationalism flourished in Finland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Finnish intellectuals embraced the ideas of the German philosopher Gottfried von
Herder about the embodiment of the national soul in rural folk traditions and the need
for a nation’s political state and artistic expressions to be rooted in and developed out
of its own national (ethnic/racial) heritage (Wilson 1976). Thus, Finnish nationalistic
folklorists were delighted when they discovered a surviving tradition of narrative poetic
singing, or runo-singing, among peasants in the eastern borderland regions of Karelia
and Ingria. They interpreted the poetic texts in this oral tradition as being extremely
ancient. The earliest documentation of runo-singing was by disapproving clergy in the
sixteenth century, but some folklorists have theorized that some of the songs are as old
as two thousand or even four thousand years (see Anttonen and Kuusi 1999: 19–20;
Hautala 1969: 11–12; Kuusi, Bosley, and Branch 1997: 44–46). Nationalistic folklorists
also interpreted the songs as being of distinctly Finnish heritage (as opposed to being
appropriated from neighboring peoples) and as representations of ancient Finnish his-
tory and cosmology (Wilson 1975).
Runo-songs narrate—in trochaic tetrameter with much alliteration and parallel-
ism—creation stories and legends about heroes, shamans, and demigods. The same sys-
tem of runo-singing was also used for spells, wedding and funeral laments, agricultural
and hunting songs, and lyrical songs. Some of these songs were sacred; some were for
entertainment. Many songs express a pre-Christian Finnish cosmology, while others
reflect later Christian beliefs. The tradition died out in the seventeenth century in west-
ern Finland due to Protestant suppression and the influx of new song types from the
west, but in the nineteenth century runo-singing was still practiced in villages in the east
that were both more isolated and under the jurisdiction of the more lenient Orthodox
Church. (Listen to audio example 18.1 for a wax cylinder field recording of a runo-song
made in a Karelian village in 1915 .)
Dozens of educated folklorists undertook expeditions to rural Karelian and Ingrian
villages to collect the texts of runo-songs. Thousands of collected runo-song texts were
eventually archived and published in various compilations by the Finnish Literary
Society, which was founded in 1831 to support national(ist) folklore research. (See
Web Figure 18.1 for folklorist A. O. Väisänen’s handwritten transcription of a Karelian

runo-song, and see Web Figure 18.2 for the version of this song that was published by the
Finnish Literary Society .)
Scholarly documentation was not the only, or even the primary, goal of many of these
folklorists. In 1817, a lecturer in Finnish at the University of Helsinki proposed:
If . . . the young authors in Finland . . . would take an active interest in the production

of their native country, and try to cultivate and develop their native literature—what
a field would be open to their endeavours! . . . If one should collect the old national
songs and make a systematic whole out of them, be it an epos, drama, or whatever it
may be, then there might come about a new Homer, Ossian, or Nibelungen Lied; and
the Finnish nation would be glorified with the splendour and renown of its original-
ity, in the consciousness of its own development, and would arouse the admiration of
the present generation and of generations to come.
(Carl Axel Gottlund quoted in Alphonso-Karkala 1986: 21)
A group of scholar-activists embraced the idea that peasant runo-songs could be

reshaped into a national epic, which would be equal in greatness to the Greek and
European epics and thus demonstrate to the Finns and to the world the great ancient
heritage of the Finnish people. Scholars such as Reinhold von Becker and Zacharis
Topelius Sr. laid some of the groundwork in their collection and arrangement of
runo-songs (ibid.), but the gauntlet was taken up by Elias Lönnrot, a young circuit phy-
sician who traveled the countryside visiting patients and often learning songs from
them. (See Figure 18.1 for a drawing of Lönnrot.) Extensively collecting song texts in
the field, Lönnrot began compiling them into a gigantic epic that became known as the
Kalevala (referring to the land of the pre-Christian Finnic god Kaleva). He completed
the so-called proto-Kalevala in 1833, the first edition proper of the Kalevala in 1835, the
final edition in 1859, and the school edition in 1862.
Lönnrot’s Kalevala took episodic narrative songs, collected from numerous differ-
ent traditional singers, telling individual stories about the various exploits of legendary
shamans and heroes and combined them into a single long saga with a cohesive plot
structure. Some folklorists of the time believed that this effort was reconstructing a pre-
viously existing historical epic that had since fragmented into smaller stories—an exam-
ple of how they reimagined the Finnish past according to their contemporary hopes and
aspirations. In addition to structuring and compiling the song text, Lönnrot made sev-
eral changes. He explained: “I was convinced . . . that I had the same right that I was con-
vinced the singers took, namely, to arrange the poems in the order they thought best . . . .
I considered myself a singer, as good as they themselves were” (quoted in Gay 1997: 64).
Indeed, Lönnrot was extremely knowledgeable about and skilled in working with the
runo-song poetic language; his variations and additions were faithful to the tradition
at the level of poetic line and prosody, and individual variations were common among
traditional runo-singers. However, he also innovated and broke from the tradition in
many ways.1 Some of his changes made the material more accessible to the Finnish
urban audience who had been previously unfamiliar with the runo-song tradition: he
398 Juniper Hill
FIGURE 18.1 A drawing of Elias Lönnrot traveling through the countryside, by A. W.
Linsén, 1847. (Provided courtesy of the Finnish Literary Society.)
standardized and homogenized the dialect and added descriptions of characters and
places that were unnecessary to Karelian and Ingrian peasant audiences who had grown
up with this mythology. Other changes reflect Lönnrot’s educated European Romantic
aesthetics: He added emotive moods and settings and incorporated some influences
from other European epics. Some changes—such as the elimination of “later” Christian
elements—supported his desire to present an ancient Finnish cosmology.2 Most notice-
ably, Lönnrot transformed an oral song tradition into a written poetic tradition and dis-
seminated it to a new audience.3
This transformation of runo-song from an oral tradition to written literature, and
its widespread dissemination, had multiple and far-ranging impacts. Many folklorists
in Finland were patriots and activists, and they disseminated their interpretations of
Lönnrot’s interpretation of the runo-song tradition very widely through educational
materials, public speeches, and articles in the popular press (Wilson 1975). In addition to
Lönnrot’s classroom version of the Kalevala (1862), Zachris Topelius’s general textbook
and reader (1876), a staple in Finnish education from the 1880s onward, taught students
about the Kalevala, instilling national pride for their ancient heritage in generations
of Finns:
Everywhere the opinion prevails that the Kalevala is one of the most significant
products of folklore ever created, and Finland is considered fortunate to be in its pos-
session. For such a collection of folklore as the Kalevala is unequaled in all the world.
It depicts the characteristics of the Finnish people and although it contains much
that seems pagan and strange to us today, it expresses nonetheless a deep wisdom, a
simple beauty, and a stirring love of native land.
(Topelius quoted in DuBois 1996: 277–278)
Before independence, interpretations of the Kalevala and its thematic and mythologi-
cal content played a large role in the nation-building project, bolstering national iden-
tity and national pride, which were legitimized by this presentation of a grand ancient
Finnish history. From Independence up until World War II, both right-wing and
left-wing patriots continued to draw on the Kalevala in their public political rhetoric
(see Wilson 1975, 1976). Linked to this flourishing nationalism, the Kalevala also pro-
vided thematic source material for a revival of pre-Christian Finnish mythology in
Finnish Romantic Nationalist literature, painting, and art music.
Traditional runo-singers in Karelia were also impacted by the activities of enthusias-
tic folklorists and their dissemination of the printed Kalevala and related educational
materials and song collections. Though more research needs to be done on this area,
DuBois (1996) demonstrates how some versions of Lönnrot’s verses re-entered the oral
tradition in Karelia, and Asplund (1994) notes how collectors’ work and invitations from
elites for traditional singers to perform for them brought a higher status and some mon-
etary remuneration to traditional singers.
Generations later, the profound influence of these revival activities is still read-
ily observable. In addition to fueling the struggle for national sovereignty, the
nineteenth-century reimagination of Finnish mythology filled the national literary,
artistic, and musical canons. The Kalevala is still taught in public schools and contin-
ues to shape the public understanding of Finnish heritage and folklore among the gen-
eral Finnish populace. The Kalevala still serves as inspiration for art and popular music,
including even heavy metal (see Jaakkola and Toivonen 2005). Finnish scholars and art-
ists (after a break during the Soviet period) still go on field expeditions to villages in
Russian Karelia to collect songs and be inspired (see Hill 2007: 58–64 and many of the
publications by the Juminkeko Institute for Karelian Culture).
These transformed notions of Finnishness, new works of art, and political gains were
shaped in no small way by the activist efforts of folklorists who transformed traditional
materials and reimagined the past according to their own ideals, aesthetics, and
400 Juniper Hill
aspirations. The revivalist-folklorists succeeded in helping to shape an alternative cul-

ture that became part of future mainstream culture.
Pelimanni Music and the Rejuvenation of

Rural Culture
This next case study of old traditions reshaped in strategic cultural change concerns
the revival of amateur dance music. Pelimannit is the Finnish term for musicians, pri-
marily fiddlers or accordionists, who play instrumental dance music with western/
central European influences. Their repertoire may include polskas, minuets, waltzes,
polonaises, polkas, mazurkas, marches, quadrilles, schottisches, and foxtrots. Dating
from the seventeenth century through the 1940s, pelimanni music is considered a “new
tradition” (in comparison to the older runo-singing tradition). While similar dance
music in neighboring Scandinavian countries (such as the polska in Sweden) received
Nationalist attention and was accorded national symbolic value, Finnish Romantic
Nationalist scholars largely ignored pelimanni music in favor of the more “ancient”
kalevalaic runo-singing (Laitinen 2003c). Thus, before its revival, pelimanni music was
largely unregulated, unstandardized, and relatively under-researched. It made its way
into commercial recordings and radio broadcasts in the early twentieth century and, up
through the 1940s, was generally perceived as local dance music. A shift in terminology
in the 1950s relabeling the old popular dance music “folk music” (Kolehmainen 1994)
preceded the massive pelimanni music revival that took off in the late 1960s.
The rejuvenation of rural culture and economy was one of the primary motivations
and functions of the pelimanni revival. Finland experienced relatively late and rapid
urbanization and industrialization, which left many rural areas depopulated, depressed,
and in some cases depleted of civic services. In some areas, even post offices and schools
were closed, and many cultural activities moved to larger urban centers such as Helsinki
(Heikki Laitinen, interview, June 18, 2004, Helsinki). The Kaustinen Folk Music Festival,
which kickstarted the revival boom in 1968, was started in part as a strategy for boosting
the local economy. As Ramnarine explains, it “was interlinked with attempts to promote
the region of Ostrobothnia [in western Finland] in a climate in which local groups per-
ceived the capital as exerting too much power over local interests” (2003: 52). The direc-
tor of the Association of the Central Ostrobothnia Region, Viljo Määtälä, and the chair
of the Association of Finnishness, Erkki Salonen, organized a conference titled “Region
in a Changing Society,” which resulted in a competition launched by a regional newspa-
per for readers to suggest ideas on how to promote the region economically and cultur-
ally (52). Inspired by a local resident’s visit to the Llangollen International Eisteddfod in
Wales, as well as the village of Kaustinen’s uniquely thriving fiddling tradition and his-
tory of successful agricultural markets, it was decided that an international folk festival
should be held in Kaustinen.
Unlike parallel folk revivals in the United States and Sweden from which Finnish
revivalists drew inspiration, this folk music revival was not motivated by left-wing
political aspirations or associated with any youth movement. The average participants
tended to be more nationalistic and middle-aged (Kurkela 1994 argues that several
Romantic Nationalist beliefs continued through the Finnish folk music revival). There
have also been some indirect affiliations with center-right political parties. As one infor-
mant (who wished to remain anonymous) explained to me, several of the Kaustinen
Folk Music Festival’s organizers and overseers have been from the Farmers’ Party (now
called the Central Party), and despite the official apolitical stance of the festival, organiz-
ers sometimes have felt pressure to appease or cater to certain public officials in order to
receive funding.
The organizers of the first folk music festival held in Kaustinen in 1968 were well con-
nected with the national media, and instead of the estimated two thousand, twenty
thousand people registered to attend (Saha and Westerholm 1987). (See Figure 18.2 and
Web Figures 18.3 and 18.4 for photographs taken during the festival’s early years .)
Over the following five years, folk music activities around Finland mushroomed: Over
eight hundred folk music festivals sprang up around the country; many organizations
were founded, including the Folk Music Institute and Folk Music League; research and
educational projects were initiated; and an unprecedented number of amateur musi-
cians across the country picked up instruments and started to play and compose.
These revival activities seem to have succeeded for many years as a strategy for rural
economic and cultural rejuvenation in the region of Ostrobothnia. Four decades after
its founding, the Kaustinen Folk Music Festival continued as one of the largest festivals
in Finland; attendance was estimated at 121,000 in 2007 and 117,000 in 2008 (Finland
Festivals 2011). In addition to bringing increased business to local accommodation,
food, transportation, and other service industries, the festival and its related organiza-
tions have provided jobs and led to increased local and regional sales and income tax
revenues.4
The pelimanni revival also led to a cultural rejuvenation of another sort: mass ama-
teur performing and composing—a remarkable phenomenon in a modern Western
society in which stage performances and the creative act of composing are usually the
reserve of conservatory-trained art musicians or professional commercial pop musi-
cians. Old dance musicians who had put away their instruments received new acclaim
as folk musicians. Moreover, large numbers of untrained and low-skilled musicians had
the opportunity to perform on important stages and began composing. This wide-scale
composing was strongly encouraged by two figures, Konsta Jylhä and Erkki Ala-Könni.
Jylhä was the great media star and principal role model of the pelimanni revival. He and
his band, the Kaustisen Purppuripelimannit, had risen to national acclaim in the decade
and a half before the pelimanni revival boom, appearing on national radio and televi-
sion and receiving acknowledgment from the president of Finland. A local fiddler from
Kaustinen, Jylhä was a prolific composer of pelimanni tunes (Saha and Westerholm
1987; Kolehmainen 1994). (See the photo in Web Figure 18.5 and listen to audio exam-
ples 18.2 and 18.3 of Jylhä playing the fiddle .) Professor Erkki Ala-Könni was the
402 Juniper Hill
FIGURE 18.2 A large group of pelimanni musicians play together at the Kaustinen Folk
Music Festival. Photograph by Erkki Ala-Könni, Kaustinen, 1971. (Provided courtesy of the
University of Tampere Folklife Archives.)
foremost expert on—and indeed one of the few researchers of—pelimanni music. The
definition of folk music that he extolled to revivalists allowed for the composition of new
folk tunes. Coming from his position of authority, his permission and encouragement to
compose, together with the resources he made available to revivalists and the examples
of his own compositions, were highly influential in encouraging and enabling amateur
newcomers to the pelimanni tradition to begin composing. (See web Figure 18.6 for a
photo of Ala-Könni working with a farmer pelimanni musician ).
The resultant creativity has been described by the former director of the Folk Music
Institute in Kaustinen as “one of the most significant chapters in the music history of
Finland” (Laitinen 2003a: 169). Laitinen emphasizes the significance of this phenom-
enon of mass amateur creativity:
In the beginning of the 1970s occurred something unspeakable, that in a culture in

which composing had been transferred into its own specialized institutions as the
distinct right of fortified specialists, suddenly everyman and everywoman rose to the
stages one after the other and declared themselves composers. It was in a way a mes-
sage from the countryside: “I have the right myself to define my culture.” (221)5
The Folk Music Institute collected more than two thousand new folk music composi-
tions between 1974 and 1987 (Kolehmainen 1994: 40). Thirty years on, the director of the
Folk Music League reported that “young and old pelimannit are very much still compos-
ing their own tunes” (Päivi Utriainen, interview, July 13, 2004, Kaustinen).
Laitinen’s labeling of this mass creative phenomenon as a “therapeutic” process

instead of an artistic process perhaps relates to the relatively low skill level of many of
the participants. Indeed, pelimannit have had a reputation as being poor musicians.
Utriainen confessed that this stereotype continues to trouble the Folk Music League
(interview, July 13, 2004, Kaustinen). The artistic director of the Kaustinen Folk Music
Festival jokingly related: “There were a couple of fiddlers in the village where [my
dad] lived and they were really bad. When [the villagers] started to dance, those guys
played a tune or two tunes and then usually the dancers asked, ‘stop playing, just keep
a beat in your feet, it’s easier’ [laughter]” (Jyrki Heiskanen, interview, July 14, 2004,
Kaustinen).
In actuality, the pelimannit involved in the folk music revival were a very diverse
group. They included a small but important number of highly skilled musicians who
had grown up in the oral tradition and were honored as “master pelimannit.” They
included numerous amateur musicians, some who had studied in the Western art music
style at school, some who were completely self-taught, and some who would eventually
drift from folk music into rock. They also included a few professional classical musi-
cians who played folk music as a hobby. Performance practices ranged from reading
music from notation to oral transmission, and from composition and variation to
faithfully following the melodies as published in sheet music. Repertoire ranged from
eighteenth-century polska wedding music to 1940s U.S.-influenced jenkka tunes (after
"Yankee," otherwise known as foxtrots). However, one common practice that developed
during the revival was ensemble playing.
Although some instances of pelimanni ensemble playing occurred historically in cer-
tain locales, the pelimanni tradition was primarily a solo tradition (first a solo fiddler,
and in more recent history a solo accordionist). When Konsta Jylhä and his four-piece
band of two fiddles, harmonium, and double bass gained prominence, they became the
primary role model for newcomers to the tradition. New pelimanni bands with simi-
lar instrumentation sprang up across the country, even though such ensembles had
not been a part of the local tradition in many areas. Large groups known as pelimanni
yhdistykset (folk musician organizations) with anywhere from a dozen to over a hun-
dred fiddlers also became popular, with many civic organizations, workers leagues, and
municipalities sponsoring their own pelimanni organizations. These large ensembles
were probably inspired by the Swedish spelmanslaget that had been popular in Sweden
for decades.6
Large ensemble playing necessitated certain changes in performance practice.
Variation—which several scholars have emphasized as folk music’s single most essen-
tial characteristic (Saha 1996; Ala-Könni cited in Laitinen 2003a: 168)—becomes hard
to hear, hard to teach, and much less aesthetically pleasing in groups with over one hun-
dred fiddlers. Even the practice of individual members composing, which may be easily
incorporated into the repertoire of a three- or four-piece band, becomes less practical
when large groups of pelimanni musicians with little rehearsal time are looking for com-
mon repertoire to play together. In addition, even though the repertoire consists almost
entirely of dance music, such ensembles almost never play for dancers.
404 Juniper Hill
Large pelimanni ensembles serve other purposes. Mauno Järvelä explained to me some
of the ideology behind the large pelimanni ensembles that he teaches and directs. Järvelä
is from a highly respected family of folk musicians in the Kaustinen area; he learned orally
from his father and taught his sons. He is well known and respected in the pelimanni
music world as a dedicated music educator and ensemble director. (See Web Figure 18.7
for a photo of Järvelä’s Näppäri ensemble ). Järvelä maintains that music, like sport-
ing events, can provide an opportunity for diverse members of the community to come
together. Having people of all ages and skill levels playing music together can have posi-
tive effects on society, increasing social harmony and allowing people to overcome their
differences and bridge social barriers. Playing together is also a good way to get young
people and newcomers enthusiastic about music, since it is more fun than practicing by
oneself. Järvelä concludes idealistically: “when one gets a group to play and sing together
a lot—and this was also Lönnrot’s idea—that where there is a lot of playing then there
is no crime. Lönnrot made this observation in his travels around Karelia. In simpli-
fied words, through playing even wars end” (interview, July 2007, Kaustinen). Thus, the
pelimanni revival introduced important new musical practices to the instrumental folk
music of western Finland, including rural festivals, unprecedented amateur composing,
and large ensemble playing. These new practices served many aims: enhancing cultur-
ally and economically depressed rural areas, strengthening local and regional identity
and culture outside the central urban capital, fostering non-elitist public participation
in music-making and composing, and facilitating societal unity. Many of these activities
still continue more than four decades after the pelimanni revival movement began.
Ancient Music as Departure for

Experimental Improvisation and
Personal Expression
In this final case study, we see ancient music becoming a springboard for both personal
expression and avant-garde music. The lack of documentation and knowledge about the
earliest layers of traditional music has required more extensive use of the imagination
and experimentation to re-create the past. This fact, combined with a growing aware-
ness of the limitations set by previous folk music revivals and a frustration with the lack
of creative opportunities in contemporary Western music circles, led to profound inno-
vations and fed into the development of an alternative music subculture known as “con-
temporary folk music” (nykykansanmusiikki).7
Finnish “ancient” music is a broad category, encompassing the instrumental tradi-
tions of the five-string kantele (zither), the jouhikko (bowed lyre), and a variety of wood-
winds often associated with shepherding, including flutes, simple trumpets, and reed
instruments. Ancient music also includes the vocal traditions of kalevala-metered
runo-songs, laments, and herding calls. Considered to predate the Western influences
that filtered into Finland during Swedish imperialism and Christianization, these music
cultures rather have ties to the east. They are shared with or similar to the music of Finnic
cultures around the eastern Baltic Sea rim, including Karelian, Ingrian, and Estonian.
A few contemporary musicians perceive ancient music as encompassing thousands of
years of traditions stretching from time immemorial. (See video 18.1 for an imaginative
re-creation of Finnish Stone Age music .)
By the second half of the twentieth century, ancient traditions were virtually mori-
bund. Old instruments could be seen in museums but were rarely heard. Large concert
kanteles were played, but no one played the older, smaller kanteles. One of the last sur-
viving traditional jouhikko players, Juho Villanen, passed away in 1927. Only one known
shepherd flutist from neighboring Ingria, Teppo Repo (1886–1962), survived into the
twentieth century. With the exception of the kalevala-style epic songs discussed ear-
lier, a relatively small amount of research and documentation was done on these tra-
ditions. Though the scholar Armas Otto Väisänen (1890–1969) made important field
collections (e.g., Väisänen 1928), much about these traditions remains undocumented
and unknown—and indeed unknowable, except perhaps through experimentation and
imagination.
In the 1970s and 1980s, an interest in performing the older Finnish traditions began
to grow. Following international trends in free jazz and folk rock fusion, bands such
as Karelia (founded 1970) and Piirpauke (1974) began experimenting with old Karelian
melodies, initially playing them on jazz and rock instruments, then on traditional
instruments as they became more available (Rauno Nieminen, interview, July 3, 2004,
Haapavesi; Austerlitz 2005). The ensemble Primo, short for Primitive Music Orchestra,
was founded in 1979 with the purpose of exploring old kalevala-style music on old
instruments through improvisation. These initial projects awoke a greater interest in the
ancient traditions and set a precedent for approaching them through exploration and
experimentation.
Three men active as performers, scholars, and educators, Heikki Laitinen, Hannu
Saha, and Rauno Nieminen, were influential in creating and making available impor-
tant resources for the revival of ancient music. They taught short courses in the older
traditions at the Kaustinen Folk Music Institute and summer camps; published books
on how to play and build the five-string kantele, the jouhikko, and shepherd flutes; and
served as role models as performers in the band Primo and in other projects. Nieminen,
a skilled luthier, also made instruments available to musicians, copying and develop-
ing the instruments he found in museums, and trained new luthiers. (See Figure 18.3
for a photo of Nieminen and a jouhikko he built.) In the 1980s, these activists carried
out an ambitious project to provide a small kantele for every school in the country, as
well as teacher training (Laitinen, interviews, June 18, 2004, and October 1, 2008,
Helsinki; Saha, interview, October 7, 2008, Helsinki; Nieminen, interview, July 3, 2004,
Haapavesi). The establishment in 1983 of the Folk Music Department at the prestigious
and influential Sibelius Academy tremendously impacted the revival of ancient music.
The department’s first leader, Heikki Laitinen, explained that one of their initial goals
“was to restore this historical folk music, since it has been missing from Finland . . . what
406 Juniper Hill
is found in the archives. In that manner, each student would become something of a
researcher” (interview, June 18, 2004, Helsinki).
Despite these efforts in instrument building, archival researching, and how-to book
publishing, many contemporary musicians felt that insufficient historical materials were
available to create artistically satisfying performances. As early music scholar Richard
Taruskin has observed,
music has to be imaginatively recreated in order to be retrieved . . . . [The] historical

reconstruction of Messiah can only invoke the pastness of the past . . . unless it derives
its sustenance not only from whatever evidence musicological research may provide,
but from imaginative leaps that will fill in the gaps research by its very nature must
leave. Otherwise we will have not a performance but a documentation of the state of
knowledge.
(Taruskin 1982: 343)
An important ideological shift occurred in the 1970s and 1980s that helped legitimize
the use of the imagination as a historically authentic way of (re)creating ancient music.
The publication of Albert Lord’s Singer of Tales (1960), with its theory of oral compo-
sition explaining the creative processes of Yugoslavian and Homeric epic singing,
hugely impacted Finnish folklore intellectual circles. Folklorist Anneli Asplund, Heikki
Laitinen, and others formed a group called the Nelipolviset (The Tetrametereds) with the
goal of learning how to (re)create runo-songs in the moment of performance according
to what they now perceived to be the traditional oral creative process (Asplund, inter-
view, May 27, 2004, Helsinki; Laitinen, personal e-mail, 2005; see also Hill 2005: 125–127
and Asplund 2010). The criterion of authenticity shifted from the final musical sound
product to the creative process.8 Many contemporary folk musicians set out to explore,
experience, and embody the creative processes of historical folk musicians and to create
their own music in the process.
Arja Kastinen and Leena Joutsenlahti are professional contemporary folk musicians who
have undertaken personal journeys and experimental artistic research to go more deeply
into the traditions of small kanteles and shepherd flutes, respectively, trying to re-create
historically authentic processes of personal expression and improvisation. Kastinen has
been particularly inspired by descriptions of historical kantele players who were “playing
their own power.” In her concert programs and album liner notes (Iro, 1995), Kastinen has
quoted the following journal entry from historian O. A. Hainari’s 1882 field trip:
We wanted to hear a kantele player from Lahti Village near Lake Säämäjärvi whose
skill had been praised. After playing a few dances, the man fell silent, claiming that he
knew no more. We left him in peace and thought that he had been praised for noth-
ing. The kantele player was forgotten. He sat alone in a corner with his kantele on his
lap staring out ahead of him. Gradually, he began to play softly, at times faster with a
greater display of feeling and warmth, at others so softly that he was barely audible.
When we then said that that was exactly what we had been wanting to hear and asked
what it was, he said that it was nothing, that he had just been playing his own “power”
FIGURE 18.3 Luthier and revivalist Rauno Nieminen plays his handmade jouhikko (bowed
lyre) at the site where the last known traditional jouhikko player, Juho Villanen, was photo-
graphed. (Photograph by Juniper Hill, Savonranta, 2004.)
[mahtia—an old term often used in connection with shamans]. Then we let him be
in peace, each going about our own business. But the kantele player, no longer asked
any questions and being left to his own devices, played throughout the evening, and
what a pleasure it was to listen to him.
(Hainari cited in liner notes to Kastinen 1995 from Relander 1917)
There are unfortunately no transcriptions or recordings of the lengthy solo impro-

visations as described above (most of the archive recordings of kantele players are of
408 Juniper Hill
relatively short dance tunes). So Kastinen has done her best to enter into the same state
of mind, creative process, and approach toward music as these elusive early kantele sha-
mans who “played their own power.” She explains:
The tradition was dead, completely dead . . . . I was trying to understand the ideol-
ogy of this music: What can this kind of music be that you play with a pretty sim-
ple instrument with only a few strings and you can play it for hours without getting
fed up with it yourself? . . . And so I started to play music with this instrument. But
because I don’t have any recordings of that music and because those people said that
they were playing their own power [mahtia] . . . I thought that if I tried to play like
someone else has played then I’m not playing my own power anymore, so I have to
find my own music.
(Kastinen, interview, November 9, 2003, Helsinki)
Kastinen describes how she made her own improvisations, reasoning that if she wanted
to “play my own power now” she had to live in the moment and incorporate sounds
from her contemporary life, including musical influences that would not have been
heard by historical players. She concludes that it is necessary to “listen to the inner part
of yourself . . . and let your imagination go” (ibid.). In this manner, Kastinen uses her
understanding of the traditional kantele ideology, approach to music-making, and cre-
ative process in order to go deep into her own personal expression and play her own
music on traditional instruments. The resulting music is considered both historically
and personally authentic. (See the photo in Web Figure 18.8 and listen to audio example
18.4 of Kastinen improvising on kantele .)
Similarly, Leena Joutsenlahti has been working to understand more deeply the cre-
ative processes of the last documented shepherd flute player, Teppo Repo, while simul-
taneously developing her own personal expression through improvisation. Repo was
famous for playing “from his own head” (omasta päästä) as he improvised melodies on
his shepherd flutes. In a series of concerts for her artistic doctoral degree at the Sibelius
Academy Folk Music Department, Joutsenlahti explored different approaches to play-
ing omasta päästä on traditional flutes. Her first concert explored structured and prepre-
pared improvisation. Her second concert experimented with completely unprepared and
unstructured improvisation—literally playing omasta päästä, from her own head in the
moment of performance in the concert. For her third concert, she learned melodies and
motifs composed by Repo and created her own improvisations using these traditional
melodic materials (Joutsenlahti, personal communication, October 3, 2011, Helsinki).
(Watch video example 18.2 to hear Joutsenlahti improvising on shepherd flutes .)
In the liner notes to Joutsenlahti’s solo album Makale, Heikki Laitinen writes:
Makale is a journey: a road and another road . . . . Poised on the forest path with
her pipe is a shepherdess, listening to the echo . . . a matchless teacher of imagina-
tive variation and improvisation . . . . . The life of anyone interested in ancient shep-
herd instruments is not an easy one: the archives are silent, the facts are scattered
far and wide. There is little left to catch hold of. Thus the only alternative is to use
one’s imagination and to journey into the past, to drink in the archaic features of the
Finnish mind . . . . Archaic mindscapes in the modern world. [The piece] “Valssi” is
like a description of this whole journey of the imagination: the coarse, archive sound
of the beginning being molded by the power of imagination into a pure echo of eras
past . . . . It is strange how only the very latest music technology [e.g. loop delay and
studio effects] seems to be able to capture the most archaic sound of all, to accom-
pany the mind on a journey into the past.
(Laitinen, liner notes to Joutsenlahti 1999)
Laitinen’s description of Joutsenlahti’s musical journey is romanticized (presumably

for marketing purposes) yet reveals a fundamental approach to performing music of
the ancient past by trying to enter into a (pre)historic mental/creative state. This under-
scores the importance of combining and supplementing historical research with imagi-
nation, exploration, and personal expression. Joutsenlahti and Kastinen’s work also
manifests one of the primary agendas of the late twentieth-century revival of ancient
music, which was not nation-building or community-building but individual artistic
and creative freedom.
A key factor shaping the revival of ancient music and the development of the con-
temporary folk music scene in general was a growing awareness of and dissatisfaction
with the limitations on creativity and artistic development placed on folk musicians by
previous revival efforts. Contemporary folk musicians whom I interviewed complained,
sometimes bitterly, of the negative stereotypes and public perceptions generated from
the legacy of Romantic Nationalist revivals (see Hill 2009b: 92–95). Hannu Saha cri-
tiques his revival predecessor of the early twentieth century, the Romantic Nationalist
scholar Armas Otto Väisänen, who “did not approve at all of musicians making their
own compositions” and insisted that “they should play old, traditional, valuable music.”
In contrast, Saha and his colleagues “represented complete freedom” and asserted that
“one could do what they wanted in the name of folk music” (Saha, interview, October 7,
2008, Helsinki). Saha elaborates on this difference in ideology:
There was really a change of perspective . . . of the essential nature of the tradition.
In the [early] 1900s it was understood that tradition is that which is found in the
archives . . . and it was old and valued. In contrast, we understood that this did not
necessarily represent authentic culture, because it was just copying a particular
model . . . . Creativity has always been a part of folk culture. In all folk cultures, a per-
son has the right to create from one’s own point of view . . . The nationalist culture did
not understand this side at all. They copied [the tradition], and in a certain way they
also warped it. They wanted to present folk culture slightly from the perspective of
art music, and they called this cultivated . . . . And then after the 1970s we wanted to
return again to the original qualities. (ibid.)
Saha thus discredits earlier revival approaches for at best imitating and at worst warping
the tradition, while legitimating contemporary approaches for embracing the essence of
the tradition, which he defines as creativity.
410 Juniper Hill
Additional activist impulses that further fueled the desire for artistic freedom in folk
music came from a perceived lack of creative opportunities in Western art music educa-
tion and culture. In a paper titled “Why Teach Folk Music?” presented at a seminar of
Finnish music school teachers and administrators, Heikki Laitinen declared that “folk
music is taught and will be taught for the salvation of musical creativity” (1989: 9). He
strongly criticized the Finnish music education system, polemically proclaiming that
“art music is based on the eradication of the creativity on the part of some 50,000 chil-
dren” and that “the music education system is founded on repetition, obedience, subju-
gation and conformity” (10).9 Saha has confessed that both he and Laitinen “explicitly
wanted to offer an alternative music pedagogy to the classical music theory–based stud-
ies” (interview, October 7, 2008, Helsinki). Their ambitious project in the 1980s to pro-
vide five-string kanteles to every school in Finland was one such effort. At the Sibelius
Academy, Laitinen developed several pedagogical techniques for teaching students to
improvise within the traditions, to improvise beyond the traditions, and to overcome
the limitations that were both self-imposed and culturally imposed on students from
being raised in Western music culture.10
The process of developing the curriculum at the Sibelius Academy Folk Music
Department led to a critical questioning of the nature of revived folk music and to a
commitment to the development of artistically free and avant-garde folk music. The
department’s former head reflects:
It was terribly exciting, because all the time we got to imagine everything that should
be [in the curriculum]. One time we had a long discussion . . . about whether impro-
visation belongs in folk music and we decided together that improvisation does
belong in folk music . . . all types of improvisation.
(Laitinen, interview, June 18, 2004, Helsinki)
He elaborates:
This whole process [of developing a five-and-half-year-long folk music curriculum]

was so demanding that it gave rise to an enormous amount of questions, to which
I myself had to invent the answers . . . . I suddenly noticed that it’s really significant
that in all other musical idioms there is an avant-garde, except in folk music. And
I myself had been a classical music avant-gardist when I had studied modern com-
position, classical composition . . . . I started to understand the limitations and pro-
hibitions from the times of the Public Enlightenment. One prohibition was that if
there is old folk music, then it should be kept the same. In other words, it didn’t have
any right to change. And when I noticed that, then it was clear that we had to seek an
avant-garde for folk music and permit it and find it.
(Laitinen, interview, October 1, 2008, Helsinki)
One of the foundational principles of the department became that “there cannot be
any boundaries, rather the folk musician has to be just as free as the jazz musician and
classical musician” (Laitinen, interview, June 18, 2004, Helsinki). In addition to teaching
composition and improvisation in folk music, Laitinen and his colleagues began offer-
ing experimental improvisation courses to encourage folk music students to challenge
all of the boundaries that might be limiting them as folk musicians and as artists (see
Hill 2009b, 2009c). He has also encouraged and served as a primary role model in the
development of a folk music avant-garde.11
The revival of ancient music, with its lack of documentation and need for imagina-
tive and experimental re-creations, has provided particularly rich opportunities for
realizing these aspirations toward increased artistic freedom and personal creativ-
ity. Some artists, like Kastinen and Joutsenlahti, take their creative freedom in more
traditional-sounding veins, while other artists (described below) have gone in more
avant-garde directions. For Laitinen and many of the professional contemporary folk
musicians who studied under him, ancient music and experimental music go hand in
hand. Experimentalism is used as a journey into the ancient, and ancient music is used
as a springboard for the avant-garde. Furthermore, since ancient music may be exotic to
present-day musicians and audiences, it can sometimes be perceived as avant-garde in
and of itself.
Anna-Kaisa Liedes, one of Laitinen’s first students and now a lecturer at the Sibelius
Academy Folk Music Department, is a vocalist who has specialized in the older singing
traditions as well as avant-garde vocal improvisation. In her first concert for her artistic
doctoral studies, entitled “Journeys into the World of Voice-Sound,” she used a variety of
vocal improvisation techniques to explore the birth of human sound, the birth of song,
and the development of voice-sound into song.12 Her exploration of very ancient con-
cepts of the origin of voice, sound, and song—which, considering the lack of documen-
tation, can only be done through imagination and experimentation—was carried out
through very personal, corporeal self-experimentations with the production of sound
in her own body (Liedes 2005). The resulting performance sounded avant-garde and
experimental, particularly in her use of ei-laulu (non-song, i.e., nonmusical) sounds,
but for Liedes it was also a means of connecting with prehistoric song:
At first thought, traditional music and voice-sound improvisation seem to be quite

distant from each other. But going deeper into improvisation, I found there all of
the music that I had experienced or heard as well as many other things that I am
not capable of analyzing. In the minimalism of voice-sound improvisation and
voice-sound composition is a convergence with the old tradition in kalevalaic meter
with few notes. The aesthetics of music-making are the same. I feel that the further
I proceed to the birth source of voice-sound through improvisation, the closer I am
to the original fountainhead of song and music.
(Liedes 2005: 39)
One of the most avant-garde musicians associated with the contemporary folk music
scene is Pekka Westerholm, a luthier and free improviser who builds and develops
traditional Finnish reed instruments, such as the mänkeri, and uses them to play his
own music with his band, the World Mänkeri Orchestra (watch video example 18.3 ).
412 Juniper Hill
Westerholm explained to me that he grew up as a reed player trying to play jazz and
improvise like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, but no matter how much he practiced
he felt that he couldn’t get the right sound, he was just copying and wasn’t playing his
music. Two breakthroughs came for him, first when he met Heikki Laitinen, who taught
him that one can improvise in any type of music (before he had thought it was only
possible to improvise in African-American idioms), and second when he met Rauno
Nieminen, who taught him that he could build his own instruments. After his encoun-
ter with these folk music revivalists, Westerholm started building his own instruments
and playing his own music. The old “primitive” Finnish instruments, he explained, give
him the ability to create his own sounds and to express himself in a way that standard
Western instruments never did. His creative work with ancient instruments is extremely
important to him because it allows him “to get that type of sound that helps me be able
to endure each day” (Westerholm, interview, September 22, 2008, Helsinki). Though his
music sounds like avant-garde free jazz, some consider it to be folk music because it is
created with an omasta päästä process similar to the one that the traditional shepherd
flautist Teppo Repo used (Riitta-Liisa Joutsenlahti, personal communication, February
2004, Nakkila).
Such valuation of personal expression is extremely strong in the contemporary folk
music scene, and has come to be one of the defining characteristics of being a folk musi-
cian, even when one is playing avant-garde music. For example, after an avant-garde
concert of a collaboration between a contemporary folk musician, a classical musician,
and a jazz musician, I asked the folk musician Jouko Kyhälä: “when you are doing free
improvisations with musicians from other musical genres . . . how is that related to folk
music?” He responded:
I feel always when I’m playing that I’m playing folk music. It doesn’t depend on
the context . . . . The idea of music, the way I think of music is coming from folk
music . . . that it should be personal, it should reflect something that comes from your
inside, and all the techniques are just a method of expressing your inner voice and
feeling. So I think that it might sound like we are playing free jazz to someone, but
I still think I am a folk musician . . . . I don’t care then what other people say, I feel it.
(Interview, October 16, 2004, Helsinki)
This transformation to perceiving and valuing folk music as a vehicle for personal
expression, and the concurrent increase in degree of artistic freedom for folk musicians,
developed in Finnish contemporary folk music as a direct result of the conscientious
efforts of revivalists such as Heikki Laitinen, Hannu Saha, and their cohort. As cultural
and musical activists, they had two primary goals: (1) to overcome the rigid attitudes
and negative perceptions of folk music as national symbol that were the legacy of the
Romantic Nationalist and Public Enlightenment movements, and (2) to create an alter-
native musical culture and pedagogy that offered more opportunities for individual cre-
ativity than the existing mainstream Western music culture and education system. Since
contemporary folk musicians selectively chose to judge historical authenticity not on
the sound product or repertoire performed but on the creative process, they were freed
to express themselves and develop their personal artistry while exploring and remain-
ing faithful to what they perceived and asserted to be the essence of the tradition.
Listening to the narratives of contemporary folk music revivalists, it might sound
as though their revival was the only one to value and allow creativity and innovation.
However, the original revivalists from all three case studies discussed here exercised
considerable creativity, from the extensive poetic liberties taken by Elias Lönnrot to the
explosion of amateur pelimanni composing and to the avant-garde improvisations of
Liedes, Westerholm, and Kyhälä. But after the activist agendas of the original revival-
ists were fulfilled and their changes became established, the resulting post-revival music
cultures became standardized, and the degree of innovation decreased—which eventu-
ally generated impetus for the next cycles of activism and revival.
Conclusions
Reimagining the past has been a successful way to create cultural change, and to inspire
and legitimize innovation, throughout the last two centuries of Finnish history. The
Romantic Nationalist and Public Enlightenment activists of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries selected what they valued from the folk tradition (poetic song texts
with pre-Christian mythological content and “beautiful” folk melodies), transformed it
according to their own aesthetics (into great literature and “refined” folk melodies), and
used it to support their agendas of building the Finnish nation and “civilizing” the Finnish
people. The instigators of the amateur pelimanni revival of the late 1960s and 1970s were
motivated to rejuvenate a rural culture that had been decimated by rapid urbanization.
Even though this revival continued to represent many of the nationalist values of the ear-
lier revival, it also created a significant alternative to contemporary mass-mediated cul-
ture by encouraging widespread amateur participation in music performance and music
composition. Small pelimanni ensembles provided an arena for amateurs to engage in
creative activities that were normally within the purview of cultural elites, while large
pelimanni ensembles contributed to social cohesion. At the same time, the seeds were
being sewn for the next folk music revival, which would transform the perception of and
approach to folk music. In the newer “contemporary folk music” scene, completely dif-
ferent aspects of the past were brought forward. The folk creative process, understood as
personal expression using traditional material as a point of departure, came to be seen
as one of the most important defining elements of folk music, and the new criterion for
judging its authenticity. Thus, contrary to those outsiders who might consider the syn-
cretisms and innovations of Finnish contemporary folk music to be less traditional and
less authentic than the folk-costume-wearing, archive-transcription-playing pelimannit
of the earlier revival, Finnish contemporary folk music (post)revivalists consider their
music—no matter how avant-garde—to be even more historically faithful because their
primary criterion of authenticity is creative process.
All of the aforementioned revivalist efforts led to significant innovations: from the
creation of a national literary epic and the Romantic art music pieces based on it to the
414 Juniper Hill
proliferation of networks of folk festivals and civic organizations for amateur folk music
with their own aesthetic of playing pelimanni music and to the free improvisations and
avant-garde experimentations of contemporary folk musicians. And they have all left
legacies that can be seen and heard in the diverse Finnish music soundscape of the
twenty-first century.
Since the efforts of these revivalist-activists have succeeded and resulted in firmly
established, if subcultural, scenes, there is less of a need to emphasize the authenticity
of the revived music to legitimize their cultural and musical changes. Contemporary
folk music has been accepted as a legitimate art form in the larger Finnish musical com-
munity, both at the prestigious Sibelius Academy and the government’s arts council, to
such an extent that twenty-first-century contemporary folk musicians no longer need to
claim historical authenticity to legitimize their musical innovations but instead can be
heard to claim their “artistic right” to make their music the way they want to. However,
small counter-revivals and rerevivals continue to emerge, and the cycle of reimagining
the past to create new futures continues.
Acknowledgments
This essay has been informed by ethnographic field research conducted in Finland
between 2002 and 2012. I would like to thank the many Finnish musicians and scholars
who shared their expertise and artistry with me over the years. I am also grateful for the
support provided for this research by Fulbright IIE, Fulbright CIES, the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation, the Marie Curie Action of the European Community’s Seventh
Framework Program, UCLA, and the Sibelius Academy.
Notes
1. Like many revivalists across different cultures, Lönnrot was accused of being inauthentic
and producing “fakelore.” (See Dundes 1985; Rosenberg, this volume.)
2. See Alphonso-Karkala (1986), DuBois (1993), and Gay (1997) for analyses of Lönnrot’s edi-
torial and creative processes in the creation of the Kalevala.
3. The compilation of runo-song texts into a national epic was not a revival of folk music but
a revival of the folk poetry and mythology originally conveyed through singing. A revival
of runo-singing as a form of music-making would not occur until the 1970s, when a group
of performing folklorists would try to enter into the traditional process and re-create
runo-songs as a living tradition (see Hill 2005: 126; Asplund 2010).
4. Studies on the economic impact of the Kaustinen Festival have been carried out, for exam-
ple, by Tohmo (2002) and Haaga Instituutti (2007).
5. All quotations from Finnish sources are my translation.
6. According to Swedish scholar Krister Malm, the phenomenon of several dozen fiddlers
playing together in unison got its start when hordes of American tourists started arriving
in Sweden and, in the absence of electrical amplification technology, musicians simply

added more players together to gain the volume needed to project to the crowds of tourists
(personal communication, November 2004, Tucson).
7. The performance of ancient Finnish music and avant-garde folk music are overlapping
streams in the broader Finnish contemporary folk music subculture. They represent
the most extreme manifestations of an ideology valuing individual artistic freedom and
authenticity to creative processes that is generally shared by most contemporary folk
musicians. For more on other streams in the contemporary folk scene, such as commer-
cial world music bands, contemporary pelimanni music, jazz-folk and other fusions, see
Ramnarine (2003), Hill (2007), and Austerlitz (2005).
8. Ronström (1996) describes a similar shift from object-oriented to process-oriented music-
making in the Swedish folk revival scene.
9. In 2008, I interviewed various Finnish music education professors and administrators and
asked them if Laitinen’s assessment of Finnish music education was accurate. To my sur-
prise, they agreed that it was, at least back in the 1970s and 1980s. The twenty-first century
has seen some important curricular changes, including the mandatory introduction of
vapaa säestys, or free accompaniment, which requires all music teachers to learn to impro-
vise (and has been challenging to implement, requiring many teacher training courses).
Music education professor Heidi Westerholm believes these changes were brought about
in no small part by the influence of contemporary folk music (personal communication,
November 4, 2011, Helsinki).
10. See Hill (2009a, 2009b, 2009c) for more detailed descriptions of these pedagogical meth-
ods and their impacts.
11. In the Finnish contemporary folk music scene, the term “avant-garde” is often used to
refer to folk music that incorporates atonality, extended techniques, nonharmonic and/or
unmetered improvisation, electronic manipulation, and/or unconventional performance
behavior (which is often influenced by contemporary theater, dance, and performance art).
12. The Finnish word ääni means both “voice” and “sound.” I translate it here as “voice-sound”
in order to maintain this double meaning.
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C HA P T E R 19
R E V I VA L C U R R E N T S A N D
I N N O VAT I O N O N T H E PAT H
FROM PROTEST B OSSA TO
T R O P I C Á L IA
DE N I SE M I L ST E I N
In 1965, Nara Leão, one of the founding members of Brazilian bossa nova, traveled
from Rio de Janeiro to the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia in search of traditional
sounds. On entering the Vila Velha Theater in the city of Salvador, she encountered a
group of young musicians preparing a performance that explored the roots of bossa
nova in the music of Bahia. The show was entitled Nova Bossa Velha, Velha Bossa Nova
(Old New Trend, New Old Trend). Nara was instantly drawn to the musicians and their
songs.1 Her contact with the samba world of Rio’s impoverished neighborhoods had
engaged her with politics and motivated her to incorporate marginalized musical tradi-
tions into her work with bossa nova. Nara had not set out to build a revival movement.
She was, rather, riding along on a revival current that carried her to times and places
outside of the Brazilian musical mainstream.
The musicians that Nara met in Salvador, especially Caetano Veloso, Maria Bethânia,
Gilberto Gil, and Maria de Graça (soon to adopt the name Gal Costa), were poised to
become leading figures in Brazilian popular music. They had boarded the same revival-
ist current as Nara, but they rode along its edge, both because of their peripheral posi-
tion in the Brazilian music world and as members of the avant-garde environment of
Salvador. The fact that Nara hailed from the cultural, political, and economic center of
Brazil shaped how the Bahianos perceived her. In light of this, Caetano retrospectively
described Nara as “an adorable creature of the type that only Rio’s Zona Sul can produce.
One could sense in her the enjoyment of a freedom that has been won with difficulty and
determination. So all her gestures and words seemed to flow out of a direct and serious
realism, but they always came out in a delicate and graceful way” (Veloso 2002: 44–45).
Nara was drawn to Bahia’s culture, and the Bahian musicians were taken by her
cosmopolitan sophistication and openness. This trip to the periphery reflected Nara’s
REVIVAL CURRENTS AND INNOVATION FROM PROTEST BOSSA TO TROPICÁLIA 419
desire to reach beyond bossa nova. But her work was also politically motivated.
Before traveling, Nara had been performing in an antiauthoritarian musical, Show
Opinião, which challenged the regime while celebrating the most traditional music
of the urban and rural underclasses. In a response to the accusation at the time that
her work was subversive, Nara articulated the link between culture and politics that
has supported hers and other revivalist stances: “if singing music about the dramas of
the people, their sadness, their anguish and their happiness is to be subversive, then
I think I cannot escape that basic category. I prefer, however, to be called passionate for
the Brazilian soul, for seeking out the roots of true Brazilian music” (Leão quoted in
Cabral 2001: 70).
In the historical moment when Nara embarked on her voyage, aesthetic choices
consistently interacted with political concerns. As Brazil entered a period of authori-
tarianism that would last from 1964 to 1985, bossa nova roughly divided into two
overlapping groups of musicians: those who went north to the United States to
build the genre alongside jazz musicians and those who stayed in Brazil, most often
grounded by their commitment to leftist social movements. The first group identi-
fied with the bossa nova movement, while the second group belonged to “protest”
or “nationalist bossa” and incorporated political messages and revived sounds and
styles into the original bossa nova style. This group, to which Nara belonged, took
the music beyond “love, smiles, and flowers” to incorporate marginalized voices and
calls for social and political transformation.2 It was the nationalist, Marxist bent of
the social movements in which they participated that led these musicians on a search
for ostensibly authentic cultural manifestations in the music of marginalized urban
and rural populations.
The Bahian group of musicians was firmly rooted in local culture and well versed in
the traditional musics of northeastern Brazil that had inspired bossa nova veterans seek-
ing musical renewal. The sights and sounds must have been refreshing for Nara, as much
for their avant-garde aesthetic as for their grounding in the popular culture of tradition-
ally marginalized populations. In an increasingly commercial music industry, Nara and
her peers perceived musicians who were making or incorporating traditional sounds
as carriers of the authenticity that was lacking in commercial venues. They also ideal-
ized Bahia as the cultural crossroad that had produced the unique diversity of Brazilian
culture.
Nara saw in the Bahianos a group of young, lively, talented musicians ideally situated
to inject new energy to a movement that was suffering under the strain of political repres-
sion and stale musical forms. The Bahian musicians held a different self-conception. The
four were fully conversant with and critical of the national and international musical
soundscape and well on their way to innovating by melding musical influences from a
vast array of sources. Their work reflected an evolving vision of where they fit along the
historical evolution of Brazilian music. In this effort, the show they created positioned
their own songs as the next step in a narrative that moved from traditional to contem-
porary Brazilian popular music (Veloso 1977 [1965]). Nara hailed from Rio de Janeiro,
which combined with São Paulo to form the center of the Brazilian cultural industry.
From the Bahians’ perspective, her appearance on the scene opened the opportunity
420 Denise Milstein
to launch their careers as popular musicians in the national mainstream and possibly
beyond.
The two groups of musicians this essay examines, Bahians and protest bossa musi-
cians, had drifted along on what may be termed a revival current. The two groups
approached revival from such different perspectives that their intersection on common
musical ground produced more misunderstandings than musical consensus. Although
the Bahianos were familiar with the exotifying lens that Rio and São Paulo musicians
applied to the northeast, they were not prepared for being magnified in its focus. In con-
trast to the perception from the center that was bound to label them as exotic northeast-
erners, the members of the group had their eyes trained both on the Brazilian cultural
mainstream and on popular culture in Europe and the United States, especially as
expressed through film and music. They had come of age in the vibrant, avant-garde cul-
tural environment of the University of Bahia. Their training with the local and European
artists and intellectuals who formed that community had equipped them practically and
theoretically to push Brazilian music in innovative directions. The imminent conflict
between center and periphery would produce dissonance but ultimately prove produc-
tive for the evolution of Brazilian music.
One of Nara’s goals on her journey to the Northeast was to find a singer to take over
her role in Show Opinião. The show took audiences through the exercise of cobbling
together a leftist consensus from diverse perspectives. Three characters, a peasant, a
shantytown dweller, and a student, discussed their differences until they came to agree-
ment. When Nara resolved to invite Maria Bethânia to play her role in the Rio de Janeiro
production, she effectively opened the doors for the entire Bahiano group. In a year,
all four had moved to Rio and São Paulo. They entered the music and television indus-
tries through their contacts in the protest bossa and politically engaged theater worlds.
The four had witnessed how protest bossa developed gradually and without major rup-
tures from previous Brazilian musical genres. They also recognized that Nara’s search
built on a continuous effort in the movement to find new voices that could infuse pro-
test bossa with an “authentic” Brazilian sound. As repression against labor and student
leaders increased, protest bossa harnessed those voices to build its legitimacy as the
musical arm of political resistance. However, in a cultural field made increasingly tense
by mass-media-driven competition and deepening authoritarianism, Brazilian popu-
lar music found itself immersed in crisis. This essay describes how that crisis eventu-
ally fueled conflict between musicians identified with protest bossa and the Bahianos.
Revivalism, viewed as a cultural current, provided the threads from which the Bahianos
wove their own musical movement, Tropicália. This innovative, countercultural move-
ment also drew on contemporary, transnational musical influences and grew to chal-
lenge the sound and the evolutionary dynamic of Brazilian popular music.3
Revival and innovation processes interweave in repeating patterns along the history
of Brazilian musical movements. Their interaction was especially fruitful in the history
that evolved from this encounter. The coincidence of Nara’s turn toward marginalized
music with her deepening leftist political consciousness is representative of a wide swath
of her generation of artists. Political and cultural currents led to Nara’s encounter with
the Bahianos and to the historical turning point examined here. The revivalist impetus in
bossa nova serves as a hinge that opens a passage to a new movement in Brazilian music.
More broadly, analysis of the dynamic between revival and innovation in 1960s Brazil
addresses the question of how political crises and transitions shape artistic movements.
In this case study, I identify revival as a current along which musical threads weave in
the creation and dissolution of musical movements. As a current, revival moves musi-
cians to look to spatially and temporally displaced musics in the process of innovation.
The Brazilian revival current initiates in the early twentieth century and runs through
the history that leads from protest bossa to Tropicália. Revival provides threads, or
sounds, that share a space with innovative practices through the life cycles of musical
movements. Encounters and relations in art worlds and transformations in the envi-
ronment in which those art worlds evolve lead musical movements along contingent
paths. In this framework, the analysis of artistic movements must balance between
two extremes in understanding the emergence of innovation. On one hand, attribut-
ing innovation to autonomous creative processes grounded in individual artists ignores
the role of social, political, and economic structures in creating and shaping spaces for
specific types of expression. On the other hand, individual trajectories express agency,
and group dynamics also shape innovation, which leaves some space for maneuvering
at specific historical junctures. The story of revival and innovation evolves in between
these two extremes.
Art transforms as a result of relations in a space that mediates between agency and
structure. Relational approaches in the sociology of art reveal the importance of social
networks in the communities that develop around artistic production. Examining art
worlds without attention to relations among artists, audiences, and mediators would
miss the social aspect of artistic production (Becker 1982). This approach recognizes
that systems of production and aesthetic practices shape one another through the rela-
tions that develop among actors (Peterson and Anand 2004). Institutional settings,
including those that disseminate culture, and their transformations and crises produce
opportunities for style overlaps and determine the survival possibilities of innovative
aesthetic practices, once again, through relations (White and White 1993; White 2008).
This essay discusses how revival currents act as a social catalyst, facilitating the estab-
lishment of collaborative (but also competitive) relations across generations, socioeco-
nomic classes, cultural groups, and regions.
The inception and consolidation of authoritarianism in Brazil through the 1960s
transformed interactions between artistic and social movements. Revival wove in and
out of the relations that musicians established with one another in that context. The
narrative that follows emphasizes the impact of relations on musical movements in the
political, social, and cultural context of 1960s Brazil. This approach demands a broaden-
ing of the notion of revival to explore musical movements that engage in revivalist activ-
ities without producing formal revivals. Definitions that categorize revival as a social
movement shed light on the intersection of political and aesthetic concerns in the search
for new and old sounds (Livingston 1999; Livingston-Isenhour and Garcia 2005: 131–
132). The work of Nara Leão and her protest bossa cohort only partially qualifies as a
422 Denise Milstein
revival of this type. Although they pursued a sense of authenticity and built a musical
alternative to the mainstream, the effort was too diffuse to construct a revival move-
ment. The protest bossa musicians may be categorized as “folk stylists” because they
did not hail from the musical traditions that they worked to perform and disseminate
(Filene 2004: 185–186), but again, their work was too wide-ranging to formally classify
as revivalist. And what about the Bahianos? The narrative that follows demonstrates that
although their work did not conform to the definition of revival as a social movement,
and their individual careers may not be identified with those of folk stylists, they were
riding along the same revivalist current as the protest bossa musicians. That current,
however, deposited them downstream from the protest bossistas, at a different musical
and political juncture.
The outline of a revivalist current as a multidimensional conduit to musical inno-
vation begins to emerge here and will be further articulated in the last section of the
essay. A revivalist current, as opposed to a revivalist movement, carries musicians to the
margins, whether spatially or temporally, in a search for ostensively authentic sounds
that exist outside the mainstream. Although these currents may give rise to full-fledged
revivals, the closest to this case being the Brazilian choro revival (Livingston-Isenhour
and Garcia 2005), they may also serve as bridges to new relations between musicians,
conduits for new musicians to join existing movements, and even potential exits for
musicians wishing to leave a movement. These currents infuse music with old sounds
that drive innovation once displaced from their original contexts. This essay highlights
the presence of all these processes in the Brazilian case. The focus on revivalist currents
in the evolution from bossa nova to Tropicália illuminates the tense but productive rela-
tionship between revival and innovation. The narrative that follows emphasizes pro-
cesses and the flux of relations between artists to examine transformations in ideologies
and identities in the shifting political and cultural context of Brazil in the 1960s.
From Bossa Nova to Tropicália along the

Path of Revival
Nara’s journey to the northeast fit the zigzag pattern between tradition and innovation
that characterized Brazilian cultural development during the first half of the twentieth
century. The process of intercalating a return to tradition with innovative steps for-
ward in musical style was neither new to Brazil nor original to protest bossa. Brazilian
intellectuals had begun to build a modern national identity in the populist surge of the
1920s, when debates within and between artistic disciplines brought issues of authen-
ticity, cultural syncretism, and universality to the fore. Earlier articulations of national
identity had reflected Brazil’s continuing allegiance to its colonial past and denied the
richness of Brazil’s multiethnic heritage, relegating African and indigenous cultures
to a status below that of European culture. The 1920s formulations of national identity
were heavily influenced by contemporary cultural movements in Europe, particularly

post–World War I modernism, with its confidence in the universality of art. The effort
to make that Brazilian identity universally accessible accompanied an assiduous search
for national expressions in art, music, and literature. For musicians, this involved setting
out to record marginal musics and then returning to the dominant center to incorporate
those sounds in the broad compositional norms of classical and art music. Prominent
musicians and intellectuals involved in this effort included Heitor Villa-Lobos, who
incorporated Brazilian folk into his art music, and Mario de Andrade, who collected
and documented rural musics and evolved into a leading figure in Brazilian modern-
ism (Stroud 2008: 11–12).4 The modernist debate initially divided cultural producers into
two camps, one advocating for a pure, more traditional Brazilian identity and the other
building a cosmopolitan but identifiably Brazilian character. The modernists, including
Villa-Lobos and Mario de Andrade, effectively bridged the distinction between these
two positions. This smooth dynamic of change would recur and prevent fractures along
most of the transitions in the history of Brazilian popular music. This modernist move-
ment presents one among multiple examples of how Brazilian unity builds on a syn-
cretic model of national identity (Livingston-Isenhour and Garcia 2005: 180). The 1920s
also set the pattern of combining a reference from the past or from a marginal location
with a forward-looking determination to innovate. Coupled with a capacity to move flu-
idly back and forth between high and popular culture, this approach would propel the
evolution of Brazilian music through the twentieth century (38).
Although this dynamic first developed in “high” art and intellectual circles, by the
1950s it had expanded to popular musicians performing for mass audiences on the radio
and television. The populist Vargas regime that began in 1930 crystallized Brazilian
musical identity by defining samba-song, which had developed from carnival genres,
as national music, and using it to build a ubiquitous musical identity through its dis-
semination on National Radio (McCann 2004: 24; Reily 2000: 5).5 The Brazilian music
industry developed on the backbone of samba-song, which was easier to broadcast and
record than traditional carnival samba. In that context, music that reflected or built a
Brazilian identity gained popularity among Brazilian audiences and encouraged suc-
cessful competition with the foreign music that had dominated the Brazilian market
before the institutionalization of samba (McCann 2004: 14–15). Samba outshone other
genres through the 1930s and 1940s as it settled in and successfully embodied the com-
promise between reflecting national identity and providing a bounded space for inno-
vation. This stability ended when, spurred by the evolution of bossa nova, the 1920s
cultural debates over national identity reemerged.
The mythology of bossa nova suggests that the style developed in the 1950s among a
small group of musicians who, after admiring, following, and collaborating with a pre-
vious generation of singers who had combined samba with jazz, met to experiment in
living rooms and other intimate spaces in southern Rio de Janeiro. Although popular
memory identifies João Gilberto as the mythical founder of the style, published inter-
views with the musicians involved reveal continuity between the fusion of jazz and
samba that was being played in Rio’s nightclubs at the time and the cooler, stylized
424 Denise Milstein
synthesis that came to be called bossa nova (Lyra 2006).6 As Tom Jobim stated in 1966,
“bossa doesn’t have an owner. We are all part of a movement that comes from way
back. It was being defined and rehearsed long before it was baptized” (quoted in Britto
1966: 121–122).
Bossa nova, or “new trend,” was not entirely new, and certainly not autonomous
from Brazilian cultural history. Musics as disparate as traditional northeastern baião,
which builds on a syncopated rhythm and emerged from the meeting of African and
Portuguese sounds in the nineteenth century, and classical impressionism also influ-
enced the genre. Like their modernist predecessors, the bossistas traveled along the
revivalist current, looking back in time and out to the periphery to fuse tradition with
innovation. The style built on the basic structure of samba-song, but bossa musicians
contributed their knowledge of other musics. Bossa vocalists took rhythmic freedom,
relying on the stability of the accompaniment, which was primarily acoustic guitar.
Taking technological changes in amplification in stride, bossistas valued subtle interpre-
tations and intimate tones best captured with microphones.7 Singers almost spoke the
lyrics, and avoided the use of vibrato or excessive ornamentation, consciously moving
away from the flamboyant and dramatic performances then in vogue. Even as the style
incorporated elements of foreign popular and classical musics, it lived up to the nation-
alist expectations prevalent in the 1950s and remained consciously Brazilian, building
on samba and more traditional genres, especially of the northeast (Britto quoted in
Campos 1968: 20).
The time and place in which the “new trend” emerged facilitated its expansion and
dissemination beyond its small founding group. Music was commercialized, produced,
and released in Rio and São Paulo. The economic boom of the Kubitschek administra-
tion accelerated development in the mass media and communication industries; as
radio broadcasting and national television grew, the music industry expanded.8 From
the beginning, music fueled much of television and radio broadcasting; Brazilian
programs mimicked variety shows in the United States and European music festi-
vals. Television became a space where audiences could build personality cults around
popular musicians. Image became as important as sound in fueling the popularity of
musicians. Paralleling the state’s developmentalist drive, bossa matured into the first
Brazilian cultural product readily exportable to the rest of the world (Campos 1968: 48).
By the early 1960s, bossa had reached beyond Brazilian audiences and become popu-
lar internationally—particularly in the United States, where it met with jazz in collabo-
rations between Gilberto, Carlos Lyra, Tom Jobim, and Stan Getz. These collaborations
with U.S. jazz musicians produced the reaction of protest bossa musicians who feared
for the Brazilian identity of the genre.9 The willingness among protest musicians to con-
nect bossa music to social change led to participation in the student movement and
encouraged a return to the revival current. Turning to samba de morro, or samba of the
hill (Rio’s shantytowns are located mostly on hills overlooking the affluent neighbor-
hoods that line the coast), allowed musicians to blend the political drive to bridge class
distinctions with the cultural quest for “authentic” manifestations of Brazilian culture
(Livingston-Isenhour and Garcia 2005: 127–128).10 This turn paralleled both earlier
and contemporary politicized folk revivals in other countries, including the United
States. These types of revivals are characterized by folksingers who reject commercial-
ism, straddle the cultural and political spheres, and use folk songs as a tool of protest
(Rosenberg 1993: 7, 19). Protest bossa branched off from the original bossa nova through
a revivalist reinvention that reproduced Brazil’s pattern of seamless evolution: the intro-
duction of innovation without enforcing exclusive boundaries.11
Breaking the Pattern of Evolution
Protest bossa musicians encountered a broad musical palette when they began explor-
ing the sounds of the shantytowns. Migration to urban centers had accelerated with
the economic exuberance of the Kubitschek period, which produced a steady stream of
northeastern and other musicians to Rio and São Paulo. After a brief struggle to enter
the music industry, a minority assimilated to the musical mainstream enough to suc-
ceed and transcend the distinction between regional and national artists (Sandroni
2001: 84–99).
For protest bossa musicians, the turn away from the promise of success in the
Northern Hemisphere corresponded with new collaborative relationships that tran-
scended socioeconomic class. These musicians pursued popular music in contexts that
linked musicians living in the affluent, coastal neighborhoods of Rio with shantytown
samba musicians, backcountry folksingers, and northeastern traveling musicians.
Collaboration with these musicians and exposure to other politicized artists led pro-
test bossa singers back and forth between unearthing the roots of Brazilian music and
building the communicative potential of their work for political ends. By 1962, protest
bossistas were collaborating with the cultural arm of the student movement, the Popular
Center for Culture (Centro Popular de Cultura; CPC), which brought music, theatre,
and musical theatre to broad audiences. This influential but short-lived organization
brought Communist and radical Catholic students together and looked to a leftist think
tank, the Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies (Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiros;
ISEB), for ideological guidance. A manifesto drawn up by an ISEB sociologist, Carlos
Estevam Martins, articulated the goals of the CPC. In it, Martins posited that only clear
and explicit language could raise consciousness and produce social change, rejecting
less realist perspectives on art and politics that had grown as critiques of the Lukácsian
approach and were prevalent in other politicized cultural movements of the time (Mello
2003: 50). The CPC manifesto thus called on artists to use familiar forms to carry a
revolutionary message to broad audiences. The document produced discussion but
no significant consensus around the call for socialist realism and the notion of art as
a reflection of social relations within a historical materialist framework (Contier 1998;
Demaitre 1966; Garcia 2007).
The CPC standardized politicized artistic production and created a diverse and reviv-
alist cultural façade for the left. Interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as new relations
426 Denise Milstein
across classes, neighborhoods, and regions, also encouraged the effort to revive periph-
eral or past musical styles. In 1964, the regime banned the CPC and intensified repres-
sion against students. However, the authorities were slow to repress leftist cultural
expression not formally linked to social movement organizations, and protest musicians
continued to collaborate across disciplines (Schwarz 1978: 63). Over the next four years,
as the student movement languished underground, artistic production became the
most visible nonviolent resistance to the regime. Without the impetus of formal social
movement organizations, the search for an authentic national identity overshadowed
other tactical concerns and ideological imperatives. Increasing repression and censor-
ship pushed artists away from explicit calls for revolution and toward less risky work
exposing life in the poor, marginalized sectors of Brazilian society. Aesthetically, the
search for authentic roots to Brazilian music in the shantytowns and rural regions of
Brazil undid part of the modernist path that the initial bossa nova had forged and car-
ried into jazz collaborations. The folk canon the musicians sought did not, to borrow
Philip Bohlman’s words, “depend on a preexisting community with primordial roots
or procrustean cultural boundaries” but “formed during a period of cultural ferment”
(1988: 120). Bohlman’s notion of revival illuminates the dynamic of displacement and
its political potential by emphasizing “the dialectic between context and text, which
by definition resolves through change” (120). Traveling along the path of revival thus
produced dialogic songs, with rich communicative potential during a charged political
moment.
This dynamic between text and context structured engagement in Brazilian popular
music and drove Nara Leão to Bahia. The same revival current drove the Bahianos to
Rio. By the time they arrived, they found the musicians who had participated in the
student movement scattered throughout the cultural realm. In 1964 and 1965, Show
Opinião, which was directed by Augusto Boal, a leading figure in the politically com-
mitted artistic world, was the centerpiece of musical resistance. The show presented a
synthesis of the revivalist paths that protest bossa musicians were pursuing. Three main
characters represented the three revolutionary classes of students, workers, and peas-
ants, as envisioned by the extinct CPC. Nara (and later Maria Bethânia) played the role
of a university student with an emerging political consciousness. Second was Zé Kéti,
playing a character much like himself, a samba singer from Rio (Kéti 2000 [1973]: 257).
His songs were grounded in the life of the city’s lower class and became more militant
with his connection to protest bossa. The third actor, João do Vale, also played a char-
acter much like himself, a musician from the class of rural poor. He had traveled to Rio
from a remote northeastern region, singing and working his way across the country.
Like Kéti, he had met bossa musicians in one of the city’s traditional samba venues,
Zicartola.
Kéti and João do Vale maintained protest bossa’s requisite aura of authenticity by con-
forming musically and stylistically to the prevalent stereotypes. The show attempted
to salvage the idealism of cultural progressives regrouping after the 1964 coup d’état.
Through the show, Boal proposed a union of the three classes in solidarity against the
dictatorship but avoided a deeper discussion of Brazilian inequality and class conflicts.
In its search for a unified Brazilian identity, Show Opinião celebrated Brazilian cul-
ture as a rich and diverse patchwork. This image would come apart with the harden-
ing of the regime in 1968. The effort posed a political challenge to military power while
also articulating a progressive, nationalist response to the perceived cultural inva-
sion of Anglo-American music and the internationalization of Brazilian mass culture.
Observations from Brazilian critics who attended convey that the show served as a col-
lective rite of mourning and absolution for the failure of social movements to prevent
the coup (Hollanda 1981: 35). The show played to middle-class sensibilities in a context
that was a far cry from the earlier participative CPC performances in the countryside
(Schwarz 1992: 145).
Between 1964 and 1968, artists whose work had been shaped by the CPC experience
adapted to the hardening regime and diminishing possibilities for expression. Moving
their work to safer venues meant losing the link to marginalized audiences. As radical
activists took up arms, musicals such as Show Opinião struggled to maintain their link to
social movements. Protest bossa could not stand on its own as a form of resistance, and
censorship limited possibilities to support the more radical actions taking place in the
country.
In this context, Maria Bethânia was sent by Nara to act in Show Opinião as an exem-
plar of northeastern culture. The show both adapted to her presence and required
that she reshape her image to fit the stereotype of a northeastern youth. Her hair was
straightened and pulled back to fit a northeastern image, and she donned jeans and a
button-down shirt (Veloso 2002: 44). As she explained in a recent interview,
it’s because I had to be representative of the Brazilian Northeast, a warrior. When

they saw me and heard my voice in the rehearsals, Augusto Boal, my beloved direc-
tor, was the first to demand a strong figure. I even sang in Franciscan sandals to
appear more rural . . . and afterward, people only wanted to see me like that.
(Bethânia quoted in Weinschelbaum 2006: 192–193)
The Bahian singer’s voice was deeper than Nara’s, and her stage presence had a rougher
edge. Bethânia quickly gained prominence in Rio as a new northeastern voice. However,
Bethânia’s background had not been formed by the mythological hotbed of traditional
culture imagined by Brazilian cosmopolitans. The unique racial and ethnic makeup of
Bahia’s capital had originated under the prosperity of the slave trade and sugar industry.
Salvador, which had been Brazil’s capital from 1549 to 1763, held a marginal economic
and political status in relation to Rio and São Paulo by the twentieth century. In the early
1960s, the city was undergoing a cultural renaissance. The conjunction of different eth-
nic groups formed a montage of cultures, easily stereotyped from the outside (by turns
as the spiritual hub of Brazil, as the center of poverty, or as the source of Brazilian music
and dance) and infinitely complex to those living inside it (Albuquerque 1999). In the
mid-twentieth century, the University of Bahia was an enclave for foreign intellectu-
als and artists, who formed an influential community within the city’s already rich cul-
tural circles (Risério 1995). Bahia thus became a center for avant-garde culture, with the
428 Denise Milstein
thriving cultural institutions of the city supporting innovative artistic production and
interdisciplinary collaboration.
The popular music world in Brazil prescribed a path for the Bahianos similar to that
of other musicians from the shantytowns and marginalized regions of the country. For
decades, musicians had trickled down into Rio and São Paulo and struggled to climb
onto the pedestals to authenticity set up in the metropolis. This path explains how
Bethânia willingly adapted her avant-garde, Salvador image to fit the northeastern folk
aesthetic.12 She offered her raw voice to Rio’s leftist intellectual audiences as a reflection
of the cultural capital's notion of authenticity, producing a collective catharsis even as
these audience’s political hopes and projects collapsed under the pressure of authori-
tarianism. She also opened the way for her Bahian peers to access the center of Brazilian
cultural production and the music industry. The reflections of her brother, Caetano
Veloso, indicate that the Bahianos recognized the strategic potential of the opening in
the Rio and São Paulo music worlds and shared a tacit determination to maintain aes-
thetic independence from protest bossa (2002: 44–47).
Show Opinião was the first of a series of politically engaged, revivalist musical shows
in which the Bahianos participated. Most of them drew on Bahian culture and history
to convey a political message and foment a revolutionary national identity. Even as the
entertainment industry built images for the Bahianos around their identities, the art-
ists themselves grew skeptical about the Bahian label and its mix of exoticism, under-
development, and traditionalism. Still, the disjunction between the urban, avant-garde
identities of the Bahianos and the myth constructed by Rio and São Paulo cultural entre-
preneurs would not come to the fore until the Bahians had established themselves.
The Bahians entered the mainstream cultural industry just as the regime began to
harden. While Nara and other members of protest bossa who openly opposed the dicta-
torship were threatened with arrest (Mello 2003: 121), the Brazilian music industry and
mass media continued to expand. These two processes overshadowed what was left of
the antiauthoritarian, grassroots cultural movements that had opposed the dictatorship.
In this context, the Bahianos began to take an alternative path to that pursued by earlier
migrant musicians. Gilberto Gil’s trajectory exemplifies these differences. Within a year
of arriving in São Paulo, Gil received a call from the prominent singer Elis Regina invit-
ing him to present a song on her popular television show O Fino da Bossa. At the per-
formance, he interpreted his own song, “I Came from Bahia” (Eu vim da Bahia), which
described the coexisting liveliness and poverty of Bahia in a style reminiscent of the
more traditional ballads and sambas from the region (Dunn 2001: 59). The performance
was a success, setting Gil at the center of protest bossa.
Gil’s career took a turn in early 1967 when he traveled to the city of Recife in the north-
eastern state of Pernambuco to perform at the Teatro Popular de Nordeste (Gil 1982
[1972]: 63). For a short period before the 1964 coup, Pernambuco’s population had lived
under a democratically elected socialist government. Miguel Arraes, the governor of
the state, had initiated a process of agrarian reform and showed unmitigated support
for unions and community organizations. That experience was a model and focus of
hope for Brazilian leftists. In 1964, Arraes had been forced out of office, imprisoned,
and exiled after refusing to obey the order to renounce his post. For Gil, the encounter
with Pernambuco’s impoverished population and their fresh memory of the possibility
for transformation underlined the necessity for political engagement. Reflecting back to
that moment, Gil commented:
I returned from Recife to Rio with the certainty that something had to be done in
terms of a movement, in terms of integrating those needs that already existed among
Brazilian university students. . . . In truth it was my own attitude, a reflection of a bad
political conscience, trying to mix everything with that confusion in my head that
was protest music, that whole thing about participant music and so on. . . . But soon
I became disillusioned, it became clear very quickly that it wouldn’t work.
(Gil 1982 [1972]: 63–64)
Gil had returned to Rio with the intention of organizing musicians to produce a new
kind of music, using the dominant commercial venues to disseminate a revolution-
ary message. His own experience with mass media and a growing sense of political
urgency led Gil to look for new forms of expression to incorporate to the protest bossa
movement. The move followed the typical dynamic of change in Brazilian culture.
He sought to bring traditional genres to the present by producing a combination of
folk and pop that could be performed on television. Guilherme Araújo, the Bahianos’
agent, collaborated in organizing a meeting that brought together members of pro-
test bossa and the Bahianos (Veloso 1997: 132). Caetano’s description illuminates the
conflictive dynamic between protest bossistas and the northeastern newcomers. Here,
their differing understandings of revival and its role in forging political and aesthetic
transformations come to light. The protest musicians’ opposition to incorporating
rock sounds issued from an anti-imperialist stance that identified rock with cultural
domination. The Bahians on the other hand did not perceive rock music as a political
or cultural threat to Brazilian popular music. Veloso reflected on the meeting in his
autobiographical Tropical Truth:
I do remember this much clearly: Chico—bohemian and wary of programs—would

get drunk and make ironic remarks about what he had barely listened to, while Sérgio
Ricardo would misinterpret Gil’s words. For instance, Gil’s phrase “to be really popu-
lar” moved Sérgio to suggest that we do shows at the entrance[s]‌to factories. Gil had
an awful time trying to make himself understood. Whenever he mentioned rural
music from Pernambuco, one could almost hear someone say that Edu was already
working on that satisfactorily; and when he talked about the Beatles, some lowered
their eyes, others opened them—all mouths were closed. He didn’t dare speak about
Roberto Carlos [a prominent pop singer]. And, after a tense pause, someone would
say something just to show that he had understood it all to be a clever if somewhat
dishonest strategy—and therefore destined to fail: to make music that was more
commercial so it could better serve as a vehicle for revolutionary ideas. In the end,
Gil did not give up trying to make himself understood, even though the others gave
up trying to follow him. It was up to us to go it alone.
(Veloso 2002: 79–80)
430 Denise Milstein
Perceiving the impossibility of coordinating a movement and the incompatibility of aes-

thetic visions, the Bahianos decided to launch their own movement. They followed Gil’s
plan to take popular music beyond the essentialist assumptions of protest musicians and
openly embrace new directions, even if they came from abroad. In their strategies, the
Bahianos took a step beyond the perspective that only explicit antiauthoritarian and
politically engaged expression could serve the interests of Brazilian leftist movements.
Their work placed art on a plane that retained autonomy from social movements while
maintaining a loose commitment to their goals.
By 1967, Veloso and Gil were deepening their relations to avant-garde currents in
music, visual arts, and literature, based in São Paulo. The composer Júlio Medaglia had
connected Gil and the composer Rogério Duprat, who was among the founders of the
new music movement in Brazil. Medaglia and Duprat had both studied with Pierre
Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany. They had returned to Brazil determined
to continue producing art music and open to crossing borders into the realm of popu-
lar music. The New Music Manifesto, which they had drawn up with other composers,
claimed “total commitment to the contemporary world,” “concretism,” acceptance and
use of communications media, and willingness to keep up with international develop-
ments in art. The manifesto ended with Mayakovsky’s words “there is no revolution-
ary art without revolutionary form” (Cozzella et al. 1963). As Gil recalled, “Rogério has,
with respect to art music, a stance quite similar to ours with respect to popular music.
That stance of dissatisfaction with imposed values. He wants to develop art music; he
doesn’t want to limit it in an academic sense” (quoted in Campos 1968: 183–184). The
same year, through Duprat, Gil met and began to collaborate with the Paulista rock band
Os Mutantes (The Mutants). The combined sound of Os Mutantes, Duprat’s arrange-
ments, and Gil’s songs would define the Tropicália musical aesthetic over the next two
years. Revived sounds were there, in Gil’s songs, but in fragmented, collage form. The
revival current had deposited Gil in a place where he could actively incorporate and
interrogate traditional sounds in his songs, surround them with new and pop sounds,
and use poetry to infuse them with surreal, contemporary images.
These collaborative relationships and the beginnings of Tropicália took place behind
closed doors. As a result, Gil lived in anguished conflict during 1967, when he partici-
pated in a television program, Frente Única, that launched and promoted a nationalist
music organization, the United Front of Brazilian Popular Music. The program upheld
Brazilian music, as represented by the protest bossa aesthetic, against pop music. In
the course of a few days, Gil had both marched in a demonstration against electric gui-
tars sponsored by Frente Única and become obsessed with the Beatles’ concept album
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, two activities that appeared incongruous to
him. Participation in the protest bossa movement contradicted his desire to innovate
along the lines suggested by contemporary rock and roll. For nationalist protest musi-
cians, these sounds were signs of cultural infiltration from the North. His instability
reflected the experiences of students, intellectuals, and leftist activists on a broader level.
Disillusionment with the Brazilian Communist Party set Brazilians adrift on a sea of
possibilities, including armed insurgence. By 1967, any goodwill attributed to the regime
had worn off as power was transferred to a hardliner, General Costa e Silva. In the mean-
time, protest bossa and politically engaged theatre were losing ground as forms of cul-
tural resistance (Schwarz 1992: 145). It should come as no surprise that frustrated artists
would radicalize in this tense context.
When Gil’s turn came to anchor Frente Única, he opted to read texts praising Roberto
Carlos, the pop king of the Jovem Guarda group, a commercial movement reviled by
protest musicians. He also invited Bethânia (who by that time had built her own femi-
nine and unmilitant image as diva) to sing with an electric guitar while wearing a mini-
skirt and knee-high boots (Mello 2003: 183). Nationalist and protest fans were outraged.
From that moment onward, a transformed group of Bahianos, led by Caetano and Gil,
burst onto televised festivals with a new, polemical style that combined traditional,
bossa nova, and rock styles, using allegorical, provocative lyrics. The movement was
named Tropicália after an art installation by the neoconcretist artist Hélio Oiticica that
presented a similar critique and celebration of the Brazilian myth. As the movement
grew to include artists across disciplines, Tropicália musicians avoided explicit identifi-
cation with any political current and, as the following paragraphs show, only won audi-
ences to their cause after infuriating them.
The Tropicália movement built a relationship to traditional musics different from that
of their protest bossa predecessors. They deftly incorporated northeastern rhythms, tra-
ditional instruments, and revived song styles in a fragmentary, whimsical fashion. In this
light, revived musics sounded in juxtaposition with electronic, contemporary sounds.
The initial reaction, both from audiences and the cultural workers who had supported
the Bahianos’ rise, was negative. Augusto Boal, wielding his influence as gatekeeper to
the politically engaged artistic sphere, attacked Tropicália for being “neo-romantic,”
“homeopathic,” “inarticulate,” “timid and gentle,” and “imported” (Basualdo 2005: 272–
273). Sérgio Ricardo, a musician identified with protest bossa, called it “an alienating
movement” and lamented that with it “values were pretty much inverted, politics were
forgotten. . . . And the doors opened. And rock came in, the Beatles, McLuhan came in,
all kinds of things” (Barcellos 1994: 399).13
Like other innovative musicians who had entered their respective musical worlds
via folk and traditional sounds, the Bahianos faced a negative reaction that, ironically,
labeled their work as antiprogressive.14 In response to Boal’s and other attacks from
established artists, Veloso presented the song “É proibido proibir” (“It’s forbidden to for-
bid”), which took its title from a widely disseminated 1968 Parisian graffito. The song
did not sound like any previous festival song. The lyrics confronted repression with-
out naming either the regime or nationalist, leftist artists and audiences. By omitting
the direct reference, Caetano opened a space for an interpretation that aligned the two
as enemies of free expression. At the first festival round, the audience, dominated by
militant students, booed and insulted Caetano and Os Mutantes, who were backing his
vocals. By the second round, Caetano had prepared a response. As he describes it,
“É proibido proibir” was transformed, with a little help from Os Mutantes and
Rogério Duprat (who, though not responsible for the orchestral arrangement,
432 Denise Milstein
directed the atonal introduction, reminiscent of Os Mutantes’ concrete and elec-

tronic music), into a highly scandalous piece. My hair was very long and, left to
its own rebellious curliness, seemed like a cross between Hendrix and his British
accompanists from the Experience. I wore plastic clothing in green and black, my
chest covered with thick necklaces made of electrical wires with the plugs hanging at
the ends, and thick chains with animal teeth. . . . After the long introduction—whose
atonality and lack of rhythmic definition provoked some booing—I started to sing
the silly lines (“The virgin’s mother says no / And the TV ad / Was written on the
gate”) and do a kind of dance that consisted entirely of moving my hips to and fro,
although not in the mechanical manner of the Elvis grind, but in the easygoing, sexy
way one observes in Bahian women, or morro samba dancers, or Cuban men and
women. Then, as if that were not enough, the singing and dancing were interrupted
by a recitation of [a]‌Fernando Pessoa poem. . . . To accentuate the contrast, I inverted
the popular saying “the devil is loose,” screaming “God is loose,” as if announcing his
arrival onstage in the guise of an American youth, John Danduran, who was obvi-
ously a gringo, tall, very white, wrapped in a hippie poncho, and without a single hair
anywhere on his body . . . who howled and grunted unintelligibly.
(Veloso 2002: 187–189)
The presentation, which resembled a happening more than the performance of a song,
drew a violent, negative reaction from the audience. Veloso writes that “the audi-
ence . . . made up predominantly of students who were pro-Left nationalists (meaning
anti-imperialists), reacted with violent indignation. Many faces looked at me with evi-
dent hostility, and not a few punctuated the conventional booing with swearing and
insults” (2002: 189). As members of the audience began to turn their backs on Caetano
and Os Mutantes, who were accompanying him, the Mutantes themselves turned their
backs to the audience. It was then that Caetano began his tirade against the audience:
So is this the youth who say they want to take power? . . . You don’t understand any-
thing, anything, anything—nothing at all! . . . The problem is this! You want to police
Brazilian music! . . . But Gil and I already opened the path, so what do you want?
I came here to end this. I want to say to the jury: disqualify me! . . . We [Gil and I]
had the courage to go inside all the structures and leave them all. And you? You, if
you are . . . if you are the same in politics as you are in aesthetics, we’re done for! God
is loose!
(Caetano quoted in Basualdo 2005: 244–245)
Gil echoed Caetano’s sentiment in an interview soon after that performance, saying:
You know the types of people that were there: young people connected with the uni-
versity student movement, with an ideological conditioning for music, a group com-
mitted to social clichés. At the same time, a group that’s reactionary with respect to
aesthetics. It’s contradictory. They’re policed in the political realm and they want to
police the aesthetic realm? Why? It’s wrong, isn’t it?
(Gil 1982 [1968]: 33)
Revival, Disjunctions, Innovations
The history described above begins with a puzzle. How and why did the new recruits to
protest bossa overturn the movement in four years, undoing the history of smooth tran-
sitions that had characterized Brazilian popular music over the previous decades? Why
was music transformed abruptly and not gradually, as had happened in earlier transi-
tions? How and why did the Bahianos establish a different relationship to the state, the
media, and revivalism itself from that of other northeastern migrants? Attention to the
music alone does not answer these questions. Revived sounds are amenable to incorpo-
ration, in continuous or disruptive manners, to popular songs. Folk genres commonly
do combine with rock and produce new movements through incremental steps and
innovations (Burns 2007). Only an appreciation of the social and political context in
which the Bahianos innovated illuminates how their trajectories could lead to unprec-
edented conflict between and among musicians and their audiences. This examination
of the relationship between revival and innovation addresses rupture by recognizing
the dynamics of a revival current that wove through musical movements in a specific
social and political context and carried musicians to different places in the cultural
sphere.
The Tropicália movement was set in motion by the disjunction between central and
peripheral perceptions and interpretations of identities, ideologies, and aesthetic posi-
tions. Veloso aptly articulates the source of the conflict in his description of the Brazilian
illusion surrounding Bahia. His retrospective view on the rupture combines the periph-
eral perspective with an intimate understanding of the cultural center:
there’s this whole mystery, a myth and folklore around Bahia, because Bahia ended
up being like the root, like a place . . . the deepest expression of Brazil, that whole
thing. Because of those elements [ethnic and cultural diversity, colonial history, etc.]
and the mystification that those elements underwent, right? So, in a country [Brazil]
that is basically rootless, if you were to compare any country in America to European
or African countries, you’d notice that America is a tacky place from top to bottom,
in other words, it’s a continent without a past, right? The American past may be
summarized as the extermination of indigenous nations, no? And then of course in
what came after, that is, European colonization, English, Spanish, French, Dutch or
Portuguese, and in the importation of slaves which is a detail of major importance in
this continent of ours. . . . So you have the permanence of a European language, a con-
tinuation, but under different conditions than that of a European culture, you under-
stand? So that creates a damned mess; at the same time you have holes, the American
has holes, all Americans, from Canada to Patagonia, holes for lack of roots, imported
holes, the necessity to affirm a national character artificially, something that doesn’t
happen in Europe, you understand?
(Veloso 1972)
434 Denise Milstein
Revival efforts and the incorporation of revived sounds in music do not emerge sui
generis from inspired artists or independent of historical processes. Rather, persistent
interests in reclaiming a sense of authenticity, often spatially and temporally grounded,
drive revival. The protest bossa musicians in the early 1960s remained aloof to the root-
lessness, fragmentation, and constructed quality of culture that Veloso identified. Moved
by the political crisis in their environment, protest bossistas rode along the revival cur-
rent in pursuit of authenticity and a rich repertoire of sounds. Still, they recognized that
revived sounds, once unhitched from their spatial and temporal origins, may be infused
with new meaning. In this way, they incorporated revived sounds in a conscious effort to
consolidate oppositional identities and politically mobilize their audiences.
The impetus to follow along the thread of revival gave rise to new relations. As this case
shows, the relations forged through revival efforts restructured movements and carried a
symbolic and ideological content that merits analysis. Culture and politics intersected in
the identities that mediated between ideology and aesthetics in the production of music.
But beyond the structure of relations, media institutions added one more layer to the evo-
lution of musical movements. Not just ideology but also aesthetics builds on materially
experienced reality, including the conditions that limit and determine the lives of social
agents (Wolff 1993: 50). Thus, the music and television industries, as well as the trans-
forming political regime, created, cut off, and reshaped paths for revival and innovation
in the careers of musicians. Further, the history described shows how when structures
and institutions impede individual or collective movement, they become the targets of
transformative action. This is also true for genres, which, like institutions, set boundaries
around cultural production. In addition to articulating ideologies, artists forge aesthetic
approaches through collective experience and reflection. Moments of crisis destabilize
identities, sometimes breaking down the boundaries between different social groups, at
other times building them up. Oppositionality, in the Brazilian case, found grounding in
the affinity to “otherness.” This appeal to marginality has been defined (Livingston 1999)
and identified in the U.S. folk revival movement (Feintuch 2006: 13).
The case of Brazilian popular music shows revival not as a movement but as a current
forged through a historical dynamic that repeatedly links revival and innovation and is
always available as a conduit between movements and between present and future. In
this case, looking back in time or out to the periphery in a search for authentic expres-
sions of identity allowed artists to regain footing in crisis contexts. The transition to
authoritarianism facilitated this process by producing a crisis that restructured relations
among artists and between activists and artists. Shifts in the music and television indus-
tries also transformed relations by emphasizing competition and creating new spaces
for dissemination. In this context, those engaged in political resistance used revival to
reconstruct identities with traditions, genres, or simply sounds and symbols that had
become malleable as a result of decontextualization. But malleability has a limit, and
bringing musics forward in time or into the mainstream from a peripheral position also
produces conflict.
In considering that initial encounter between Nara and the Bahianos in the Vila Velha
Theater, this essay opts to frame Nara’s revivalist impulse as the choice to travel along a
revivalist current as opposed to joining or starting a revival movement. That approach

leaves more space for a disjunction of the type described between the protest bossa and
Bahiano perceptions. This disjunction between those looking out from the center and
those looking at the center from the periphery persisted in spite of the awareness, among
all the musicians involved, of the differences in their experiences. Developing a broad
understanding of revival not as a specific movement but as a cultural current brings to
light its role as a key ingredient in the rise of Tropicália in Brazil. This effort calls for
recognizing that the boundaries around the revivalist movements that informed protest
bossa and Tropicália were quite permeable, if not entirely fictitious. Revival currents,
as distinguished from movements, open avenues for innovation rather than recycling
practices or re-creating a fictitious past. However, revival currents in themselves would
not exist without the experience and existence of revival movements, including the criti-
cal practices and perspectives that they produce.
Beyond contributing to understanding rupture in the evolution of musical move-
ments, tracing the thread of revival that interconnected bossa nova and Tropicália
opens the way for a dynamic and nonlinear conceptualization of musical movements.
The inner workings of these historical dynamics center on relations among musicians,
which drive transformations in musical styles through imitation and shared practices.
But political, economic, and cultural crises produce the shifts that lead to new relations.
Thus, the causes of innovation are of two types, operating simultaneously. First, rela-
tions among musicians evolve and produce change in a process endogenous to move-
ments. Second, exogenous causes such as social movements, political change, and media
transformations open spaces for innovation. The two types of causes mingle in revival-
ist currents. Musicians engage in collective reflection and action, building movements
from musical practices, as part of a sociohistorical process. The institutions surrounding
artists, including the state, different types of venues for performance and dissemina-
tion, and in some cases social movements, do not simply provide a structure or context
for action. They exist in dialogic relation with the artist, who on the one hand builds an
identity as realist or idealist “representer” and on the other hand struggles for autonomy
through his or her aesthetic journey. The meaning attached to revival varies according
to the position of the artist within this constellation of actors, institutions, and forces.
Innovation expresses the transformations that result from clashes between identities
and interpretations.15
The Bahianos rose within protest bossa and then countered the musical movement
that had brought them into the fold. They did so with a devastating critique to the notion
of cultural authenticity in Brazil. Their career paths were shaped by the dynamics of the
music world and the political and institutional contexts that surrounded them. Under
different conditions, the Bahianos might have gradually transformed bossa in man-
ageable increments and not by the radical turn that produced controversy and divided
audiences. The fact that one movement—by way of a search for renovation—unex-
pectedly opened the way for an entirely new aesthetic that fundamentally challenged
its own premises is not atypical among processes by which innovation emerges in art
worlds. Revival as a current, rather than as a movement, provided protest bossistas with
436 Denise Milstein
an opportunity for building political legitimacy through a constructed sense of authen-

ticity. For the Bahianos, engagement with the revival current provided the ingredients
for radical innovation. The Brazilian revival current fomented the complex relations
that developed in this environment, including links to marginalized musicians, col-
laboration with an avant-garde musical movement, and conflicts between the Bahianos
and their bossa nova mentors. The effervescent network of artists that resulted pro-
duced transformations in the identities of artists and in their work. In this context, the
Tropicália musicians articulated an answer to the typical challenges of revival move-
ments. By combining the drive to create a universal sound with the willingness to incor-
porate traditional sounds, but doing so irreverently, creatively, and in a fragmented way,
they were able to transcend static notions of authenticity to create a musical environ-
ment open to innovation. They successfully turned the tables on the assumption that
politically engaged art should only reflect social reality or that art, in order to commu-
nicate a political message, must use a fully recognizable language. The Bahianos forged
their own path by embracing revival with whimsy and irreverence, consciously wielding
it as a tool for musical innovation.
Acknowledgments
This essay has benefited from ongoing dialogue with Caroline Bithell, Juniper Hill, and
Sun-Chul Kim. Earlier versions were critiqued by participants in the 2010 Conference
on Politics, Criticism, and the Arts at Vanderbilt University and the 2009 Sociology of
Music Conference organized by the Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical
at the Universidade de Nova Lisboa. I am grateful for these readers’ comments, which
have sharpened the ideas expressed here.
Notes
1. Here and throughout, I refer to artists by the names most often used in historical and con-
temporary sources. In the case of Nara Leão, her first name is consistently used alone in
printed sources. In other cases, such as that of Gilberto Gil, the last name has become the
primary identification.
2. See the discography and videography for examples. See also the website http://tropicalia.
com.br/ (in English at http://tropicalia.com.br/en/) that accompanies Oliveira et al. (2010).
The title of João Gilberto’s second album, released in 1960, was Love, Smiles, and Flowers.
3. Oliveira Filho (2001), a compilation of Brazilian music, covers the musical movements
described in this essay. The selected songs provide a representative view of the historical
evolution of Brazilian music through the twentieth century.
4. The recordings from the Missão de Pesquias Folclóricas released in 2006 (Andrade 2006)
offer a sample of the folk material collected under Mário de Andrade’s direction. The proj-
ect was integral to Brazilian modernists’ interest in folk sounds and revival. See also its
companion website at www.sescsp.org.br/sesc/hotsites/missao/index.html. For a sample of

Villa-Lobos’s compositions, please refer to The Complete Choros and Bachianas Brasileiras
(Villa-Lobos et al. 2009). This compilation illustrates the incorporation of Brazilian folk
sounds in classical music in the work of the composer Heitor Villa-Lobos.
5. For a sample of popular samba songs from the first half of the twentieth century, see Silva
et al. (1998), a compilation that represents the sound promoted as inherent to Brazilian
national identity during the Getulio Vargas populist era.
6. João Gilberto’s album, O amor, o sorriso e a flor, is emblematic of the bossa nova movement
at a time when the sound had settled into the conventions, both musical and lyrical (of love,
smiles, and flowers) that Nara sought to transcend in her travels beyond Rio.
7. Performers initially made this adaptation in the 1930s, in the United States. The bossa
musicians followed the crooner style that emerged in that context (Lockheart 2003).
8. McCann’s research reveals that radio stations nationwide grew from twenty in 1931 to one
hundred in 1941, and three hundred in 1950 (2004: 24). During the period, investment in
television advertising doubled in relation to radio, printed, and other media (based on
research by Dias 2000: 53 and Mattos 1990: 5). The growth of television audiences was even
more impressive and is reflected in the increase of television sets in use from 598,000 in
1960 to 4,584,000 in 1970 (Mattos 1990: 10).
9. The collaborations between Brazilian bossistas and U.S. jazz musicians produced a distinc-
tive sound exemplified in the two albums with Stan Getz cited in the discography (Getz
et al. 1997a, 1997b).
10. The film Orfeu (Diegues et al. 2002) marks the meeting of bossa nova musicians with the
marginalized world of Rio’s favelas and epitomizes the romantic view of it. The bossa nova
songs incorporate and stylize the more traditional samba sounds of the favela.
11. The discography includes three albums that showcase the songs from Show Opinião and
the Protest Bossa movement (Show Opinião 1994; Leão 1965; Leão et al. 1965). These songs
interweave bossa and more traditional Brazilian genres. The lyrics address historical and
contemporary socioeconomic inequalities in Brazil and celebrate freedom, social mobili-
zation, political militancy, and crossclass solidarity.
12. The album Domingo by Gal Costa and Caetano Veloso (1990) reflects the sound the Bahians
adopted on their initial entry to the Rio–São Paulo music scene. The album was recorded
before the Bahians decided to change musical paths.
13. Listen to the following three albums for a broad sample of the Tropicália sound. Tropicália
(Duprat et al. 1993) was Tropicália’s concept album, recorded shortly after the musicians’
controversial live performances of the songs. Tropicália é proibido proibir (Gil et al. 2006)
gathers a diverse set of songs, many of them performed in televised festivals and identified
with the Tropicália movement. In Grande Liquidação (2011), Tom Zé’s take on tropicalism
ventures even further into experimental music than his colleagues’ work does. His songs
proved more challenging to listeners and, though they were less amenable to categoriza-
tion, embodied the spirit of Tropicália. Listen to the podcast and see the accompanying lis-
tener’s guide and further references at http://rwm.macba.cat/en/specials?id_capsula=537
(Pratginestós 2009). Compiled in conjunction with a Tropicália exhibit at the Museum
of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, this website reaches beyond the period described
in this essay and offers the listener a window onto the continued evolution of Tropicália
musicians.
14. Bob Dylan, for example, faced similar reactions beginning with his performance at the
1965 Newport Folk Festival (Denisoff 1983: 127; Filene 2000: 184).
438 Denise Milstein
15. For an overview of the history of Tropicália, see the following recommended films in the
videography. Jom Azulay’s Doces Bárbaros (Azulay et al. 2008, presents the work of the
Bahians in the mid-1970s, tracing the evolution of Tropicália past the period described in
this essay, as the musicians continued innovating on the basis of references to past sounds
and critical, often irreverent notions of national rootedness. La Révolution tropicaliste
(Billon and Dreyfus 2001) describes the evolution of Tropicália and complements some of
the perspectives developed in this essay. Claude Santiago’s film on Tom Zé (Santiago and
Zé 2010) develops a contemporary view of Tom Zé the artist, also highlighting the mecha-
nism at play in the evolution of Tropicália as an innovative movement that builds forward
on the basis of a revival current.
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Getz, Stan, Charlie Byrd, Keter Betts, Gene Byrd, Buddy Deppenschmidt, and Bill Reichenbach.
1997b. Jazz Samba. CD. New York: Verve.
Gil, Gilberto. 1970. “Eu vim da Bahia.” In Maria Bethânia, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Geraldo
Vandré, and Caetano Veloso, M.P.B. espectacular Caetano, Bethania, Gil, Gal, Vandre. LP.
Montevideo, Uruguay: RCA Victor.
Gil, Gilberto, Gal Costa, Caetano Veloso, Jorge Ben, and Tom Zé. 2006. Tropicália é proibido
proibir. CD. London: Soul Jazz Records.
Gilberto, João. 1972. O amor, o sorriso e a flor. LP. São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil: EMI-Odeon.
Leão, Nara. 1965. Opinião de Nara. LP. Rio de Janeiro: Philips.
Leão, Nara, Edu Lobo, and Tamba Trio. 1965. 5 Na Bossai. LP. Rio de Janeiro: Philips.
Show Opinião. 1994. CD. Manaus, Brazil: Philips.
Silva, Orlando, Carmen Miranda, Moreira da Silva, Patricio Teixeira, Silvio Caldas, Guarda
Velha, Breno Ferreira, et al. 1998. Samba 1917–1947. CD. Vincennes, France: Frémeaux &
Associés.
Veloso, Caetano. 1999. “É proibido proibir.” In Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Nara
Leão, and Rogério Duprat. Tropicália essentials. CD. Universal City, CA: Hip-O Records.
Villa-Lobos, Heitor, Catullo da Paixão Cearense, Ruth Valladares Corrêa, Manuel Bandeira,
Anders Miolin, Fábio Zanon, Cláudio Cruz, et al. 2009. The Complete Choros and Bachianas
Brasileiras. CD. Åkersberga, Sweden: BIS.
Zé, Tom. 2011. Grande liquidação. CD. Brighton, East Sussex, England: Mr. Bongo.
Films Cited
Azulay, Jom Tob, Isabel Câmara, Gilberto Gil, Maria Bethânia, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Kati
Almeida Braga, Olivia Hime, Renata Mader, and Sylvia Medeiros. 2008. Os doces bárbaros
Gilberto Gil, Maria Bethânia, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa. Rio de Janeiro: Biscoito Fino.
Diegues, Carlos, Renata Almeida Magalhães, Paula Lavigne, Toni Garrido, Patrícia França, Murilo
Benício, Zezé Motta, and Vinícius de Moraes. 2002. Orfeu. New York: New Yorker Video.
Santiago, Claude, and Tom Zé. 2010. Tom Zé. Paris: la Huit production.
Websites Cited
Pratginestós, Raül G. 2009. “Objeto semi-identificado no pais do futuro: Tropicália and
post-tropicalismo in Brasil (1967–1976).” Podcast. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani
de Barcelona. http://rwm.macba.cat/en/specials?id_capsula=537, accessed August 30, 2013.
A list of further audio, visual, and textual sources and of web links can be found on the com-
panion website .
C HA P T E R 20
BENDING OR BREAKING THE

NAT I V E A M E R I C A N F LU T E
TRADITION?
PAU L A J. C ON LON
The Native flute of the indigenous peoples of North America has undergone many
layers of cultural transformations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Questions arise as to how far the Native flute can travel and still remain connected to
its traditional roots, and where the Native flute will go from here. The tensions and iro-
nies that hover around these questions are much more complex and nuanced than these
questions imply. It is not just about how far or close the Native flute is to its traditional
roots but about how different artists strive to be or are interpreted by others as being tra-
ditional or nontraditional, and how “purists” may in fact be innovators and innovators
may retain elements of the tradition.
To examine these issues, I have divided the Native flute’s journey into four blocks: the
traditional flute up to 1879, the prerevival period from 1880 to the late 1960s, the revival
period from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, and the postrevival period in the first decade
of the twenty-first century. The Native flute was no longer part of everyday Native life
after 1879, when federal laws to suppress Native culture and send Native children to
boarding schools came into effect. The subsequent prerevival period lasted from the
1880s until the mid-twentieth century. By the late 1960s, the early stages of the Native
flute revival had begun, with the flute having been transformed into a public expression
of Native identity. In the mid-1980s, crossfertilization with non-Native music traditions
began to appear, followed by a shift to offering opportunities for non-Natives to learn
to play the flute by the end of the decade. The 1990s saw the advent of female Native
flute players, with increasing non-Native involvement in the inner workings of the
Native flute world by 2000. The postrevival period of the first decade of the twenty-first
century has non-Native flute players, makers, and recording artists at the helm, with
a number of Native flutists still playing an active role. Information is drawn from the
available literature, interviews, and correspondence with Native and non-Native flute
Bending or Breaking the Native American Flute Tradition? 443
players and makers conducted over the course of thirty years, participation at Native
and non-Native workshops between 1996 and 2010, and my own journey from purist
researcher to hands-on flute enthusiast and back again.
Traditional Native Flute—Pre-1880
The Lakota flutist Kevin Locke has suggested delineating the traditional Native flute
as “American Indian,” the legal term for a member of a federally recognized tribe, and
reserving the term “Native American” for its contemporary counterpart (personal com-
munication, Feb. 9, 2011). This designation, however, would still require a common
ground for what is meant by the word “tradition.” The Choctaw ethnomusicologist Tara
Browner separates her Native music courses at the University of California Los Angeles
into two classes, “Traditional North American Indian Music” and “Contemporary
North American Indian Music.” When I asked what music she includes in the tradi-
tional course, she replied that “traditional” refers to tribal-specific forms, essentially
those that existed prior to European contact, and “contemporary” refers to everything
else (personal communication, December 19, 2010).
The ethnomusicologist Beverley Diamond notes that aspects of traditional knowl-
edge in the belief systems of various Native groups emphasize the importance of place,
including environmental sound and the properties of natural materials used for sound
production (2008: 21). During the course of research for my earlier work on the Native
flute (1983), I found information about the construction of the traditional flute and its
music in accounts of flute origin stories from Plains and Eastern Woodlands tribes. It
is difficult, though, to trace precisely how far back the Native flute goes in history. The
earliest date for Native flutes in collections is the 1860s (Hensley 2002: 16), explained in
part by the fact that dates generally refer to the accession date and that Native flutes were
made of compostable wood and often buried with the maker.
Stories of the first love flute contain references to a young man finding a bird, often a
woodpecker, pecking holes in a cedar tree, with the wind rustling through the hollow
wood to “make the branch sing.” Flutes were traditionally made of a straight-grained
wood, preferably cedar because of its ease of carving, its spiritual connotations, and its
image of everlasting life. Links to the origin stories are sometimes portrayed by animal
or bird effigies on the flutes themselves, either at the base of the flute or on the upper sur-
face of the external block that sits on top of the flute (see Figure 20.1).
The ethnomusicologist David McAllester notes that the distinctive external block
sound mechanism makes this type of flute unique to the New World (1980: 307), and the
Navajo-Ute flutist R. Carlos Nakai refers to this type of flute as “the block flute” (Nakai
and DeMars 1996: 7). This ingenious device is the equivalent of the interior whistle
sound mechanism of the European recorder. A plug is inserted inside a hollowed-out
tube of wood near the mouth hole, with a hole on either side of the plug; the external
block guides the air stream across the plug and into the longer vibrating tube with the
444 Paula J. Conlon
FIGURE 20.1 Bird effigy on external block. Flute maker: Timothy Nevaquaya. Private collec-
tion of author. Photograph by author.
Slow air chamber (SAC)

Sound Chamber
Airflow
Breath hole Plug
FIGURE 20.2 External block sound mechanism. Diagram by Clint Goss. Used with
permission.
finger holes. The block is also referred to as a “bird,” “rider,” “jigger,” or “saddle,” due to its
shape. Because of the predominance of the flute and its origin stories in the Plains area,
the Native flute authority Richard Payne calls this type of flute “the Plains flute” (1999)
(see Figure 20.2).
In the southern Plains area, flute players traditionally made their own flutes, fash-
ioned after the bodily dimensions of the maker—the flute was the length of the man’s
arm, the flute’s diameter was the size of his thumb, finger holes were a thumb width
apart, the external block was a hand’s span from the mouth hole end of the flute, and the
first finger hole was a fist width down from the block.
Origin stories describe the Plains flute as having five finger holes, and flutes with five
finger holes continue to be considered as more traditional than flutes with six, the norm
for contemporary flutes. The lowest tone on traditional flutes is frequently highlighted
by an intense vibrato that is built into the flute and considered particularly desirable. The
Sac and Fox-Comanche ethnomusicologist Edward Wapp refers to this warble as “the
secret of good flute makers” (personal communication, August 19, 1982). Grace notes,
usually of an octave or other large interval, often occur between repetitions of the “war-
bling” base tone in traditional flute songs. Ornamental devices also include glissandi
(upward and downward slides), note bending, turns (upper and lower notes), trills, and
a quick release at the ends of phrases. This quick release of the fingers results in a fast, ris-
ing pattern, sometimes referred to as “dog barks.”
In the northern Plains, many Lakota (Sioux) flutes have the carving of a crane with
open beak at the base end, harking back to the story of the first flute. Once a young
Lakota man had proven his skill as a hunter, he could obtain permission to go to a flute
maker, called an elk dreamer, to obtain a courtship flute. Along with the flute, the elk
dreamer provided a flute song and a corresponding vocal love song, based on words spo-
ken by the young woman he wished to court. Melodic fragments are frequently found at
the end of northern Plains courtship songs, varying from one note to a short phrase.
These coda-like motifs are generally high in pitch in imitation of a bird (produced by
overblowing from the lower octave fingering), leading Locke to refer to these fragments
as “bird calls” (personal communication, February 5, 1983).
The ethnologist Willard Rhodes recorded the Lakota flutist John Coloff in the 1950s,
including the flute and vocal renditions of a Lakota love song said to be “the original flute
song.” The English translation of the vocal version is “I am coming in a round-about way.
An important family I seek for myself. I have arrived, I have arrived” (Locke, personal
communication, February 5, 1983). The performance style of traditional Lakota flute songs
reflects the lack of ornamentation in the corresponding vocal love songs, and flute players
made it a practice to learn the vocal counterpart before undertaking the flute rendition.
Origin stories from the southern Plains underline the supernatural power of the love
flute, such as the Kiowa flutist Belo Cozad’s story of a poor Kiowa boy who was given a
flute and a flute song from a spirit and then became “well off, and got [a]‌good woman
and raised children” (Payne 1999: 13). Cozad gave the right to make flutes to Woody
Crumbo of the Potawatomie tribe, who believed the flute was essentially an instrument
of love, advising that the bird carving on the external block should face away from the
mouthpiece to send the flute music outward. To further enhance the flute’s power, four
holes were sometimes carved at the base of it to send the sound to the four directions. To
protect the flute’s power, women and children of the Potawatomie tribe were not permit-
ted to handle or play it, for fear of breaking the love charm. The Comanche tribe also
restricted the flute to male use, “to be put away after marriage for fear of breaking up the
family” (Payne 1999: 22).
446 Paula J. Conlon
Native Flute Prerevival, 1880 to Late 1960s
The ethnomusicologist Tamara Livingston points out that “if a tradition is perceived
to be alive and well, there is no need to revive it” (1999: 67). By the mid-twentieth cen-
tury, however, the Native flute had all the earmarks of a dying tradition. The original use
of the flute by young adult Native males to court their prospective brides went under-
ground in the 1880s when federal governments of the United States and Canada insti-
gated laws to suppress Native ceremonies and cultural expression. These laws included
edicts to send Native children to federal boarding schools, with the goal of assimilation
into mainstream society by placing children in institutions where they were separated
from their relatives and forced to reject Native culture, often from the time they were
five or six years old until they were eighteen or even older.
The Native experience in Oklahoma has a particularly complicated history. Tribes
were removed from other parts of the United States to Indian Territory (present
Oklahoma) from the 1830s through the 1870s. Allotment, the federal policy of divid-
ing communally held tribal land into privately owned property (160 acres per Native
adult) took effect in 1887. The 1889 Land Run, with the provision of “surplus acreage” to
eager settlers, followed by the Curtis Act of 1898 that abolished tribal courts in Indian
Territory, culminated in Oklahoma’s statehood in 1907.
The ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin believes that the word “revival” in its literal
sense—to bring back to life—is largely inapplicable to most musical situations because
expressive culture does not really die; he thinks of it “more as a spiral, changing, but
dipping back along the way” (1983: 37). For example, in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, Native music and dance experienced instances of both non-Native
appropriation and renewed Native interest in performative cultural expression. When
the first generation of boarding school Native children forcibly admitted in the early
1880s graduated as young adults in the latter part of the 1890s, many chose to return
to their reservations over being “assimilated,” sometimes, even often, integrating their
Western music training with Native American practices they had not been privy to for
many years. These “returned students” were accomplished musicians from years of dis-
ciplined training in military-style marching bands and music lessons at Indian boarding
schools. The generation of Native children who had been forcibly sent to federal board-
ing schools for their entire formative years made good use of the intertribal powwow to
reintegrate themselves into their home communities, and in effect spurred the Native
music and dance renaissance of the early twentieth century (Troutman 2009: 39).
The concentration of Native people onto small, confined areas of reservation land
offered ethnologists rare access to Native cultures. The Smithsonian Institution
employee Frances Densmore (1867–1957) was the most prolific, collecting thirty-five
hundred songs, including vocal love songs and their Native flute counterparts, and tran-
scribing twenty-five hundred of these songs for her many publications. Her ability to
find singers reveals that many performative traditions banned by the federal Office of
Indian Affairs had persisted in the memories of Native people. The irony of the situation
was not lost on the Native communities she visited, where singers asked why she, a gov-
ernment worker, was requesting them to perform songs associated with dances the fed-
eral government had forbidden since the 1880s (Troutman 2009: 159–160). Densmore’s
reply that she was preserving their heritage for their children was complicated and
conflicted by the fact that she was simultaneously involved in a plan to introduce her
own version of their songs, in Western notation, to Native students at federal boarding
schools and to the non-Native public.
The non-Native public’s fascination with the “vanishing Indian” around the turn of
the twentieth century was fueled in large measure by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows
and World Fairs. The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where the
Americas’ many nations and peoples were represented, was attended by twenty-eight
million people, nearly half the population of the United States at that time. The Czech
composer Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) published an article in a New York newspaper
after touring the Exhibition, encouraging American composers to look to their folk tra-
ditions to find their nation’s voice. Native people represented the closest relationship
to the American landscape (Troutman 2009: 155), and by 1913 these classical compos-
ers, known as “Indianists,” had written hundreds of Western art music pieces based on
Native themes (Pisani 2005: 184–185). Browner points out the paradoxical discourse
inherent in Indianist music: “making songs accessible to the general public required
changing them to fit into the Western musical system. Thus accessibility contributed to
the degradation of authenticity, the very reason composers sought out Native songs in
the first place” (1997: 279–280).
President Theodore Roosevelt’s public endorsement of The Indians’ Book: Songs and
Legends of the American Indians (1907), by the ethnologist Natalie Curtis, made a strong
impression on Francis Leupp, commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1905 through 1909.
In 1907, Leupp ushered in a new music curriculum for the federal Native boarding
schools, based on Native music collected by ethnologists and works by Indianist com-
posers, far removed from their context in indigenous systems of knowledge. As noted by
Slobin, “in culture, context counts for more than half of meaning” (1983: 37), and Native
families were outraged at the sanitized tribal music being taught to their children in
boarding schools without their consent.
Thurlow Lieurance (1878–1963), an Indianist composer who worked closely with the
Office of Indian Affairs from the 1910s to the 1940s, based his compositions on Native
music he had personally recorded from thirty-three tribes, along with collecting over
forty Native flutes (Hensley 2002: 7). Many of Lieurance’s pieces based on Native music
were derived from flute calls and flute songs he had collected, which affirms that there
were Native flute players who still knew the old songs in the early twentieth century.
At Bacone College in Muscogee, Oklahoma, a Native music component was added
to the curriculum in 1932 when the Creek flutist A. C. Blue Eagle and the Potawatomie
flutist Woody Crumbo, both of whom had been influenced by Kiowa flutist Belo
Cozad, joined the faculty (Payne 2002a: 3). This gave Native students access to Native
flute, taught by Native instructors, in the second quarter of the twentieth century. The
448 Paula J. Conlon
FIGURE 20.3 Doc Payne and his flute collection, 2000. Private home, Oklahoma City.
Photograph by author.
Comanche flutist and artist “Doc Tate” Nevaquaya (1932–1996) heard Native flute for
the first time as a young child at the 1939 American Indian Exposition in Anadarko,
Oklahoma, the year that Kiowa artist and flute player Stephen Mopope was a featured
performer. Nevaquaya recalled that “the sound fascinated me. . . . I heard a lot of stories
about flute music, but even long ago, very few Indian people played it” (1975: n.p.).
A repository for Native flutes in Oklahoma in the mid-twentieth century came
from Dr. Richard W. “Doc” Payne (1918–2004), a non-Native medical doctor born in
Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Payne became interested in collecting Native flutes while still in
high school, and he picked up his hobby again when he returned to Oklahoma on grad-
uation from medical school in Boston; he had also studied classical Western flute at the
Boston Conservatory. Payne taught at the University of Oklahoma’s medical school and
practiced medicine in Oklahoma City, which enabled him to travel around Oklahoma
collecting Native flutes and visiting with Native flute players and makers. He amassed a
collection of over a thousand flutes over the course of his life. (Most of the Payne Native
flute collection was sold individually at auction by his family after his death in 2004.)
(See Figure 20.3.)
The American student movement that began in direct connection with the civil
rights movement in the early 1960s became a new kind of audience for folk music. Their
interest was generated by the broader political and social movement, in which the criti-
cism of a mass, technological culture was of central importance (Eyerman and Jamison
1998: 119). The 1960s also saw the founding of two Native-run civil rights organiza-
tions—the National Indian Youth Council (founded in 1961), and the American Indian
Movement (founded in 1968). Both groups used powwow singing and dancing around
the drum to exhibit Native identity and pride.
Thus, the period of decline and oppression of Native culture that began in the latter
part of the nineteenth century was followed by non-Native collection and appropriation
of Native music and, later, Native civil rights and pride movements, which spurred a
renewed interest in Native music and set the stage for a Native flute revival.
The Native Flute Revival, Late 1960s to

Late 1990s
The ethnomusicologist Max Peter Baumann proposes two models to use as heuristic
devices to help interpret revival music in the context of cultural-political movements,
dividing performing musicians into two categories: “those who define folk music tra-
ditions within the concepts of purism (with a tendency towards stabilizing or even
regressive preservation) and of syncretism (with a tendency towards reinventing the
past by emancipatory creation to the point of breaking the local and regional frontiers)”
(1996: 80). For example, the Native American flute revival began with the activities of
artists perceived as being purists or preservationists and later developed in more syn-
cretic, frontier-breaking directions.
A critical juncture in the early stages of the Native flute revival was the chance meet-
ing of Payne and Nevaquaya at the 1968 Anadarko Exposition. Payne noticed a flute
player in one of Nevaquaya’s paintings, handed him a flute, and asked if he knew how
to play. Payne was amazed at Nevaquaya’s playing, noting it was “just like it should be
played, strong and masculine” (2002b), and the two men became lifelong friends. They
were both firmly rooted in the purist revival model, which accounts for their mutual
agreement about how the Native flute revival should progress. Nevaquaya also pos-
sessed the “charismatic leadership” element of the leader-follower relationship charac-
teristic of revitalization movements (Wallace 1956: 273), later becoming the first Native
musician to give a solo concert in New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1990, and cofounding the
American Indian Cultural Society in 1991 (Conlon 2007: n.p.).
Livingston notes that performers and consumers alike were obsessed with a search
for “authenticity” in the 1970s, in part stimulated by the increased availability of
long-playing record albums (1999: 76). When Comanche Flute Music Played by Doc Tate
Nevaquaya was released in 1979 by the Smithsonian Institution, Nevaquaya received an
official stamp of “authenticity,” and he was named the 1986 National Heritage Fellow by
the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA 1986: n.p.).
The ethnomusicologist Jeff Titon muses that when he joined the Folk Arts Panel in
1981 (an appointed group that advises the NEA on which projects to fund), he was struck
by an “overwhelming irony” (1993: 222). The panel had decided to consider only propos-
als from traditional folk artists, eliminating proposals from revivalists because they had
450 Paula J. Conlon
not grown up inside a traditional family or community. But as he glanced around the
panel, Titon saw mostly “lapsed revivalists” like himself (from the 1960s folk revival),
voting to give money only to nonrevivalists. In the case of Native proposals, there is a
further irony in that the proof of being a traditional folk artist is having your name on a
tribal roll created by the federal government that outlawed your performative traditions
a century before.
Slobin has observed that in most cases of both preservation and change, a small num-
ber of key individuals set the pace and/or serve as source for an entire community, and
this kernel group is often comprised of an activist, a researcher, and a pragmatic practi-
tioner (1983: 39). The release of Nevaquaya’s 1979 album was due to the foresight of the
ethnologist Verna Gillis, who recorded Nevaquaya in 1978 in Oklahoma and presented
the tape to Moses Asch, founder and director of Folkways Records. An added bonus is
the inclusion of Nevaquaya’s verbal introductions to each song, a discussion about the
intricacies of Native flute playing, a demonstration of the characteristic warble on the
flute’s lowest pitch, and four pages of liner notes that contain a diagram of the external
block sound mechanism (Gillis 1979: n.p.).
Earlier in the 1970s, the Comanche singer K. D. Edwards had recorded Nevaquaya
and privately released the tape Indian Flute Songs from Comanche Land (1976), and the
Kiowa-Comanche flutist Tom Mauchahty Ware’s Flute Songs of the Kiowa and Comanche
(1978) was released by Indian House Records. Although these earlier recordings were
not widely distributed, they provide confirmation of the presence of the traditional style
of Native flute playing in Oklahoma advocated by Nevaquaya in his 1979 album. (For an
analysis of these albums, along with ethnologists’ field recordings, see Conlon 1983.)
Along with recordings in the 1970s, the Native flute was increasingly used as live
entertainment in the form of workshops and concerts at both impromptu and more
formal venues. Nevaquaya played his flute at his art booth at events such as the annual
Anadarko Exposition, and soon he was being asked to perform Native flute concerts
and lecture/demonstrations. In 1970, the Smithsonian Institution commissioned him
to perform flute on a Goodwill Tour of England and at the 1973 National Folk Festival
in Washington, D.C., and he gave flute workshops at local and national venues, includ-
ing Brigham Young University (1972) and Georgetown University (1974). He also played
Native flute on numerous television appearances in both the United States and England.
Oklahoma was not the only state with a budding Native flute revival in the 1970s.
Lakota flutist Kevin Locke, born in 1954 and raised on the Standing Rock Reservation
in South Dakota, learned the Lakota flute and vocal love song tradition from the Lakota
elder John Coloff. In the late 1970s, Locke decided to devote himself to reviving and
diffusing appreciation of the Lakota/Dakota flute tradition, stating that he saw himself
“strictly as a preservationist” and basing his repertoire on the old songs (NEA 1990: n.p.).
Locke released his first solo flute album, Lakota Wiikijo Olowan—Lakota Love Songs
and Stories, in 1982 and followed in Nevaquaya’s footsteps as the 1990 National Heritage
Fellow.
Baumann outlines the typical process for the syncretism model of music reviv-
als, starting with simple arrangements and then crossing one borderline after another
(1996: 82). The “closeness” to the original source is dominant at the beginning, but the
creative and individual aspects become increasingly dominant later on. Navajo-Ute flut-
ist R. Carlos Nakai’s career is a perfect example—he has released over thirty-five Native
flute albums, most as collaborative efforts with an array of outside influences, with over
four million copies distributed worldwide.
Born in 1946 on the Navajo reservation near Flagstaff, Arizona, Nakai began playing
classical Western trumpet at school in the seventh grade, going on to study trumpet and
jazz at Northern Arizona University. When he was gifted a traditional Plains cedar flute
in 1972, at the height of the American Indian Movement’s political activism era, Nakai
decided the best way for him to support the Movement’s fight for Native rights and rec-
ognition was through his music. He sees his role as a performer of the traditional flute
“not to reiterate the traditional sounds but to find new avenues of expression for the cul-
tures of native peoples” (Nakai and DeMars 1996: 120).
Nakai’s early albums stay relatively close to the traditional solo Native flute style
advocated by Nevaquaya, whose 1979 album Nakai had in his possession. The tracks on
his 1983 solo flute album, Changes, have titles such as “Whippoorwill,” with imitation
of birdcalls, pitch bending, trills, tremolos, and quick releases at the ends of phrases.
Nakai’s 1989 album, Canyon Trilogy, also for solo flute, became the first Gold Record
issued for a recording of Native music, with five hundred thousand units sold in the
United States alone.
Livingston notes that the popular culture component of revivals frequently cre-
ates tension in a revival movement, which may result in breaking it up into conserva-
tive and “progressive” wings (1999: 80). This split occurred in the Native flute world
of the mid-1980s, when Nakai decided to pick up on his jazz roots from his college
days with a group he called Jackalope, whose first album, also called Jackalope, was
released in 1986. The conservative wing of the Native flute revival, including Wapp and
myself, lined up behind Locke and Nevaquaya; Nakai simultaneously developed a fol-
lowing among the progressive wing, many of whom were Native and non-Native jazz
aficionados.
In a discussion of old instruments in new contexts, the ethnomusicologist Karl
Neuenfeldt notes that part of the instruments’ appeal is their “cultural baggage in the
form of notions of authenticity and simplicity of manufacture” (1998: 6), and the dis-
tinctiveness of the traditional Native flute’s external block sound mechanism has been
left largely intact in contemporary Native flutes. Neuenfeldt goes on to note that another
part of the old instruments’ appeal is how their authenticity and simplicity of manu-
facture is electronically integrated or synthesized (1998: 6). Nakai explains his use of
a digital processing unit onstage as a means to simulate the echo effect of the Arizona
canyons on the Navajo reservation where he grew up, saying, “my music speaks my life
in Dinetah [Navajo for ‘the people’s home’]” (1997: n.p.). Nakai collaborated with jazz
flutist Paul Horn on two albums, Inside Canyon de Chelly (1997) and Inside Monument
Valley (1999). There is an incongruity, though, with what is left unsaid—there are no
echoing canyons in the Plains area where the traditional Native flute originated, and
Nakai did not grow up with the Native flute tradition.
452 Paula J. Conlon
Given Nakai’s receptiveness to influences from non-Native cultures in his own music,
it is not surprising to find him at the forefront of opening up the Native flute world to
non-Native participants. In 1987, Nakai cofounded the International Native American
and World Flute Association, whose goal is the advancement, appreciation, preserva-
tion, and understanding of the Native flute, as well as other world flute traditions. The
formation of the Association stimulated the formation of regional Native flute circles in
various pockets of the United States, made up primarily but not entirely of non-Native
flute players. In 1992, Nakai cofounded the “Renaissance of the Native American Flute,”
an annual weeklong summer retreat near Helena, Montana. Relatively inexpensive plas-
tic flutes, built by non-Native flute maker and cofounder Ken Light, made the Native
flute accessible to anyone who wanted to learn. In 1996, Nakai coauthored The Art of the
Native American Flute with classical composer James DeMars. McAllester contributed
a chapter as well: “The Question of Authenticity,” in which he bemoans the stereotype of
the “authentic” (prereservation) Native American, asserting that Nakai’s willingness to
mingle his creative output with elements of other music is itself very “Indian” (1996: 112).
As the 1990s progressed, revival ideology and discourse focused more and more
on improvisation techniques adapted for the Native flute. The ethnologist Owe
Ronström describes a similar stress on improvisation in European folk revivals in the
1970s: whereas before, “authentic” had referred to the material itself, it could now also
refer to how the material was treated, not to reproduce but to produce anew (1998: 5–6).
Nakai’s workshops encouraged improvisation as a means to develop personal artistic
expression, and participants shared their own improvisation ideas when they gathered
at the growing number of Native flute workshops, circles, and annual meetings taking
place in the 1990s across the country. By the close of the decade, players and makers of
the Native flute were from all walks of life—male and female, Native and non-Native,
young and old, rock musicians and university professors.
Attitudes toward gender, from restriction to male players to permission and recogni-
tion of female flutists, are another aspect of revival ideology and practice that shifted
during this period. Neuenfeldt discusses the Australian myth of blanket restrictions on
women playing or sometimes even touching or hearing the didjeridu (2006: 37). I have
heard similar statements about the Native flute, but not from Native consultants, who
are careful to speak only on behalf of their own tribe’s traditions. I think Nevaquaya’s
statements about the Comanche tribe’s restriction of the Native flute for male use, com-
bined with his pervasive influence during the early days of the Native flute revival, is
largely responsible for blanket statements about Native women being prohibited to play,
touch, or even look at a Native flute. Conversely, around 1968, a Lakota woman played
the Native flute as her talent for the Miss Indian America contest (Wapp, personal com-
munication, August 19, 1982).
The Chugach Aleut-Seminole flutist Mary Youngblood, born in Seattle in 1958, was
adopted into a white, middle-class family at seven months of age, an unwitting partici-
pant in the Indian Adoption Project, the federal assimilationist program enacted in the
late 1950s. (Canada had a comparable program.) Raised as Mary Edwards, Youngblood
was immersed in Western classical music growing up, taking piano, violin, flute, and
guitar lessons. She decided to switch to her biological father’s surname after meeting
her birth mother in 1980, and she began playing Native flute in the early 1990s after find-
ing a Native Plains flute at a local pawnshop. Youngblood went on to become the first
woman honored at the Native American Music Awards, as 1999 Flutist of the Year for
The Offering (1998), her debut solo Native flute album, which was comprised of her own
compositions.
Native Flute Postrevival, 2000 to the

Present (2014)
Livingston suggests that when there is no longer an overriding concern for authenticity,
and “tradition” is felt to be too constricting a reference point, revivals may stimulate new
styles and cease to exist as a revivalist genre, although revivalist strains, differentiated by
use of the term “traditional,” may nonetheless exist alongside the new styles that have
been generated by, or merged with, the revivalist genre (1999: 80–81).
This was indeed the case in the arena of the Native flute world at the millennium. As
the twentieth century drew to a close, one indicator that change was imminent was the
launching of the Native American Music Awards in 1998, followed in 2000 by the for-
mation of a Native music category for the Grammy Awards. These awards favored inno-
vation and individuality/originality, reflecting the artistic climate of the time, which
included significant departures from traditional playing by both Native and non-Native
artists and an expectation of a high degree of professionalization and commercialization.
A look at the activity of three of the major Native flute players active in the early
2000s—Nakai, Youngblood, and Locke—confirms the Native flute’s arrival at the
“postrevival” stage in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Nakai’s propensity
to collaborate with musicians from a wide variety of cultures earned him high praise
and phenomenal record sales. Youngblood’s acceptance as a female performing artist
on an instrument formerly forbidden to women was a public disregard for traditional
restrictions. Locke, initially focused solely on the preservation of the Lakota flute tradi-
tion, had broadened his scope to collaborate with traditional instruments from other
cultures.
It is interesting to compare the award track records of these artists. Nakai received
eight Grammy nominations for his collaborative albums. Youngblood received
three Native American Music Awards: Flutist of the Year in both 1999 and 2000 and
Best Female Artist in 2000. She was the first Native woman to receive a Grammy
Award for Best Native American Music Album and the first Native person to win two
Grammy Awards, in 2002 and 2006. Locke received accolades in the first decade of the
twenty-first century from both ends of the Native awards spectrum. In 2000, the album
The First Flute garnered Locke the Native American Music Award for Best Traditional
Album, and his 2008 release, Earth Gift, was awarded 2009 Record of the Year. Earth
454 Paula J. Conlon
Gift is a new departure for Locke, combining Native flute with “old” instruments from a
variety of cultures. As indicated by the Native flute’s journeys in the Native awards laby-
rinth, by 2010 the postrevival stage of the Native flute had been up and running for an
entire decade.
The ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman suggests using a musical creativity con-
tinuum to study the performance practices of folk musicians in the modern world
(1988: 78–80), which provides a useful framework to assess performing artists’ contri-
butions to the Native flute revival. At one end of the continuum is regulated creativity
(faithful reproduction); beside this category is discriminatory creativity (limits reper-
tory or performance aspects); followed by rationalized creativity (adapts to external val-
ues and contexts); then integrative creativity (repertories and styles are altered in ways
consistent with the expectations of diverse audiences); and at the opposite polarity is
ubiquitous creativity (willful departure from traditional constraints, with tradition serv-
ing as a reference for variation and change). The folk musician’s challenge is to maintain
the balance between individual creativity and a society’s expectation of adherence to
tradition.
A look back at the original liner notes from Nevaquaya’s seminal album of solo
Native flute music in 1979 provides a window of reflection regarding changing atti-
tudes on allowable parameters around the “authenticity” label. Gillis’s four pages of
liner notes contain a diagram of the Native flute’s sound mechanism, some information
about Nevaquaya’s name and where he grew up, and details about the recording ses-
sion (1979: n.p.). When Nevaquaya was designated 1986 National Heritage Fellow, he
was presented as a purist and traditionalist who was a leader in the revival of the Native
flute tradition, and his 1979 album was credited with bringing the flute tradition to wider
public attention (NEA 1986: n.p.).
When Comanche Flute Music Played by Doc Tate Nevaquaya was rereleased as a
CD in 2004, the expanded liner notes (eighteen pages) had a very different tone. The
notes begin with introductory notes by Nakai, describing the impact Nevaquaya’s 1979
album made on him, and Gillis’s original notes are included at the end of the booklet
(2004: 14–15). Wapp’s portion of the liner notes describe how Nevaquaya introduced
new playing techniques for the Native flute when the album was first released in 1979,
including experimenting with crossfingerings to extend the flute’s range, developing
ornamentation to embellish the melodic line, and extending the warbling sound on the
lowest tone to all the available pitches (2004: 4–13). Wapp notes that these innovations
resulted in the expansion of the Native flute’s repertoire to include renditions of such
varied singing styles as powwow songs, traditional vocal songs, and Christian hymns,
as well as original instrumental compositions. Nevaquaya’s explorations as a creative
artist in the 1970s are freely acknowledged in the postrevival era of the 2000s, lending
credence to the temporal dimension of the traditional-syncretic spectrum of the Native
flute’s journey. In fact, the 2004 liner notes themselves reflect a move away from the
Native flute’s revival stage, when the authenticity police are no longer out in force.
Nevaquaya’s innovations meet Bohlman’s criteria for rationalized creativity, adapting
the traditional Native flute’s private courtship repertoire to its new context as a public
expression of Native identity, where the musician functions as a mediator. Nevaquaya

developed two new compositional styles in the 1970s, one he called his “modern court-
ing song style” and the other a creative mode through which an individual musician
could improvise while still remaining within the aesthetic parameters of Plains Indian
musical forms (NEA 1986: n.p.).
The view of Nevaquaya as a bridge to the “old school” is well supported and docu-
mented. Browner designates Contemporary Native music as “post-European contact,
including post-Nevaquaya flute” (personal communication, December 19, 2010); Nakai
describes Nevaquaya as “a link from the Old Culture to the new generations” (2004: 2);
and Wapp refers to Nevaquaya as “a traditionalist, [who] gave concerts of solo flute
music only” (2004: 11).
Nakai’s multicultural contributions mostly land in the integrative creativity category,
with his inclination to alter repertories and styles multiple times in multiple ways to sat-
isfy his far-flung audiences watching to see what he would come up with next. So while
Nevaquaya and Nakai are often contrasted as coming from different ends of the spec-
trum, their approaches can be viewed as not so very far apart after all. Right next door to
each other on the musical creativity continuum, this would explain why Nakai referred
to Nevaquaya as “a bridge to the Old Culture” (2004: 2).
On the other hand, albums such as Nakai’s willfully different Kokopelli’s Café (1996),
for jazz combo, could arguably belong in ubiquitous creativity at the far end of the “pro-
gressive” wing. Deliberately unpredictable throughout his career, Nakai rarely released
more than a couple of recordings with the same combination of instruments before
moving on. It is interesting that his recent solo Native flute album Sanctuary (2003)
hearkens back to his very early solo albums, Changes (1982) and Canyon Trilogy (1989).
All three of these recordings could keep Nevaquaya’s 1979 solo Native flute album com-
pany in the rationalized creativity area of the continuum.
Most of Locke’s albums, certainly his earlier ones, fit with either discriminatory cre-
ativity, close to the conservative, purist end of the spectrum, or rationalized creativity,
one step over in the continuum. His most recent album, Earth Gift (2008), is somewhat
of an enigma—a collaborative effort with “old” instruments from non-Native cultures,
this recording offers an unusual variant of “progressive” syncretic music.
Meanwhile, Youngblood’s albums could all be viewed as belonging in the ubiquitous
creativity region at the furthest edge of the “progressive” wing, willfully departing from
perceived traditional constraints on Native women and introducing dual-chambered
flutes that are distinctly nontraditional (though retaining the external block). Then
again, one could argue that the majority of her compositions belong in the integra-
tive creativity area. After all, “Youngblood is regarded as the female [R.] Carlos Nakai”
(Wright-McLeod 2005: 278).
Finally, there are researchers like myself, who live tucked up in the regulated creativ-
ity box at the furthest tip of the conservative wing, faithfully playing transcriptions of
traditional Native flute songs. Or so I thought, until I participated in Nakai’s retreat in
2000, ostensibly as research for my upcoming article about his work (2002). There, I dis-
covered the illicit pleasures of improvisation, using the ever-friendly five-note scales on
456 Paula J. Conlon
contemporary Native flutes, and leapt over to the ubiquitous creativity box to celebrate
with my new-found “flute family.”
When I arrived to Oklahoma in the mid-1990s, I had the good fortune to meet “Doc”
Payne, and we became close friends until his passing in 2004. Along with sharing infor-
mation about the Native flute’s history and his time with Nevaquaya, Payne would invite
me to come up to his “flute house” whenever anyone dropped by he thought I should
meet. We also traveled around Oklahoma visiting Native flutists and their families,
including Charlotte Nevaquaya, Doc Tate’s widow, and sons Edmond, Timothy, and
Calvert, all Native flutists and artists in their own right.
In 2001, the anthropologist Laurent Aubert stated that the coexistence of traditional
world music and modern world music remains problematic; the first affirms the spiri-
tual identity of established collectives, while the second extols the fusion of genres
and integration at all costs. He goes on to say that “these two positions are antinomic
in essence and any attempt to reconcile them highlights their fundamental antipathy”
(2007: 56). I would like to offer a more hopeful view of this scenario, at least from where
I am situated in “Indian Territory” in 2014.
In 1999, Payne published his book The Native American Plains Flute, which provides a
wealth of information about Native flutists in the mid-twentieth century, and he served
as principal adviser for the video Songkeepers the same year (reissued as a DVD in 2010).
Songkeepers looks at the careers of Nakai, Locke, Nevaquaya (Doc Tate and his eldest
son Sonny), Ware, and the Cherokee flutist Hawk Littlejohn (1941–2000). When Payne
and I went to Littlejohn’s funeral in North Carolina in 2000, the “flute family” I had met
at Nakai’s workshop earlier that year discovered a treasure. Payne’s flute house soon
received a new wave of out-of-state visitors, and he was adopted as mentor by an entire
contingent of new followers. Flute makers came along as well, and Payne’s workshop was
a going concern again, with eager helpers making flutes with the famous “warble” on the
lowest tone.
In 2003, I presented a talk on Doc Tate Nevaquaya at the annual meeting of the
International Native American Flute Association in Taos, New Mexico. Payne went
with me, and Wapp drove up from Santa Fe with K. D. Edwards, both of whom knew
Nevaquaya growing up in Apache, Oklahoma. What started as an academic talk soon
turned into an informal panel discussion about the life and times of Nevaquaya and the
Native flute. As a result, yet another contingent of new followers was making the trek to
Oklahoma City to Payne’s flute house, and I was now driving up to help host his visitors.
By the time of his passing in 2004, Payne’s one-thousand-plus flutes had been photo-
graphed and recorded, a CD of Payne playing Native flute had been made, and a video of
Payne and his flute collection produced (called Toubat, the Kiowa word for “flute” that
had been given to Payne), recently reissued in an expanded format on DVD. A wealth of
information on the traditional Native flute is now readily available. (See the companion
website for webography on the Native American flute: 20.Conlon.webography .)
Jacobson House Native Art Center (Norman, Oklahoma) hosted a minicourse in
Native flute in 2002, cotaught by Payne, Edmond Nevaquaya, the Kiowa flutist Terry
Tsotigh, and myself. When the four classes were over, the participants wanted to
continue meeting, and Oklahoma’s first Native flute circle was formed. For a couple of
hours once a month, chairs are placed facing inward in a large circle, and each person
in turn shares a story, a flute song, or a personal anecdote or says “pass” for that month.
There is no prescribed formula for how a flute circle should function; sometimes there is
a “special guest,” perhaps a Native maker or flute player, but this does not replace going
around the circle for all persons to share their music as they wish. The Oklahoma Native
American Flute Circle has continued to meet on the first Fridays of each month for the
past twelve years, with an open door policy for anyone who wants to drop by (see Figure
20.4). In the fall of 2009, the circle cofounded a two-day Native flute festival at Medicine
Park in southwestern Oklahoma with the Medicine Park town council, which has since
become an annual event. The setting is idyllic, with vendors along the roadway and
“open mic” sessions on the island stage during the day combined with evening concerts
by invited artists. Sonny, Timothy, and Calvert Nevaquaya shared the headliner spot-
light at the inaugural festival in 2009, and Tom Mauchahty-Ware was the featured artist
at the 2011 festival.
At first glance, it seems that the contemporary Native flute is now so far removed
from its roots that it has become a new entity, but a closer look reveals that many of the
innovations have not fallen nearly so far from the tree as they first appear. The six-holed
flute, considered by absolute purists inferior to the “more traditional” five-holed ver-
sion, is used for the most part to play songs based on a five-tone scale. One five-tone
scale keeps the third finger hole covered at all times; the other five-tone scale keeps the
fourth hole covered at all times. So the six-holed flute can be explained as a means to
house two five-tone scales in one instrument.
When woodworking tools became readily available, Native flutes could be made in
almost any size, with whatever wood the maker wished to use. Pear and other fruit trees,
maple, mahogany, even ebony flutes appeared on the scene, depending on the timbre
and volume desired by the player. A variety of woods and different sizes of Native flutes
are available on the current market, making finding a flute that fits one’s hands and tem-
perament a relatively easy task. Nevertheless, the “F-sharp” flute is still the standard,
closest to the size of the traditional Native flute, determined by the length of the man’s
arm. (“F-sharp” flute indicates that F-sharp is the lowest available pitch, with all the fin-
ger holes covered; it has no relationship to a Western key signature.)
Cedar, with the soft, sweet sound referenced in the origin stories of the love flute,
remains the most popular choice of wood, especially for flutes used for personal enjoy-
ment and informal small gatherings. Many a romance has sprung out of this extended
contact with people who share a common interest, such as the courtship of a couple
who met at a Nakai workshop and returned year after year. Wanting to be married sur-
rounded by the flutes that had brought them together, they arranged for a private cer-
emony at Payne’s flute house in Oklahoma City.
Just as the construction of the contemporary Native flute is only superficially differ-
ent from that of its predecessor, so the topic of flute songs remains tied to courtship
and images of love. Youngblood’s flute songs “Children’s Dance” and “Grandmother’s
Last Sunset” (from her 1998 album The Offering), Nakai’s 2003 album Sanctuary, and
458 Paula J. Conlon
FIGURE 20.4 Oklahoma Native American Flute Circle, 2002. Jacobson House Native Art
Center, Norman, Oklahoma; left to right: Rodger Brown, Bill Dengler, Leon Murdock
(Kickapoo tribe), Jim Klumpp, Deborah Kay. Photograph by author.
Nevaquaya’s “Edmond Wayne Song” (for his son) and flute rendition of the hymn “Jesus,
I Always Want to be Near to You” (from his 1979 album Comanche Flute Music Played by
Doc Tate Nevaquaya, reissued in 2004) exemplify contemporary flute renditions of vari-
ous forms of love.
As for the wide distribution of contemporary Native flutes across cultures, even across
continents, the traditional Native flute also traveled extensively, moving across North
America from coast to coast and from north to south. Alongside its portability was the
flute’s ease of playing. The traditional five-tone scale, where everything sounds good,
meant a young Native male did not need to be an accomplished musician to create a
flute love song for his intended that would be pleasing to listen to. Similarly, a big selling
point for contemporary Native flutes, which have maintained the five-tone scale, is that
one need not be a trained artist to create enchanting melodies on them. Furthermore,
Western-trained musicians are delighted with the ease with which one can improvise on
the Native flute—how satisfying it is to create endless melodies without ever having to
concern oneself with being “in tune” or “on the beat.”
Diamond notes that “there are few people on earth who have been mythologized as
much as Native Americans” (2008: 1). It is no coincidence that the emergence of the
Native flute revival was simultaneous with the formation of the American Indian
Movement in the late 1960s, with Native activists and their allies fighting against the
“vanishing Indian” status assigned to them at the turn of the twentieth century.
There is a conundrum, though, in determining what the essential elements of Native

America’s heritage actually are. Where is the borderline between “old” traditional music
and contemporary syncretic music, which arguably dates back to the “discovery” of the
Americas in 1492? In April 2011, the Grammy Awards announced they were eliminat-
ing thirty-one categories, combining a number of genres in folk and world music, in
part due to challenges in distinguishing between traditional and contemporary entries.
Native American, Hawaiian, Cajun/Zydeco, and Polka music were incorporated into a
Regional Roots Music category, somewhat analogous to the “flavors” of a Zumba class.
The Native community has expressed its dismay and disappointment over the demise
of the Grammy’s Best Native American Music Album category, but initially to no avail.
At the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Native flute finds itself
again at a crossroads—one way maintains or restores a link with tradition, the other lays
it aside and moves on. A decision to link with tradition is not without potential conflict.
Concerns over claims of cultural appropriation, brought into the limelight by the 2003
report of the World International Property Organization regarding who has the right to
record traditional music, generates a multitude of queries as offshoots. Does this imply
that non-Native flute players have been inappropriately or unethically appropriating
the Native flute tradition? Are issues of authenticity or purism regarding non-Native
performers the same as or different from those regarding Native players? How are
non-Native players received by the Native community? How are the motivations to
play or the symbolic meaning of the Native flute different for Native versus non-Native
players?
There are no easy answers to these potential hot spots and no one-size-fits-all solu-
tion to alleviate concerns about cultural appropriation. There have been non-Native
flute players who have postured as being Indian, adopted Indian-sounding names, and
promoted their own music as “Native American flute” on the internet. This is one reason
I am always grateful to have a Native or non-Native person who is known and respected
by the community speak for me when I am first introduced to Native artists and/or their
family members.
Approaching issues of authenticity or purism is an individual decision for non-Native
performers that may well change over time, similar to Native artists who choose to
broaden their performance practice to include influences which might well have
been labeled inauthentic a decade before. The same option is available to research-
ers. When I first came to Oklahoma, I not only preferred what I considered to be tra-
ditional music (i.e. Doc Tate Nevaquaya), I steadfastly avoided teaching anything else,
justifying my decision with the reasoning that there wasn’t enough time to do other-
wise in a one-semester survey course on Native American music. By 2006, a decade
after my arrival, I had updated my reading pack to include “postcontact” music. The
impetus to change grew out of discussions with many artists, including Nakai, Locke,
Youngblood, Wapp, Tsotigh, and Nevaquaya’s sons—Sonny, Edmond, Timothy, and
Calvert. I realized I was guilty not only of living in the “ethnographic present,” I was
not giving my students the opportunity to decide for themselves what Native American
music is all about. Subsequently, in the fall of 2011, I taught a class on Native flute based
460 Paula J. Conlon
primarily on experiential learning and was rewarded with heartfelt thanks from a cadre
of Western-trained graduate music students who, just as I had done, discovered the joy
and empowerment of creating their own music on the Native flute.
This brings us to the question of how non-Native performers are received by the
Native community. My personal experience is that over time my abilities as a flute player
and researcher have been acknowledged, but this acceptance is not a given and has to be
earned. I have been invited to give talks at a variety of Native gatherings, including the
American Indian Cultural Society that Nevaquaya cofounded in 1991, and the Seminole
Nation Senior Citizens’ group at the tribal complex in Wewoka, Oklahoma (to help start
up a local flute circle). Sonny Nevaquaya invited me to join him as a presenter at his
annual Native flute retreat in Florida in 2013.
The motivation to play Native flute and the symbolic meaning of the Native flute
appears to differ between Native artists who have the Native flute in their own tribal her-
itage and those who do not. This does not mean these performing artists are restricted
to their tribal songs, but I have observed that their personal heritage serves as a point
of reference for their public persona. For instance, Locke self-identifies as Lakota, and
his focus on sharing the Lakota version of the origin story of the Native flute reflects his
heritage. The Kiowa flutist Tsotigh tells the Kiowa story of the first flute, and Comanche
flutists Nevaquaya and his sons focus on the Comanche version.
Accounts of the symbolic meaning of the Native flute vary from tribe to tribe, player to
player, and maker to maker. Attributing the sources of the material you share is impor-
tant, and you can expect questions if you don’t include this information, especially if
what you relate is different from what your listeners (both Native and non-Native) have
learned from other sources about the symbolic meaning of the flute.
Perhaps the only question one can realistically address at this juncture is that of how
non-Native involvement has affected the revival and/or postrevival stages of the Native
flute tradition. When I arrived in “Indian Territory,” I found myself teaching Native
students who made comments such as “That’s not how my tribe does it [dance format,
etc.].” When I gave a lecture/demonstration for the neighboring community, a gentle-
man said, “You know, a Native woman would never touch a flute.” There are different
ways to react to perceived criticism—close down and/or run away, or realize what a gold
mine of information is before you. I invited the Native students taking my class to share
information about their tribal ways with their classmates as we progressed through the
course, and I was invited as their guest to their tribes’ gatherings that included music
and dance. The end result of the “taboo on female flute players” comment was that the
gentleman carved me half a flute (split down the middle) to show my classes how the
external block sound mechanism of the Native flute worked, he invited me to play Native
flute with him at his daughter’s wedding, and he gifted me a Native flute and painting to
thank me for playing.
I would like to think that my and others’ respectful non-Native involvement in the
revival and postrevival stages of the Native flute have assisted the flute’s rejuvenation
and will continue to ensure the maintenance of the tradition, in all its guises, for years
to come. With mentors such as Payne providing a model of “suitable behavior” for
FIGURE 20.5 Five Native flutists from Oklahoma, 2012. Ruggles Native American Music
Series, School of Music, University of Oklahoma, Norman, February 22, 2012. Flyer code-
signed by author.
462 Paula J. Conlon
non-Natives in the Native flute world, issues of cultural appropriation are largely inap-
plicable. Although there is no one sure plan to preserve and develop cultural heritage,
especially when starting off as an outsider, I suggest that the following format has a
better-than-average chance to succeed.
When I participated in the International Council for Traditional Music colloquium
“Indigenous Music and Dance as Cultural Property: Global Perspectives” (Toronto,
2008), I found that the most convincing proposals involved active interaction between
Native consultants and outside researchers. The anthropology professor Michael Brown
has recommended that we stop waiting around for lawmakers to come up with a com-
prehensive vision for “Total Heritage Protection” (2003: 252). Instead, he advocates
consulting with indigenous elders, museum curators, archivists, and cultural-resource
managers, who have many years of experience negotiating their way to more balanced
relationships, with the understanding that progress will be built on small victories,
innovative local solutions, and frequent compromise.
As trust is built by following these guidelines, I believe it is possible for traditional
American Indian flute and contemporary Native American flute to negotiate a means to
effectively cohabitate. For example, the International Native American and World Flute
Association has the Native flutists Nakai, Locke, and Sonny Nevaquaya on its advisory
board and in 2011 released the CD Preserving the Heritage . . . Insights and Songs from
Kevin Locke.
Both traditional and contemporary Native flute repertoire was showcased in the
spring of 2012 at a historic concert in the newly formed Ruggles Native American Music
Series at the University of Oklahoma’s School of Music in Norman. The previous fall,
Tsotigh had approached me about cohosting an event, saying he wanted to let people
know about some talented Native American flute players in Oklahoma who are still
practicing their cultural ways, including the flute (personal communication, October
5, 2011). I leapt at the chance to work with him on this project, which culminated in
a concert featuring the Oklahoma flutists Terry Tsotigh (Kiowa), Tom Mauchahty
Ware (Kiowa-Comanche), Timothy Nevaquaya (Comanche), Calvert Nevaquaya
(Comanche), and Tommy Wildcat (Cherokee). Sonny Nevaquaya (home for a family
funeral) made an impromptu appearance as well, playing a Native flute rendition of a
memorial song titled “Vietnam, Why Did You Take My Only Son?” (see Figure 20.5 and
web Figure 20.1 ).
The 2012 Native flute concert at the University of Oklahoma is an example of how
Slobin’s kernel group of activist, researcher, and pragmatic practitioner (1983: 39) is a
viable model to help ensure the Native flute’s preservation and development. With
Native and non-Native advocates, collectors, makers, and players sitting side by side,
pooling their ideas and resources, sharing a love for and dedication to the Native flute,
the tradition will neither bend nor break. Cognizant and mindful of intellectual prop-
erty rights for intangible cultural heritage, the Native flute tradition can and will con-
tinue to prosper and flourish in the twenty-first century, providing a welcome respite
from the busyness and stress of the modern world.
References
Aubert, Laurent. 2007. The Music of the Other: New Challenges for Ethnomusicology in a Global
Age. Trans. Carla Ribeiro. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate. Original publication in French, 2001.
Emancipation.” World of Music 38 (3): 71–86.
University Press.
Brown, Michael F. 2003. Who Owns Native Culture? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Browner, Tara. 1997. “‘Breathing the Indian Spirit’: Thoughts on Musical Borrowing and the
‘Indianist’ Movement in American Music.” American Music 15 (3): 265–284.
Conlon, Paula. 1983. “The Flute of the Canadian Amerindian: A Study of the Vertical Whistle
Flute with External Block and Its Music.” Master’s thesis, Carleton University, Ottawa.
——. 2002. “The Native American Flute: Convergence and Collaboration as Exemplified by
R. Carlos Nakai.” World of Music 44 (1): 61–74. Reissued in The World of Music—Readings
in Ethnomusicology, Max Peter Baumann, ed., 118–133. Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und
Bildung, 2012.
——. 2007. “Nevaquaya, Joyce Lee ‘Doc’ Tate (1932–1996).” In Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History
and Culture, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia, accessed February 19, 2014.
Reprinted in Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, vol. 2, Dianna Everett, ed.,
1014. Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 2009.
Curtis, Natalie. 1907. The Indians’ Book: Songs and Legends of the American Indians.
New York: Dover.
Diamond, Beverley. 2008. Native American Music in Eastern North America. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Eyerman, Ron, and Andrew Jamison. 1998. Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions
in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Gillis, Verna. 1979. “Comanche Flute Music Played by Doc Tate Nevaquaya.” In Comanche Flute
Music Played by Doc Tate Nevaquaya.FE 4328. Washington, D.C.: Folkways. Reprint: “Original
Notes by Verna Gillis.” In Comanche Flute Music Played by Doc Tate Nevaquaya, 14–15. SFW
CD 50403. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 2004.
Hensley, Betty Austin. 2002. Thurlow Lieurance Indian Flutes. 2nd ed. Vida, Ore.: Oregon Flute
Store. Original study 1979.
(1): 66–85.
McAllester, David P. 1980. “North American Native Music.” In Musics of Many Cultures: An
Introduction, Elizabeth May, ed., 307–331. Berkeley: University of California Press.
——. 1996. “The Question of Authenticity.” In R. Carlos Nakai and James DeMars, with David
P. McAllester and Ken Light, The Art of the Native American Flute, 109–116. Phoenix: Canyon
Records.
Nakai, R. Carlos. 1997. “Tsegi – Within the Rocks.” In Inside Canyon de Chelly. CR-7019.
Phoenix: Canyon Records.
——. 2004. “Introduction [to] Doc Tate Nevaquaya.” In Comanche Flute Music Played by Doc
Tate Nevaquaya, 1–3. SFW CD 50403. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
——, and James DeMars, with David P. McAllester and Ken Light. 1996. The Art of the Native
American Flute. Phoenix: Canyon Records.
464 Paula J. Conlon
NEA Heritage Fellows. 1982–2010 [1986]. “1986 NEA National Heritage Fellow Joyce Doc Tate
Nevaquaya, Apache, OK, Comanche Flutist.” http://www.nea.gov/honors/heritage/fellows/
joyce-doc-tate-nevaquaya, accessed February 19, 2014.
——. 1982–2010 [1990]. “1990 NEA National Heritage Fellow Kevin Locke, Mobridge, SD,
Lakota Flute Player/Singer/Dancer.”http://www.nea.gov/honors/heritage/fellows/kevin-
locke, accessed February 19, 2014.
Neuenfeldt, Karl. 1998. “Notes on Old Instruments in New Contexts.” World of Music 40 (2): 5–8.
——. 2006. “The Ongoing Debate about Women Playing Didjeridu: How a Musical Icon Can
Become an Instrument of Remembering and Forgetting.” Australian Aboriginal Studies
1: 36–43.
Nevaquaya, Doc Tate. 1975. Doc Tate Nevaquaya: Interview No. 1. Oklahoma City: Oklahoma
Historical Society.
Payne, Richard W. 1999. The Native American Plains Flute. Vida, Ore.: Oregon Flute Store.
—— 2002a. Introduction to Betty Austin Hensley, Thurlow Lieurance Indian Flutes. 2nd ed.
Vida, Ore.: Oregon Flute Store. Original study 1979.
—— 2002b. Qtd. In Doc Tate Nevaquaya: Portrait of an Oklahoma Treasure. University of
Oklahoma Center for Music Television.
Pisani, Michael V. 2005. Imagining Native America in Music. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Ronström, Owe. 1998. “Revival in Retrospect. The folk music and dance revival.” European
Centre for Traditional Culture 4: 1–9.
9: 37–44.
Titon, Jeff Todd. 1993. “Reconstructing the Blues: Reflections on the 1960s Blues Revival.” In
Transforming Traditions: Folk Music Revivals Examined, Neil V. Rosenberg, ed., 220–240.
Troutman, John W. 2009. Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879–1934.
Wapp, Edward. 2004. “Doc Tate Nevaquaya and the Native American Flute.” In Comanche Flute
Music Played by Doc Tate Nevaquaya, 4–13. SFW CD 50403. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Folkways Recordings.
Wright-McLeod, Brian. 2005. “Youngblood, Mary.” In The Encyclopedia of Native Music: More
Than a Century of Recordings from Wax Cylinder to the Internet, 278–279. Tucson: University
of Arizona Press.
Discs Cited
Locke, Kevin. 1982. Lakota Love Songs and Stories. Featherstone Records FS 4001-C.
——. 1999. The First Flute. Makoché Music/BMI.
——. 2008. Earth Gift. CDBY.
——. 2011. Preserving the Heritage . . . Insights and Songs from Kevin Locke. INAFA Productions.
Nakai, R. Carlos. 1982. Changes. Canyon Records CR-615.
——. 1986. Jackalope. Canyon Records CR-7001.
——. 1989. Canyon Trilogy. Canyon Records CR-610.
——. 1996. Kokopelli’s Café. Canyon Records CR-7013.
——. 1997. Inside Canyon de Chelly. Canyon Records CR-7019.
——. 1999. Inside Monument Valley. Canyon Records CR-7020.

——. 2003. Sanctuary. Canyon Records CR-7060.
Nevaquaya, Doc Tate. 1976. Indian Flute Songs from Comanche Land. Rereleased in 2004.
Santa Fe: Native American Music.
——. 1979. Comanche Flute Music Played by Doc Tate Nevaquaya. Folkways FE 4328. Rereleased
in 2004. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings SFW CD 50403.
Ware, Tom Mauchahty. 1978. Flute Songs of the Kiowa and Comanche. Indian House IH 2512.
Youngblood, Mary. 1998. The Offering. Silver Wave Records SD 917.
Films Cited
Doc Tate Nevaquaya: Portrait of an Oklahoma Treasure. 2002. University of Oklahoma Center
for Music Television.
Songkeepers 2010: A Saga of Five Native Americans Told through the Sound of the Flute. 2010.
America’s Flutes. Original video in 1999.
Toubat: A Journey of the Native American Flute. 2001. Sundance Media Group. Expanded ed.
on DVD. 2006.
Chapter 21
Toward an Appl i c at i on of
Gl obaliz ation Pa ra di g ms
to Modern Fol k
M u sic Rev i va l s
Britta Sweers
Modern globalization processes have significantly influenced the development of

musical revivals and the situation of postrevival structures. In this chapter I focus pre-
dominantly on one interdisciplinary analysis that combines insights gained from stud-
ies in politics, economics, culture and communication, migration, and environment.
In Global Transformations (Held et al. 2003), David Held (politics), Anthony McGrew
(international relations), David Goldblatt (social sciences), and Jonathan Perraton (eco-
nomics) have developed an analytical framework based on a comprehensive database
including original long-term studies in the areas of global politics, military globaliza-
tion, global trade and markets, finance activities, corporate power and production net-
works, migration, cultural markets, communication, and environment. In this study,
globalization is conceived as
[a]‌process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial orga-
nization of social relations and transactions . . . generating transcontinental or inter-
regional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power.
(Held et al. 2003: 16)
This definition of globalization is highly useful because it not only leads away from a
simple pro-and-contra scheme but can also be transferred to cultural studies, ethno-
musicology, and issues of revival in a global(ized) context. As proposed further by
Held et al., the contemporary situation might also be described as “thick globaliza-
tion.” To approach the actual nature of modern globalization processes more precisely
and from an unbiased perspective, Held et al. analyzed the historical development of
GLOBALIZATION PARADIGMS AND MODERN FOLK MUSIC REVIVALS 467
globalization according to the factors of extensity, intensity, velocity, and impact (Held
et al. 2003: 21–27). For example, rather than setting a distinct beginning for global-
ization, they described the premodern situation before 1500 as “thin globalization.”
Although this period was already shaped by extensive global migration (as apparent in
the distribution of musical instruments in the Pacific region or the exchange of goods
along the Silk Road), it was nevertheless characterized by comparatively low inten-
sity, velocity, and impact. The subsequent different phases of “expansive globalization”
(until the mid-twentieth century) can be characterized by high extensity and impact
(as apparent in the Americas), but they are still shaped by low intensity and velocity.1
Contrary to these earlier processes, the contemporary situation of “thick globalization”
is characterized by a high level of quantity and extensity (toward a globe-spanning out-
reach), a high speed of communication toward simultaneousness, and the increasing
emergence of homogenizing forces. This is likewise paralleled by a high density of inno-
vative or transforming events.
With regard to Europe, from which the case studies in this chapter are taken (see also
Sweers 2010), thick globalization has clearly been apparent since the end of World War
II. The second half of the twentieth century was shaped by the emergence of large num-
bers of acoustic—and later electric—folk music revivals that shifted orally transmitted
material, as well as collected and notated versions, into a modern, urban, and increas-
ingly mediatized and digitalized context. Many European countries had already expe-
rienced their first systematic folk song collecting activities in the wake of nationalist
movements that were embedded into the broader context of emerging global empires
and nation-states (Held et al. 2003: 77–86). As the material was transferred from its origi-
nal oral and rural2 contexts to notated and recorded versions, as well as into academic or
otherwise institutionalized frameworks within the early urban environment, one might
also speak of a revival into a new context. In England, for example, this development was
strongly intertwined with the activities of the London-based Folk Song Society (founded
in 1898) and Folk Dance Society (founded in 1911).3 It was also centered on educated col-
lectors, such as English music teacher Cecil J. Sharp (1859–1929) and composer Ralph
Vaughan Williams (1872–1951). This mixture of partly organized/institutionalized and
partly individual activities was subsequently referred to as the “first folk song revival” as a
way of distinguishing it from the (acoustic) post-World War II English folk revival move-
ment. The latter was retrospectively named the “second folk (song or music) revival”
(Sweers 2005: 21–65). As in Scotland and Ireland, this second revival of the 1950s–1960s
was significantly influenced by the American folk revival of the 1950s, which had been
preceded by the activities of leftist workers’ organizations like People’s Songs (founded in
1945) and musicians like Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) and Pete Seeger (1919–2014).
One can observe related developments in other Western European movements that
occurred either simultaneously in the 1960s, as in France, Finland, and Sweden, or in
the wake of the Anglo-American movements in the 1970s, as was the case in Germany.
In Eastern Europe, the emergence of similar revivals has occurred at slightly diver-
gent times, depending on the political situation. For example, the Baltic States of
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had each experienced folk collecting activities in the late
468 Britta Sweers
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (in Latvia, e.g., this was strongly intertwined
with the Atmoda or “national awakening” movement that led to independence in 1918).
Each country then also witnessed a postwar acoustic folk revival (in the wake of the
Russian revival that started in the 1960s) in the 1970s–1980s, as did many other East
European countries and regions that were noticeably affected by developments in the
Soviet Union. Similarly, in associated states like Hungary, one could observe the urban
tanchaz (“dance house”) movement in the 1970s—again a counterdevelopment against
regulated folk music and state ensembles.
Many of these (East and West) postwar European movements were political, yet
they were also shaped by the search for musical alternatives outside state-controlled or
institutionalized, mass-media–based networks—issues that already hint at the impact
of modern thick globalization. An early indication of this was the emergence of elec-
tric folk movements in the British Isles (and also in other places, such as France and
Scandinavia) from the late 1960s. Employing modern electronic means, the groups rep-
resenting these movements—like Fairport Convention or Steeleye Span in England,
for example—seemed to associate themselves strongly with the mass media. In some
senses, this direction could be described as a “revival” in England because many electric
folk musicians came out of the acoustic movement and used similar material. Yet these
groups also reached different, more rock-oriented audiences due to the different styles
of arrangement and interpretation they embraced and the degree to which they were
promoted by the media.
The broader impact of modern thick globalization became especially evident after
the end of the Cold War, with the emergence of an increasing number of electric folk
revival forms in Eastern Europe. Sometimes called folk rock or electric folk, and some-
times postfolklore (Latvia) or fusion music, these musical approaches touched on issues
of the global impact of Western—predominantly popular—music artists, genres, and
economic structures on various levels. This became especially apparent in relation to
the (mainly) Western cultural network called “world music” with which many groups
have been clearly intertwined. This has been reflected in the coverage of leading maga-
zines, the presence of CD labels, and festival appearances. The global impact of trans-
national business structures is also visible in the strong affiliation with global modern
mass media, which underwent a profound transformation toward digitalization and
forms of widely accessible hypermedia in the 1990s. It is likewise apparent in issues of
musical hybridity, which have often been inter-related with the impact of globally pres-
ent Western popular music (see, e.g., Lundberg, Malm, and Ronström 2003; Ramnarine
2003; Sweers 2005).
Yet, as the situation in England has already highlighted (see Sweers 2005), adequate
assessment of the actual global impact of the Western mainstream and business struc-
tures has often been difficult. This becomes even more apparent when comparing this
situation with post-Cold War discourses in Latvia. Through a comparison of these two
different contexts, this chapter sets up a framework to identify and analyze paradoxes
and ambiguities of revival concepts, particularly within a modern context. As is argued
here, the ambivalence of these concepts becomes especially apparent with electric or
folk rock developments, which have often challenged established acoustic revival struc-
tures. The ideas presented by Held et al. (as introduced earlier) provide the central theo-
retical basis for a more in-depth exposition of this discursive variety and ambivalence.
Skandinieki and Iļģi: Two Revival

Groups from Latvia
Nature-related images feature prominently in media advertisements produced by the

Baltic state of Latvia (located between Estonia in the north and Lithuania in the south).
The concept of an unspoiled environment is also reflected in the large choirs that were
significantly involved in the Singing Revolution (1987–1992) that led to the indepen-
dence of all three states.4 Since the eighteenth century, Latvia, like its neighbors, has
been markedly associated with images of unspoiled nature and rural traditions. Johann
Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who taught at Riga’s Dome School between 1764 and 1769,
discussed various Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian songs in his Stimmen der Völker
in Liedern (1778/79). As he remarked there, these songs were dominated by “the peas-
ant’s tender nature and by something specific to a people.”5 The experience of this region
apparently influenced his equating nature with the “uneducated peoples” (Herder
[1778/78] 1975: 237)—a perception that shaped various folk music definitions up until
the official definition of the International Folk Music Council from 1954/55.6
Against this background, the output of the so-called “authentic” acoustic revival
group Skandinieki and the electric revival or “postfolklore” group Iļģi, recorded in the
1990s and the first decade of the new millennium, seems to confirm the impression of a
traditionally based musical approach versus a threatening Westernization. Skandinieki,
a collective of singers and instrumentalists that was termed “authentic” in the local musi-
cal discourse, presents itself—as on Rotelas un Danči (1996) and Dzied un spēlē (2003)—
in a family-like atmosphere, its members wearing traditional gowns and inhabiting
rural environments. The music, as can be heard on these recordings, sets an emphasis on
a rough, mostly monophonic choral singing style with sparse accompaniment. In con-
trast, as albums like Sēju Vēju (2000) and Ne Uz Vienu Dienu (2006) indicate, the folk
rock fusion band Iļģi—which describes its approach as “postfolklore”7—prefers not only
modern clothing but also modern CD designs (with an electrified kokles [a plucked,
zither-like instrument]). The Westernizing element is clearly apparent in the use of elec-
tric instruments, a rock drum set, and the incorporation of sound effects along with
fiddle styles that sometimes come close to Irish fiddling.8
Iļģi has been present on the international festival scene and has occasionally been cov-
ered by world music media like The Rough Guide: World Music Vol. 1 (ed. Broughton,
Ellingham, and Trillo 1999); the group was also exposed to an audience of millions dur-
ing the interim break of the Eurovision Song Contest (2003). At first sight, these sketched
impressions seem to indicate the strong impact of a Western homogenization process
470 Britta Sweers
that also occurred in the British Isles and Germany in the 1950s. One could easily assume
that the local population might progressively give up the remnants of its traditions in
order to catch up with the modern world of the Western or American mainstream,
which gained greater presence in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. A few
decades later, and the region might thus experience a growing loss of its individual
identity within an increasingly dominant Western mainstream (Sweers 2005). Similar
concerns were clearly voiced by Latvia’s Lithuanian neighbors during a United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conference on Folk
Culture at the Beginning of the 3rd Millennium in Vilnius, in 2001 (Astrauskas 2002).
However, a more detailed analysis of the sociocultural and historical background to
these recordings reveals a much more complex situation (cf. Boiko 2001; Schorno 2007;
Sweers 2010). For example, the modern image of Latvian folk music still falls strongly
back on the composed choral and instrumental music of the Soviet era. The latter also
profoundly shaped and transformed the choral singing tradition that had formed a
separate “traditional” layer since the nineteenth century. Noticeably influenced by the
German male choir tradition, choral singing had become an icon during the national
revival of the First National Awakening (1850s–1880s), especially following the first
singing festival in Riga in 1873. Having become independent in 1918, Latvia would later
be occupied first by the Soviet Union in 1940, by Nazi Germany in 1941, and then again
by the Soviet Union in 1944. Subsequently, the choir tradition was partly integrated into
the category of official Soviet amateur art (samodejatel’nost), with its professional sing-
ing and dance ensembles. The material bases were often musical pieces in positive major
tonalities with partly newly written or neutralized texts or, on a more popular level,
kitschy Schlager variants. This was one reason why Iļģi singer and spokesperson Ilga
Reizniece long rejected “folk music,” until she rediscovered the rural-traditional mate-
rial (interview, May 17, 2004, Riga).
In contrast, the actual traditional music—which differs from art and popular music
by annual-ritual contexts, specific performance styles, or (oral) transmission forms—
suffered significant neglect and was also viewed as politically suspect during the Soviet
era. This especially applied to the so-called dainas, songs based on four-line verses. With
texts ranging from the daily lifecycle to seasonal rituals and mythic-cosmological top-
ics, and musical features like modal tonalities, a narrow melodic range, and mixed or
asymmetrical meters, the dainas contrasted with the positive Soviet ideal image. Only
after the political liberalization of the 1970s–1980s could this material—which was also
seen as a threat because it could be taken as a means of emphasizing a local Latvian iden-
tity—be sung in public again. During this period, the group Skandinieki emerged. With
the Livonian family Stalti at its core (a Finno-Ugric minority from the Baltic Sea coast),
Skandinieki managed to establish a new musical ethnic-Latvian identity. In this context,
distinctive elements were overemphasized: the revival of the material (often with a con-
scious emphasis on pre-Christian elements) was combined with a likewise consciously
developed performance practice. This contrasted with the (partly academically) trained
Soviet ensembles by focusing on collective group singing using untrained, rough voices,
combined with sparse accompaniment.
Within this discourse, the expression “authentic” thus needs to be understood as a

deliberate contrast to the Soviet ensembles, not as a synonym for traditional Latvian
music. Moreover, one can observe here that a homogenizing impact is answered by a
similarly extreme countermovement—in this case, directed not against the Western
mainstream but against the cultural politics of the Soviet Union (see Caute 2003 for a
deeper discussion).
The core musicians of Iļģi, including singer Ilga Reizniece and instrumentalist Māris
Muktupāvels, came initially from this authentic movement and had also been part of
Skandinieki. Like the British acoustic folk club–based Second Revival of the 1960s,
this acoustic revival also became highly dogmatic about its musical approach. As Ilga
Reizniece emphasized in a personal interview (May 17, 2004, Riga), she and Muktupāvels
had been looking for more creative ways of working with the material. Against the
background of a homogenizing Soviet state culture, this meant fusing the traditional
material with pop and rock elements—or with elements of other folk traditions, such
as Irish fiddling—because the original instrumental traditions were often nearly gone.
Simultaneously, as interviews and sound analyses indicate, Iļģi has been deeply involved
with the actual reconstruction of traditional performance elements (Sweers 2010). This
included the reconstruction not only of traditional Latvian kokles playing (as under-
taken by Māris Muktupāvels and his brother, ethnomusicologist Valdis Muktupāvels),
but also of fiddling and singing styles (based on the teceijas singing style that was char-
acterized by a loud sound projection based on tightly closed vocal cords, a style that had
been present in the region until World War II).
Toward a Wider Framework
As is apparent here, performers working with electric folk fusions have contributed sig-
nificantly to the highly complex picture of revival developments within contemporary
thick globalization. Because this also hints at likewise complex identity constructions
that combine traditional components with shifting contemporary alliances (Diamond
2007), electric folk fusions could be viewed as deep expressions of contemporary global-
ization processes as defined above by Held et al. (2003). Furthermore, as is apparent in
the case of England (Sweers 2005), fusions of Western rock (and other musical genres)
with local folk/traditional elements are not necessarily an indication of the populariza-
tion—and commercialization—of traditional material or previously acoustic perfor-
mances. Despite the modern pop/rock musical basis, the fusion processes behind the
performed or mediatized sound of electric revival bands can be a result of processes
completely different from those that lie behind other fusion groups that have begun to
dominate the world music sphere.9
However, the electric side of musical fusion processes has often been met with a
biased perspective within ethnomusicology, often being equated with popular music or
features of (global) homogenization. For example, this is apparent in Laura J. Olson’s
472 Britta Sweers
description of world music as a “commercial venture” (2004: 222). Discussing the acous-

tic Russian folk revivals in careful detail, Olson, by especially referring to groups like
Farlanders (who combine Russian traditional music with elements of Western popular
and jazz music), describes these electric approaches as an illusory musical sound picture
that is exclusively oriented to Western tastes (ibid.).
A similar perception was already evident within the internal discourse of musicians
of the English folk revival movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Sweers 2005). Here, the
evaluation of the combination of traditional musical elements with electric pop and
rock components (e.g., instruments and arrangement techniques) was viewed from two
opposing camps. Although electric folk groups like Fairport Convention and Steeleye
Span regarded this approach as a creative enrichment of their musical possibilities, crit-
ics (particularly traditionalists of the folk club scene, who—like Scottish singer/actor
Ewan MacColl—focused on unaccompanied singing) saw it as a threat and a move
toward the musical/ commercial mainstream.
As indicated here, acculturation processes have often been accompanied by multi-
layered discourses. Likewise, as a comparison between Latvia and Britain indicates, for
instance, global flows—such as those described by Appadurai (1990; see also 1991 and
1998) as ethnoscape, mediascape, technoscape, finanscape, and ideoscape—can have
differing deep impacts on local situations. Moreover, such flows might not always rep-
resent a central homogenizing force; in particular, global hypermedia, such as the social
networks on the World Wide Web, can also become a means of survival for musicians
from relatively small countries with limited audiences. Given these contrasting views, it
seems useful to fall back on a descriptive tool that allows us to differentiate between the
different perspectives and possible interpretations.
Understanding Globalization: Three
Different Perspectives
The issue of globalization has been investigated from a variety of perspectives within
ethnomusicology. Examples comprise studies of the world music scene, which also
includes revival performers like Marta Sebestyén, Värttinä, or the various so-called
Celtic groups (see e.g., Taylor 1997). Another aspect has been the impact and use of mod-
ern mass media, which not only led to new forms of musical entertainment (e.g., Miller
2007; Rommen 2007) but also provided new alternative communication and advertis-
ing spaces like Facebook and MySpace. Likewise, analysis of the context transformation
of local music traditions in which revival processes and postrevival structures played a
central role (e.g., Chen 2005; Harnish 2005; Ramnarine 2003) and of the global impact
on the local (see Post 2006, part IV) has been a growing concern in ethnomusicology.
One significant feature has been the emergence of a large and highly varied body of
globalization literature (also apparent in the ethnomusicological discourse; see, e.g., the
different interpretations of Erlmann [1999] and Taylor [1997]). However, although the
term “globalization” is widely used, one only occasionally encounters precise definitions,
such as that offered by sociologist and globalization theorist Ulrich Beck (1997: 26–28).
In Beck’s usage, “globalization” indicates the process itself. In contrast, “globality”
(Globalität) describes the situation of the “globally interconnected world,” whereas “glo-
balism” refers to the ideology and practice of modern neo-liberalism. Furthermore, as
Thomas Turino pointed out with regard to the study of the local-global dissemination of
Zimbabwean popular music, the term “globalization” is often used synonymously with
“Westernization,” “Americanization,” “homogenization,” or “hybridization” (Turino
2003: 52).
This indicates that the public debate, particularly since the late 1980s, has been notice-
ably shaped by critical perspectives. Two main counterarguments against globalism
dominated popular discussion and journalism in the first decade of the new millen-
nium: (a) the increasing power of corporations and (b) the gradual retreat of diversity
in the face of a single, global culture. As Turino explained further (Turino 2003: 52), it
seems that this globalism/globalization discourse was strongly fueled, after the defeat of
communism, by key terms such as “colonialism,” “anticolonial nationalist movements,”
and “global.” Turino, in tune with Robert Burnett (1996), thus pointed out that “global
culture” has, since that time, been used to describe capitalist expressions (such as the
image of McDonald’s in Beijing). This perspective is also inherent in the argument that
the omnipresence of Western popular musics in nearly all East European countries
has led to an increasing dominance of Western music styles in revival musics as well.
However, resistance to this Western cultural domination is apparent in the often critical
perception of modern mass media and, particularly within the performance sphere, in
an increasing emphasis on national elements, as has been evident in the Baltic countries.
To develop a broader perspective that might help to relativize each of these perspec-
tives I will again fall back on the model that was developed by Held et al. (2003) in their
study Global Transformations. By analyzing the globalization flows and models within
several different (political, economic, cultural, and ecological) areas, the authors also
distil three different perspectives, which they term sceptic, hyperglobal, and transforma
tionalist. These perspectives lend themselves well to an interpretation of the situation in
the Baltics and elsewhere.
The Sceptic Perspective

The sceptic perspective equates globalization with homogenization, which is inter-
preted negatively. From this perspective, local traditions disappear due to the global
homogenization process, so that revival is regarded as an important means of preserva-
tion. Consequently, the musical emphasis is on acoustic performance practices, which
are often combined with a discourse centered on “authenticity.” Particularly within
those ethnomusicologies (or folklore studies) of Eastern Europe (i.e., the countries of
the former Soviet bloc) that are characterized by a focus on regional traditions, one can
474 Britta Sweers
detect a strong dominance of the sceptic’s perspective (Astrauskas 2002). However, a

central criticism of this approach (as is apparent in Britain and the Baltics) has been the
danger of creating a museum-like atmosphere.
Although folk music has been perceived as a national-iconic symbol within many
regions of the former Soviet Union, the revived music has also played a central role in
the supercultural sphere, especially within education and also as part of an attempt to
maintain visibility within a broader global context. However, the modern equation of
(revived) folk music as a symbol of national identity contains a tendency toward nation-
alism when it is restricted to a static local perception. It is especially from such a static
view, created to set identifiable boundaries, that globalization is perceived as a threat.10
Although this issue was already apparent with the romanticized collection and revival
movements that were part of the national movements of the nineteenth century, this
legacy has also shaped, consciously or unconsciously, the postwar revivals.
In the Baltics, this lingering nationalist trace is particularly apparent in the authentic
and pagan revival music groups that have based their recreation on mystic, yet fixed
pre-Christian images, ignoring any transregional flows that might have occurred. This
identity construction includes not only a bundled body of mythology and the choice
of an ethnonym (e.g., Celts or Old Prussians in the case of various Latvian groups)
but also an agreed prehistory. Generally speaking, many of these groups fall back on
pre-Medieval epochs—with uncertain source material—to create a nevertheless mod-
ern, multilayered Latvian/Baltic identity similar to those of the Celtic movements (see
James 1999).
This identity is often combined with a strong iconic emphasis, for example, through
references to pre-Christian deities such as Laima, the goddess of good fortune, and the
sun deity Saule. As archaeologist Simon James warned, “Agreed national histories are
inevitably nationalist histories, and are always partisan. Many notions of deep history
underpin ancient claims to territory and precedence over other groups, justify modern
antagonisms and constitute the fault lines of future conflicts” (1999: 11). Even if “Celtic” is
understood simply as a cultural categorization, it can easily slide back into a dangerously
ethnic label if it is allowed to become too static. In the case of the Latvian pagan-metal
band Skyforger, which used the Swastika as a pan-Baltic symbol in their iconic design,
this led to a conflict in German performance spaces.
The Hyperglobal Perspective

The hyperglobal perspective understands globalization predominantly from an eco-
nomic perspective. Related homogenization processes are viewed from a positive
perspective because they will lead to an interconnected global civilization with global
economic, governmental, and social structures—from which revival and postrevival
structures could also benefit.
The hyperglobal view has been most noticeably present within the music indus-
try and modern media corporations. Hyperglobalizers would interpret the impact of
globalization on revival processes and the situation of postrevival music cultures not
as a threat but as a means of access to Western market structure—and also to world
music networks, which represent the central market for revival and fusion musics. This
perspective has been strongly criticized in ethnomusicological writing, as is indirectly
evident in structural-functional approaches (e.g., John Blacking’s depiction of Venda
music, which leaves out traces of Western impact; cf. Blacking 1973). More directly, it is
especially apparent in Marxist-influenced popular and folk music studies (see Harker
1985, where folk collecting activities are interpreted as highly profit-oriented) but also in
analyses of popular music and the music industry (e.g., Middleton 1990/1995).
A similar perspective is apparent in recent analyses of hypermedia (see Bennett and
Peterson 2004), in which global hypermedia are interpreted as a central means of exis-
tence and survival for smaller independent labels in smaller countries with relatively
small audiences. This was clearly the case with the label UPE, under which Iļģi recorded
until 2010. Although existing outside established business networks, UPE has been
noticeably falling back on independent hyperglobal structures, not only by presenting
itself at WOMEX but also by making a large portion of its sales via the internet—a strat-
egy that has been taken up by Iļģi, who also make use of social networks like MySpace.
Likewise, many acoustic authentic bands have been falling back on the internet as a
means of advertising and benefiting from hyperglobal structures, as in the case of inter-
nationally distributed CD compilations.
However, along with the focus on general economic perspectives (e.g., the issue of
global networks), a hyperglobal approach is also apparent in the activities of transna-
tional cultural organizations, as is the case with UNESCO and its function as global cul-
tural regulator. This likewise applies to academic organizations, such as the International
Council for Traditional Music, which, as a global academic network, may also serve to
voice concerns or provide background knowledge for revival developments.
The Transformationalist Perspective

Finally, a transformationalist perspective argues that the contemporary patterns of
globalization are unprecedented, as are modern development directions, the musical
results, and postrevival structures. Transformationalists thus perceive the increasingly
dense global networks as the basis for developing new musical structures, in this case
through revival, which needs to be approached with an open perspective. This particu-
larly applies to the analysis of the actual relationship between traditional performance
practices and increasingly prevalent revival forms, and also addresses the actual space
and deep impact of Western popular music in this process. A revivalist might participate
in a complex network of musical cultures, of which the seemingly dominant Western
popular music might be simply one element among many and not necessarily a destruc-
tive one. Revival forms could, thus, also include or lead to fusion and electric forms.
From this perspective, modern technology—often a central part of this revival pro-
cess—could lead to a rediscovery and reconstruction of traditional elements. However,
476 Britta Sweers
these might be embedded into new contexts—a situation that is apparent with Iļģi’s
music. Contrary to Skandinieki, for instance, Iļģi became strongly visible within an
international (global) context. Yet the group never managed a financial breakthrough
and was never able to establish a broader postrevival scene, in contrast with “authentic”
acoustic groups like Skandinieki that have become significant reference points for many
younger acoustic performers in the new millennium (Sweers 2010). Neither could Iļģi
establish a niche in Latvia’s pop/rock mainstream that also includes radio play. Instead,
the musicians of Iļģi needed to finance their folk rock fusion projects with other jobs (in
music or education, for example).
Some broader ethnomusicological approaches that proposed models based on a more
comprehensive global perspective combined with a descriptive approach for these com-
plex developments and that could be described as transformationalist were presented
by Slobin (1993), Lundberg et al. (2003), Baumann (2004), and others. Falling back on
globalization theorist Arjun Appadurai, Mark Slobin (1993) developed an open concept
of three interacting cultural systems. This spatial framework consists of an umbrella-like
supercultural system; microcultures, which can be found in various forms underneath the
superculture; and intercultures (e.g., existing between diaspora and mother culture). This
approach is useful not only for describing the location and spatial organization of music
revivals but also for avoiding the use of the biased term “subcultures,” which has been
strongly associated with youth cultures (Slobin’s usage of the term notwithstanding).11
Another more differentiated perspective that allowed for a clearer assessment of
mediatized forms of music was taken up by Lundberg et al.’s study Music, Media,
Multiculture (2003). Indicating that an acoustic performance could also be situated at
the end of a long “mediaized” (sic) transformation, the authors indicated the following
stages a music form might undergo: (a) primary mediaization (CD-radio), (b) medi-
aization reworking (transculturation, scratch), (c) demediaization (initially mediaized
music is taken up in performance), and (d) remediaization (music is again conveyed to
a medium).
Similarly, Max Peter Baumann’s (2004) classification of transculturation (i.e., fusion)
processes allows for the more precise assessment of those fusion processes that have
inevitably accompanied electric revival forms. Going beyond the earlier developed
model of purism versus syncretism in revival (Baumann 1996), Baumann further noted
that fusion processes can take on different forms, for example, as compartimentalization
(different qualities are still recognizable; the musicians move [bimusically] between the
different spheres), as syncretism (a lighter form of fusion in which individual elements
take on a new meaning), and as transformation into new qualities and forms. Developed
to describe the acculturation process of the charango in South America, Baumann’s
model can be transferred to folk rock fusions. These processes can likewise be described
as the interactions of different music cultures as they move toward syncretism or trans-
formation into completely new forms (which has been the case with jazz folk fusions in
the Baltics).
However, as is apparent in the discussion that follows, this rather egalitarian perspec-
tive also invites criticism. This can be seen especially in analyses of Western world music
networks and fusion groups which see these forms as becoming muzak-like or “disem-
bodied sonic markers” (Hill 2007: 69) and in the exploitative side of musical appropria-
tions from other countries (see Hill 2007 for a broader discussion).
Applications of the Meta-Descriptions
Here, I discuss some recurring sceptic discourses that have frequently surfaced with
regard to revivals in Western Europe (the British Isles, especially England) and north-
east Europe (the Baltic Countries, especially Latvia). The timing and political conditions
out of which Latvian groups like Skandinieki and Iļģi emerged (see Sweers 2010) were
clearly different from the background against which revival performers like acoustic
guitarist Martin Carthy or electric folk fusionists Fairport Convention developed in
England and the British Isles (see Sweers 2005). Yet, different historical contexts not-
withstanding, one can discover some striking similarities.
Electric Revival Discourses: Sceptics Versus

Transformationalists
In both the English and Latvian cases, internal discourses were markedly shaped by a
predominantly sceptic perspective. The main initiators of the English Second Revival,
A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, partly set the English Revival against then-dominant
American (popular) music to reestablish an English-British musical identity. Similarly,
the Latvian revival was (like neighboring movements) also set against a supercul-
ture—the official Soviet “amateur art” model (samodejatel’nost) with its folk and
dance ensembles and arranged folk material set in major modes, with newly written,
neutralized texts.
The sceptic-turned-static view became especially apparent in the musical crises that
appeared in both regions. At the core of the English folk club-based movement was the
dogma that folk songs should only be sung unaccompanied, and the Latvian authen-
ticity movement also (initially) strongly emphasized rough, untrained singing styles
and sparse accompaniment. This “authentic” movement, which emerged in the 1980s,
also subsequently became extremely dogmatic, as is apparent in the group Skandinieki,
which resembles groups from the English hardcore folk scene of the mid-1960s.
English electric folk groups, such as Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, became a
creative musical alternative that opened the way for new developments (and, in the case
of Morris dancing, led to a continuation of certain traditions). These groups embraced a
varied selection of instruments as well as various styles of arrangement and the introduc-
tion of improvisation—and they also attracted new audiences (e.g., from the progressive
rock scene). Electric groups thus overcame the musical dead-end of historicizing acous-
tic revival movements. The case of Iļģi also highlights the impact of broader musical
478 Britta Sweers
folk microcultures from outside the Latvian sphere, such as the Swedish-Finnish group
Hedningarna (as an example of Scandinavian folk fusion music) and the use of Celtic
fiddling styles as a replacement for the near-lost art of Latvian fiddling.
As did many English groups, Iļģi’s band members perceived the move toward a fusion
style as an act of creative liberation—as freedom from having to play “authentically.”
Referring to Beverly Diamond’s (2007) “alliance concept” here, one can discover a high
degree of openness in the modern identity construction process of these bands, one
that combines a flexible core with a constantly changing surface. The English groups
have adapted elements of the Anglo-American superculture and folk music into a new
syncretic music form. Iļģi’s music can be understood as a counter-reaction to both the
supercultural layers of the Soviet Era and the subsequent restrictions of the authenticity
movement, which represented not only a sceptic view but also reflected a static concept
and identity perception (within the folk music microculture).
Sceptic Concerns and a Transformational Answer: The

Musical Side
In relation to music, sceptic concerns have significantly shaped discourses about the
global impact of Western culture and economy and the processes of globalization.
For example, criticism in Anglo-American regions has often been aimed at electric
instruments, which are seen as “destroying” the old traditions. Moreover, the electric
guitar has been viewed as an icon of global (in this case American mainstream) struc-
tures: Bob Dylan was attacked by sceptic journalists for playing an electric guitar, which
they regarded as taking his music a step toward popular music (see Sweers 2005: 21–23).
With regard to contemporary developments, it seems that electric fusion approaches
are thus often still regarded as a step toward the Western-based world music sphere (cf.
Olson 2004).
However, it is difficult to determine the degree of the actual tendency toward
homogenization through a global Western cultural mainstream that has musically
often been embodied by electric instruments. In the case of electric folk in England,
the true impact of playing electrically is difficult to assess. Sceptic concerns about a
too overtly egalitarian approach should not be completely ignored, however, because
the use of electric instruments and rock drums could indeed lead to an alteration
of the material’s essence. For example, due to their narrative parlando-rubato style,
it seems reasonable to suppose that ballads were sung more or less unaccompa-
nied within the British-Irish ballad singing tradition. A good example of this is the
Child ballad “Tam Lin.” The almost speech-like renditions of A. L. Lloyd or Anne
Briggs seem to indicate that this highly dramatic ballad does indeed need a flexible
rhythmic-metric framework. This could also lead to the assumption that a simple
backbeat setting might destroy the music. And yet the rhythmically straight rock
arrangement of Fairport Convention (on Liege & Lief, 1969) is likewise reasonable
because it carries the complex drama forward. I would rather argue that backbeat
arrangements could become destructive only if applied exclusively (see Sweers

2005: 160–167).
A definite answer on the degree of homogenization is also difficult due to the broad
variety of traditional songs and ballads. In the case of British-Irish traditions, this
includes, on the one hand, narrative ballads and lyrical songs (e.g., “She Moves Through
the Fair”) that are metrically free and thus provide room for ornamentation. But, on
the other hand, it also includes songs that have always been sung to dance tunes or have
never been strongly ornamented. Similarly, ballads that were danced to on the Faeroe
Islands would not have allowed for much rhetorical freedom because dance movements
need a steady, rhythmical beat.
A similar variety of electric fusion forms can also be observed in Latvia. Again, despite
different political conditions, repertoire, and arrangement styles, these Latvian groups
have been confronted with similar criticisms. Iļģi has been attacked by the authentic
movement because the group’s adaptation of popular/modern elements seemed to indi-
cate a step back to former ideologies from which the authentic movement had initially
departed.
Moreover, from the performers’ perspective, electric instruments per se are not the
main problem: Many pointed out that electric instruments (aside from being louder)
could be played much more delicately. As guitarist Martin Carthy emphasized, playing
electrically “taught him economy” (see Sweers 2005: 160–167). This same perspective
could also be transferred to working with a microphone, which often actually requires
a more intimate singing style and thus can also lead to highly nuanced fusion revival
approaches.
Here, especially, the three perspectives become helpful in detecting the nature of
these various conflicting discourses—in the case of electric instruments, a sceptic
(acoustic/preservationalist) position versus a transformationalist (electric) view,
which is only in part shaped by hyperglobal thinking (as might have been assumed by
critics). As demonstrated next, an application of these three aspects often also reveals
the highly uneven circumstances of revival performers in a global- or mass-media–
dominated context.
Hybrid Performance Contexts and the Mainstream: Sceptic

Criticism Revisited
A recurring issue of the sceptic criticism of electric fusion revival groups has been
the financial/commercial aspect of such music. As is often argued, acoustic/revival—
or even traditional—performers might be tempted to follow the example of electric
groups and give up their delicate alternative playing and singing styles (also understood
as alternatives to popular and art performance styles) to grasp at success within the
mainstream.
Although the electric component (e.g., technical equipment, specific performance
requirements, etc.) indeed ties groups more strongly to the global media and business
480 Britta Sweers
sphere, its deep impact cannot be automatically deduced here. For example, although
often not having grown up in the initial traditional reference contexts, many modern
revivalists have become involved in a very profound rediscovery process. In several cases,
this is likewise accompanied by a clear self-reflection with regard to the musician’s rela-
tion to the traditional material. This was apparent in Latvia and also in Lithuania, with
Russian artists like Farlanders and Sámi artists like Mari Boine. The members of Iļģi even
began to undertake fieldwork expeditions to discover traditional performances, and they
became central driving forces for the revival of traditional instruments and singing styles.
However—and here we are back to the criticism of the transformationalist perspec-
tive (in this case, the danger of ignoring the profundity of the alteration)—any revival,
no matter how carefully concerned with reconstruction, transfers traditional musics
into a different sociocultural context. This usually means that the music is performed
on a stage, which was rarely part of the original performance situation. Although this
transformation of the performance sphere also clearly occurred with all acoustic revival
groups (including in the hardcore English folk club scene and with Skandinieki), it has
become much more apparent with electric groups. Because amplification techniques
often demand larger spaces, this automatically results in a greater distance being placed
between performer and audience. As the subtitle “untraditional Latvian folk music” of
the Latvian sampler Electric Amber (2005) demonstrates, and as is also evident in the
problem of finding a proper category for Iļģi’s music in Latvia (Sweers 2010), the various
electric revival approaches have often become distinct genres lying somewhere between
folk and popular music—and driven by the technical demands of both sides.
Yet because such groups could often only fall back on existing (acoustic) performance
spaces, the music’s greatest strength (musical originality due to hybridity) also became
one of its greatest weaknesses. In England, these electrified groups were too loud for
the folk clubs, the traditional performance spheres of the Second Revival, although the
emerging Progressive Rock movement provided new performance sites here, such as
smaller halls or university auditoriums. Nevertheless, in other cultural spheres, such as
the American East Coast of the 1990s, the hybrid nature of specific ethnic electric folk
groups like the English-focused New St. George could constitute a problem (see Sweers
2005: 248–249). Although New St. George appealed to an extremely varied audience, it
could not fall back on an existing network of musical venues because the American elec-
tric folk scene was very small and could provide few suitable spaces for hybrid electric
acoustic folk bands, apart from outdoor festival venues.
Moreover, as Lundberg et al. elucidated in the case of the Swedish drone rock group
Garmarna (2003: 156), a further modern performance problem is caused by the con-
stant shift between different mediatized forms and the increasing incorporation of pre-
programmed music. Through its work with samples and loops, the group can perform
some parts of its repertoire only if the performance space is equipped with computers,
multichannel equipment, and large monitor systems. Yet again, the characteristic per-
formance sites for these Scandinavian folk fusion groups are usually not large, techni-
cally well-equipped concert arenas but smaller venues specializing in acoustic artists
and thus without their own costly sound engineers.
Musical hybridity has a financial impact. Even if not working with preprogrammed
music, groups like Iļģi nevertheless need the expensive, larger rooms of the rock scene
for an ideal performance situation. However, these spaces are often too big for the com-
paratively small audience. As New St. George founder Jennifer Cutting has pointed out
(see Sweers 2005: 248–249), external sound engineers specializing in the hybrid com-
bination of electric and acoustic/traditional instruments were nearly unaffordable for
small bands like New St. George, which could not even pay roadies to handle their
large, technical equipment. This was one of the reasons why the group finally disbanded
in 1996.
Moreover, as became especially visible in smaller countries like Latvia, if musicians
want to become affiliated with the modern mainstream, they usually play pure pop or
rock—but rarely ever hybrid fusion genres such as electric folk because this form is often
regarded as a highly eccentric niche music. In the case of Latvia, the youth generation
remains affiliated within—now likewise “traditional”—organized dance groups and
choirs because these have been providing primary communal rural leisure activity for
several decades now. Iļģi is neither part of the established authenticity movement (and
partly related acoustic directions), nor is it a group of interest for the masses of younger
audiences focused on Western popular music. Although Iļģi has become a household
name within the whole region (the group is often mentioned in introductions to the
music and culture of the Baltics), it only occupies a small niche position within Latvia’s
actual music sphere. These musicians are thus semi-professional, unable to earn a living
wage from their music within a country of 2.2 million inhabitants.
This automatically raises the question of to what extent these revival groups still
represent an outer or popular layer of their country’s folk music—and this represents
another sceptic argument. As indicated earlier, not only do (grassroots) traditions,
acoustic, and electric folk (revival) musics exist in very different performance spheres
and sociocultural contexts, but the multilayered hybrid structure also has resulted in a
contradictory situation (cf. Sweers 2010). To use Slobin’s terminology, despite the elec-
tric instruments, folk rock or electric folk often does not reach into all parts of the super-
cultural sphere. For example, Iļģi is well-known within the international festival scene
(performing in the United States, Canada, and Germany, for example). Yet the group’s
CDs are only rarely featured in world music journalism, as their highly specialized label
(UPE) does not have an international distribution. Conversely, the group also maintains
a newly created space within the internet, which is regularly visited by a large group of
exiled Latvians in the United States and Canada who currently form a distinct intercul-
ture (Slobin 1993) with their mother country through the internet.
Contrasting this representative role within the global (musical mainstream) sphere,
Iļģi is only part of a small electric folk microculture within a local context. This difference
became especially apparent when the group became Latvia’s musical ambassador dur-
ing the Eurovision Song Contest, held in Riga in 2003. As Iļģi’s atmospheric video was
watched by several million Europeans during the interlude, one might have expected a
subsequent positive impact on the group’s economic/professional situation within the
local and international contexts. Yet, as Ilga Reizniece told me in 2004 (interview, May
482 Britta Sweers
17, 2004, Riga), this continental media presence led to only one or two extra concert/fes-
tival bookings on an international level, and the group received no additional requests
within Latvia. This clearly reflects the isolated position electric folk can take on within
its own cultural sphere.
This might also relativize some sceptic views on the actual impact of global structures
such as hypermedia or the world music network. Returning to Olson (2004), Russia
and the Ukraine have also been dominated by already established revival structures
that have become distinct traditions but are, in fact, clearly detached from their initial
rural contexts. Therefore, not only did the world music scene offer some bands a chance
to survive the difficult economic situation of the post-Soviet era (Olson 2004: 222), it
also—alongside the new mediatized contexts—opened up new spaces for alternative
musical approaches. Examples of the latter are the Russian experimental revival group
Farlanders or the Ukrainian Carpathian Ska-punk band Haydamaky. Both groups
exemplify how a connection to the Western music industry and the world music net-
work can create new spaces for the rediscovery and revival of grassroots elements, par-
ticularly in an atmosphere in which institutionalization has led to a static new tradition
of its own.
Outlook
Although I have emphasized the transformationalist perspective with regard to the dis-
courses centered on electric folk revival forms, I nevertheless think a more profound
understanding of revival within globalized contexts is only possible by combining all
three approaches—transformationalist, sceptic, and hyperglobal. Turning to the sceptic
perspective, which I view as highly important in shaping problematic and identity-related
aspects of modern globalization, it is obvious that today’s increasingly dense transfor-
mation processes have also been leading to an increasingly rapid disappearance of tra-
ditional musics. Yet these same musics often become central anchor points for modern
identity constructions. As was apparent in Lithuania and Latvia, but also in the British
Isles and Scandinavia, the younger generation of musicians has often displayed a strong
need to readapt their particular rural traditional singing and instrumental techniques.
In Latvia, one may even observe the adaptation of performance techniques of margin-
alized Russian “minorities” (who constitute 40% of the population) by Latvian musi-
cians integrating these approaches as Latvian tradition. One example is the Riga-based
Russian group Ilinskaja Pjatnica, which—led by Sergey Olenkin—has revived the rep-
ertoire of the Old Believers who have been living in Latvia/Latgalen since the eighteenth
century. This seems remarkable, as Latvia, while establishing its new post-Soviet identity,
has actually been developing a noticeably ethnically shaped nationalism. And because
of the traumatic experience of the Soviet era, this new nationalism often excludes the
Latvian Russian minority as a whole from the supercultural sphere (e.g., government and
cultural life).
This situation is also an indication of the political side of sceptic thinking within
the region. As is apparent here, revival folk music took on a specific role in rela-
tion to national identity construction in these regions. In the context of the “Singing
Revolution,” folk music became a means of establishing an individual identity set
against the universal Soviet mainstream. Yet although this realization of “Latvian” musi-
cal characteristics (particularly within the authenticity movement) did indeed lead to an
assurance of national independence, the resulting situation after independence can be
instead described as exclusivist with racial elements (e.g., excluding not only the Soviet
culture, but also anything Russian that had also previously existed in the region).
Although current thick globalization seems to confirm the central role of a sceptic
ethnomusicological approach that focuses on the preservation and documentation of
material resources and performance practices, it nevertheless also calls for the inte-
gration of hyperglobal and transformationalist elements. Switching to the modified
hyperglobal perspective, this does not simply emphasize the need for alternative media
networks: Increasingly thick global structures have also opened up new possibilities for
collaboration and musical/scholarly interaction. It seems, for instance, that the vocal
teceijas technique, which was revived by Latvian postfolklore musicians, is also evident
in Lithuania, where it was revived by modern sutartinė singers, as well as in neighbor-
ing Belorussia and (with some variants) in the Ukraine. This effort, however, calls for a
broader transregional collaboration of researchers and musicians, one that goes beyond
political conflict zones before the last direct, living contacts disappear within the next
twenty years.
The open—transformationalist—perspective, which also includes modern prac-
tices combined with precise knowledge of current transformation processes, might
then perhaps contribute to new revivals of various kinds within global contexts. For, as
Christopher Small’s significant concept of “musicking”—as developed in Music of the
Common Tongue (1994)—has demonstrated, it is the human factor that has the power
to alter those cultural flows, also seen within music genres, that are perceived as global
mainstreaming. As Small describes it, “musicking” is a creative process strongly con-
nected to improvisation and particularly central to African-influenced music in which
musicians organize their experiences and explore and confirm who they are (1994: 50,
464). The improvisational process is especially apparent in Afro-American music—the
initial basis of Western popular music—and thus represents a constant process inter-
twined with the search for human meanings, in which one’s own identity is sought out,
confirmed, and transformed.
It may also be that this openness, combined with a deep adaptiveness (i.e., fusion in
the sense of transformation), is the reason that Anglo-American music has not only
been so successful on a global scale, but has taken on highly varied meanings outside the
mass media sphere. This perception also helps us to perceive folk rock fusions as creative
processes that are moving toward new musical forms, rather than as homogenizing pro-
cesses, and as embracing deeply human issues that go beyond national, static perceptions.
This is apparent in Ilga Reizniece’s description of Iļģi’s modern revival of Latvian (pagan)
traditions as a “national sentiment that is positive” (interview, May 17, 2004, Riga).
484 Britta Sweers
Notes
1. This sketched situation between 1500 and 1950 is likewise highly heterogeneous and can be
further differentiated, for example, with regard to the significant alterations that occurred
in the mid-to-late nineteenth century (development of increasingly globe-spanning mass
media, global migration flows, etc.).
2. Although the initial context was mainly rural, the whole body of revived material also con-
tains, among others, early industrial songs (e.g., with texts referring to spinning factories)
and popular music (e.g., sheet music).
3. Both merged into the English Dance and Song Society in 1932.
4. Latvia became independent on May 4, 1990.
5. “In diesen Liederchen herrscht bäurisch zärtliche Natur und Etwas dem Volk eigenes”
Johann Gottfried Herder ([1778/1779] 1975: 240).
6. “Folk music is the product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process
of oral transmission. The factors that shape the tradition are: (i) continuity which links the
present with the past; (ii) variation which springs from the creative impulse of the indi-
vidual or the group; (iii) selection by the community, which determines the form or forms
in which the music survives. The term can be applied to music that has been evolved from
rudimentary beginnings by a community uninfluenced by popular and art music. . . . 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-creating of the music
by the community that gives it its folk character” (International Folk Music Council 1955).
7. It should be noted that, although the term “postfolklore” is usually attributed to Sergey
Nekljudov (1995), Iļģi’s application of the terminology clearly differs from Nekljudov in
that it refers mainly to musical features.
8. This was also confirmed by Reizniece in a personal communication (May 17, 2004, Riga).
9. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish clearly between revival-related structures—such
as electric folk in England, which indeed falls back on preexistent structures—and gen-
eral fusions. The latter have come close to muzak-like mixtures with neither recognizable
original components nor clearly identifiable new structures (often also apparent in lounge
music compilations such as the Buddha Bar collection, e.g. Ravin 2004), particularly
in the new millennium. Not part of a broader transculturation process, the latter forms
rather seem to go far beyond Baumann’s deculturation processes. See, for instance, NRW
KULTURsekretariat (2007) with regard to the equation of “world music” with “fusion,”
especially within journalism.
10. This also applies to the role of modern mass media. In tune with Adorno (1962), for exam-
ple, media theorists have argued that humans are manipulated by modern mass media.
11. This is clearly apparent in Simon Frith’s analyses of Anglo-American youth cultures (see
Frith 1978).
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PA R T V I I
F E ST I VA L S ,
MARKETING,
A N D M E DIA
C HA P T E R 22
C O N T E M P O R A RY E N G L I S H
FOLK MUSIC AND THE
F O L K I N D U S T RY
SI MON K E E G A N - PH I PP S A N D T R I SH W I N T E R
In 2007, the folk development organization FolkArts England ran two “Folk Industry
Focus Days” as part of a four-day conference describing itself as “what may well be the
biggest gathering of folk activists, promoters and media folk since, well, who knows?!”
(FolkArts England 2007). The size and professional nature of this conference, which
took place at a state-of-the-art business conference centre, as well as the use of the term
“folk industry” in its description, was indicative of a growing sense of the folk arts in
England as existing in relation to an “industry”; a growing engagement with profes-
sionalization and commercial markets. A further consolidation of the “folk industry”
concept was achieved the following year with a shift in the title of the long-standing
Association of Festival Organisers (AFO) Conference to become the “Folk Industry and
AFO Conference.” The conference brochure promised that attendance would be a “fan-
tastic opportunity to be part of Folk’s cultural renaissance and to share and connect with
the people who are shaping its future” (FolkArts England 2008). There is an assumption
here, then, that a burgeoning folk industry is an integral part of a “renaissance”—or, to
use our preferred terminology, a resurgence—in the folk arts in England.1
There is evidence that the period starting around 2002 (and still continuing in
2013) may indeed be identified as a period of markedly increasing interest in the folk
arts in England. While this interest extends beyond English folk music to include other
musics designated as “folk” (and other folk arts such as dance), music that explicitly,
often emphatically, identifies itself as English folk is a key element of the resurgence and
the main focus of our attention here. It is possible to point to several indicators of resur-
gence: Folk festivals have become increasingly popular; the demography of folk audi-
ences is getting younger—folk is enjoying considerable and growing popularity with
people in their teens, twenties, and thirties; and folk has moved beyond the boundar-
ies of the folk scene and toward popular cultural contexts like Mercury Music Awards
490 Simon Keegan-Phipps and Trish Winter
nominations and mainstream music festivals. The media profile of folk has shifted, with
greater media visibility for folk music in both arts and popular entertainment television
programming, for example, and in all of this an increasing number of professional folk
acts are foregrounding their Englishness.2
It is the purpose of this chapter to examine the multidimensional folk industry that
is associated with the resurgence in English folk music and to consider the ways an
increasingly commercialized and professionalized infrastructure coexists and interacts
with philanthropic, anticommercial, and determinedly amateur motivations. The win-
dow through which we will examine this burgeoning folk industry is the festival, a key
location for the resurgence in English folk music, before going on to consider the signifi-
cance of the media, competitions, and folk development organizations.
Historical Context
Although we are suggesting that the language and concept of a “folk industry” is recently
emergent, we are not claiming that folk music has previously always existed outside
economic or commercial structures. Rather, it existed in relation—sometimes uneasy
relation—to them throughout the twentieth century. For this reason, we begin with a
general overview of the historical context for the current resurgence. This is designed
as a broad outline relevant to the development of a folk industry rather than a compre-
hensive digest of the two multifaceted periods of revival through which folk music in
England has been shaped.3
The first discernable movement of revival in English folk dance, song, and music was
that most popularly associated with—and, for the most part, directed by—Cecil Sharp
between around 1890 and 1920 (although Sharp’s involvement in the revival didn’t begin
until around 1899). Among the most significant of Sharp’s legacies has been his crystal-
lization and explicit statement of a particular construct of folk—a construct with which
practicing folk music culture has found itself in conflict or negotiation ever since. His
definition was explicated in his groundbreaking definition of the term “folk song” in
the work English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, and revolved around the construction of
an inherently rural and uneducated social group (“the folk”) as the unconscious—and
increasingly inadequate—guardians of a national music and dance repertory:
The song which has been created by the common people, in contradistinction to the
song, popular or otherwise, which has been composed by the educated . . . “the com-
mon people” are the unlettered, whose faculties have undergone no formal training,
and who have never been brought into close enough contact with educated persons
to be influenced by them.
(Sharp 1907: 3)
Contemporary English Folk Music and the Folk Industry 491
Sharp’s unwavering insistence on these criteria for the denoting of the authentic source
came under some criticism at the time (see Francmanis 2002), but his political influence
and published rhetoric ensured strong support from the majority of active musicians,
academics, and antiquarians.
It can be argued that the quest for the cultural expressions of an idealized rural, agri-
cultural underclass was motivated by the desires of the educated elite to oppose two
apparent trends in urban society at the end of the nineteenth century: (1) the fetishiza-
tion and perceivedly disproportionate influence of other European orchestral traditions
(specifically German Romanticism) in nineteenth-century British art music, and (2) the
ubiquity of the popular music characterized by the repertory of the burgeoning music
hall context, a repertory that (it was feared) was now pervading all areas of vernacular
cultural engagement. The “unlettered classes” were thus constructed in contradistinc-
tion to what Storey has referred to as the “supposedly degraded culture of the urban
working class” (Storey 2003: 11). Significantly for the purposes of this essay, the culture
of that urban working class (by the end of the nineteenth century certainly the larg-
est social group in the country) consisted of products designed for mass consumption.
Desires to highlight and oppose the capitalist aspects of these new popularist cultural
products were central motivations for many involved in collecting and recontextual-
izing English folk song and music. In his inaugural address of 1899 in the Journal of the
Folk Song Society, C. Hubert H. Parry offered a damning indictment of “modern popular
music,” with specific reference to its being “made with commercial intention out of snip-
pets of musical slang” (quoted in Storey 2003).
It must be acknowledged that an explicit anticapitalist rhetoric was not the main
emphasis of the revival movement’s rationale. Rather, an opposition to the commercial-
ism of late Victorian urban culture was implicit in the discourse of social philanthropy
foregrounded by the revival’s vocal advocates:
The revival of our national folk music is . . . part of a great national revival, a going
back from the town to the country, a reaction against all that is demoralising in city
life. It is a re-awakening of that part of our national consciousness which makes for
wholeness, saneness and healthy merriment.
(Mary Neal, quoted in Gammon 1980: 81)
Discussion of the subject centered on the reuniting of the English population with a
lost musical legacy for the purposes of widespread cultural enrichment (and, ultimately,
patriotic sentiment):
Please allow us to teach the children to know and to love what we believe to be the
natural and spontaneous music of our ancestors. Then we may hope (with Mr. Cecil
Sharp) to have in the future Griegs and Glinkas of our own to do for English music
what these patriotic musicians did for the music of their own countries.
(J. Heywood, quoted in Francmanis 2002: 13)
The above quotation speaks explicitly of the two objectives to which focus was directed
in this first revival movement: (1) the increase in the role of folk song, music, and dance
in school-based education (a brief prioritized by Sharp himself), and (2) the interpo-
lation of collected folk music material in a specifically English body of chamber and
orchestral art music (tackled most conspicuously by composers such as Ralph Vaughan-
Williams, C. Hubert H. Parry, and George Butterworth). Both preoccupations were
expressed in terms of a greater good (the instillation of national identity and pride), an
ethos consciously distanced from any potential economic motivations.
Despite this ethos, however, the practices of the movement were not without eco-
nomic considerations: For instance, every body of collected and arranged material rep-
resented a publication to be sold as fuel for the growing interest in an English national
culture. Works were commissioned from professional composers, and concerts were
given by professional (and, from 1893, trade-union-represented) classical musicians.
While the majority of activists in this field funded their projects through their own per-
sonal wealth or private income (often a wage in the private education sector, as in the
case of Sharp’s early collecting career), the ultimate state sanction of Sharp’s work took
the form of public finance: a civil list pension of £100 a year, granted in July 1911 for his
services to the collection and preservation of English folk songs (Karpeles 1967: 82).
Between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s, folk music across Britain was the subject
of what is widely referred to as the second folk revival. This new period in the develop-
ment of folk music scholarship and performance differed greatly from Sharp’s move-
ment, primarily due to its political and ideological alliances: Here, emphasis on folk
music as the cultural expression of the “people” was predominantly shaped by an inter-
nationally growing socialist political agenda (Brocken 2003; Sweers 2005). This new folk
revival asserted alignment with the antiapartheid, civil rights, and CND (Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament) activisms that were central to the preexisting—and ongoing—
American folk movement, while engaging more openly with Marxist discourse and
Communist political allegiances.4 Brocken (2003: 49–55) points, for example, toward
the significance of the Workers’ Music Association in providing support for the revival,
and to the involvement of key movers in the second revival—such as Albert Lancaster
Lloyd and Ewan MacColl—in Marxist politics. Just as the folk music of the first revival
had been imagined as a more wholesomely English alternative to the popular music of
the industrializing period, so some central figures in the second revival saw British and
English folk music as an alternative to the commercialized popular music of that time.
Alternative circuits of distribution and performance for folk music began to emerge,
circuits that placed themselves apart from, or in opposition to, the popular music mar-
ketplace, and of central importance in this were the folk clubs that spread from the 1950s
onward as a forum for participatory folk music performance, with an amateur ethos
(MacKinnon 1993: 33–41).
While English folk music continued to be constructed in opposition to commercial-
ized popular music, and the political ideology of leading figures in this revival period
may have been “bent on resisting the over-arching economic reality of Western capi-
talism” (Brocken 2003: 43), this period was also one in which folk music engaged in
different ways with the marketplace. The folk clubs, for example, while understanding
themselves as an alternative to the commercial music marketplace, also developed as
a circuit for professional folk performance, as some clubs also began to book guest art-
ists, who performed alongside the clubs’ amateur floor singers.5 Similarly, the indepen-
dent record label Topic Records developed from the 1950s on to become an important
producer of recorded folk music and, in doing so, inevitably had to acknowledge its
position in a recorded music marketplace. Brocken captures the ambiguity of this in
his description of Topic as “realistic, albeit reluctant capitalists” (43). A more explicit
entry of English folk music into a popular music marketplace came through its hybrid-
ization with popular music in the folk rock and electric folk of this period, genres that
are considered in detail by Sweers (2005) and Burns (2012). Not only did music that
featured elements of English folk have commercial success (this reached a peak, Sweers
argues, between 1972 and 1975 with the chart successes of Steeleye Span), but this music’s
professional stars achieved an attendant visibility in the mainstream media. Sweers, for
example, notes that while early coverage of folk music by the popular music magazine
Melody Maker had focused on American performers like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger,
the English revival subsequently started to receive space in the magazine from the 1960s
onward, with articles on performers like A. L. Lloyd, Ewan MacColl, Anne Briggs, and
Shirley Collins.
Through these two revival periods, then, English folk music has largely been imagined
and practiced as an alternative to commercialized popular musics—an alternative that
has variously been viewed as more properly “English” or else a more authentic expres-
sion of “the people.” There are, however, also ways English folk engaged with commercial
markets and became, in various ways and to various extents, professionalized through
these periods. This took different forms, from the public support afforded to Cecil
Sharp through the alternative circuits of the folk clubs where amateur and professional
share the stage, and to the intersections of electric folk and folk rock with mainstream
commercial markets and musical styles. These engagements can all be traced into the
further-developed, multidimensional industry of contemporary English folk culture.
For instance, the presence of numerous booking agents and artist managers at the Folk
Industry/AFO conference in 2009, including showcase concerts where their acts were
profiled for festival organizers, illustrated the extent to which the resurgence had by this
time become increasingly reliant on an infrastructure of backstage professionals.
Our choice of the term “resurgence” to describe the movement under investigation
reflects a need to distinguish the new developments from those of the preceding first
and second “revival” periods. There are a number of reasons for this differentiation.
First, there is no clear discourse of a tradition in need of “rescue” (to borrow the term
from Livingston 1999: 70). None of the protagonists interviewed for the present research
showed any concern that the material performed by folk musicians was in danger of fall-
ing into disuse. Rather, this resurgence is most clearly understood as a growth of popu-
larity and profile of a preexisting genre. It is also unlike previous revivals (and those in
certain other cultures) in that it is not accompanied by a strong discursive opposition to
any “mainstream” cultural developments. Through outputs such as singer Jim Moray’s
album Low Culture, musicians go to great lengths to emphasize folk music status as one
kind of “popular music” or to engage in a postmodernist deconstruction of the folk/art/
pop boundaries. In addition, the collection of traditional material—cited by Livingston
as a “basic ingredient” of any revival (69)—plays no discernable role in the resurgence,
although consultation (and celebration) of existing collections made during the previ-
ous revivals is common.
Furthermore, there is no unified (or even predominating) methodology for a rein-
vention of traditional material or performance. In fact, the resurgence has foregrounded
and celebrated a considerable diversification of stylistic approaches. For instance, the
singer and multiinstrumentalist Jim Moray has employed experimental live-sampling
techniques in his arrangements, while the English Acoustic Collective has concen-
trated on the development of a strictly acoustic polyphony and heterophony, and the
eleven-piece folk “big band” Bellowhead has explored arrangements ranging from
vaudeville to 1970s disco. Although some acts have developed new and unusual ways of
presenting traditional material, many are performing in much the same way as would
have been expected before the resurgence began, and all are enjoying increased pop-
ularity and media profile. Musicians tend to consider the resurgence as a newly posi-
tive, receptive attitude toward folk music by those coming to the genre from outside,
assisted by a “new generation” of performers who have made the music more appealing
to younger audiences. While other labels are occasionally employed by various com-
mentators for the contemporary movement, use of the term “revival” is very rare, with
participants seeking to distance themselves from what are perceived to have been the
more heavily politicized objectives of the first and second revivals. Thus, interviewees in
our research have generally responded positively to the term “resurgence,” even taking it
up in future public discussion.
Related to the foregoing points, the current resurgence also differs from the preced-
ing folk revivals in that it is not underpinned by any explicit political or ideological
movement. As we demonstrate elsewhere (Winter and Keegan-Phipps 2013), the wider
political climate in England can be understood as a contributing factor in the growth in
popularity of the English folk arts but cannot be demonstrated to be an explicit motiva-
tion for any of the activities manifest in the resurgence. Instead, any political statements
locatable in the resurgence are generally subtle, ambiguous, multifaceted, and often
downplayed.
Some of the organizations and events mentioned in this essay are in receipt of pub-
lic funding. However, it is important to acknowledge that the British government has
no clear or explicit policy on the funding of the English—or wider British—folk arts
as opposed to the funding of any other form of arts activities. During the course of the
research presented here, new Arts Council England awards have been made for certain
activities, while preexisting, regular financial support for others has been withheld.
There is certainly a feeling among folk musicians and audiences that although the situ-
ation is improving, folk music receives far less support from the state than it deserves
because of its established status as an object of ridicule. It is a widely held view among
those involved that the resurgence has occurred in spite of the state’s arts funding policies
rather than because of them, although it is also recognized that the state’s response to the
resurgence has been a positive one.
The Festival
As a category of cultural and social event, the festival constitutes arguably the most sig-
nificant performative arena for the early twenty-first century resurgence in English folk
music and dance. Earlier studies of folk music in England have focused their attentions
on the folk club, but this legacy of the second revival period weakened steadily in signifi-
cance through the 1980s and 1990s (a decline documented quantitatively by MacKinnon
1993). Barring one or two notable exceptions, club audiences are far from representative
of the younger generation (under forty years old) that apparently resides at the heart of
the contemporary movement. Younger participants often associate folk clubs with unap-
pealing residual features of the second revival period from which the establishments were
born, such as an older personnel, anachronistic cultural capital, unacknowledged formal-
ities, and a heavily (if not always explicitly) politicized ethos. Festivals, however, have seen
a considerable increase in attendance by younger audiences. Festivals are also sites of con-
centrated activity across the full range of the folk arts—music and dance, from the fully
presentational (e.g. formal concerts) to the fully participatory (such as open workshops
and ceilidh dancing). In recent years, many key innovations in the contemporary English
folk arts have been premiered at or instigated by festivals rather than other performance
venues (as with the first performance of the ground-breaking morris dance group Morris
Offspring at Sidmouth International Festival in 2003, which went on to tour arts venues
nationally in 2007). Festivals are therefore considered to represent the most central per-
formance context of the current resurgence by the majority of its participants.
Estimates for the number of annual folk festivals throughout the United Kingdom
were set in 2004 at around 350 (Association of Festival Organisers 2003). Such esti-
mates can only be approximate, for a number of reasons. First, festivals can range from
weeklong, high-profile events attracting upward of ten thousand attendees to some-
thing more akin to a series of workshops over one or two days, perhaps attracting fewer
than a hundred. Most significantly, the identification of folk festivals is complicated by
the fact that generic boundaries and labels are ambiguous. Even among those festivals
that include the term “folk” in their title, the nature of the content programmed var-
ies immensely. Different festivals choose to include to greater or lesser extents music
that is—or can be—described as world music, early music, singer-songwriter, American
old-timey, blues, acoustic pop, and jazz alongside that which is unambiguously tradi-
tional music of the British Isles. Meanwhile, symptomatic of the current resurgence is a
new-found willingness by music festivals widely regarded as “mainstream festivals” to
program folk music.
As festivals vary in size and content, so too do they vary in their location and imme-
diate physical setting: For the vast majority of folk festivals, most attendees stay on a
campsite, and this is often a focal space for festival activities. In the cases of larger fes-
tivals, a sizable field plays host to almost all of the programmed activities, with space
portioned out for camping, vendors’ stalls, catering vans, and temporary performance
venues (commonly marquees of varying sizes). At many festivals, at least some of the
performances are housed in a nearby building, such as a school or leisure center, while
others make greater use of local public buildings for performances (town halls, churches,
theaters, large pubs). A number of “folk festivals” basically amount to a concert series,
hosted by an arts center, with attendees expected to organize their own accommodation.
A defining feature of “folk festivals,” as opposed to other genres of music festival, is
the relative centrality of active artistic participation by attendees. For these attendees,
membership of concert audiences may play a significant role, as it would at any other
form of music festival, but a great deal of expectation and value is placed on opportuni-
ties to take part in music and dance, through either programmed, organized workshops
or less formalized (and potentially relatively spontaneous) occurrences such as instru-
mental music sessions or singarounds (the nearest vocal equivalent to the session).
Nonetheless, it is true to say that relatively nonparticipatory performances are the high-
est profile element of programming at folk festivals—the concert bill remains a central
element of festival advertising. Again, emphases differ considerably from one festival to
the next, but music concerts and dance displays are likely to account for the majority of
the festival program.
The festival plays host to the full gamut of commercial activity that now exists in
England’s folk music culture. Beyond the initial financial investment on the part of the
attendee at the point of purchasing a ticket, the event itself is constructed as a multifac-
eted economic space.6 Whether situated in a self-contained festival site or positioned
in another easily accessed area of the hosting town, the provision of a variety of com-
mercial outlets specific to the event is a central element. Perhaps the most significant
category of such vendors (at least from the point of view of turnover) is catering: at a
large festival, several trailers and mobile kitchens provide attendees with diverse suste-
nance, ranging from burger-vans and purveyors of full English fried breakfasts through
to vegetarian specialists and exponents of various “ethnic” cuisines. Large numbers of
stalls offer a huge array of clothes and gifts, many of which can be said to play a role in
the construction of cohesive subcultural identities among the attendees (items such as
non-Western—“ethnic”—clothing and ethically traded products). In the vast majority
of cases, all of the above vendors have negotiated contracts with the festival organizers in
order to secure their pitch at the festival.
Much space (and attendees’ money) is given over to the stalls that are culturally spe-
cific to the folk festival: sellers of musical instruments and sheet music and sellers of
recorded music (“the CD tent”). The former reap considerable economic benefits from
their presence at folk festivals: since only a handful of permanent shops exist in the UK
that specialize in the trade of folk and traditional musical instruments,7 the festivals
provide these vendors with the opportunity to tour their wares—to bring them to their
potential clients. Individual sales from these stalls can range from £1 (e.g. a toy harmon-
ica key-ring) to £2,000–3,000 (e.g. a high-quality melodeon). Just a handful of sales at
the top end of this spectrum may leave an instrument stall’s total turnover equalling
that of another kind of stall (e.g. a food vendor) that does continuous, brisk business
over the course of a busy weeklong festival. Where sales are not forthcoming during the
festival itself, potential clients are provided with the opportunity to try out instruments
for comparison with a view to a future purchase (a particularly important prelude to
future online purchases). The economics of the CD seller at a large festival can also be
comparatively involved. In most cases, there will be only one outlet for recorded music,
which will have negotiated (with the event organizers) sole rights to sell music and other
merchandise specific to the bands featured at the festival. The organizers will agree to
this in exchange for either a flat fee or a percentage of takings, and where such rights
have been secured by the vendor, acts performing at the festival will be contracted not
to sell their merchandise by any means other than through the vendor, who will apply
a standard commission rate (e.g., 20 percent) (Simon Bannister, interview, December
2, 2009, Telford). Meanwhile, the vendor will also arrive at the festival with his or her
own prepurchased stock, largely made up of CDs by the more commercially success-
ful and established acts, and often procured from record distributors such as Proper
Distribution, a company that specializes in the distribution of “specialist” music (mainly
folk and jazz).
Folk festivals are connected to a wider events industry in their contracting of services
such as sound engineers, public address system hire, marquee hire, stage and lighting
hire, portable toilet hire, and outdoor generator hire. For the most part, these roles are
fulfilled in much the same way as they would be at any large outdoor event, although
professional and social networking in England’s folk culture results in a situation where
a relatively small number of contractors for sound, public address systems, marquees,
stages, and lighting are hired by folk festivals throughout the country. Sound engineer-
ing, however, deserves a special mention, since this area has resulted in a specialization
process since the early 1980s: The individuals who are well known in this area are par-
ticularly respected for their knowledge in the field of successfully amplifying the sounds
of a range of acoustic instruments, including some—such as melodeons, concertinas,
whistles, and bagpipes—that might be unfamiliar and challenging to sound engineers
working in other genres.
Alongside this developing and professionalized folk industry, however, there remains
a strong noncommercial (even anticommercial), amateur ethos at the center of the
English folk culture’s identity. We have already noted the centrality of artistic participa-
tion in the idea of the folk festival, with the attendant blurring of distinctions between
performers and audience: Professional performers booked to perform at festivals might
be found at times playing in informal music sessions on the campsite, for example.
Performers remain strongly associated with, and surrounded by, a discourse of authen-
ticity through nonmonetary motivation. Most professional folk musicians are seen as
being motivated by “the love of the music”—not even the love of performing but a love of
the music. They are referred to, and regarded as, “tradition-bearers,” while their activi-
ties are regularly described in terms of “cultural heritage” (see e.g. Association of Festival
Organisers 2003). Amateur protagonists continue to play a central part in promoting
folk music and dance events, from festivals to clubs; their use of the politically loaded
term “folk activists” (rather than simply “volunteers”) to describe themselves is a quiet
statement of motivations that are not merely cultural but socially responsive and even
philanthropic.
English folk culture, then, demonstrates an apparently contradictory coexistence
of a folk ethos privileging amateurism and culturally philanthropic motivations with
a growing commercialization and professionalization. But this cohabitation—particu-
larly in the festival context—is far from uneasy. For example, many festivals program
participatory activities that engage directly with issues pertaining to the newly emerg-
ing folk industry, in such a way that the apparently inscrutable aspects of that indus-
try are demystified and explained for festival attendees. The 2008 workshops program
at Shrewsbury Folk Festival (one of the largest of England’s single-site folk festivals)
included talks by a representative of the Musicians’ Union titled “Releasing Your Own
Product” and “Spreading the Word: How to Approach Opinion Makers and Potential
Employers with Your Music Product,” while representatives of Birmingham City
University provided an advanced workshop on sound engineering. Similar program-
ming was beginning to appear at all the major festivals at this time. Other events show
how folk ethos and folk industry are increasingly combined, by constructing an image
of the arts industry as an inherently “grassroots” arena, where aspiring festival attendees
are encouraged to actively participate in the folk industry in much the same way as they
would expect to participate in a music session. Shrewsbury Folk Festival offered access
to two on-site mobile recording studios (a feature that is also becoming an increasingly
common instalment at larger festivals), one provided by the BBC’s county radio station
(BBC Radio Shropshire) and the other by Birmingham City University. These enabled
attendees to create a “music product,” with the promise of radio airplay by BBC Radio
Shropshire for the best recording made in their studio. A similar reward was on offer to
those who took part in the BBC’s workshop entitled “Learn Interviewing Techniques
and the Basics of Digital Editing.” Here, participants were taught the necessary skills
before being sent forth to create a radio “package” over the course of the festival week,
with the promise that “the best/funniest/most revealing gets played on [BBC Radio
Shropshire’s folk program] Sunday Folk” (Shrewsbury Folk Festival 2008).
The economic relationships being practiced here are multifaceted. In the case of
the Musicians’ Union’s educative discussion fora, the attendees remain consumers of
the industry about which they wish to learn (the Musicians’ Union representative, for
instance, is offering his own advisory “product” and will be paid out of money made
from festival ticket sales). In the case of the recording studios, attendee investment in
the commercial system extends to the free provision of “products” for that system, either
directly (in the case of the BBC’s airplay incentives) or through the indirect feeding of an
emphasis on product-led commerce. A developing media involvement even suggests an
apparent increase in the potential for talented attendees to be “discovered” in a manner
that simultaneously references current popular cultural trends (such as television talent
shows like The X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent) and an inclusive democratizing of oppor-
tunity consistent with longer standing cultural values of the English folk scene.
These developments are relatively recent (the appearance of mobile recording studios
at festivals, for instance, has only occurred since approximately 2004), but the merg-
ing of consumption and participation has played an important if tacit role in English
folk music culture for some time. The most obvious and long-standing example of this
ambiguity is the role of festivals as arenas for the sale of musical instruments and tune/
songbooks, predominantly to amateur attendees, by the vendors mentioned. Even the
most unambiguous form of product sale—the sale of music CDs—has historically taken
place from the boot of the performer’s car ever since the medium became available for
public manufacture: sole-trader festival contracts notwithstanding, the purchase of CDs
direct from the performer is a celebrated part of the folk music culture, emphasizing the
“grassroots” identification of folk musicians with their audiences. In the context of the
larger festivals, this point of cultural contact has, since around 2005, been reinvented
with the now standard appearance of a “signing tent”: After concerts, artists may sched-
ule an autographing session in the signing tent (invariably positioned alongside—and
often administered from—that of the CD seller). Thus the opportunity for some brief
personal contact with the performer/s remains achievable for audience members, while
the former are operating within the contractual requirements of the festival’s sole-trader
agreement. The institutionalization of performers autographing their merchandise
simultaneously enhances their status as celebrities in their culture—individuals to be
considered approachable only via a queue. In these ways, the increasingly common
practice of the “signing session” can be regarded as both a manifestation and an active
vehicle of the professionalizing folk industry.
The Media
Media institutions and platforms are recognized by many as being engaged with—and
complicit in—the development of a broader, active, and professionalizing English folk
industry. In interviews, regular reference is made to the growth of interest in folk music
across the country’s radio and television programming as both reflective of and contrib-
uting to the current resurgence of English folk music. Steve Heap (FolkArts England)
contextualized his experiences of the conception of the folk-music-based Channel 5
television series My Music thus:
Now, for twenty-odd years, I’ve been in and out of radio and television studios, and
media, saying “folk music” . . . usually with a small “f ” and, in the earlier days, qui-
etly. And they’ve laughed and giggled and said “morris dancers and silly old men
with beards and beer bellies.” At [a]‌meeting . . . less than a year ago, twelve top profes-
sional television people sat around a table and discussed folk music at length, very
seriously, and nobody laughed and nobody giggled and nobody laughed about mor-
ris men—and they were discussed—and nobody said “beer bellies” and . . . . That’s
a resurgence. That’s people who previously didn’t quite know what it was, taking it
seriously. And understanding the potential. Some people only understand the com-
mercial potential, other people can see the artistic potential, some can see the heri-
tage potential, the community potential . . . . It’s got lots of different branches to it, and
more and more people are recognizing it . . . . That’s a resurgence.
(Steve Heap, interview, January 25, 2008, Matlock)
By 2010, there had been a significant increase in generic references to “folk” in main-
stream public print, television, and online media and journalism. When related to
music, this has included a broadening of the term “folk” to include some varieties of
acoustic popular music and musicians, and the term’s expansion into popular classi-
fications such as Nu Folk (e.g., in relation to the acoustic-rock sounds of acts such as
Mumford and Sons or Noah and the Whale) and Folktronica (characterized by the com-
bination of heavily electronic and “natural” acoustic sounds, as heard in the work of
Tunng). In parallel to this development, English folk musicians (i.e., those who identify
with English folk culture and are accepted as such in it) have been receiving new atten-
tion from mainstream media and programming. For example, Jim Moray supported the
pop singer Will Young on his 2003 U.K. tour, and Bellowhead has made several appear-
ances on the BBC2 televised music show Later with Jools Holland.
Although these growing folk music incursions into popular music programming are
significant, perhaps the strongest of English folk music’s relationships with the broad-
cast media is that with BBC Radio 2. Since the station’s inception in 1967, it has been the
sole provider of regular, national radio broadcasts devoted to folk music, albeit often
scheduled at times of the day likely to receive low listener ratings. Brocken refers to a
process of “marginalisation” via a justificatory discourse of “specialisation” (2003: 137),
and his clearly aggrieved belief that “folk music has been condemned to a degree of
radio exile” is one commonly held by members of the folk music culture in England.
Nonetheless, throughout the resurgence, “Folk and Acoustic” programming (in the
form of the Mike Harding Show) has been broadcast for an hour between 7 p.m. and
8 p.m. on a Wednesday evening (by no means the “graveyard shift”) on BBC Radio 2, the
most listened-to radio station in the UK.
BBC Radio 2’s notable relationship with folk music and dance culture has been
cemented in recent years by its involvement in and financial support of two of the largest
folk festivals in England: Sidmouth International Festival and Cambridge Folk Festival.
At Sidmouth, the station sponsored the largest of the covered performance venues—
the Radio 2 Concert Stage Ham Marquee—from 1998 to 2004, after which the festival
was taken under new management, scaled down, and renamed Sidmouth Folk Week.
During this period, performances from the Ham Marquee were routinely (and exclu-
sively) recorded for and broadcast on the Mike Harding Show (Schofield 2004: 191).
The station has also acted as title sponsor of the Cambridge Folk Festival, with the
BBC enjoying exclusive rights to recording and broadcasting at the festival: regular live
broadcasts are made from the substantial media enclosure at the festival ground during
the week of the event on Radio 2, with highlights of the festival broadcast retrospec-
tively on the BBC’s “culture” digital television station, BBC 4. In 2009, the BBC retained
its role as the festival’s principal media partner, but status as title sponsor of the event
was passed over to The Co-operative, a food retail and banking organization whose
famously ethical procurement and investment policies make its financial involvement
here a resonant one for a folk industry whose “industrial” aspects interface with philan-
thropic discourses.
The increasing professionalization of English folk culture has not only occurred in
juxtaposition with a continuing discourse of cultural philanthropy. The process has also
coincided with the converse increase in the vernacularization of access to the distribu-
tion of promotional materials, music files, and information via the Internet. The Internet
has, of course, allowed increased ease of communication (and therefore the commercial
distribution of products or information) for protagonists in all fields of the folk indus-
try, and this includes the musicians themselves, who are ostensibly able to reach ever
wider audiences with their music, without the aid of professional distributors or agen-
cies. The social and music networking site MySpace was particularly instrumental at
the turn of the twenty-first century in enabling amateur and semiprofessional musi-
cians to be heard by an active/selective audience. However, this apparently democratic
distributive media does not necessarily equate to a democratization of direct access to
music sales: MySpace enables musicians to “spread the word” but does not necessarily
lead directly to transactions without going through a third party. For instance, only a
small proportion of those listeners who listen to and download (where possible) mp3
files from such band-profile sites will follow this up by seeking to purchase an entire
album in hard copy (i.e. a mail-order CD) directly from the band. Folk music consum-
ers are well aware that if they can find an album for sale on an online shopping site such
as Amazon.com, HMV, or CD Baby, they are likely to pay considerably less than if they
were to purchase direct from the musician. The significance of networking sites, profile
sites, or independent websites rests predominantly in their potential to act as billboards
for cheap advertising to audiences or promoters who are actively seeking information.
In other words, the Internet has supported and diversified the communication of music
and information throughout an active and largely preexisting market. The musicians
interviewed by the authors all pointed to live events as the most significant context for
the “discovery” of folk music by new audiences—in particular, individuals encouraged
to attend a folk event by friends who are members of an existing audience and individu-
als witnessing a performance of folk music at a nonspecialist (mainstream) music event.
Whether or not these narratives are based on corroborating evidence, the inherently
social act of live audience membership remains central to internal discourse around the
expansion of a folk industry.
The achievement of significant commercial success via the Internet continues to
depend on the musicians’ engagement with professional distributors—in the case of folk
and traditional music in the UK, Proper Distribution—enabling wider circulation of
CDs to counteract the inevitably lower profit margins. Through distributors of this kind,
CDs are sold in much larger quantities via the popular online shops. And it is the democ-
ratization of access to these retailing channels that represents a significant vernacular-
ization of industrial activity. Proper Distribution, for instance, offers a package—Proper
Access—that enables the cost-effective distribution of CDs in relatively small quantities

and is therefore attractive for small labels and unsigned artists who are “just starting
out” (Proper Distribution 2010); it is also relatively simple for artists to deal directly with
the American online catalogue and retailer CD Baby. These opportunities for unsigned
acts to make their music widely available without heavy investment in the management
sector speaks to both an ideological investment that privileges the “little people” (the
new acts that are overlooked by the big record labels, particularly at early stages in their
careers) and a progressive, explorative, and inherently capitalist discourse surrounding
the quest for “hot new talent.”
As with all areas and genres of the contemporary Western music industry, however,
the increased opportunities for self-distribution and self-promotion might also be read
as moving folk music into line with a larger hegemonic economy in which musicians are
able—and encouraged—to become professional (or rather, professionalized) by work-
ing, on a self-funded basis, to begin the process of profile and popularity building. That
is, artists are encouraged to invest their own time and money in order to obtain the first
indicators by which the industry may assess their economic potential.
Competitions and Folk Development

Organizations
As we have already suggested, activities geared toward learning and participation make
a significant contribution to the programming of all festivals, and the work of develop-
ment organizations dedicated to the progression of the “next generation” of folk musi-
cians has been a significant contributor to the resurgence and is integrally tied to the folk
industry. Workshops are the most ubiquitous of such activities: They offer paying par-
ticipants access to the technical expertise and social contact of often fairly high-profile
performers, while providing those performers with an important supplement to their
performance income as well as the opportunity to develop a fan base (Keegan-Phipps
2008: 148). Workshops specifically aimed at children and young people, however, play
an important and increasingly acknowledged role in the mid- to long-term future of fes-
tivals, and of folk culture more generally. Dedicated educational provision for children
has become an essential criterion for the majority of key cultural event funding bodies
(particularly Arts Council England) and thus vital to any event requiring public contri-
bution. At the same time, festival organizers are becoming increasingly aware that the
provision of workshops and activities designed specifically for young people (preferably
by young people) enables the participants to quickly develop an identification with that
particular festival and to express a “festival loyalty” that will manifest itself in regular
attendance through to adulthood and beyond (283).
Shooting Roots, the most extensive series of this kind to develop in the context of
the English folk festival, began during the mid-1990s at Sidmouth International Festival
(under the commission of Heap’s Mrs. Casey Enterprises). By 2007 Shooting Roots
had grown to be what is essentially a subcontracted organization in its own right: run
by musician and dancer Laurel Swift, the group employed around twenty tutors on a
casual basis and was hired out to various festivals to provide a fully formed pack-
age of workshops, activities, and entertainments aimed at children and young people
between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. The popularity of Shooting Roots among
festival-attending tutees (and therefore festival organizers) is in no small part attribut-
able to the relatively young demographic of the tutors (who are aged between eighteen
and thirty) and the enthusiastic and informal presentation of the activities on offer.
It is relatively easy for the young tutees to identify with their tutors, and it is therefore
unsurprising that many regular attendees at Shooting Roots workshops have gone on to
become tutors in recent years (Keegan-Phipps 2008: 278–280).
In this way, the Shooting Roots experience is a relatively self-perpetuating cycle, and
this progression from participant to tutor can also be seen in other nonfestival work-
shops. But this sustainability of the festival youth workshop economy has developed
in parallel with a broader educational and competitive structure for the training and
encouragement of a “younger generation” of professional folk musicians. The Folkworks
program at the Sage Gateshead is by far the largest and most high-profile example of
the institutionalization of folk and traditional music education in England. Based in the
North East region of England, Folkworks is a highly resourced program, facilitating per-
formances and learning opportunities for children and adults at community, regional,
and national levels. As well as playing a major role in concert programming at the Sage
Gateshead—the £70 million Norman Foster building in which it is housed—Folkworks
has provided extensive workshop series, residential weekends, and summer schools
for adult and youth attendees. These formally structured, professionally managed, and
closely taught educational experiences provide instrumental, song, and dance tuition
(although the emphasis is on the former, as is congruent with the North East England
folk music culture from which the organization developed and in which it continues to
operate).8
Although the vast majority of Folkworks’ activities remain located in the North East
region, their influence on a developing younger generation of folk musicians is felt
across England and Britain as a whole. The success of the institution has for some time
taken the form of an upward spiral in popularity nationally and internationally. Secured
funding from the Arts Council England (among many other funding bodies and spon-
soring organizations) and reliable track records in publicity and marketing have enabled
Folkworks to offer securely waged employment opportunities for professional folk and
traditional musicians from across the country and beyond; thus, high-profile artists are
drawn from a range of geographical areas and musical traditions to work as tutors at
summer schools and other workshop-based events. This influx of nationally and inter-
nationally renowned teaching personnel, in turn, attracts greater numbers of tutees
from further afield. This has been particularly true of the relationship between tutors
and tutees hailing from the English folk music tradition, resulting in a partial transloca-
tion of English traditional music tuition to the home of Northumbrian traditional music
culture. This culture is characterized by pluralism and adoptive attitudes toward reper-
toires, and English folk is now to be found alongside Celtic and Northumbrian in the
area, as well as—to a lesser extent—Scandinavian, American, and eastern European tra-
ditional musics (Keegan-Phipps 2007: 29–31).
In 2001, the International Centre for Music Studies (ICMuS) at Newcastle University
joined forces with Folkworks to deliver an undergraduate degree (B.Mus.) in “folk and
traditional music.” Hailed as the first of its kind in England, the four-year course is
designed to offer a higher education opportunity for folk and traditional musicians with
an emphasis on performance, and tuition is delivered by a combination of professional
musicians, Folkworks personnel, and ICMuS academic staff. As part of this degree
course, tuition is provided in the extramusical elements of a performance-based musi-
cal career, such as stagecraft and arts administration. Almost from the conception of
the degree course, students have enjoyed opportunities to perform in professional con-
texts, such as “showcase” concerts in the Sage Gateshead’s programming. More impor-
tantly, students (many of whom have come through the Folkworks summer schools and
workshop experience) are able—and encouraged—to form groups, many of which go
on to perform professionally. They are also given such social and musical access to exist-
ing high-profile professionals that the course can be reasonably regarded as a potential
launchpad for a successful career as a folk or traditional musician. Multiinstrumentalist
Ian Stephenson, for instance, not only performed professionally as a soloist and ceil-
idh band musician during his time as an undergraduate earning the “folk degree”; he
also played as part of the Kathryn Tickell Band, accompanying Tickell, probably the best
known contemporary Northumbrian small-piper, who is one of the leading lecturers on
the course and, since 2009, the artistic director of Folkworks.
Institutionalization of folk and traditional music in England has occurred through
not only advanced education but also the strengthening profile of competition. Here,
too, connections with a developing folk music industry and related media coverage are
clear. Beyond simply broadcasting British folk music, BBC Radio 2 has also been associ-
ated with the development of a competition culture via the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.9
These have been awarded since 2000, and the award ceremony has been televised each
year since 2004 for BBC’s digital station, BBC4. The awards cover a range of categories,
including Folk Singer of the Year, Best Traditional Track, Best Duo, Best Album, and
Best Live Act, and are determined by a judging panel of unnamed experts in the field
of folk and traditional music. It is notable that the award categories indicate evaluation
of both the social performance of folk (Folk Singer of the Year; Best Live Act) and the
folk recording as a commoditized product (Best Traditional Track; Album of the Year).
Considering the high profile of ceilidhs and ceilidh bands in the folk community (par-
ticularly in England), coupled with the fact that ceilidhs often represent the first contact
with folk music for many new audiences, the failure to recognize this particular sector
of the professional folk music scene in these awards is telling. Many professional ceilidh
bands do produce albums, but these are, for the most part, collected only by a small
proportion of ceilidh enthusiasts and are often treated by the bands as a way of advertis-
ing the nature of their sound and repertory in order to secure bookings for the actual
dances. An award for Best Dance Band was presented to the ceilidh band Whapweasel
in 2005 but has not been awarded before or since. It is perhaps possible to infer from
the ceilidh bands’ general absence from the award listings that the experiential and pre-
dominantly unrecorded commodity offered by such acts does not meet with the more
commercial-product-led interests of an industry whose outlook gravitates toward the
needs of the mainstream media. Of course, a counterargument lies in the continual
presence of the Folk Club Award, which would appear to suggest an interest in reward-
ing participatory, community-oriented institutions. It is interesting to note that no Best
Folk Festival category has yet emerged, despite the far greater media profile, total num-
ber of attendees, and visible impact of these events in comparison to the clubs.
The awards are highly regarded among folk musicians, managers, promoters and
festival/venue programmers, and references to Folk Awards and nominations are
prominent in artists’ promotional materials. They therefore play an important role
in the professionalization of the folk musicians they celebrate, guaranteeing not only
national media exposure to audiences but also widespread recognition from prospec-
tive clients. Nonetheless, it is essential to bear in mind that the BBC remains a publicly
funded broadcasting organization with a cultural brief that demands a fundamentally
charitable support of the arts. Here, then, is a further indication of the extent to which an
increasingly commercialized English folk arts culture simultaneously maintains identi-
fication with a socially conscientious ideology, through its associations with—and reli-
ance on—a noncommercial (and ultimately state-sanctioned) cultural institution.
The BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award, on the other hand, represents the drawing
together of competition, industry celebration, and educational institutionalization.
Much of the event’s organization (including unrecorded semifinal judging) was con-
ducted by Folkworks from 1998, when the competition was started (notably preceding the
main BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards), until 2005.10 The links between the folk industry and
this competition are perhaps even more explicit than those between the industry and
the “adult” version of the awards: the prizes of the Young Folk Award have, for a num-
ber of years, consisted of live recording sessions for broadcast on BBC Radio 2’s Mike
Harding Show, as well as guaranteed performance slots at the Sidmouth International
and Towersey Village Festivals. A representative of both festivals has appeared on the
judging panel of the competition in the form of Steve Heap, while other past judges have
included John Leonard, director of Smooth Operations, the company that produces the
Mike Harding Show. Clearly, then, the judging criteria must include consideration of the
saleability of the products offered by the contestants.
Over recent years, the points of intersection between the educational institution-
alization of Folkworks, the folk degree, and the professional folk music industry have
developed beyond the competition context of the Young Folk Award. At the annual Folk
Industry and Association of Festival Organisers Conference in 2009, the free promo-
tional packets handed out to delegates included a free CD, Folk Degree Sampler 2009,
that provided a recorded showcasing of a number of promising performers currently
studying for the degree, and a two-track single, SpinnDrift, that served as a preview of a
forthcoming album by a band made up of folk degree students. During the conference
(organized by Steve Heap as the head of FolkArts England and the AFO), busking spots
were provided to give new performers the opportunity to be heard by festival organizers
and programmers. Folkworks-nurtured talent featured heavily, and cofounder Alistair
Anderson was also at the conference, not only speaking to delegates but also lending his
support to these budding professionals. Just as the provision of recording opportunities
to amateur performers at festivals feeds a cyclical system for market rejuvenation, an
infrastructure has developed in order to mature and present students of folk music edu-
cation for professional careers—careers that not only support the burgeoning industry’s
thirst for new young performers (each with a good grounding in arts administration and
the nonmusical aspects of the trade) but also provide advertisement for the educational
institutions wherein they have achieved such high technical standards and gained their
performance and recording opportunities.
Conclusions
A folk industry is growing, then, in the context of a music culture that has, since its
inception, been framed within versions of an anticommercial ethos. The industry is
developing with the professionalization of folk music products and artists and the
commercialization of participation but appears largely to reconcile this commercial-
ization with underlying principles of amateurism, social philanthropy, participation,
noncommercialism, and voluntarism. Indeed, the extent to which these trends are
reconciled and the professionalism of the folk industry is embraced can be striking.
The festival draws together the celebration of a developing, professionalizing indus-
try with a powerful “more-important-than-money” discourse. Festival programming
reveals an emphasis on social interaction as a folk-defining fundamental, from which
cultural philanthropy (widely referred to as “folk activism”) maintains and negotiates
the justification of professionalization as a means to an essential, culturally valuable
end. But the development of an industry is not merely seen as a necessary progression
for folk to be “taken seriously” by a mainstream-music-oriented media (and thus the
wider society) but also is celebrated as demonstrative of success—as the trappings of
achievement in this pursuit for cultural credibility and popularity. The significance
of the increasing commercialism in England’s folk culture is that it is one manifesta-
tion—and, simultaneously, one active vehicle—of a cultural identity in flux: it speaks
to larger (political) issues currently under negotiation in English folk music and
dance—concerns for engagement with the contemporary, the urban, the realist, and
the progressive.
As we have shown, to declare the contemporary developments in English folk music
culture a “revival” per se is questionable: The music being performed is not deemed to
be in danger of disappearing by those involved, and there are very few expressions of
intent to create a new music culture, or one that offers an alternative to a contemporary
mainstream. Contemporary English folk music is, however, undergoing a significant
process of recontextualization. This process has involved a partial shift in demographic

(in the form of a growing young audience) but hinges primarily on a cultural realign-
ment of folk music with the commercial structures more commonly associated with
pop music. Far from being a hegemonic resolution to earlier revivals, however, dis-
courses remain that maintain a central “folk” identity. A valued sense of authenticity
is retained through processes rather than through musical material: The “folk ethos”
is consolidated through an emphasis on inclusive participation that mitigates any
potential concerns about the “selling out” of professionalization or the “artifice” of
media representation. The lack of clearly underpinning cultural objectives by partici-
pants actually fuels the sense of authentic expression by suggesting that the resurgence
is inherently organic, rather than something “manufactured” by political agenda. To
put it another way, the “other” to which the current resurgence is offering an alterna-
tive is the explicitly directed, heavily politicized revivalism of previous revivals. The
resurgence is taking place in a cultural context where professionalization and indus-
trialization are the natural order, and where attempts to reject that order would not
only undermine the success of English folk music but would actually erode its claims of
authenticity or legitimacy as a popular movement.
Notes
1. Our choice of the term “resurgence” is discussed later.
2. The nature of this resurgence in the popularity and profile of English folk arts—and the
ways it speaks to a broader growth of interest in a notion of English national and cultural
identity—was the subject of a two-year ethnographic and ethnomusicological research
project, Performing Englishness in New English Folk Music and Dance (2007–9), hosted
by the University of Sunderland and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The research presented in this essay draws on ethnographic data, including interviews and
participant observation, collected as part of that project.
3. For more detailed historical accounts of English and British folk, see Boyes 1993; Brocken
2003; Harker 1985; MacKinnon 1993; Sweers 2005.
4. For more on the politics of the American revival, see Reuss and Reuss 2000.
5. See MacKinnon (1993: 70–76) for an account of the rise of the folk professional.
6. See Thomas (2008) for an expanded discussion of this, albeit one that is closely focused on
large mainstream festivals.
7. The most significant of these are the chains Hobgoblin and The Music Rooms, which have
stalls at most of the large folk festivals.
8. For more on Folkworks, see Keegan-Phipps 2007. For a broader discussion on the educa-
tional institutionalization of traditional musics, see Hill 2009.
9. The more explicit nationalism, local-national stratigraphy, and technical orientation of
Norwegian fiddling contests examined by Goertzen (1997) make them an interesting case
for comparison with the competitions discussed here.
10. For a more detailed analysis of Folkworks’ involvement in the training of many successful
competitors, see Keegan-Phipps 2008.
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Organisers Conference (Programme). Matlock: FolkArts England.
FolkArts England. 2008. The Folk Industry & AFO Conference 2008. Matlock: FolkArts England.
Francmanis, John. 2002. “National Music to National Redeemer: The Consolidation of a
‘Folk-song’ Construct in Edwardian England.” Popular Music 21 (1): 1–25.
Gammon, Vic. 1980. “Folk Song Collecting in Sussex and Surrey, 1843–1914.” History Workshop
10: 61–89.
Chicago Press.
Harker, Dave. 1985. Fakesong: The Manufacture of British “Folksong” 1700 to the Present Day.
Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Hill, Juniper. 2009. “The Influence of Conservatory Folk Music Programmes: The Sibelius
Academy in Comparative Context.” Ethnomusicology Forum 18 (2): 207–241.
Karpeles, Maud. 1967. Cecil Sharp: His Life and Work. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Keegan-Phipps, Simon. 2007. “Déjà Vu? Folk Music, Education, and Institutionalization in
Contemporary England.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 39: 84–107.
Keegan-Phipps, Simon. 2008. “Teaching Folk: The Educational Institutionalization of Folk
Music in Contemporary England.” PhD diss., Newcastle University.
(1): 66–85.
MacKinnon, Niall. 1993. The British Folk Scene: Musical Performance and Social Identity. Milton
Keynes: Open University Press.
Proper Distribution. 2010. “Proper Access.” http://www.properdistribution.com/proper-
distribution/proper-access.php?pg=1.
Reuss, Richard A., and JoAnne C. Reuss. 2000. American Folk Music and Left-wing Politics,
1927–1957. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Schofield, Derek. 2004. The First Week in August: Fifty Years of the Sidmouth Festival.
Sidmouth: Sidmouth International Festival.
Sharp, Cecil J. 1907. English Folk Song: Some Conclusions. London: Mercury Books.
Shrewsbury Folk Festival. 2008. Shrewsbury Folk Festival Programme. Bridgnorth: Shrewsbury
Folk Festival.
Storey, John. 2003. Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sweers, Britta. 2005. Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Thomas, Peter. 2008. “Geographies of the Music Festival: Production, Consumption and
Performance at Outdoor Music Festivals in the UK.” Ph.D. diss., Newcastle University.
Winter, Trish, and Simon Keegan-Phipps. 2013. Performing Englishness: Identity and Politics in
a Contemporary Folk Resurgence. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Discs Cited
Moray, Jim. 2008. Low Culture. NIAG Records.
Newcastle University. 2009. Folk Degree Sampler 2009. Newcastle University.
Spinndrift. 2009. SpinnDrift. Self-published.
A webography featuring annotated links to the websites of organizations, festivals, and
artists mentioned in this chapter can be found on the companion website. (See Website
List: Annotated Links .)
C HA P T E R 23
I VA NA K U PA L A
( S T. J O H N ’ S E V E ) R E V I VA L S
A S M E TA P H O R S O F S E X UA L
M O R A L I T Y, F E RT I L I T Y, A N D
C O N T E M P O R A RY U K R A I N IA N
FEMININITY
A DR IA NA H E L BIG
Revivals are an integral part of communal experience and function as a set of social
practices that suit a variety of needs at a particular point in time. That which becomes
constituted as a revival depends on context and on social forces that create the oppor-
tunity for revival. Revivals may be rooted in practices that have gone out of mode or
practices that were perhaps censored or abandoned due to broader economic, political,
or social changes. They may also be rooted in ongoing processes that are deemed more
effective if reconstituted as revivals. Revivals offer connections to sought-after experi-
ences. As such, revivals are common in societies where a consciousness of change is evi-
dent. Shared experience is couched in frameworks of nostalgia and remembering that
foster a sense of connectedness to other participants and draw on indexes that create
understandings of what is being recreated anew.
The very idea of “revival” is a modern one and offers a consciousness of the present
in relation to the past. Revivals garner meaning from that which came before but are
tailored to suit the needs of the present day. Revivalists may function within a discursive
understanding of the past that may be cast in terms of “authenticity,” often by intellec-
tual elites, or a conscious temporal framing of that which is “old” or belonging to that
which is not “now” (Bealle 2005; Peterson 2005; Rosenberg 1993). Revivals adhere to the
ever-changing social conditions in which they are experienced. As such, revivals are, as
Ron Eyerman and Scott Baretta argue, influenced by social movements in which social
IVANA KUPALA (ST. JOHN’S EVE) REVIVALS IN UKRAINE 511
actors produce knowledge and cultural goods as part of processes that are defined by
institutional frameworks (Eyerman and Baretta 1996).
Not every event that has connections to past traditions succeeds as a revival or is
necessarily viewed as such. Certain criteria establish a cultural expression as a revival.
First, the practice in question lends itself to being transformed into an expression that
is meaningful in the present day. It possesses an ability to be tailored to the needs of
the revivalists. Central actors set the tone of the movement and lead revivalists through
shared activities that lend meaning to the cultural expression being revived. Second, a
revival may assume importance in light of communal gatherings that take place at a cer-
tain time of the year or at a certain place that lends symbolism to the revival’s meaning.
A revival’s success often depends on the context in which it is shared and how informa-
tion and cultural products are disseminated. Third, accompanying images, costumes,
music, dance movements, and cultural artifacts that contribute meaning to commu-
nal involvement are central to creating public and personal spaces where revivals are
experienced.
Participants constitute their identities as revivalists in the established frameworks of
the revival in question. Discussions of class identity in revival settings prevail in schol-
arly literature, particularly with regard to folk music revivals in the United States in the
mid-twentieth century (Cantwell 1996). In contrast to class, issues of gender are rarely
analyzed in revival contexts. And yet, with respect to issues of tradition and times of
“old,” gender is one of the most defining aspects of social interaction in revival settings.
The nature of gender identity in revivals must be viewed in the context of the broader
social, economic, and political parameters within which revivals take place. How are
female and male identities ascribed a variety of actions deemed appropriate in revival
contexts and how are certain spaces and actions, if any, deemed to be gender-specific? In
what ways does gender discourse in revival contexts influence or reflect gender ideolo-
gies in nonrevival settings?
Revivals in Post-Soviet Spaces
If we understand revivals to be a way through which people forge connections to each

other via frameworks that are rooted in a certain time that differs from “now,” then for-
mer Soviet spaces are rife with possibilities for drawing on various interpretations of the
past in order to organize and make sense of the present. More than twenty years after
the fall of the Soviet Union, a new generation born and educated in independent repub-
lics is defining ways in which Soviet and pre-Soviet pasts are being negotiated in new
contexts. A popular Russian cable television channel, Nostalgia, features films, news,
and music from the 1970s and 1980s. Broadcasting in Russia’s “near abroad,” the channel
invites viewers to reconstruct their relationship to Soviet culture. In its logo, “Nostalgia,”
it replaces the Cyrillic letters c and t with images of the iconic Soviet sickle and hammer,
respectively. The word “nostalgia” itself creates a distance between the present and the
512 Adriana Helbig
past by objectifying the past, framing it as a new experience. The recasting of informa-
tion in new contexts is part of a process I term “mediated intimacies”: cultural codes
through which social actors create new understandings of physical and emotional shar-
ing and social connectedness through reframed familiarities. A person watching the
televised images may experience them on the basis of having lived through the era or
of being exposed to them for the first time via a nostalgic rendition of a time gone by. In
this way, each person’s interpretation and process of mediation is unique to a set of expe-
riences they have had in the past.
Relationships to the Soviet past in former Soviet republics such as Ukraine are
highly politicized in the media due to a long history of Soviet censorship and Russia’s
continued stronghold on popular culture, media, and economic and political develop-
ments in the region. A heightened need to rediscover the past guides much of Ukraine’s
youth, as evidenced in a proliferation of popular culture that deals with historical
themes. Films, documentaries, novels, and festivals feature aspects of pre-Soviet life,
whether through “rediscoveries” of important cultural and political figures or through
a renewed appreciation of village folk music genres and peasant crafts. A proliferation
of festivals reflects a renewed nationwide interest in ethnic Ukrainian lore, particu-
larly village folklore that was destroyed through collectivization, Soviet moderniza-
tion, censorship, and government terror. Since independence in 1991, aspects of village
folklore and life that could be salvaged or remembered have become festivalized and
marketed for consumption among the emerging middle class. Festivals are perceived
as revivals that invite participants to embrace and learn about pre-Soviet traditions
that have for the most part fallen out of public practice. A variety of such festivals
are organized by local governments as a way to encourage local tourism and to cre-
ate events that are ethnic Ukrainian in content in a public sphere that is dominated
by Western and Russian cultural aesthetics. Some festivals are ethnic-oriented, such
as the Kyiv-based festival of Jewish music titled “Klezfest in Ukraine,” which aims
to draw awareness of Jewish history through music. Others are culture-oriented,
such as the festivals of beer, coffee, and chocolate in Lviv that highlight the city’s
long-standing culinary traditions. In many ways, contemporary festivals have paral-
lels with Soviet-era government-sponsored social gatherings. Soviet ideologies were
spread through communal celebration, whether concerts, parades, festivals, or widely
organized social events with speeches, music, and dancing. Such effective organizing
was rooted in the structures of long-standing social traditions in the region that were
modified and made socialist in form and content.
Contemporary revivals draw on the organizational tactics of Soviet events but fill
the content with traditions that are pre-Soviet in origin. Certain public events borrow
the frames of traditional pre-Soviet gatherings but have a distinctly post-Soviet flavor.
Reflecting political and economic changes that have occurred since the early 1990s, such
events take place with financial support from corporate sponsors, ticket sales, adver-
tising, technology, and financial support from local and national political parties. In
Ukraine it is in the interests of the government to support festivals that promote cer-
tain ways of being in order to influence society to act in certain ways. Sponsorship of
a tradition such as Ivana Kupala, St. John’s Eve (Midsummer’s Eve), which forms the
main example in this essay and accents traditional beliefs of female fertility, functions
in parallel with social campaigns that are rooted in traditional ethics and family values.1
While the manipulation of tradition for contemporary purposes was characteristic of
Soviet times as well, the government of Ukraine is particularly interested in reversing
the declining birth rate and a significant population loss due to economic migration
to the West. Government campaigns have begun to focus on population growth as a
moral responsibility, with slogans such as “There used to be 53,000,000 of us, now there
are only 48,000,000—Kokhaimosia!” Kokhaimosia is a play on words that means “Let’s
love each other” as well as “Let’s make love.” As such, government sponsorship of Ivana
Kupala festivities taps into local ways in which female purity and courtship rituals were
regulated in traditional settings.
Contemporary cultural emphases on female purity and on the female as mother evi-
dent in Ivana Kupala marketing processes and celebrations aim to overturn two decades
of realities of Ukrainian women entering the roles of internet brides (Taraban 2007),
prostitutes, pornography workers (Barker 1999), and sex trafficking victims (Malarek
2003). In the early 1990s, the influx of Western popular culture overturned Soviet-era
aesthetics that did not celebrate overt displays of sexuality in the media, a shift that
culminated in widespread access to pornography in printed media and on television
(Barker 1999). The female, celebrated as mother in the Soviet era, came to be viewed
in public media predominantly as a sexual object, reinforced by a spike in local pros-
titution and sex tourism to Ukraine from Western countries. At this time, Ukrainian
women also became the primary targets of international sex trafficking.
An antitrafficking protest in Kyiv by a group of young women calling themselves
FEMEN symbolically fused the figure of the crucified Christ and a trafficked Ukrainian
woman. The headdress donned by the protagonist in this public action evoked the
wreath of flowers donned by young unmarried women during Ivana Kupala festivities.
Such artistic public actions tie Ivana Kupala festivities to broader social campaigns that
aim to reclaim women’s bodies on female terms and overturn the stigma placed on vic-
tims of sexual transgressions. Elements of such a “purification” discourse are embraced
by public figures such as former prime minister YuliaTymoshenko, who wears her hair
in the form of a braid, a hairstyle culturally associated with unmarried young girls.2
Tymoshenko’s plait also evokes Christian iconography regarding Ukrainian folk por-
trayals of the Mother of God (forbidden in the Soviet era). It further draws on Slavic
pagan mythology from a time when a matriarch, later named Berehynia, the Mother
Protectress, was believed to preside over the ancestral Ukrainian hearth (Bilaniuk
2003: 54). The symbolism of Tymoshenko’s hair has not been lost on the public, espe-
cially her political enemies in Parliament, who taunted her in session to prove that
the braid was real. Tymoshenko undid her braid, a symbolic gesture at weddings that
signifies the deflowering of the young bride and is usually done by the mother-in-law.
However, because Tymoshenko undid her own braid, she held agency over her body and
reinforced the popular idea that only a woman can and should decide who will do what
with her body, and when.
514 Adriana Helbig
Political and social symbolism associated with Ivana Kupala capitalizes on a renewed
public interest in ethnic Ukrainian traditions that were wiped out or manipulated by
the Soviet regime. Kupala celebrations are spaces where people are welcome to explore
their heritage via language, music, dance, and costumes while experiencing a context in
which female fertility and the nuclear family play a central role. Stripped of their spiri-
tual connotations during the Soviet era, contemporary Ivana Kupala celebrations offer
ways through which participants connect to nature, to the past, and to each other. In
what ways do Ivana Kupala celebrations influence contemporary understandings of the
feminine in post-Soviet society? What roles do traditional expressions play in (re)defin-
ing contemporary social values? To what extent do relationships with gendered deities
in spirituality-based revivals influence understandings of gender identity among revival
participants?
Ivana Kupala as Revival
Ivana Kupala, St. John’s Eve (Midsummer’s Eve), was among the most widely celebrated
folk holidays in central and eastern Ukrainian villages before World War II. In the
Lemko regions of western Ukraine, the holiday was known as Sobitka. Young people
burned bonfires called sobitky in honor of Perun, the ancient Slavic god of thunder, fire,
and lightning. In the early part of the twentieth century, Ivana Kupala was perceived as a
religious Christian holiday that celebrated the birth of St. John the Baptist. Local priests
encouraged the blessing of herbs, rooted in the pagan myths that herbs gathered on St.
John’s Eve had special healing powers. Such myths have been written about by Ukrainian
writers such as Olha Kobylianska, who describes Ivana Kupala rituals in her book On
Sunday Morning She Gathered Herbs (1909). Despite overt pagan references, the asso-
ciation of the pagan effigy Kupalo with the figure of St. John the Baptist marked the
festivities as Christian and in opposition to anticlerical Soviet ideology. Nevertheless,
Ivana Kupala is represented in Ukrainian literature and in pre-Soviet memory as a night
during which freedoms from socially prescribed sexual norms were socially accepted
among the rural population.
Traditionally, on the evening of July 6 (according to the Julian calendar), large crowds
gathered alongside rivers and lakes to participate in celebrations whose ritual elements
are described in chronicles dating as far back as the eleventh century. The term “Kupalo”
was itself first mentioned in the Hypatian Chronicle under the year 1262. The Ivana
Kupala rituals were so deeply rooted in the folk practices of the Ukrainian people that no
attempts to ban them—for instance, by the ruling Cossack hetman Ivan Skoropadsky,
who in 1719 decreed Ivana Kupala celebrations to be the root of all evil and disease—
were successful. These rituals were once celebrated to ensure a bountiful harvest, as well
as the fertility of young women, in rites closely tied to nature.
During the 1960s, Ivana Kupala was restructured as a celebration of agricul-
tural bounty devoid of overt religious and spiritual meaning in the Ukrainian SSR.
Ukraine was known as the “breadbasket of Europe,” and the reconstruction of Ivana
Kupala as an agricultural holiday was molded to fit the structure and ideology of
Soviet-influenced work holidays. Following Khrushchev’s Thaw (Vidlyha) from the
mid-1950s to the early 1960s, certain villages were allowed by local leaders to incorpo-
rate new versions of Ivana Kupala into their annual calendar of Soviet holidays that cel-
ebrated the worker (Klymets 1990). These holidays were usually organized and run by
the zavkluba, the head of the local klub, who also took on the responsibility of report-
ing on the festival to socialist media outlets such as local magazines and newspapers,
while simultaneously accenting the lack of religious traditions such as the festival’s cal-
endar association with the Christian feast of St. John the Baptist (Kononenko 2004).
Such articles, printed in Ukrainian-language Communist journals such as Prapor
(Flag), Sotsialistychna Kultura (Socialist culture), and Chervonyi Prapor (Red flag), as
well as ethnographic journals such as Narodna Tvorchist ta Etnohrafija (Folk culture
and ethnography), point to the festivalization and mass organization of Ivana Kupala
events in villages and towns throughout the central and eastern Ukrainian SSR by the
early 1960s. In a 1963 article titled “New Birth of an Old Holiday” published in the jour-
nal Sotsialistycha Kultura, the author, M. Tryzna (gender unknown), cultural direc-
tor of the Bohodukhiv regional Dom Kultury (Building of Culture) in Kharkiv oblast,
includes a picture of a kolhosp (collective farm) milkmaid, Yefrozynia Pomazan, “Hero
of Socialist Labor,” greeting the event participants with traditional bread and salt pre-
sented on a traditional Ukrainian embroidered towel (Figure 23.1). She is clad in regu-
lar clothing, her chest decorated with Soviet medals. Standing next to her, a man in a
Ukrainian embroidered shirt holds the microphone for her. According to the author,
Pomazan reportedly stated: “I pass on to you the baton of my work. Hold it tightly, so
that the list of worker-leaders of the region fills with new names. The older generation
of workers believes that the youth will stand strongly on the frontlines of development”
(Tryzna 1963: 25–26). It seems clear that by the 1960s, the Ivana Kupala celebration in
this village shifted from a traditional emphasis on spirituality and female fertility and
focused on gains in agricultural development, the Soviet celebration of the worker, and
communal striving for socialist ideals (Kuveniova 1967; Lohozha 1964; Petrone 2000;
Tarasenko 1966).
The artifice of this event is further evidenced through the conscious performance
of socialist discourse among rural peasants, the emphasis on influencing generational
attitudes toward the land, and the controlled pageantry that interweaves traditional
Ukrainian folk elements such as embroidery and traditional Kupala songs with Soviet
slogans and a portrait of Lenin onstage. According to Tryzna’s article, more than two
hundred singers performed as members of various kolektyvy, performance groups usu-
ally associated with the workplace or the village House of Culture. Among the songs was
one titled “Lenin,” with music by V. Vermenych and words by V. Sosiura.3 Alongside
the performance of “Lenin,” young women danced khorovody around a Kupala derevtse
(literally, “small tree”; a branch decorated with ribbons) and sang the well-known tradi-
tional Kupala song “Kruhom Marynonky” (Around Maryna): “Around Maryna the girls
danced / While the rain came down upon them / And onto my red rose.”
516 Adriana Helbig
FIGURE 23.1 Kolhosp (collective farm) milkmaid Yefrozynia Pomazan, “Hero of Socialist
Labor,” greets Ivana Kupala participants in Bohodukhiv village, Kharkiv oblast, 1963.
Reproduced with permission of the Periodicals Division of the V. Stefanyk Lviv Scientific
Library of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
The emphasis on the gendered pagan effigies of the female Maryna and the male
Kupalo reflect the maintaining of the gendered structure of Ivana Kupala festivities from
the pre-Soviet to the Soviet era. Kupalo was believed to be the god of love, harvest, and the
earth’s fertility. This allowed for the Soviet-era transformation of the holiday as a celebra-
tion of agrarian labor tied to the harvest. Kupalo was represented by fire, while Marena
was represented by water; similar figures of sirens, water nymphs (rusalki), and mermaids
reflect associations between water and female sexuality common to many cultures.
Ivana Kupala since Independence
Since Ukrainian independence in 1991, Ivana Kupala revivals have become celebra-
tions of ethnic pride (Kononenko 2004) and renewed celebrations of community
and the nuclear family. The significance of Ivana Kupala celebrations in their present
rural and urban forms lies in the reconstructed belief that on some levels Ivana Kupala
revivals foster personal and collective forms of Ukrainian identity, particularly
through song, revived ritual, and ethnic dress. Concurrently, these events encourage
celebrations of ethical values, understood as acts of social responsibility regarding
family, community, and the nation (Kuehnast and Nechemias 2004; Rubchak 1996;
Zhurzhenko 2004).
Ivana Kupala revivals, particularly those that feature collective singing on stage and
communal dancing and chanting among the audience, play a significant role in contem-
porary discourses regarding the role of women in society by blurring traditional dis-
courses of gender with contemporary social responsibilities associated with population
growth. Reconstructions of pre-Soviet versions of Ivana Kupala festivities have contrib-
uted greatly to a broader nationwide shift in reconceptualizing the female as mother and
protector of the nation’s moral and family values in opposition to that of female as sexual
object, a discourse that influenced gender relations in the 1990s (Barker 1999; Buckley
1997; Gal and Kligman 2000; Johnson and Robinson 2007; Marsh 1996). Ivana Kupala
revivals are marketed in contemporary contexts in Ukraine as family celebrations, with
a specific focus on the purity and innocence of young women, who are meant to index
the sociopolitically revived figure of the Slavic Berehynnia—the pagan protectress of
Ukrainian lands.4 The fertility of Ukraine’s land is often compared to female fertility.
In anti-Soviet discourse, people often personalize the experience of collectivization by
comparing Ukraine to a victim of rape by Russian occupiers. To what extent do Ivana
Kupala celebrations reflect and influence contemporary perceptions of women as cul-
tural matriarchs and ethnic tradition-bearers? What types of musical, linguistic, and
gender discourses inform such revivals? How does corporate sponsorship and financing
from nongovernmental organizations or local government influence the ways in which
cultural messages regarding tradition and identity are marketed and received among
different members of the population?
In posters that advertise Ivana Kupala-themed events, girls adorned with wreaths of
flowers signify renewed connections to nature and, by extension, pre-Soviet cultural
roots, allegedly untainted by the cosmopolitan and consumerist ideologies that have
become the norm in postsocialist society (Humphrey 2002). On a poster (Figure 23.2)
advertising an event called Den Dnipra (Dnipro River Day), held on July 6, 2008, the tra-
ditional date for Ivana Kupala celebrations, the words “Ivana Kupala” do not appear, but
the cultural framework for the festivities is implied through the depiction of the young
woman holding a magical flower, kvit paporoti, believed to blossom only at midnight on
518 Adriana Helbig
FIGURE 23.2 Poster on a building in the center of Kyiv advertising Den Dnipra (Dnipro River
Day) on July 6, 2008, the traditional date of Ivana Kupala celebrations. (Photo: A. Helbig)
St. John’s Eve. People believe that the person who finds kvit paporoti will be lucky in love
and happy in life. (See Web Figure 23.02 .)
The event featured in this poster may be described as a local rock concert held in a
public square popular with young people in the Podil district near the Dnipro River in
Kyiv. The young people in attendance danced and sang along with the popular musi-
cians who were hired by the festival organizers, which in this case included a radio sta-
tion, a soft-drink company, a nongovernmental organization, and local government. As
in all Ivana Kupala celebrations, there was no entrance fee, and the event was accessible
to anyone who wished to attend. The central feature of this event was that it was social
in nature and helped participants forge connections with others who arrived at the cel-
ebrations from different parts of the city and its outskirts. This forging of community
relations at a time of great change in urban contexts, particularly with an influx of

migrant workers from rural areas, has been a central motivating factor behind many
such sponsored events.
Ivana Kupala in Kyiv
To show the variety of ways Ivana Kupala is celebrated and understood, I draw on two
Ivana Kupala festivals—one held in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, and the other near
Kharkiv, a city close to the border with Russia that served as the first capital of the
Ukrainian SSR (1919–34). These contexts demonstrate differing relationships with the
past through the medium of pre-Soviet folk traditions gathered and revived by ethno-
musicologists and enthusiasts in surrounding villages. Kyiv, the center of Ukraine’s post-
socialist music industry, is rife with groups who perform a variety of revived folk styles
and repertoires. Kharkiv oblast is often viewed by intellectuals from western and central
parts of Ukraine as an assimilated region that was not able to retain pre-Soviet folklore
due to a longer history of collectivization and the destruction of local traditions during
the Soviet-induced famine-genocide of 1932–33 (known in Ukrainian as Holodomor,
literally “death by hunger”) that resulted in tremendous population loss. The differing
relationship to the past has a direct influence on the ways Ivana Kupala celebrations are
staged and the music that is presented at these regional festivities.
On July 6, 2008, I attended the neighborhood-based Ivana Kupala celebrations in
Kyiv (referred to earlier) that drew hundreds of participants to the banks of the Dnipro
River. The chosen area was a park amid high-rise apartments in an area of the city called
Obolon. Traveling for half an hour by metro from my rented apartment in Kyiv’s city cen-
ter and then continuing on foot, I followed scores of people dressed in jeans and ethnic
embroidered shirts and blouses. Many young women and girls wore wreaths of flowers
and greenery on their heads, recalling how, on the eve of Kupala—as described in Olha
Kobylianska’s 1909 novel V Nediliu Rano Zillia Kopala (On Sunday morning she gath-
ered herbs)—young women would set their wreaths afloat on the water. If a girl’s wreath
flowed out of a young man’s reach, it was believed that she would not wed that year.
A stage was erected from which an emcee (master of ceremonies) guided the early
evening festivities and on which a children’s folk music and dance group presented
“scenes” of traditional pre-Soviet Ivana Kupala celebrations. The apparent purpose of
these performances was to entertain and to instruct the festival attendees in traditional
Ivana Kupala rituals. The emcee often repeated: “This is how your grandmothers and
grandfathers celebrated Ivana Kupala.” This kind of expression of self-awareness func-
tioned as a discursive ritual throughout the evening and established a consciousness
regarding Ivana Kupala as a celebration of ethnic identity, cultural memory, and oral
history.
The staged scenes were presented by a Kyiv-based children’s folklore group called
Dai Bozhe (Let It Be, God), founded in 1989 by Olha Melnyk, wife of Taras Melnyk, a
520 Adriana Helbig
FIGURE 23.3 Young performers from Dai Bozhe perform a scene around the straw effigy of
Kupalo. Kyiv, July 6, 2008. (Photo: A. Helbig)
well-known figure on Ukraine’s festival scene for his work in organizing and running
Chervona Ruta, the first Ukrainian-language music festival in independent Ukraine.
The scenes performed by Dai Bozhe included spoken word, chanting, singing in tradi-
tional bilyi holos (white voice) style, and khorovody, ritual dancing. Bilyi holos refers to
the throaty, tense vocal aesthetics associated with female polyphonic singing in rural
Ukraine. These vocal aesthetics have become popular through the reclaiming of rural
repertoires by young urbanites, as well as through a growing consciousness that the folk
ensembles of the Soviet era presented an arranged folklore that altered or did not truly
represent village traditions. The children were dressed in ethnic costumes that were
similar to peasant everyday wear in villages of central Ukraine more than a century ago.5
Stage props included straw and grass effigies of the feast’s main pagan figures, Kupalo
and Marena (Figure 23.3). (See Web Figure 23.03 .)
Following the official program, the emcee guided the audience members through the
lighting of the Kupalo fire—a relic of the pagan custom of bringing sacrifice—around
which people performed ritual dances and sang songs about lovers’ fates. Couples were
instructed by volunteers about what to chant as they leapt across smaller fires; people
used to believe that those who made it across would marry within the year. Young mem-
bers of Dai Bozhe intermingled with the crowds and indicated where to dance and
when to run toward the burning Kupalo effigy (Figure 23.4). The excited crowds, the tall
burning effigy whose falling ashes burned holes in participants’ clothing, and a swirl of
media cameras gave the event the feel of a semicontrolled social experiment that oscil-
lated between freedom of personal expression and self-aware cultural experimentation.
The crowds were guided by the taped Ivana Kupala music, which was punctuated by
instructions on the dance moves given to the revelers by a young woman with a micro-
phone. (See Video Example 23.01 and Web Figure 23.04 .)
Ivana Kupala in Kharkiv
Soviet alterations and assimilations of Ukrainian folk traditions have been most evident
in eastern and central Ukraine (Noll 2000). Here Lenin’s death, together with the rela-
tively low degree of consolidation and the unclear future direction of the Communist
Party in the 1920s, allowed for public displays of Ukrainian national consciousness and
the promotion of the Ukrainian language and culture, particularly in education and
media. The 1930s under Stalin, however, brought vast socioeconomic changes, includ-
ing the collectivization of peasant landholdings into kolhospy (large communally owned
farms), significant investments in industrialization, expansion of the transportation sys-
tem, and rapid urbanization. At the same time, the Soviet-orchestrated famine-genocide
of 1932–33—a horror intentionally induced by Stalin to weaken Ukrainian nationalism
and gain control over Ukrainian agricultural lands—took the lives of four million vic-
tims in eastern Ukraine in a single year.6
Conscious Soviet-era alterations to Ukrainian traditions, such as those described ear-
lier with reference to the village of Bohodukhiv in Kharkiv oblast in the 1960s, have cre-
ated significant problems for ethnographers and ethnomusicologists wishing to collect
and revive pre-Soviet cultural practices in certain regions of Ukraine. Many Ukrainian
scholars believe that there is very little actual pre-Soviet tradition left in eastern and cen-
tral Ukrainian villages. This thinking is so deeply rooted among scholars in other parts
of Ukraine that ethnomusicologists from Kharkiv are hardly ever invited to national eth-
nomusicology conferences held in the capital, Kyiv, and in the western Ukrainian city of
Lviv, where scholars conduct research in the nearby Carpathian Mountains, where they
believe fewer rural traditions were destroyed by the Soviet regime. Assessments regard-
ing processes of Soviet/Russian assimilation among the rural population in central and
eastern Ukraine are argued from various points of view (Noll 2000). Villagers in these
areas speak surzhyk, a mix of Ukrainian and Russian (Bilaniuk 2005), and a significant
part of the local population has much stronger beliefs in the overall benefits of Ukraine
having closer ties with Russia (in opposition to the population of western Ukraine).
As if reinforcing the alleged stereotype that eastern Ukraine has suffered a more sig-
nificant loss of tradition, the Kharkiv regional Ivana Kupala festival that I attended on
July 5, 2008, opened with young women dressed as rusalky (water nymphs) performing
ballet-like movements with Kupalo wreaths in their hands. These modernized, “non-
traditional” expressions were interpreted by a fellow ethnomusicologist who grew up
near Lviv, the ethnic Ukrainian stronghold of western Ukraine, as “evidence of assimi-
lation and cultural destruction.” The wreath-clad female and male announcers invited
the audience members to join the traditional Ivana Kupala festivities that had been
522 Adriana Helbig
FIGURE 23.4 Young performers from Dai Bozhe lead the crowds in khorovody around a
burning effigy of Kupalo, Kyiv, July 6, 2008. (Photo: A. Helbig)
brought to them “on the wings of ancient songs.” (See Video Example 23.02 .) To a
background of new-age fusion music, the young rusalky called out to Kupalo to join
the festivities. This fusion-style introduction framed the performance of the following
group, Muravskyi Shliakh (The Murav Way), led by Halyna Lukianets of the Kharkivskyi
Narodnyi Tsenter Narodnoii Tvorchosti (Kharkiv Center for Folk Traditions), as “tra-
ditional.” Muravsky Shliakh markets itself as a “research and reproduction group.” Its
members collect folklore during ethnographic expeditions to eastern and central
Ukraine (Slobozhanshchina and Poltava oblasts) and recreate the village style of singing,
bilyi holos or “white voice.” Thus, their singing is much closer to what would commonly
have been heard at Ivana Kupala celebrations in the pre-Soviet era. On this occasion,
however, Muravskyi Shliakh was forced to follow the festival setup as regards staging
and technology and had to lip-sync to a prerecorded track, a feature that is common to
many public events in the postsocialist space.
The Kharkiv oblast Kupala celebration differed from that in Kyiv on many levels. Most
significant, it was multiethnic, featuring both ethnic Ukrainian and Russian perform-
ers from neighboring villages and towns. In the scene shown in Figure 23.5, the four
women holding the kupalske derevtse (Kupalo tree) at the center of the picture are ethnic
Russians from a nearby village and wear the sarafanka, a sleeveless folk dress worn by
Russian women in the nineteenth century. This Russian presence dates back to the 1930s,
when the ethnic Russian population in eastern Ukraine increased as a result of Stalin’s
Russification policies introduced as a backlash to the Ukrainianization movement of
the 1920s. In the post–World War II years, more Russians migrated into Ukraine as part
of Soviet repopulation and industrialization efforts. Despite ethnic tensions between

Russians and Ukrainians in other parts of Ukraine, particularly in western Ukraine, the
celebrations on the outskirts of Kharkiv appeared to be conscious expressions of ethnic-
ity, but not nationalism, which seems to have been more the case at the Kyiv celebra-
tions. (See Web Figure 23.05 .)
Ethnomusicology and the Political

Significance of Collected
Musical Folklore
Postsocialist attempts to reclaim Ivana Kupala as a celebration of youth and courtship

have gone through several stages of change since the early 1990s. Initial events were
small-scale and were sponsored by enthusiasts. The transitional, strongly pro-Russian
government in Ukraine was not interested in promoting ethnic Ukrainian folk tradi-
tions. There was also little cultural memory regarding how Ivana Kupala had been cele-
brated in pre-Soviet times. An improved economy, a fostering of ethnic Ukrainian pride,
and the growing influence of world music markets have added cultural and financial
value to village music genres such as those once associated with Ivana Kupala. The influx
of recording technology and the growth of ethnomusicology as a discipline have also
contributed to a wealth of publicly disseminated traditional music recordings, which
in turn have helped foster widespread public interest in traditional music festivals and
music-related cultural events such as Ivana Kupala.
The repertoires revived and performed during Ivana Kupala festivities, as well as
being simultaneously taught to the festival-goers, are gathered and researched by schol-
ars, performers, and enthusiasts from older, predominantly female interlocutors in
rural settings who practiced pre-Soviet, Christian, and pagan-influenced forms of Ivana
Kupala rituals in their youth. While descriptions in literature and ethnographic studies
focus predominantly on pagan-influenced lore, Ivana Kupala was nevertheless at some
point tied to the Feast of St. John the Baptist, and Christian elements crossed with pagan
ones. The descriptions of Ivana Kupala festivities in the 1960s from central and east-
ern Ukraine published in Soviet ethnographic journals stress the nonreligious charac-
ter of the village-based Ivana Kupala revivals. In the new millennium, the stress is on
neither the Christian nor the pagan elements but rather on the fact that the repertoires
are pre-Soviet and therefore perceived as authentic, untampered with by Soviet cultural
policy. The ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky describes this process as “rooted in
Herderian nostalgia and Romanticism striving for the authentic ‘soul of the folk,’ trans-
muted through the confusing push-and-pull of Soviet formulae for socialist folklore,
and now reinvented in the first tumultuous era of Ukrainian independence” (Sonevytsky
2010: 16). A search for lost Ukrainian musical traditions and an attempt to rescue rel-
ics that represent pre-Soviet ways of life guide the present-day revivals. People collect
524 Adriana Helbig
FIGURE 23.5 Ethnic Ukrainian (far left and far right) and Russian performers (center) hold
kupalski derevtsia (Kupalo trees) and prepare for Ivana Kupala festivities near a rural lake on
the outskirts of Kharkiv, July 5, 2008. (Photo: A. Helbig)
artifacts (songs, instruments) as texts through which to reconstruct the past (Noll 1997).
Adhering to an ideological commitment to uncover (pre-Soviet) truths, their practice
of ethnographic antiquarianism and historical ethnography contributes to mediating
practices through which the past informs the present (Bauman and Briggs 2003).
The passing on of musical traditions via female channels (evidenced also in the high
number of female ethnographers and female students in newly established ethnomusi-
cology programs in Ukraine) points to gendered generational networks of transmission.
The recording of older peasant women by younger urban female scholars (Figure 23.6)
disproportionately situates aurally associative performative aspects of Ukrainian ethnic
revival in the rural traditional female realm: the nuclear family and the home. In this
way, one may argue that Ivana Kupala revivals aim to instill family values within loosely
defined frameworks of emerging ethnic consciousness. Music is tied to ethnic identity
through the recording of Ukrainian-language songs from rural areas. The revival of pre-
socialist forms of such repertoires helps elevate the Ukrainian language in the public
sphere. Linguistic anthropologist Laada Bilaniuk points out that during the Soviet era,
Ukrainian was publically held in low regard and was viewed in Soviet-Russian public
discourse as a language appropriate mostly for folkloric venues and singing (Bilaniuk
2003: 51). Ivana Kupala revivals tie Ukrainian language usage in music to broader
Ukrainianization movements in literature, culture, and society, as well as politics, as wit-
nessed during the 2004 Orange Revolution. (See Web Figure 23.06 .)
Perhaps more significant than the ethnic and moral incentives to stage Ivana Kupala,
however, is the wish among performers to earn money from their folk craft. In a brief
telephone conversation in July 2010, Taras Melnyk, the festival entrepreneur whose wife,
Olha, leads the children’s Dai Bozhe folk ensemble in Kyiv, indicated his disappointment
that festival organizers do not pay folk music performers enough money to make their
craft economically worthwhile. Such disappointments have also been voiced by ethno-
musicologists such as Iryna Klymenko, who leads the performance group Hurtopravtsi
at the Kyiv Conservatory of Music. Klymenko stresses the lack of copyright protection
as a detriment in her work as an ethnomusicologist and claims that her folklore research
issued on CD has been copied and performed for profit at Ivana Kupala celebrations by
folk groups who do not undertake their own collecting in the villages.
This also brings into question the role of village women in the revival process.
Klymenko recounts how, during a past Ivana Kupala festival, two groups who were
invited to perform had inadvertently prepared an identical repertoire that had originally
been collected, arranged, and released on CD by a group of ethnomusicologists. The
older women from whom the repertoire had been recorded learned of this incident and
demanded that next year they be invited because they were the original carriers of the
pre-Soviet musical culture. Ironically, the repertoire they sing is that of young unmar-
ried women and does not therefore sit well, in terms of age appropriateness, either with
the older women themselves or with the academic-conservatory-based ensembles that
appear on stage (Figure 23.7). (See Web Figure 23.07 .)
These situations bring to mind Tamara Livingston’s discussion of “core revivalists,”
people who are so strongly involved in revived traditions that they assume individual
responsibility for passing them on to others. Livingston notes that these actors do not
merely “rescue,” they create “a new ethos, musical style, and aesthetic code in accor-
dance with their revivalist ideology and personal preferences” (1999: 70). Actors in such
revival circles may play particular attention to recreating the manner in which the rep-
ertoires used to be performed, but at the same time they may alter the traditions in ways
that make them more appropriate for the stage. In the case of the Ivana Kupala festivals
described here, the involvement of city councils, cultural institutions, and organized
performance ensembles gives the events a loose structure that nevertheless offers par-
ticipants opportunities to enjoy a day out with family and friends.
The nationalist and gendered experience of Ivana Kupala festivals garners sup-
port from the government and general public in ways that fuse discourses of whole-
some spiritual revival, environmental awareness, and population growth. Central to the
enactment are young women who wear traditional flower wreaths that reference images
of women as “natural” and as saviors of national ideals. These symbols function in oppo-
sition to the new cultural, political, and economic processes that create anxiousness
regarding the need to protect ethnic Ukrainian identity from global (i.e., Russian and
Western) assimilation.
The involvement of scholars attests to the high level of mediation and cultural control
within which Ivana Kupala festivals function. The repertoires in Ivana Kupala festivities
are researched, collected, and arranged by ethnomusicologists, who then release them,
often in a chronological arrangement of events, on CD; often they will also publish the
songs that have been remembered by the largest number of informants. Performers such
526 Adriana Helbig
FIGURE 23.6 Ethnomusicology students from the Kharkiv Conservatory of Music interview
and record older female interlocutors in the village of Lyman, Kharkiv oblast, June 8, 2008.
(Photo: A. Helbig)
as Dai Bozhe learn the repertoires from such CDs and interpret the music through staged
scenes with music and dance. In turn, the performers teach the audience members the
“proper” ways Ivana Kupala is celebrated. Through such intimate mediations, Ivana
Kupala festivals offer opportunities to practice and embody new postsocialist attitudes
toward love, family, and tradition. The emphasis on the practice, by audience members,
of rituals such as jumping across the fires and setting wreaths afloat on the river reveals
the performance-mediated ways that ethnically framed gender expectations are being
reconstituted through music- and dance-based revivals in postsocialist Ukraine.
Conclusions
Revivals of Ivana Kupala are processes that gather meaning from social contexts in
which a variety of factors foster interest in communal sharing and celebration. These
revivals are reflective gatherings during which participants forge relationships to past
identities and forms of expression while creating new understandings of ideologies that
are relevant to their present experience. Revivals may be political, ethnic, cultural, spiri-
tual, or social in nature. Their structure may change in line with broader economic pro-
cesses, and their staging may differ from one manifestation to another on the basis of
their context-defining nature. Revival events can draw participants in on many levels,
offering a space in which to explore both personal and communal identities. They are
deeply influential structures that also function as aural expressions of memory through
FIGURE 23.7 A svynarka (pig farmer) from the former collective farm in Lyman—also seen
being interviewed and recorded in Figure 23.6—performing the songs of young maidens at
the Ivana Kupala festival near Kharkiv, July 5, 2008. (Photo: A. Helbig)
which people engage with their own surroundings by lending consciousness to that
which has come before and to that which is now.
The most important aspect of gatherings such as those described in this essay is the
fluidity that they lend toward interpreting the past. Individual rituals may be recast to suit
the needs at hand, while broader revivals may be tailored to accommodate values deemed
most fundamental at a certain point in time. Previous knowledge of what is being revived
is crucial to drawing a depth of understanding and to lending meaning to the revival itself.
As such, there are as many ways to analyze revivals as there are ways to experience them.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks are due to Yurii Romanyshyn, Director of Periodicals at the V. Stefanyk
Lviv Scientific Library of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, for helping me
to gain access to the Soviet-era journals in July 2010.
Notes
1. In Ukrainian speech and song, “Ivan Kupalo” is referenced most often in its conjugated
form “Ivana Kupala” or simply “Kupala.”
528 Adriana Helbig
2. Yulia Tymoshenko was prime minister of Ukraine from January 24 to September 8, 2005,
and again from December 18, 2007 to March 4, 2010. She was dismissed from the post
by the Ukrainian Parliament, Verkhovna Rada, after losing the runoff vote in the 2010
Ukrainian presidential elections against Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych ran for presi-
dent in 2004 against Viktor Yushchenko. His voting falsifications fueled the popular pro-
tests that came to be known as the Orange Revolution, led by Yushchenko, Tymoshenko,
and others.
3. The poet Volodymyr Sosiura (1898–1965) fought in the Ukrainian People’s Army. When
the short-lived Ukrainian independent state was overrun by the Bolsheviks in 1921, he
joined the Red Army. His literary output reflects his ideological loyalty to the Soviet Union
and his patriotic feelings for Ukraine. In 1948, he was awarded the Stalin Prize, but in 1951
he came under attack for his 1944 poem “Liubit Ukrainy” (Love Ukraine), deemed too
nationalistic after the war. Sosiura’s portrait and the title of this poem are featured on the
2-Hryvnia coin, the currency of independent Ukraine.
4. This study excludes Ivan Kupalo events among Ukrainians in the North American dias-
pora, where the holiday functions as a celebration of courtship among people who share a
Ukrainian ethnic background.
5. These costumes differ greatly from the types of ethnic Ukrainian costumes that were popu-
larized by Soviet-era national folk dance ensembles such as the Pavlo Virky Ukrainian
National Folk Dance Ensemble and Moiseyev Dance Company.
6. In addition to the four million who died from forced starvation, Ukraine’s Famine-Genocide
(Holodomor) of 1932–33 led to an estimated birth loss of six million people, placing the
total number of victims at ten million.
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C HA P T E R 24
T R A I L I N G I M AG E S A N D
C U LT U R E B R A N D I N G I N
P O S T- R E NA I S S A N C E HAWA I ‘ I
JA N E F R E E M A N MOU L I N
Almost 500 times every day across the state of Hawai‘i, the Consolidated Amusement
theater chain projects a well-known trailer before each feature screening.1 In a prac-
tice dating back to 1992, conversations quiet and the theater darkens as a triumphant
horn call heralds the sonic move to a different world—one where waves lash dramati-
cally on a rocky coast, an orchestral score accompanies canoe-paddlers in the fading
light of the sunset, and torch-bearing hula dancers descend a rocky coastline to the
accompaniment of an ancient chant. Chant gives way to dance, and the fire-lit move-
ments of traditional hula kahiko (ancient Hawaiian dance) seem to reach from the very
depths of time. The scene is riveting, and the gradually building rhythms of the ancient
pahu drum are powerful and slightly ominous, as if to make us wonder what lies ahead.
The final seconds have little to do with traditional Hawaiian culture, however. To the
sounds of wind, drum, and horn calls, the camera moves away from the dancers to
focus on a petroglyph representation of the Consolidated theater logo and the words
“Consolidated Amusement—entertaining Hawai‘i since 1917.” (See trailer on compan-
ion website .)
As part of Hawai‘i’s theater-going public, I have been pulled into this image for over
two decades, even as my ethnomusicological training simultaneously forces me to won-
der how the community reads this and what factors shape that reading. Why does this
particular trailer impact audiences—even those who have viewed it repeatedly as the
longest running trailer in Hawai‘i’s history? Why did the sale of the theater chain to a
mainland company in 2008 prompt anxious phone calls by people who feared the trailer
might disappear? How in the world did this become so embedded in local culture that
an out-of-town visitor was told he had missed a part of the “real Hawai‘i” by not experi-
encing the trailer? Clearly this bit of cultural minutia finds meaning in something much
more consequential than simple theater branding.
Trailing Images and Culture Branding 531
Long a site of commodification, it is not surprising to find hula encapsulated here as

imaging the entertainment industry. These images, however, counter the widespread
portrayal of Hawaiian performance perpetuated by the national media and interna-
tional tourism. Far from the smiling hula girl on the stage of a Waikiki hotel and the
“long tradition of ‘celebrating’ (or rather, objectifying) difference as light but exotic
entertainment for the dominant culture” (Fusco 1995: 27), these dancers are serious
and intense. They come from a different world and do not endeavor to pull us into
their performance. In fact, this does not even seem like a performance; rather, it hints
at a ritualistic past that touches on a source of deeper purpose. Knowing that hula
and chant link firmly to identity expression in these islands raises questions concern-
ing the trailer’s ongoing role and opens the way to multiple interpretations of identi-
fication in this one-minute of cultural reflection. Moreover, hula possesses a strong
history of encoding music and dance as indigenous resistance, pointing to theories
of opposition and counter-hegemonic practice as possible leads to interpreting this
unique trailer.
The selection of imagery, choice of music, style of movement, and attire all situate this
production in the period of the late twentieth-century Hawaiian Renaissance. Springing
from a rebirth of interest in the Hawaiian language and pre-colonial traditions, and pro-
pelled by Native Hawaiians’ desire to know and perpetuate a range of ancestral prac-
tices (e.g. chant, dance, navigation, farming, mediation, health, etc.), the Renaissance
encompassed multiple strands of cultural activity. Analysis must look to revival theory
and the role of media in perpetuating and reinterpreting expressive culture but also con-
sider hula as a multi-dimensional performance in which language, music, movement,
costuming, and related cultural knowledge link to convey powerful messages. Finally,
the trailer is a form of theater branding for Consolidated, but this particular one moves
beyond the commercial interest of the theater chain to connect to something else. In an
economy dominated by a vast visitor industry that relies on the conscious construction
of culture through print and visual media, residents easily pick up cues differentiating
what is “for us” and “for them.” The study must consider how this trailer contrasts with
the imaging of culture by the tourist industry to find meaning in the lives of Hawai‘i
residents.
Unlike Texans in Texas, the term Hawaiian applies to a specific ethnic group, not all
residents of the state. The concept of “host culture” is critical, and the Renaissance was
instrumental in reinforcing the imperative that Hawai‘i’s many immigrant commu-
nities must acknowledge and respect the indigenous culture of the islands—one that
has accommodated group after group of immigrants, but whose people retain special
rights as the original settlers of these lands. In such a climate, the multi-ethnic category
of “local” becomes an important multi-ethnic signifier of identity in Hawai‘i. Despite a
complex history grounded in the politics of power and race (Rosa 2000: 101), the cat-
egory experiences ongoing transformation through what Hall describes as the “continu-
ous ‘play’ of history, culture, and power” (Hall 1990: 225). Today, “local” continues to
mark the “dialogic process . . . between Hawai‘i and the continental United States” (Rosa
2000: 100) and functions as a way for people to mark the distinctions between those
532 Jane Freeman Moulin
who spent their formative years in the islands and possess cultural and political sensi-
tivity to island ways and those who are part of the constant stream of visitors and new
arrivals.
Drawing on these threads, this exploration starts with the cultural milieu of the
trailer’s production and examines its contemporary interpretation as grounded in the
Hawaiian Renaissance. Then, turning to the artistic elements of producer intent, it uses
information from the producer and press accounts to provide a background to the his-
tory and making of the trailer. Incorporating data from public surveys and looking to the
cinematic image as a vehicle for cultural meaning, it analyzes how culture is purposely
configured on the screen to create ongoing messages in a post-Renaissance Hawai‘i.
Finally, it examines the concept of “localness” to understand audience reactions to the
work. The goal is to show how this trailer functions at multiple sites of cultural purpose
that move it far beyond a tool of commercialization and commodified culture, allowing
it to invoke, support, and reaffirm contemporary perceptions of place and culture in an
ethnically pluralistic Hawai‘i.
“The Birth of Hawai‘i”
The trailer’s title, “The Birth of Hawai‘i,” provides a hint about the social and cultural life
of Hawai‘i leading up to the time of its release in 1992 and the multiple meanings audi-
ences ascribe to that time-situated production. Not coincidentally, this trailer came to
life during the mature phase of a period of birth and rebirth for Hawaiian culture.
The two decades prior to the production witnessed the development of the cultural
movement known as the Hawaiian Renaissance, which first emerged in 1969 and then
flowered into widespread community recognition and acceptance. I use this designation
out of deference to Native Hawaiian sentiment and practice, while acknowledging both
the historical discourse that has surrounded the issue of revival terminology (Slobin
1983) and the earlier need of ethnomusicology to grapple with issues such as the fluid-
ity of tradition (Linnekin 1983) and the invention of tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger
1983). Speaking years before this scholarly debate and fourteen years before Feintuch’s
observations that musical revivals are actually musical transformations (Feintuch
1993: 184), Hawaiian cultural expert George Kanahele eloquently talked about “reviv-
ing traditional values and practices of a culture, but incorporating new elements. Since
each generation brings perforce something new into the world—new perspectives, new
forms, new concepts, new words—traditions must accordingly change . . .” (Kanahele
1979: 7). Cautioning people not to get hung up in terminology—“What’s important is
the reality, not the rhetoric” (2)—he clarified that “the Renaissance does not mean a lit-
eral rebirth of classical Hawaiian traditions, dances, chants and so forth. To believe oth-
erwise is to make a fetish out of tradition. . .. Consequently, today’s chants are not the
same as those of 1778. They are different, but yet they still retain some identifiable char-
acteristics that we can call Hawaiian” (7). Then, displaying great insight, he wisely points
out: “It may well be that much, if not most, of what we are reviving is new traditions
that look like old traditions” (7). In highlighting the performative aspects of cultural
renewal, its temporal recontextualization, the changes wrought by that displacement in
time, and the notion of creating new traditions, Kanahele directly aligns the Hawaiian
Renaissance with the concerns and approaches of this volume.
The cyclical nature of music revivals noted in the literature is also apparent in Hawai‘i
and calls for a brief clarification of terminology. An earlier revitalization of culture took
place during the reign of King David Kalākaua (1874–1891), who specifically encour-
aged hula and the traditional arts. Although this has prompted some to label the recent
revival the Second Hawaiian Renaissance, throughout this essay I use the widely
accepted Renaissance or Hawaiian Renaissance labels to refer to the twentieth-century
revitalization. Understanding this movement requires a brief overview of events leading
up to and surrounding the florescence of “new traditions that look like old traditions.”
Following America’s illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, Hawai‘i
became a U.S. Territory. Admission to the United States in 1959 by an overwhelming
majority vote capped decades of assimilationist thought in a now-criticized ballot offer-
ing only the options of continued territorial status or statehood—with no possibility of
independence. As Hawai‘i’s focus turned increasingly to the continent, growing aware-
ness of events taking place in the larger United States moved into island society. The civil
rights and free speech movements, anti-war sentiments, and the push for Ethnic Studies
all became important causes in this new state with a long history of racially based labor
struggles, a large military presence, and an ethnically diverse population. The growth
in air travel in the 1960s meant that Hawaiian culture was packaged and sold to an
expanding tourist market, even as the language and many aspects of that culture were
already falling into disuse. In the 1960s, Kamehameha Schools, founded by the estate of
Hawaiian Princess Bernice Pau‘ahi Bishop and dedicated to the education of Hawaiian
children, still promoted an American-centric education. Given the long legacy of mis-
sionary disapproval, hula and chant held particularly ambivalent positions because of
their historical association with non-Christian rituals and purported licentiousness. In
fact, up until 1965, Hawaiian female students were forbidden to perform standing hula
on campus for fear that the girls would “wiggle too much” (King and Roth 2006: 55, 58).
Against this background, something remarkable happened—a new consciousness
emerged that would breathe life into Hawaiian traditions. People generally trace the
beginning of the Renaissance to the realm of Hawaiian popular music and, particu-
larly, the release of the album Guava Jam in 1969 by the group The Sunday Manoa. Nettl,
noting the ability of traditional music to offset cultural disorientation and displace-
ment, states: “As other means of identification become less effective, music is increas-
ingly stressed” (Nettl 1985: 65). The irony of Hawai‘i’s experience is that what eventually
became a strongly traditionalist movement actually was prompted by an album that
launched music in a decidedly non-traditional direction. In this post-statehood phase
when Hawai‘i’s eyes turned outward, the ears of its youth were tuning in to the devel-
opments taking place in the world of late 1960s rock music. What The Sunday Manoa
did was to infuse a new energy into island music by taking Hawaiian language songs
and updating them with new instrumental sounds—interesting chord treatments and
‘ukulele strums, together with solo licks and riffs echoing rock and jazz. The effect of
hearing an altered version of the traditional chant “Kāwika” juxtaposed with song,
syncopated rhythmic interest, an extended driving ‘ukulele solo, and a final nod to the
Rolling Stone’s 1967 hit “Let’s Spend the Night Together” was both tradition-shattering
and empowering for local youth. “ ‘They stole our hearts,’ says veteran radio personal-
ity Honolulu Skylark. ‘Now it was cool to listen to Hawaiian music, it wasn’t just for our
parents’ ” (Bolante and Keany 2004: 32). Notably, the album reaffirmed the importance
of the language (in an age when many entertainers were not familiar with it and many
did not even sing in Hawaiian) as well as music’s ability to adapt aspects of the domi-
nant culture while remaining intensely local and true to the spirit of Hawaiian perfor-
mance, which values primacy of the song text. The ethnic composition of the group,
with Korean-American Peter Moon and part-Hawaiian brothers Roland and Robert
Cazimero, confirmed the ethnic diversity of the Hawaiian music scene.
The sparking of the Renaissance was unintentional. As musician and founder of the
group Peter Moon relates, “It was really the events of the time that made this album. . ..
We were surprised at how the album was received, because we didn’t set out to change
anything” (quoted in Bolante and Keany 2004: 32). Robert Cazimero, a young 18-year
old musician at the time he recorded this album, echoes those words: “People still ask
me what it was like being at the forefront of the Hawaiian Renaissance, but we didn’t
realize it. We were just having a good time playing music” (32).
Attributing the catalyst for renewal to this one album belies other actions and senti-
ments that were already swelling under the surface to create a surge of cultural activity
that would sweep the state in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1961–1962, the University of Hawai‘i
at Mānoa enrolled 27 students in Hawaiian language courses; by 1992–1993, that number
was 1,277 (Warschauer and Donaghy 1997: 351). Around 1970, UH also started offering
classes in hula kahiko (old hula), which features chant and traditional instruments. This
represented a major change from the homophonic, chordophone-accompanied hula
songs associated with the modern hula taught at local studios of the time; it also pro-
vided institutional validation of art forms that, given Hawai‘i’s outward focus, were not
receiving widespread support in the community. Ma‘iki Aiu Lake, however, was one of
the few in the community who instructed local students in both traditional and modern
styles; in 1972 she launched her first classes to train kumu hula (hula teachers) in the
traditional way.2 All of this activity aligned nicely with the launch of the first Merrie
Monarch hula competition in 1971 as an event devoted to “the perpetuation, preserva-
tion, and promotion of the art of hula and the Hawaiian culture through education”
(Merrie Monarch Festival website).3
Whereas The Sunday Manoa had opened the door to making Hawaiian music cur-
rent and attractive to a new generation, it was these three iconic symbols of traditional
culture—language, music, dance—and their convergence in renewed activity that pro-
vided a highly visible presence and strong impetus for the Renaissance. Part of the rec-
lamation of culture meant that young men began dancing again, a resurgent interest
in the language appeared, and old traditions and repertoire were brought back—not
necessarily in strict conformity to the past, but retaining identifiable elements important
to Hawai‘i’s residents rather than its visitors. Musicians, such as Gabby Pahinui and the
Sons of Hawai‘i, Sonny Chillingworth, and Raymond Kane, found new audiences and
became the revered elder statesmen to help a young generation connect with its roots.
What developed out of this artistic growth, however, soon broadened into a movement
that led to important social and political actions, including the valorization of Pacific
knowledge as both a confirmation of cultural confidence and opposition to the domina-
tion of Western views, the growth of political protest as a demonstration of belief in the
power of community action, and the realization that language was a crucial foundation
for a new era of cultural identification. The sheer force and earth-shaking consequences
of this birthing process prompted cultural expert George Kanahele to use the simile of a
dormant volcano coming to life in his description of this new Hawaiian consciousness
(Kanahele 1979: 1).
A political and counter-U.S. positioning began to develop as the 1970s progressed.
Highly publicized civil action included protests against the eviction of farmers in
Kalama Valley to make way for proposed tourist and residential development (1970–71),
the occupation of the island of Kaho‘olawe by Hawaiian activists protesting U.S. military
bombing (1976), and the passage of several pro-Hawaiian bills in the 1978 Hawai‘i State
Constitutional Convention.4 In the 1980s, continued community activism, the open-
ing of the first schools offering Hawaiian language immersion education (1987), and the
growth of sovereignty groups all created new contexts for music and dance, aligning
with Ginsburg’s argument that the products of indigenous expressive culture are linked
to these very efforts of representation, governance, and cultural autonomy that follow
decades of assimilation politics (Ginsburg 2002). In the new millennium, Hawaiians
continue to face challenges in legislation, school admission policies, and land issues that
erode self-determination.5 While the actual content of cultural products related to the
institutions and events that grew out of the Renaissance, such as specific pieces of music
and dance, may be apolitical in nature, the type of music used and its very performance
in a Renaissance context can become political statements that take on additional layers
of signification and new functions, i.e., keeping issues of representation, governance,
and cultural autonomy in the public eye. In a similar way, the apolitical nature of a cor-
porate theater trailer took on a larger meaning that also was attached to the life and
meanings of the Renaissance.
The Renaissance moved into general community consciousness as Hawai‘i residents
began to comprehend many of the dissidents’ issues and people of various ethnicities
became involved personally in Renaissance activities—not because they wanted to
claim Hawaiianness, but because they wanted to understand more about a Hawaiian
world and, in many cases, to participate more directly in Hawaiian culture. Hawaiian
causes, arts, and perspectives were constantly in the news and ever-present in the
community. Certain activities became icons of the cultural movement, and foremost
among these were music and dance. One significant part of the reclamation of culture
was a reach backwards to embrace hula kahiko as dance and chant untainted by moder-
nity, as expressive culture that reached back to an era when Hawaiians were in control
FIGURE 24.1 Male hula dancer in a photo entitled “O Kona, ia o ke Kai Malino a Ehu (It is
Kona, Home of the Calm Seas of Ehu).” (Photo courtesy of Randy Jay Braun. © Randy Jay
Braun 2011.)
of their own land and their own destiny, and as a dance that survived missionary
attempts to stamp it out. As Kanahele remarked, “The more traditional the dance, the
keener the interest. It’s as if people want to get as close as they possibly can to the first
hula that [L]‌aka did” (1979: 5). In referencing the Hawaiian goddess Laka, the creator
and patron of hula, an important detail emerges. Unlike the late nineteenth-century
Renaissance prompted by King Kalākaua, this revival of 100 years later would reach
back even further in time. Part of that search for the authenticity attached to the “old”
meant looking for costume ideas that would also convey a sense of antiquity. Male
dancers began to wear malo, a type of loincloth (Figure 24.1, Web Figure 24.01 ),
while women retained the simple, strapless, loose bodice with a full skirt and sported
the long, loose tresses of “hula hair.” Dancer adornments, which reflect fashion trends
as much as any clothing item, took on a decidedly late twentieth-century look, albeit
one founded on older ways of making the requisite head and neck lei as well as ankle
and wrist adornments (kupe‘e). These costuming trends became an integral part of the
look of the Renaissance.
The photograph in Figure 24.1 is clearly a Renaissance image—in its male represen-
tation, featuring of ancient hula, costuming, style of lei and ti leaf adornments, and its
non-modernity. It is this now normalized imagery that the trailer evokes in portraying
Hawaiian culture, and it is an understanding of those same symbols that the audience
draws on to imbue the trailer with meaning as part of a larger cultural matrix. In turn,
the trailer itself becomes a representation of the Renaissance and the specific culture
created around it.
“It’s Not Hawaiian Music”
Tracing the creation of this trailer takes us to its producer Jon de Mello, a fascinating
person in the late twentieth-century development of Hawaiian music and a major figure
in state record production and distribution (Figure 24.2, Web Figure 24.02 ). Jon is
the son of well-known composer Jack de Mello, a descendent of the original Portuguese
immigrants to Hawai‘i and a musician who shaped the soundscape of post-World War
II Hawai‘i. Working with outstanding Hawaiian singers of the 1950s and 60s—such
as Emma Veary, Nina Keali‘iwahamana, and Marlene Sai—he merged the orchestral
sounds of mainland America with lyrical songs of the islands to create an “updated”
sound for a mid-century Hawai‘i that was moving towards, and eventually into, a new
political identity as the 50th state.
Growing up surrounded by outstanding Hawaiian performers, son Jon (hereafter
referred to as de Mello) cultivated his talents in piano, composition, and the visual arts.
His many contributions to Hawaiian music include the founding of the Mountain Apple
recording company, the promotion of artists like the Brothers Cazimero and Israel
Kamakawiwo‘ole (IZ),6 and his successful effort in 2005 to have a Hawaiian Music cate-
gory added to the Grammy Awards.7 His Mountain Apple products are notable for their
high audio quality, outstanding visual design, and ability to convey a Hawaiian sound
with a distinctively contemporary edge.
De Mello’s involvement with the Consolidated project grew from the firm’s desire
to replace the cartoonish animated popcorn trailer featured on its statewide screens in
1991. President Phil Shimmen, looking for something special to mark the company’s
upcoming seventy-fifth anniversary in 1992, called de Mello over to his office and asked
him for his input. Upon returning to his home studio, de Mello’s mind kept floating to
that request when suddenly an inspiration struck him. He sat down at his keyboards,
samplers, and instruments, and finished the complete soundtrack in two hours, playing
each individual line and overdubbing slowly to build up the multi-layered sound. That
initial tape was essentially the final product; de Mello says that once he had penciled out
the scratch track and started layering, it all came together very easily. He made only a
few clean-up changes to bring it to its final form.
With his background in fine arts, de Mello also had specific visual ideas in mind. He
knew “It’s gotta have the culture thing,” (Jon de Mello, interview, February 23, 2008,
Honolulu) and that it needed to include elements of an island world—the ocean, danc-
ing, and ceremony; it also had to be dark, because people are transitioning to a movie. As
FIGURE 24.2 Producer and composer Jon de Mello. (Photo by Ray Wong. Courtesy of
Mountain Apple Company.)
he says, “There . . . is a blend of different worlds . . . and what it ends up to be. And some-
times I wasn’t even aware of that when I was actually doing it” (ibid.). Shimmen, who was
enthralled by the cassette tape brought to him the following day, spared no expense on
the project; the prints alone cost $100,000, a sizeable sum at the time for a one-minute
film. The total piece was completed within a month and copyrighted as “The Birth of
Hawai‘i, Consolidated Amusement Trailer, 75th Anniversary” (http://www.copyright.
gov/records/).
De Mello related that a researcher from the Guinness Book of World Records visited him
several years ago, claiming this was the most listened-to piece of Hawaiian music in the
history of the world (de Mello, interview, February 23, 2008). In speaking with de Mello,
I probed, “And do you call it Hawaiian music?” “No,” he responded, “I call it contemporary
island-based music, but it’s not Hawaiian music in any sense of the word” (ibid.).
His reluctance to consider this Hawaiian is well-founded, and his preference for
the term “contemporary island music” conforms to the current practice of artists
who incorporate Hawaiian elements without being restricted to their traditional use.
De Mello uses a synthesized French horn sounding a triumphant perfect fifth to open
the scene,8 saying he was inspired by the famous 20th Century Fox fanfare. This is
followed by percussion, more horns, and big pads underneath that move up the scale.
De Mello talks about having equipment with a pitch spin wheel on it. By going in
and modifying the attack and decay envelope on a vibraphone sound, he could play
a chord, slow down the attack, and push the wheel to “bend the sound” to resemble
a steel guitar. The chord slides up and hangs there as a voice enters with a traditional
Hawaiian chant. But in the background, we hear a Tahitian slit drum pattern sampled
on a woodblock, something de Mello inserted to reference Hawai‘i’s connections to
a larger Polynesian world. Brass and strings take over, and the sound of pahu drums
(indigenous hand-struck, single-headed membranophones) beating a traditional
rhythm builds, but—just as the “steel guitar” alludes to Hawai‘i without becoming
the “real thing”—de Mello adds a cymbal to the ancient drum beat. Referencing the
split bamboo rattle, pū ‘ili, used by hula dancers and underscoring both the thought
and the inventiveness that shaped each sound, de Mello said, “I rationalized that by
saying that this vibrating metallic sound was a hybrid sound of split bamboo. I didn’t
want it to overpower, knowing that there was no metal [in ancient Hawai‘i], so I just
sort of buried it. But it gave it the bite” (ibid.). When I inquired about the unresolved
string chord in the middle, de Mello confirmed, “That I did on purpose—to get you
on the edge of your seat for the movie. This is something that does not have an end-
ing” (ibid.).
I focus on the sound here, but the seamless linking of the visual and aural is so effec-
tive that many people merge the two. The careful juxtaposition of sound and image (e.g.
waves, the ocean, canoe paddlers) with placement of the first horn sounds at the very
beginning—as if announcing an event—recalls the traditional function of the shell
trumpet in the Pacific. Viewers attach to the larger symbolism rather than focusing on
the accuracy of details. As with the cymbal sound, something in the overall trailer allows
viewers to suspend their notions of sonic authenticity and to accept the departure from
tradition. Some of this may be due to the built-in fantastical setting of the movie theater.
Or perhaps the trailer attaches to something “cultural,” as de Mello planned, drawing
on a set of pre-inscribed meanings and values that speak to island viewers. With strong
cultural reference points, small inconsistencies in sound become innovative twists on
culture rather than distractions from it.
“That’s the Kaona Behind the

Whole Thing”
In discussing the meaning he personally attaches to the trailer, de Mello uses the
Hawaiian term kaona, an admired technique of Hawaiian poets who use metaphorical
language to create secondary, or even tertiary, levels of song text comprehension. The
idea here is that anyone can say the obvious; the art comes in a skillful use of imagery
and an intertextuality that requires listeners to bring their past experiences and knowl-
edge to an appreciation of the poetry. In a visual age, it is tempting to expand the use of
kaona to open a window to understanding both de Mello’s discerning use of particular
symbols and the various interpretations that a theater-going public in Hawai‘i brings
to the viewing event. De Mello says that the opening waves and the canoe at sunset are
intended to transport the viewer into a visually dark place in preparation for the movie
to follow, and “That’s the kaona behind the whole thing” (ibid.). However, the stream of
evocative symbols intertwined in the images he selected is considerably more complex.
These images are effective primarily because they tap into other memories. And that is
the genius of de Mello’s creation.
Producer intent and viewer perception do not always align, nor do they need to; ulti-
mately what counts is the message the audience receives. According to de Mello, the use
of fire was strictly for dramatic purposes; to the audience, however, that same dramatic
effect may invoke an element of danger (as in “don’t play with fire”). The trailer, more-
over, sets this up in a way that resonates with Hawai‘i residents who grew up listening to
stories about the nighttime movements of the hukai pō, ancient warriors whose torches
on Hawaiian hillsides still can be seen by believers. Generally described by storytellers
as marching to the accompaniment of chanting and drumming, these ghostly appari-
tions command respect and force onlookers to “play dead” for fear that a deadly gaze
could spell disaster. The scene with torch-wielding men processing down the cliff to
the sounds of chant taps directly into strong memories of the famous night marchers
and adds to the sense of apprehension and foreboding. “The chanting seems like it is a
ghost procession,” remarked one viewer, while many others in a survey I conducted (see
below) invoked words such as “scary,” “creepy,” or “chilling,” a response that undoubt-
edly links to this kaona.
Similarly, the canoe is not simply a means of transport or a favored local sport.
One highly significant event in Hawaiian Renaissance history was the voyage of
the long-distance sailing canoe Hokule‘a from Hawai‘i to Tahiti in 1976. This cross-
ing validated indigenous knowledge of the sea and prompted renewed interest in
non-instrument navigation and long-distance canoes based on traditional designs. In
the songs prompted by the canoe and its travels, the lessons learned from the trips, and
the warm greetings that awaited the travelers when they reached lands throughout the
Pacific, the canoe came to represent the strong pride that Polynesians feel in their heri-
tage and confirmed the connections and stories related over the centuries in their songs
and dances. The subsequent development of “canoe culture” became embedded in the
life of the Renaissance and influenced de Mello’s belief that the trailer had “to include
the ocean” (ibid.). Aside from the foregrounded physicality of strong, powerful males,
the opening scene of paddlers is a direct referent to the importance the Renaissance
placed on Hawaiian connections—to an ancestral past, across oceans and, specifically,
away from a U.S.-centric view. De Mello aurally touches on this felt past when he incor-
porates a Tahitian slit-drum rhythmic pattern (sounding as a woodblock) to accompany
the march of the dancers down the cliffside, and he ties it directly to Hawai‘i by con-
tinuing the sound under the words of the chant. The whole opening is simultaneously a
highlighting of both connections and the notion of original settlement. It represents the
very birth of Hawai‘i as a separate and unique culture. As with revival movements else-
where, part of the power comes from reframing “old” in a positive way—not as a useless
and insignificant past, but as a valued resource for contemporary action through remem-
brance. In this particular case, the past is recast as a pro-Hawaiian and pre-colonial heri-
tage that highlights Islander, specifically Polynesian, origins.
Other images also signal the ancient past through a set of visual and aural symbols
that the Renaissance made visible to the community. The Renaissance ideals of hula
kahiko, prominent male dancers, and traditional costuming are all strong prompts for
a population that, by 1992, already had been educated in the difference between tradi-
tional hula and the modern form that dominated most of the twentieth century. But
there are several aural clues as well. Some may hear drums and think “old,” “traditional,”
or even “primeval.” Those with more knowledge, however, will recognize the pahu drum
as the most sacred of Hawaiian instruments and the particular rhythm as that used to
accompany the chant and dance “Kaulilua,” one of a small handful of dances thought
to descend from rituals on the ancient, pre-Christian temple sites. As with the drum,
interpretation of the different layers of other symbols lies in the experience that each
viewer brings to the theater. The use of traditional chant immediately situates the sound
in the ancient past for the general audience; those with in-depth hula training will rec-
ognize “Kūnihi ka mauna” (Steep stands the mountain in calm), a mele kahea (lit. “call-
ing song”) often chanted to request entrance to a setting of formal learning, such as a
hālau hula (dance school) (Emerson 1909: 40).
Such complex images carry political meaning in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries, a fact that may contribute to the trailer’s remarkably long life.
Reconstruction and validation of the past, whether historically accurate or reimag-
ined for a new age, was a crucial part of the Hawaiian Renaissance and remains part
of the public debate surrounding Hawaiian sovereignty. Making a political statement
was not de Mello’s desire nor purpose, but that social climate of discussion seeking a
return to Hawaiian ways of doing and, specifically, independent rule under Hawaiian
leadership is certainly what viewers—regardless of their ethnicity or political stance—
bring with them to the theater and to their interpretation of Hawaiian artistic presenta-
tions that reference a pre-colonial past. I was curious about how the audience views this
island-based contemporary work so thoroughly enmeshed in Renaissance imagery and
its attendant political undercurrents and yet purportedly intended to provide a simple
transition from the everyday world to the imaginary realm of moviedom. Is the trailer
perceived as something as non-complex as a theatrical transition? I surveyed 224 peo-
ple ranging from ten to seventy-four years old and representing Hawai‘i’s multi-ethnic
spread.9 Those surveyed reported residence in the islands from two months to over sixty
years.10 I specifically requested three words they would use to describe the trailer, and
respondents provided 625 one-word descriptions. Collapsing closely related categories,
the highest responses in descending order included: ancient/traditional (56 responses),
cultural (55 responses), and indigenous/Hawaiian (50 responses). In other words,

despite de Mello’s claims of non-Hawaiian music and his intended kaona of simply
transporting the audience, 25.8% of all possible responses indicated that viewers read
this trailer foremost as a cultural statement of Hawaiianness conveyed by invoking the
ancient traditions of the land.
Numerically, the next set of responses included more emotionally packed terms, with
the top ones being powerful/strong (23), intense (17), and dark (11). While 32.88% of
those surveyed were neutral about their reaction to the trailer, 64.86% stated that they
liked it; a mere 3.15% noted dislike. Most comments were positive, but not all. “Boring,”
“monotonous,” “stale,” and “I’ve seen it so many times already, it doesn’t leave much of an
impact on me” all appeared on survey sheets, but were outnumbered overwhelmingly by
people who voiced feelings like “I never get tired of watching it,” “I like the familiarity,”
“It’s cool. I have seen it all my life,” and “I’ve seen it so many times that the movies would
not be the same without it.” A very small group sees the trailer primarily as a cue: “I like
it because it means the movie is starting.”
This trailer presents an unusual study topic. The work does not fall under the
rubric of indigenous media by virtue of its non-Hawaiian creator. Despite de Mello’s
intense involvement with Hawaiian music, his Portuguese ethnicity adds complex-
ity to this study by moving his work beyond the category of the native eye to that of
culture-supportive producer. Second, the piece is not a film. This sixty-second work has
no developed narrative to bring it within the field of film study per se. It is promotional
material based on an unrelated series of images added after the sound, a very atypical
process for film. Third, its locationality moves it out of the interests of television or film
by virtue of its decidedly non-twenty-first-century lack of mobility and its existence
as non-circulated display. It is not national or transnational; it does not move beyond
Hawaiian shores. Rather, it finds meaning as a reflection of identity for a geographically
restricted community that views it communally on the large screen.
It is precisely in this Hawaiian space where the trailer defines Hawai‘i as both mark-
edly separate from and something more than homogenized American culture, doing
this by paying tribute to the host culture and personifying that difference through an
island lens. And it is that sense of Hawaiianness that allows Native Hawaiian scholar Lia
Keawe, invoking the semiotics of Pacific imaging and highly critical of the appropriation
and misrepresentation of the hula girl image, to begin her 2008 M.A. thesis on imagery
and colonialism in Hawai‘i with a lengthy description of the trailer and her continuing
sense of astonishment at the allure and beauty evoked by the piece. She reads the shell
trumpet as a signal of arrival; the ocean as not a rhetorical trope of paradise, but rather
as power and control; waves as colliding world views and Hawaiian resilience; fire as a
reawakening; and the pahu drum as restoring the spiritual mana of hula. For her, the
sole reference to entertainment is the theater logo at the end (Keawe 2008: 1–3, 126–130).
The same tendency to attribute cultural importance rather than mere entertainment
value was reflected in my survey results. Only seven responses mentioned the terms
“commercial” or “entertainment,” which would seem to negate the original intent of the
Consolidated-de Mello partnership. For those familiar with the islands, however, three
important features locate this trailer beyond the realm of only entertainment and, spe-
cifically, the type of entertainment local residents normally associate with tourist mar-
keting or films about Hawai‘i produced by outsiders. First, the natural, almost primeval
setting of the Makapu‘u cliffs on the east side of ‘Oahu spatially removes the local viewer
from the tourist-overrun beaches of Waikiki, presenting a site that is read as a local
space, not a tourist one. The barren setting and lava rocks portray the very birth of the
land, in contrast to the constructed environment of international travel enterprises and
the mushrooming hotels lining Waikiki shores. Yes, the trailer taps into the ancient and
the primitive, but the activities portrayed—canoe-paddling, hula, chant, descending the
rocks to the ocean—are all familiar parts of contemporary life in Hawai‘i as well; and,
I might add, activities that stand a bit apart from the typical tourist experience, just as
the trailer experience does. The movie theater is a non-touristic site, just by virtue of the
fact that most people do not spend their vacations watching movies. Nothing prohibits
the tourist from that site, but it is nevertheless one that residents claim as a local space by
default. The non-performative, almost ceremonial, nature of the dance also establishes
it as something not conceived for tourist eyes. Instead, there is a sense of peeking in on
some primal ritual and this distinguishes it from the staged presentation of culture in
tourism. Indeed, only five survey responses out of 625 described this as “touristy,” and
only three indicated “entertainment” as one of their word choices.
A perception of authenticity matters here. Local audiences recognize performers who
are very well trained in hula, strong chant performance, and traditional styles of dance
and music normally not widely performed in Waikiki. The dance and chant carry the
weight of cultural authority, not only because of their roots in time but also because of
the high skill level displayed. Those with direct knowledge of the culture recognize and
appreciate the mastery of the language and skilled use of admired vocal techniques by
chanter Kepa Maly, a cultural resources specialist who is a fluent Hawaiian speaker and a
kumu hula (hula master).
But even more powerful than recognitions of place and performance style are the rec-
ognitions of people. ‘Oahu is a small place, and those familiar with the hula commu-
nity recognize performers selected from the hālau (hula school) of the highly-respected
Robert Cazimero, as well as Heali‘i Kihune, the daughter of Leina‘ala Heine, one of
Hawai‘i’s revered hula masters. Although it is their youthful images that are captured
on screen, some of these people are known to a younger generation as teacher, coach,
or popular performer.11 Five of the six dancers still reside in Hawai‘i—shrinking in the
theater seat as a child calls out loudly, “There’s my Daddy!” or modestly deflecting fame
when a viewer stops after the film to inquire, “Aren’t you the dancer in the trailer?” These
are not anonymous personalities from some far-off world. These are Hawai‘i’s own.12
Situating the trailer in this very Polynesian locus of land, activity, tradition, and
people is what allows Hawai‘i residents to identify with this work—even if they are not
ethnically Hawaiian. Much like Rosenberg’s notion of revivals “feeding music from the
margins into the center” (1993: 5), the Renaissance shifted the parameters of cultural
placement to move what had become marginalized Hawaiian traditions to center-stage
and taught residents that Hawaiian culture could—and should—be the focal point as
the host culture of the islands. De Mello, drawing on revival symbols and shared com-
munity connotations, also situates Hawai‘i as the center of focus, thereby allowing the
trailer to assume a stronger meaning than that of pure entertainment. Through presen-
tation on the big screen, Hawai‘i basks in the grandeur associated with cinematic space,
but it does so in a particularly local way. This is not Hollywood imaging. Rather, the
audience sees the trailer as intervening in the status quo articulated by a mainland film
industry and appreciates the bold statement of that intervention.
The work is completely inventive. There is no storyline, there is no real dance,
there is no music for dance, and people in Hawai‘i do not dance on rocky shore-
lines. Yet, amid contemporary portrayals of Hawaiians that so often thoroughly miss
the crucial identifiers of culture, de Mello’s art displays a skill in imagery, attach-
ment to place, excellence in performance, and knowledge of the kaona that allows a
Renaissance-educated audience to accept the trailer as an “insider” view that under-
stands Hawaiian culture. A small number of respondents viewed the trailer as feeding
into dominant imaging of Hawai‘i as foreign and exotic. Perhaps what they do not
understand is that many local residents, regardless of ethnicity, do view themselves
as “foreign” to American life and prefer to maintain this distancing—if done in a way
that upholds Hawaiian values.
Dávila states, “Media discourses are never produced in a vacuum; they are part and
parcel of greater discourses of identity and identification” (2002: 277). In a similar way,
the messages embedded in the trailer are comprehensible only in the full context of
the late twentieth-century Hawaiian Renaissance. A contemporary audience may take
them completely for granted, but these symbols and their messages would not have been
imaginable a half-century earlier.
“It’s Gotta Have a Shelf Life”
De Mello’s work has become such a mainstay of life in Hawai‘i that there is now a whole
generation that has grown up knowing only this trailer in Consolidated Theaters. When
the sale of the theater chain spawned a flood of phone calls in 2008, the news anchors
on two local TV stations felt compelled to go on the air and reassure the public that
Consolidated had confirmed the trailer would remain in place. This reaction is amazing,
especially considering that this is a non-consumer, non-choice product; the “consumer”
is already in the theater, and the work is ancillary to the main feature film. The public
response to the news story, however, was echoed in my subsequent survey results, where
only seven survey respondents—out of 224—thought the trailer should be redone or
dropped. Asked if they would make changes, one respondent said “No, and if I did peo-
ple would probably hate me!” Indeed, “classic” and “nostalgic” were words that appeared
several times, indicating that the trailer is ingrained as a tradition for many of those sur-
veyed. One graduating high school senior mused, “I don’t know what it’ll be like to leave
for college and not see this.”
The burning question is why so many people, almost 63% of those surveyed, are still
invested in this work. On one hand, de Mello is outstanding at what he does and perhaps
some people simply view this as a brilliant creation. There are, however, also reasons that
lie in Hawai‘i’s post-revival cultural life. Initiated and spearheaded by Native Hawaiians,
the Renaissance eventually reached out to touch the entire community. As Kanahele
declared, “anybody who claims Hawai‘i to be home, in some degree or another, wants and
even needs to share in its Hawaiian-ness” (1979: 9). Addressing what he calls the “para-
dox of the Renaissance,” he states that this rebirth “does not only belong to Hawaiians.
It belongs to non-ethnic Hawaiians, too” (ibid.). In the early twenty-first century, the
traditions that the Renaissance molded into a Hawaiian culture for the present are now
firmly established and institutionalized in hālau hula and school curricula stretch-
ing from pre-school to the university, as well as in state-wide organizations and events.
Even the rituals of government become involved when construction ground-breaking
includes chant, the untying of a maile lei,13 and the ceremonial lifting of dirt with an
‘o‘o stick rather than a shovel. The images and practices of the Renaissance have been
normalized by not only Hawaiians, but by the community at large. The ethnic diversity
of any hula troupe attests to the impact of cultural revival on those of non-Hawaiian
blood. In some ways, the outward dressings of Renaissance culture now function as a lin-
gua franca in an intensely multi-ethnic community that needs emblems of place that are
accessible, relevant, and able to cross ethnic lines. People recognize the cultural display
as that of the host culture but also respect, understand, and even embrace its symbols—
whether they are ethnically Hawaiian or not. The Consolidated trailer, as a product of
the Renaissance, also belongs to the larger community. As one sixteen-year-old Filipino
girl said, “It serves to remind me that this is Hawai‘i after all—it’s a special place.”
The trailer confirms the fundamental claim that Hawaiians have as kanaka ‘ōiwi
o ka ‘āina (‘native people of the land’), the only indigenous group among a society
that has seen layers and generations of immigration. But it ultimately taps into a
broader, contrastive “local” identity as well. Scholars such as Okamura (2008), Alba
(1990), and Rosa (2000) have theorized ethnic and racial boundary construction in
Hawai‘i and examined the notion of “localness.” Transcending the racial boundar-
ies often ascribed to “local” or the individual groups subsumed in that collective
(e.g., local Japanese-Americans versus mainland Japanese-Americans or Japanese
from Japan; “local haole (Caucasian)” versus whites born and raised on the main-
land), Okamura situates localness in a category of people who have a commitment
to Hawai‘i. He points to the late 1960s and early 1970s as a time when a “new mean-
ing of local emphasized a shared appreciation of the land, peoples, and cultures of
the islands” and considers local a shared identity that “serves as a basis of collective
agency to contest the penetration by non-local forces that threaten local communi-
ties” (Okamura 2008: 117, 121). Part of the trailer’s allure is in performing a commu-
nal space that appreciates the specialness of Hawai‘i by acknowledging the traditions
that the original people brought to these lands and invoking the sacredness of the
past. De Mello takes the non-local foreignness of the big screen (both as an indus-
try and in terms of content that seldom concerns island stories and people) and,
using Renaissance imagery, delivers a one-minute confirmation that there is some-

thing distinctive about Hawai‘i. As one nineteen-year-old local Japanese respondent
remarked, “It reminds me that the land I am on has a wonderful, unique history.”
That power to summon an emotional response linked to place is apparent in survey
comments. “Power,” “pride,” “strength,” “awe,” “beauty,” “meaningful,” and “moving”
were all descriptors included in participant responses. It is that contestation of glo-
balness, paired with emotions of place, that is engaged in many respondents when
the lights dim and the trailer comes into view.
It is also important to realize that at the time this work first appeared, the Renaissance
had a strong presence in the community but not in movie theaters.14 Predating the
expansion of indigenous media in the 1990s, the trailer brought Hawaiian culture to
the theater screen, seemingly attaching the images of Hawai‘i to the lofty heights of
Hollywood. It did so, however, in way that counters Hollywood hegemony of visual and
sound imagery and its generally insensitive, stereotypical representations of Hawaiian
people and their culture. This is the big screen, but in a way that encapsulates a local
perspective and sense of identity from the viewpoint of a general audience—not the cul-
tural specialists or academics, but the theater-going public.
Comments such as “synthesized 80s sound” or “I think after so many years it needs
a sequel” bring up the notion of “shelf life” and point to audience acknowledgement of
a disconnect between the trailer and contemporary practice, even though these same
respondents nonetheless indicated they liked the work. Most respondents were cautious
about meddling with de Mello’s creation. Underscoring the role that familiarity and rep-
etition plays as part of the meaning audiences ascribe to this trailer, one person said that
any alterations “would have to be done carefully. With such a long standing tradition,
too much change would ruin the effect.”
The trailer has become a part of island life that, like other widely accepted aspects of
the Renaissance, contributes to a feeling that “these things have always been here.” It is
a generational reality that young people today cannot imagine a 1950s world without
frequent performances of ancient hula and chant nor envision a society that forbade
the Hawaiian language and down-played Hawaiian culture rather than appreciating and
upholding it. With the normalization of Renaissance ideology and practices throughout
the islands, the page has now turned to a Post-Renaissance age.
“Ha‘ina ‘ia mai ana ka puana”
Traditional Hawaiian hula songs include the formulaic phase “Ha‘ína ‘ia mai ana ka
puana,” or a variant thereof, as part of the final verse. Translated as “tell the refrain/
theme,” “the story is told” or “thus goes the story,” it provides a closing restatement
prompting reflection on the song’s theme(s). In a similar way, closing thoughts on the
trailer offer an opportunity to review its significance.
Just as the Hawaiian Renaissance produced a musical composite of old and new tradi-
tions, de Mello creatively reaches across centuries to achieve his goal in this trailer. He
teases us aurally with synthesized sound interspersed with the aural icons of Hawaiian
history while interweaving the whole with visual images that represent the Renaissance
of the 1970s and 1980s. Rather than presenting cultural reality, however, he skillfully
manipulates the cues to create something that steps beyond the sounds and images the
audience typically associates with the Renaissance. De Mello readily admits the music is
not Hawaiian—in either its instrumentation or the way the audio track builds to a dra-
matic climax that movie-goers associate with cinematic sounds and epic dimensions.
In a similar way, he does not attempt to portray the reality of Hawaiian performance;
instead, he uses Renaissance symbols that invoke a range of associated meanings that
draw from life beyond the theater screen but do not duplicate it.
Although this case study is specific to the Hawaiian Islands, it underscores some
important points for the field of revival study. First, localization and knowledge of that
locale are crucial both to cultural revival and to the long-standing success of this trailer.
Hawai‘i residents read the aural and visual symbols in ways that draw on a nuanced
understanding of revival ideals. Such representations work to their fullest when there
is knowledge of both the icons and the broader socio-political framework they refer-
ence. Culture here transcends slick entertainment to become a means of supporting
Hawaiians in their political and social struggles.
Second, the trailer aligns with the Renaissance recasting of culture as pro-Hawaiian
and pre-colonial to support a collective and selective remembrance noted through-
out revival studies. Doing this in sonically innovative ways and through a very
non-conventional medium, it demonstrates how creativity can help to convey tradi-
tion and how commercialized space can be used effectively to support and popular-
ize revival ideology. In the viewers’ eyes, a tool of commercialization and the big
screen is co-opted and used to counter the typical imagery associated with those
spaces. For this non-documentary trailer, cultural authority is necessary to credibil-
ity, but the overall message is seemingly more important than strict accuracy in all
details.
Third, the constant repetition built into the medium and Consolidated’s wide reach
across the state played a large role in normalizing both it and Renaissance ideas. This
repetitiveness and ubiquitousness contrasts with film, particularly indigenous film
which often struggles for inroads to theater distribution, prompting reflection on both
effective ways to spread and reinforce revival messages as well as possible new avenues
for doing that.
Finally, the world of the trailer is undeniably local and intensely personal in the sense
that people attach specific meaning to its setting, its actors, and its symbols. With sensi-
tivity, de Mello moves beyond an Outsider representation of Hawaiian culture to allow
a multi-ethnic population to share in a sense of uniqueness surrounding the islands,
a sense of belonging. The trailer is a distinctive imaging of Hawai‘i, but the fact that it
is experienced communally in the islands heightens its meaning as an expression and
experience of place.
The trailer evokes a deep-felt recognition of things Hawaiian, not as a romanticized
icon of commodification, but as a tribute to the host culture. As the trailer stretches
across the generations, de Mello acknowledges that this work has “to have a shelf life
sometime” (de Mello, interview, February 23, 2008). For the time being, however, it con-
tinues to help Hawai‘i residents to transition—to the movies, yes, but also to larger ideas
concerning the role of Hawaiian culture in a modern age. As long as that role is continu-
ally challenged by political, land, and cultural issues or stereotypical outsider portray-
als, there is still a need to position Hawaiians as powerful and to portray the culture as
something that endures across time to link past and present in a “contemporary Island”
place. The future will decide the destiny of the trailer, but the past has already recognized
it as creating a previously unimagined space of possibility for Hawaiianness—even if
only for one minute at a time.
Notes
1. Publications quote trailer showings of 200 to 1,000 times per day. Although several the-
aters have closed during the years since the trailer was released, my daily count on three
dates in July 2010 ranged from 442 to 502. In the number of feature film screenings per day,
Consolidated is the largest of the three major theater chains in the islands.
2. Ma‘iki stressed the importance of male dancers in Hawaiian history and worked to bring
young men into her hula classes (Gordon 2006: FF8). Musician Robert Cazimero of The
Sunday Manoa was one of her early students and became a kumu hula under her tutelage.
3. The 1970s also ushered in cultural organizations such as the Polynesian Voyaging Society
(1973), Historic Hawaii Foundation (1974), Nā Hōkū Hanohano Music Awards (1977), and
the opening of ‘Iolani Palace as a museum (1978) (Correa 2007: 88).
4. For a discussion of the Kalama Valley controversy, see Milner 2006. The “Hawaiian pack-
age” recognized the Hawaiian language as one of the two official languages of the state,
confirmed various traditional rights, and established the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to
represent the interests of Native Hawaiians (Hawaii Legislative Reference Bureau, http://
hawaii.gov/lrb/con/conart12.html).
5. The issues surrounding self-determination touch on a far-reaching assortment of serious
concerns for Hawaiians. Bills to limit gathering rights for native practitioners of hula, pro-
posed rulings to force the sale of lease-hold Bishop Estate land of the late Princess Pau‘ahi,
legal challenges to Kamehameha Schools’ policy of admitting only students of Hawaiian
blood, and the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 (with subsequent con-
trol of former crown lands by the US government) are among the problems that under-
mine Hawaiians’ control of their own destiny.
6. The impressive Mountain Apple catalog features many of Hawai‘i’s most outstanding per-
formers, including Emma Veary, Nina Keali‘iwahamana, Keali‘i Reichel, Richard Ho‘opi‘i,
Keola Beamer, Amy Hanaiali‘i, Raiatea Helm, Ho‘okena, Nā Palapalai, and others.
7. The separate Hawaiian category was suppressed as part of Grammy reorganization in 2011.
8. There are two versions of the sound track. A 1:17 minute version, designed for surround
sound and used in only a few theaters, begins with the entrances of three conch shells and
ends with a sustained string chord that builds in volume. A shorter one-minute version is
the norm.
9. Hawai‘i’s demographic includes large Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Japanese, Chinese,
Filipino, Korean, and Caucasian populations as well as smaller Pacific Islander and
Southeast Asian communities; no one group claims a majority of the overall population.
Generations of intermarriage also result in combinations of these heritages—both in the

individual and in creating multi-ethnic extended families. It is worth noting that ethnicity
was not an apparent factor affecting responses to the survey or general like/dislike of the
trailer.
10. Those surveyed included University of Hawai‘i students and participants in the Hawai‘i
Youth Opera Chorus. UH students in film, ethnomusicology, Hawaiian language, choir,
Hawaiian studies and Pacific Islands studies classes and high school students in the Youth
Opera chorus were shown the trailer one time and asked to complete a short questionnaire.
Surveys took place during summer and fall terms of 2008 and the summer term of 2009. Of
the 224 people surveyed, twenty-five had never seen the trailer previously. All twenty-five
had been in Hawai‘i for less than one-and-a-half years.
11. Michael Casupang is a kumu hula at Mid-Pacific Institute; Arletta Johnson Soon, a teacher
of Hawaiian language and culture, works at Kamehameha Schools; legendary hula dancer
Jackie Booth performs with well-known contemporary Hawaiian performers like Amy
Hanaiali‘i Gilliom, the Ka‘au Crater Boys, and HAPA; Reggie Keaunui is involved with
Polynesian voyaging canoes and coaches youth divisions in outrigger canoe paddling;
Heali‘i Kihune works for Sandwich Isles Communications, a company that services
Hawaiian homestead customers; and Keola Kamahele is a real estate agent in Las Vegas
(Pang 2002).
12. Although this was certainly not typical when surveying UH classes, approximately 50%
of the seventeen students in one Hawaiian Studies class said they were either related to or
personally acquainted with one of the performers.
13. A garland of fragrant leaves often used for important occasions.
14. Options for viewing Islander stories were limited in 1992. The Hawai‘i International
Film Festival, established in 1981, initially featured predominantly Asian films but has
expanded in this century to include films from the Pacific and works by Native
Hawaiians. Pacific Islanders in Communications, a member of the National Minority
Consortia (NMC), aims “to support, advance, and develop Pacific Island media con-
tent and talent that results in a deeper understanding of Pacific Island history, cul-
ture, and contemporary challenges” (http://www.lifeonfourstrings.com/faqs/
pacific-islanders-in-communications-co-producers/). Emerging in 1991, it was in its
infancy at the time of the trailer’s release.
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C HA P T E R 25
GRASSRO OTS
R E V I TA L I Z AT I O N O F N O RT H
AMERICAN AND WESTERN
E U R O P E A N I N S T RU M E N TA L
MUSIC TRADITIONS FROM
F I D D L E R S A S S O C IAT I O N S T O
C Y B E R S PAC E
R IC HA R D BL AU ST E I N
In Folk Song Style and Culture (1968), the renowned American folk music collector and
folk revival promoter Alan Lomax predicted that the worldwide impact of mass media
and popular culture would lead to “cultural grey-out”; loss of the distinctive cultural
identities that fulfill the universal human emotional need for meaningful connections
with significant others.
The work was filled with a sense of urgency. To a folklorist the uprooting and
destruction of traditional cultures and the consequent grey-out or disappearance of
the human variety presents as serious a threat to the future of mankind as poverty,
overpopulation, and even war. . .. Our western mass production and communication
systems are inadvertently destroying the languages, traditions, cuisines, and creative
styles that once gave every people and every locality a distinctive character—indeed
their principal reason for living.
(Lomax 1968: 4)
But that did not happen. Instead, new hybrid forms of world music combining tra-
ditional and contemporary elements have flourished, along with widespread local,
regional, national, and ethnic musical revitalization movements. The formation of
552 Richard Blaustein
organizations devoted to reviving and preserving various forms of traditional instru-

mental music, including fiddling, has been taking place in the Western world since the
late eighteenth century and still continues in the early twenty-first century. Formal asso-
ciations centered around traditional fiddling and dance music are active in the United
States, Canada, Australia, and western European countries, including Great Britain,
Ireland, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. In the early twenty-first cen-
tury, grassroots revival activities have found new life as fiddle enthusiasts around the
world have made use of newly available internet-based technologies to build networks,
communities, and identities. In this essay, I discuss some of the social and psychologi-
cal motivations of revitalization movements and how revival-related organizations and
activities have helped meet individuals’ needs for community and identity from the
eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries.
The Emergence of Fiddling and

Traditional Dance Music Communities on
the Internet
In Neil Rosenberg’s edited volume Transforming Tradition (1993), I described the rise
of old-time fiddlers associations in the United States in the 1960s as a grassroots musi-
cal revitalization movement. The words “internet” and “cyberspace” do not appear in
Transforming Tradition. We were already living in the early internet era and didn’t real-
ize it. None of the contributors to Transforming Tradition, including myself, had any
idea that the advent of the personal computer and the internet were creating new special
interest groups focused on various genres of traditional music.
But social scientists were already beginning to study the social and cultural impact
of digital communications technology. Howard Rheingold’s work The Virtual
Community: Finding Connection in a Computerized World, an early and widely cited
study of the social impact of the internet, was published in 1994. By the late 1990s, folk-
lorists, ethnomusicologists, and cultural anthropologists were increasingly coming to
appreciate the social and cultural impact of the internet. In 2003, cultural anthropologist
Rene T. A. Lysloff published his article “Musical Community on the Internet: An On-line
Ethnography,” a major scholarly contribution to the emerging literature of online eth-
nography. As Lysloff observes, “The realization that communities are based on a sense of
belonging that is not necessarily dependent on physical proximity is not new in itself. . ..
What is of interest is how the Internet as a technology makes possible communities and
new social practices that were unimaginable before (Lysloff 2003: 235).” In sociological
terms, devotees of various types of music, including fiddling, are members of special
interest groups, also termed common interest groups or affinity groups. Sharing a com-
mon interest in a particular sort of music fulfills a fundamental human need for mean-
ingful communication with significant others. Nowadays, members of musical special
Grassroots Revival from Fiddlers Associations to Cyberspace 553
Table 25.1. Number of Hits for Internet Searches of

Fiddle Key Terms, November 2011
Search term Approximate number of hits
“Fiddle” 24,500,000
“Fiddling” 7,360,000
“Fiddle camp” 35,700
“Fiddle contests” 21,200
“Fiddle links” 709
“Fiddle resources” 1,550
“Fiddle tunes” “MP3” 47,000
“Fiddle tunes MIDI” 264,000
“Old time fiddle” 144,000
“Old time fiddling” 30,200
“Old time music” 601,000
“Old time fiddlers association” 957
“Old time fiddle contest” 16,100
“Fiddle contests” 21,700
interest groups like fiddle music enthusiasts use computers, digital recorders, and the
internet to share their passion for particular genres of music.
The extent of interest in fiddle music on the internet can be roughly gauged by inter-
net searches for key terms I made in November 2011, which resulted in millions of hits
for “fiddle” and thousands of hits for various phrases including the term “fiddle.” (See
Table 25.1). Old-time fiddling is only a minor special interest compared to fiddling
in general, and fiddling is a minor musical genre compared to major popular musi-
cal genres. Compare the number of hits for fiddle terms listed in Table 25.1 with the
approximately 45,800,000 hits for “rock n’ roll,” 4,260,000 for “rhythm and blues,” and
430,000,000 for “jazz.”
When I first encountered them in the mid-1960s, members of old-time fiddlers asso-
ciations in the United States were communicating through newsletters produced on
office copy machines and exchanging reel-to-reel tapes. Personal computers and the
internet have enabled devotees of fiddle music to communicate with kindred spirits
around the world in real time.
The primal human desire for meaningful connections with significant others that
inspires traditional fiddling and dance music enthusiasts to form organizations is a con-
stant, but the technology these groups employ is changing so quickly that it is virtually
impossible to describe these internet-based groups accurately. We need to need to freeze
this movement in time by adopting the anthropological convention of the ethnographic
present, which begins with the advent of personal computers and the internet. When
I first began exploring fiddling communities on the internet in the late 1990s, these
groups were making use of now outmoded technologies such as listservs and news-
letters, but they have quickly adopted newer, more dynamic technologies as they have
come online. At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, many
North American and European fiddling and traditional dance music organizations have
set up their own websites including links to other organizations and websites of special
interest publications and entrepreneurs selling recordings and instruments. Fiddlers
and other traditional instrumentalists with personal computers and internet connec-
tions have access to thousands of transcriptions and recordings of fiddle tunes.
Collections of MIDI and mp3 digital audio files enable fiddlers to learn tunes by ear,
creating a new medium of aural transmission for fiddle music. There are numerous
postings of all types of fiddling and traditional dance music on video hosting services,
particularly YouTube. As of April 2012, there is not yet a single integrated all-inclusive
web ring that ties together all of the various individual blogs, websites, newsgroups, and
listservs devoted to fiddling and traditional dance music.
There are two basic types of fiddlers’ special interest groups on the internet:
Place-based: groups that are actually located in a particular geographic location

1.
and have adopted internet technology; they are extensions of older pre-internet
fiddlers associations and clubs.
Cyberspace-based: groups that have been set up on the internet and have devel-
2.
oped into virtual communities with globally distributed participants.
In addition, numerous web sites and blogs of individuals actively express their interest
in fiddle music on the internet. These special interest communities on the internet are
essentially contemporary folk groups, though they do not depend on face-to-face oral
communication as traditional folk groups did in the past.
Here are my working definitions of special interest communities, networks, and con-
stellations in cyberspace:
Communities are particular special interest groups, traditionally defined by

1.
kinship and proximity but now by sharing common concerns and exchanging
meaningful information.
Networks comprise individuals and formal organizations linked by common
2.
interests that communicate among themselves.
Constellations are aggregates of networks and communities that share a common
3.
interest but may not necessarily communicate with one another—just as there
are no actual connections between the individual stars that constitute a celestial
constellation.
In the 1960s and 1970s, old-time fiddle music enthusiasts took part in jam sessions, con-
tests, newsletters, tape-swapping, and producing and marketing custom recordings
aimed at special interest groups too small to merit exploitation by commercial mass
media. Twenty-first-century old-time fiddling enthusiasts do many of the same things,
making creative use of personal computers and the internet, linking individual web
pages through sites like FiddleFork (fiddlefork.com) and the Fiddle Web Ring (www
.webring.org/hub/fiddle?sid=130) and taking part in specialized social networks like

Fiddle Hangout (www.fiddlehangout.com) and Fiddle World (fiddleworld.groupsite
.com). In addition, many individual fiddling and traditional dance music enthusiasts
and groups have set up their own pages on Facebook, the largest social network on the
internet, with roughly three hundred million users worldwide.
Fiddling Associations in the Cyber

Age: A Postrevival “New Steady State”
The grassroots cultural revival movement that led to the establishment of old-time fid-
dlers associations in the United States during the post–World War II era is still vital and
growing in the early twenty-first century. While some older fiddlers associations have
dissolved, the movement as a whole continues to grow. The creation of new contexts
for the preservation and perpetuation of cherished forms of traditional expressive cul-
ture, including fiddling and dance music, corresponds to what cultural anthropologist
Anthony F. C. Wallace called the “New Steady State” phase of cultural revitalization:
Once cultural transformation has been accomplished and the new cultural system
has proven itself viable, and once the movement has solved its problems of routiniza-
tion, a new steady state may be said to exist. The culture of this state will probably be
different in pattern, organization and Gestalt as well as traits from the earlier steady
state; it will be different from that of the period of cultural distortion.
(Wallace 1956: 275)
Postrevival culture is nothing more or less than Wallace’s New Steady State. Wallace’s
revitalization movement theory consists of five stages of development:
1. Steady State
2. Period of Individual Stress
3. Period of Cultural Distortion
4. Period of Revitalization
5. New Steady State
The first phase of the revitalization process, (1) the Steady State, is a period during which
traditional social and cultural patterns are functionally and structurally coherent,
providing effective means of reducing stress and attaining expressive gratification for
most people. Changes that bring about the perceived deterioration of these traditional
institutional and cultural systems (such as migration, invasion, acculturation, techno-
logical and economic innovations, even changes in customary forms of social play) gen-
erate (2) individual stress and ultimately (3) cultural distortion, which is subjectively
experienced as a loss of meaningful connection with significant others (see Hsu 1971).
During stage 4, the period of revitalization, members of a society may compensate for
the state of psychosocial disintegration that Emile Durkheim described as anomie (lit-
erally “namelessness”) by reviving selected aspects of their traditional culture and devel-
oping new institutional patterns centered around them, or they may choose to adopt
the cultural styles of idealized exotic others. If such a movement produces viable new
social institutions, like the old-time fiddlers associations in the United States since the
late 1950s and early 1960s, it has reached the stage of development Wallace terms (5) the
New Steady State, his revitalization movement theory provides a very powerful and use-
ful starting point for discussions of postrevival culture
The end-product of the process of cultural revitalization, old-time fiddlers associa-
tions, and similar groups devoted to traditional music and other forms of expressive cul-
ture selectively incorporate symbolic elements of an earlier culture into a new social and
technological context, thereby creating a postrevival culture. The development of orga-
nizations like the old-time fiddlers associations in the United States compensates for the
emotional trauma of disruptive social and cultural change. As the social anthropologist
Robert T. Anderson has stated, “where societies are experiencing rapid social change,
formal voluntary associations typically are found” (1971: 209). He continues: “[O]ften
associations reorganize or duplicate old institutions to give them a legal-rational struc-
ture. In this way, traditional institutions remain viable in a changed society. The pro-
cess may take the form of the reorganization of the old groups” (217). Old-time fiddlers
associations are still thriving in the United States and in Canada at the beginning of
the second decade of the twenty-first century. Their participants can now communicate
with fellow fiddle music enthusiasts around the world in real-time thanks to personal
computers and the internet.
I searched the internet in November 2011 to locate active old-time fiddlers’ associa-
tions and fiddlers clubs in the United States and Canada. I found 101 groups; 74 had
website addresses, 27 did not, and 7 had set up Facebook pages. (See Web Table 25.1 for
live links to these sites .)
Traditional music organizations, including fiddlers, are evidently flourishing in the
Nordic countries as well. As Byron J. Nordstrom notes in Culture and Customs of Sweden
(2010), there was a widespread revival of interest in traditional Swedish music follow-
ing World War II: “literally hundreds of local folk musician organizations (spelmanslag)
are spread across the country” (Nordstrom 2010: 131). My internet search for Swedish
traditional music groups in November 2011 identified eight-six active fiddlers associa-
tions and twenty-six local musicians’ clubs, all of which had website addresses (see Web
Table 25.2 for live links to these sites ).
In Fiddling for Norway: Revival and Identity (1997), Chris Goertzen describes the
complexities of the twentieth-century revival of Norwegian traditional music, which
inspired the proliferation of fiddle contests and local fiddlers organizations (spele-
mannslag). My internet search for spelemannslag yielded about 58,100 results. I also
found a detailed list of Spelemannslag on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
List_of_Spelemannslag). This list mostly includes Norwegian fiddling groups but also
some from Sweden and the United States. Some but not all of these groups have their
own websites. (See Web Table 25.3 for live links to the sites .)
My internet search for spillemandslaug, the Danish word for “fiddlers’ club” or “fid-
dlers association,” turned up about 7,890 results. Though not as well known as their
counterparts in Sweden and Norway, there seem to be a good number of these associa-
tions, and several have their own websites (see Web Table 25.4 ).
Finland’s traditional musicians’ associations websites are very advanced (see Web
Table 25.5 ).
Fiddlers associations and traditional music groups can be found elsewhere in Europe.
Here are just a couple of examples. An active fiddlers association in Northern Ireland,
the Counties Antrim and Derry Fiddlers Association, constituted officially in 1953, has
its own website (http://antrimandderryfiddlers.com/default.aspx). There is an active
Italian fiddlers association whose website is named “Il sito del violino tradizionale in
Italia” (italianfiddle.com).
Traditional music associations are also flourishing in the second decade of the
twenty-first century. in Australia (See Web Table 25.6 “Active Fiddling and Traditional
Music Association Located in Australia” ).
The Grassroots Revitalization Of Traditional Music And Dance Through Formation
of Organizations Though members of fiddlers associations and traditional dance music
clubs in the early twenty-first century are using the internet to communicate with fellow
fiddling enthusiasts around the world, the idea of the fiddlers association itself is noth-
ing new. The earliest known fiddling organization in the United States is the Old Fiddlers
Association, founded in 1901 in Fort Worth, Texas, by Confederate veterans, including
Captain Mose J. Bonner and Henry Gilliland, who recorded for Victor Records with
fellow Texan Eck Robertson in 1922 (Malone 2002: 158). In his book Fiddlin’ Georgia
Crazy, Gene Wiggins notes that the famous Atlanta fiddle contests were sponsored
by the Georgia Fiddlers Association, which dates back to 1913(1987: 46). During the
1920s, old-time fiddlers associations were established in various states; the Old Fiddlers
Association of Iowa, established in 1924, and the Old Fiddlers’ Club of Rhode Island,
founded in 1929, are still active and have set up their own websites.
It is uncertain whether Henry Ford’s efforts to promote old-time fiddling during the
1920s had a direct influence on the establishment of old-time fiddlers associations in Iowa
and Rhode Island. Nonetheless, his crusade to revitalize old-time music and dancing occu-
pied a great deal of his attention between 1923 and 1927. Antijazz and anti-popular-dance
sentiment was already prevalent among white Anglo-Saxon Protestant right-wingers
in 1923, when Ford and his wife purchased the historic Wayside Inn in Sudbury,
Massachusetts, and proceeded to hold highly publicized old-time dances. Also in 1923,
he began seeking out and recording authentic old-time fiddlers. There was an undeni-
able xenophobic element in his attempts to revive old-time music and dance. His privately
owned newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, published articles with titles like “Jewish
Jazz Becomes Our National Music” and “How the Jewish Song Trust Makes You Sing”
(Lipset and Raab 1973: 136–138). Ford sponsored major fiddling contests involving thou-
sands of fiddlers, and extensive efforts were made to promote old-time dancing, including
the publication of Good Morning (1926), a dance manual issued under the names Mr. and
Mrs. Henry Ford but actually ghostwritten by the dance master Benjamin Lovett.
Some intriguing parallels can be drawn between the American old-time fiddling
revivals of the 1920s and the 1960s. Both revivals followed major wars; both took place
in periods of rapid urban and industrial growth and drastic social and cultural polar-
ization; both postwar periods saw stylistic revolutions in which black-derived forms of
popular music (jazz after World War I; rock and roll following World War II) attracted
progressive, cosmopolitan Americans while repelling conservative, authoritarian fun-
damentalists who believed that these new genres of pop music were part of a diabolical
conspiracy to undermine the moral fiber of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant youth. While
the fiddling revival of the post-WW II period is less obviously tied to WASP xenopho-
bia, it is nonetheless a nativistic revitalization movement. According to the cultural
anthropologist Ralph Linton, the development of the Old-Time Fiddlers Association,
movement is an example of a “conscious, organized attempt on the part of a society’s
members to revive or perpetuate selected aspects of its culture” (1943: 230).
In The Invention of Tradition (1983), the Marxist social historian Eric Hobsbawm
describes a recurrent process of imputing antiquity (hence authenticity and legitimacy) to
new forms of cultural expression that bolster the distinctive identities of marginal groups.
Reflecting the influence of Antonio Gramsci, Hobsbawm interprets Romantic nationalist
and ethnic separatist movements, typically led by alienated middle-class intellectuals, as
attempts to offset the hegemony (cultural dominance) of an elite establishment. However,
Hobsbawm notes, such cultural movements are not restricted to disaffected intellectuals
who identify with common people and their cultural traditions; they are also grassroots
reactions to physical and psychological displacements created by modernization, urban-
ization, and industrialization. Whether cultural revitalization movements stem from ide-
ological alienation or actual socioeconomic displacement, they share a common goal, the
restoration of an idealized culture believed to be in danger of disintegration:
Such a break is visible even in movements deliberately describing themselves as “tra-

ditionalists,” and appealing to groups which were, by common consent, regarded
as the repositories of historic continuity and tradition, such as peasants. Indeed,
the very appearance of movements for the defense or revival of traditions, “tradi-
tionalist” or otherwise, indicates such a break. Such movements, common among
intellectuals since the Romantics, can develop or even preserve a living past (except
conceivably by setting up human natural sanctuaries for isolated corners of archaic
life) but must become “invented tradition.” On the other hand the strength and
adaptability of genuine tradition is not to be confused with “the invention of tradi-
tion.” Where the old ways are alive, traditions need not be either revived or invented.
(Hobsbawm 1983: 8)
However, when devoted tradition-bearers come to believe that cherished forms of cul-
tural expression are in danger of dying out, they actively attempt to preserve them by
establishing voluntary organizations devoted to their revival.
The Organization of Traditional Music

Revival Activities from the
Eighteenth Century On
Organized efforts to preserve folk music date back to the beginning of the eighteenth
century in the British Isles; these early revivals of Welsh, Scottish and Irish folk music
were promoted by nostalgic immigrants, a pattern still very much in the early twenty-
first century. Peter Cooke (1986) recognizes the importance of organizations devoted
to the active preservation and perpetuation of traditional music. Several organizations
in the Shetlands promote fiddle music, including the Shetland Folk Society (which was
established in 1946 and includes the famous fiddle band Da Forty Fiddlers, founded in
1960 by the noted fiddler and revival promoter Tom Anderson; see www.shetland-music
.com/prominent_artists/artistes/shetland_fiddlers_society). The several local groups
include the Lerwick Accordion and Fiddle Club (no date given) and the Unst Fiddle
Society (established 1967). These organizations all provide regular opportunities for per-
formers and enthusiasts to play and enjoy traditional music. Cooke stresses that the style
of music that comes out of these clubs is not necessarily “da aald Shetland fiddling”; as in
North America, fiddling has been heavily affected by classical violin tone and technique;
in the particular case of the Shetlands, contemporary mainland Scottish fiddling has also
been very influential. An interesting development in Shetland has been the incorpora-
tion of fiddling into the local educational curriculum. On his retirement from business
in 1971, Tom Anderson devoted himself entirely to teaching fiddle to Shetland school-
children, most of them girls, in the public schools. Peter Cooke and Pamela Swing, an
American folklorist and fiddle music scholar who worked with Anderson as a fiddling
teacher in the Shetland schools, observes that this project has encouraged the emergence
of a “New Shetland” style, with clearly transregional elements, rather than the antiquar-
ian resurrection of older Shetland fiddling styles (see 127–128.)
Comparable developments can be found in Ireland and the United States, where
we observe elaborate, standardized contest or exhibition styles seemingly submerging
older, more localized repertories and performance techniques as the institutionaliza-
tion of traditional music through formal organizations and competitive events, and the
development of specialized media networks diffusing custom albums and cassettes of
currently fashionable fiddle stylists, replaces the premodern “classic folk” patterns of
performance and communication based on oral transmission and direct face-to-face
contact. These changes in Shetland fiddling provide a clear example of the selective
reconstruction of tradition.
On the mainland of Scotland, active attempts to collect, publish, and promote tradi-
tional music date back to at least two hundred years earlier. George Emmerson states
that devotion to Scottish national music by members of all social classes continued
through the course of the eighteenth century (1971: 39). Published collections of Scottish
songs and dance tunes compiled by amateur and professional musicians appear in print
as early as 1726 in Edinburgh. The Highland Society, established in 1776 by Scottish gen-
tlemen residing in London, sponsored a piping contest at the 1781 Falkirk Tryst, a yearly
cattle market. As Mary Ellen Alburger comments, the Disarming Act of 1746 banned the
use of the bagpipes except by cattle drovers (1983: 160). Fiddle contests were also part of
Scottish musical culture; an article in the Scots Magazine in 1809 describes the young
Niel Gow (1727–1807), Robert Burns’s favorite fiddler, winning a contest that included
the finest players in all Scotland; Gow’s victory resulted in his patronage by the duke of
Atholl and later the countess of Gordon (Alburger 1983: 94). George Emmerson records
that J. Scott Skinner (1843–1927) won a similar competition that included the major fid-
dlers of his day in Inverness in 1863, and that fiddling contests then had been common
for over a century (102).
Another wave of Scottish grassroots cultural nationalism expressed itself in the for-
mation of strathspey and reel societies. The Edinburgh Strathspey and Reel Society was
established in 1881; “interest in fiddle music then seemed to be in decline,” noted the
organization’s first president, James Stewart Robertson, in the society’s minutes, hence
it was “very desirable that this class of music not be allowed to fall back as undoubtedly
it was doing for the past few years” (Alburger 1983: 195). The outcome was the estab-
lishment of a voluntary association for “upholding and developing the taste for our old
national highland strathspey and reel music on the fiddle” (195). As Alburger comments,
the idea of the strathspey and reel society spread only gradually; a Highland Reel and
Strathspey Society was founded in 1903, a similar group was organized in Aberdeen in
1928, and the Elgin Strathspey and Reel Society in 1937. Emmerson (1971) refers to an
Orkney Reel and Strathspey Society as well. These groups feature large numbers of fid-
dlers playing written arrangements of fiddle tunes under the direction of conductors
and are still quite popular.
A more recent development in the revitalization of Scottish traditional music has
been the advent of accordion and fiddle clubs since the early 1970s. Alburger notes that
there are now over fifty such clubs in various parts of Scotland. Like American old-time
fiddlers associations, these groups meet monthly or bimonthly and provide their mem-
bers with opportunities to meet and play with other amateurs of traditional music;
occasionally the clubs also sponsor concerts by outstanding professional fiddlers and
accordionists (1983: 197). Ailie Munro (1984) notes the existence of a coordinating orga-
nization, the National Association of Accordion and Fiddle Clubs, which corresponds
to the National Old Time Fiddlers Association in the United States (boxandfiddle.com).
Fiddle contests are still important in Scotland. Alburger makes reference to several
major contemporary contests, including the National Fiddle Competition initiated by
the BBC in 1969, the Golden Fiddle Award contest organized by the Daily Mail in 1977,
and the National Fiddle Championship, sponsored by the Lothian District Council, also
in 1977 (1983: 203).
Like Scotland, Ireland also has a long, continuous history of folk music revivalism.
Captain Francis O’Neil, (1849–1936), himself one of the greatest of Ireland’s migrant folk
revivalists, notes that the revival of the Irish harp was initiated by James Dungan, an
Irish merchant living in Copenhagen, who organized and subsidized three gatherings
of Irish harpers in Granard, County Longford, in 1781, 1782, and 1783. In 1791, a group
of “patriotic gentlemen” organized a harp festival in Belfast; [I]n 1807 they formed the
Belfast Harp Society, which sponsored an annual harping festival that lasted through
the 1830s. A Dublin Harp Society was formed in 1807, and a later revival of Irish harp-
ing was led by Father T. V. Burke, who founded a new Harp Society in Drogheda in
1842 that only lasted a few years (O’Neil 1913: 474–475). The formation of the Society for
the Preservation and Publication of the Melodies of Ireland by the collector-revivalist
George Petrie resulted in the publication of Petrie’s Ancient Music of Ireland in 1855. The
Gaelic League, founded in 1893, was very active in promoting Irish traditional music
and dance around the turn of the century.
Edwin O. Henry (1989) examined the history of Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann (CCE),
the most substantial modern organization devoted to the preservation of Irish tradi-
tional music (comhaltas.ie). Founded in 1951 as an outshoot and extension of the Piper’s
Club of Dublin, which dates back to 1908, CCE presently has four hundred branch soci-
eties in Ireland and ten other countries that meet regularly to offer instruction in Irish
music and dance; sponsors a series of contests that culminate in an annual international
Irish folk arts festival, the Fleadh Ceol; and maintains a paid professional staff through
membership fees and government grants (68). The current membership of the organiza-
tion is approximately thirty-five thousand, with thousands of competitors and hundreds
of thousands of spectators taking part in its events.
Like the old-time fiddlers contest in the United States, the fleadh cheoil is perhaps
the most important context of performance for modern performers of Irish tradi-
tional music. These competitions are organized in hierarchical order, ranging from
county and regional to provincial and national. Forty-three fleadhs were held in 1981,
forty-five in 1984. The national competition, the Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann, attracts
participants from all over Ireland, with substantial contingents from Britain and the
United States.
Henry notes various effects of this centralized organization on Irish traditional music
that have parallels to modern contest music in Scotland and North America. While cer-
tain instruments and genres are encouraged, others are not. Players of the uilleann pipes
are welcomed; musicians playing Irish tunes on the bouzouki are excluded. To simplify
the task of judging, only the jig, reel, hornpipe, and slow air are permitted in competi-
tion; other more restricted tune types such as the polka and the slide are banned from
competition. As Henry says, this policy favors certain selected aspects of the ongoing
tradition while dismissing and downgrading others. Parallels to this situation can be
found in arguments among American contest fiddlers concerning the age of tunes and
the use of tunings other than the standard GDAE. As elsewhere, competition accelerates
stylistic change and standardization. It is only natural that competitors should emulate
the performances of winning contestants, but the unintended result is the restriction of
the full range of styles and tunes to suit the criteria of the judges. According to Henry,
one of the obvious effects of competition is the increasing technical refinement of fid-
dling and the assimilation of classical violin technique—which Peter Cooke refers to
as “the Westernization of Western music.” As in the United States, tape recorders and
custom albums have made the music of outstanding competitors easily accessible to
aspiring contestants (Henry 1989: 92).
Clearly not a purist or antiquarian, Henry feels that revivalist organizations like CCE
can only preserve the traditions they espouse in a selective fashion and that their major
role in modern societies is to provide new contexts of performance for evolving cultural
traditions: “[T]he role of sponsorship should be to provide the stage for the drama to be
acted out, to continue to involve people that speaks of their collective experience, music
that they can perform with the old/new balance they prefer. By these criteria, the CCE
has been quite successful” (1989: 49).
Revivals of Traditional Music as

Responses to Social and Cultural Change
Ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl believes that such revivals of traditional music enable
modern people to offset disorientation and displacement by enabling them to periodi-
cally regenerate an idealized primordial community evoked through particular histori-
cal musical styles:
The fact that most humans can no longer conveniently exhibit their cultural special-
ness by dress, social structure, material culture, or even by their location, language
or religion has given music an increased role as an emblem of ethnicity. Culture
units, nations, minorities, even age groups, social classes, educational strata all iden-
tify themselves by adherence to particular repertories and styles of music. As other
means of identification become less effective, music is increasingly stressed. I would
agree this is why world music of the twentieth century has retained its diversity.
(1985: 165)
Displacement can be symbolic as well as literal; a more abstract form of displacement,

alienation, lies at the heart of transcultural folk romantic movements like the urban folk
music revival in the United States and Britain in the twentieth century. Historically, the
alienation of middle-class intellectuals from urban, industrial, commercial, bureau-
cratic values has characteristically led to romantic identification with idealized folk
communities that have seemingly preserved their primitive integrity, uncorrupted by
the metropolis. Anthony D. Smith’s description of the attraction that marginal, exotic
Brittany held for nineteenth-century French pastoral romantics applies to folk romanti-
cism in general: “They turned their backs on the materialism of city life, on technologi-
cal advance and commercialism, and on the ever-increasing complexity of a centralised,
regulated state, and sought instead some antidote far from the capital, which might
restore them to themselves and express concretely a more “natural” and “spiritual”
form of existence than that they had abandoned” (1981: xi–xii). Disaffected people
reacting against an oppressive social order will often attempt to create more satisfying
identities for themselves by selectively adopting and adapting the cultural symbols of
idealized exotic others. To quote cultural anthropologist George De Vos: “[I]n brief, the
ethnic identity of a group of people consists of their subjective symbolic or emblem-
atic use of any aspect of culture, in order to differentiate themselves from other groups.
These emblems can be imposed from outside or embraced from within” (1982: 16–17).
Folklorist R. Raymond Allen addresses the controversial issue of adoptive cultural
identity in his article “Old-Time Music and the Urban Folk Revival” (1981). Allen notes
that academic discussion of the urban folk revival movement dates back at least to 1963,
when the New York Folklore Society published the proceedings of a symposium devoted
to the controversial subject. Allen asserts that Jan Brunvand’s dismissal of urban folk
revivalism as “irrelevant to the study of folklore” is a reflection of “historical shortsight-
edness and failure to recognize the cultural significance of the phenomenon” (1981: 66).
According to Allen, the recent urban folk revival is not an isolated event but rather a
specific manifestation of a continuing history of at least two hundred years of romantic
folk revivalism in the Western world (see 71). Essentially, Allen postulates that old-time
music “revivalists,” that is, musicians who have adopted traditional rural American
styles of instrumental folk music not part of their immediate ethnic or geographic back-
grounds have nonetheless developed an authentic sense of community based on shared
affinity. Like other folk romantic movements, the old-time music revival entails the
rejection of what is perceived to be a dehumanizing, hegemonic social order and the
quest for an idealized primordial community. This particular movement has strong ele-
ments of antimodernism, anticommercialism, and antiurbanism: “this romanticizing of
rural living through old-time music suggests that what is actually being revived is not
only a genre of folk music but cultural elements of a bygone era that symbolize a bet-
ter way of life” (78). Allen is one of very few American folklorists who has attempted to
relate the development of folk music revivals to the theories of nativism and revitaliza-
tion propounded by cultural anthropologists Ralph Linton and Anthony F. C. Wallace:
Strong parallels can be drawn between the revitalistic movements described by

Wallace and Linton and the old-time music revival. During the past two decades,
many young Americans felt a disillusionment with their cultural gestalt. Rapid mod-
ernization and technological advancements caused psychological stress, which, for a
small group, has been eased by the revival of an old folk form symbolic of a happier
past when people lived closer to nature. Whether or not rural culture is, in reality,
an idyllic garden of Eden, is inconsequential. The point is that old-time music rep-
resents the mythos of simpler existence, and playing it brings revivalist musicians
spiritually closer to that way of life.
(Allen 1981: 79)
Of course, very much the same thing could be said of nostalgic immigrants, which high-
lights the inadequacy of the term “revivalist” as used by most American folklorists. The
ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin in his essay “Rethinking ‘Revival’ of American Ethnic
Music” (1983) suggests that folklorists misapply the term “revival” in most cases. In
Slobin’s opinion, traditions do not usually totally die out; what actually takes place is the
reinterpretation or reinvention of traditions rather than their literal rebirth. The term
“revival” is widely used because cultural forms are subjectively perceived to decay, even
disappear, and then reemerge in revitalized forms (1983: 38–39). Why do these move-
ments take hold? Slobin suggests that they stem from the recurrent need of individuals
to reconstruct their social and cultural identities (40).
Regarding transethnic folk revivalism, Slobin states:
A great deal of contemporary revivalism is not done by people who claim a direct
lineage to the expressive culture involved. . .. A group of people more or less arbi-
trarily decides that a certain self-defined tradition means so much to them that
they will not only become engrossed in it themselves, but will try to teach it to
others, even going so far as returning to the putative homeland of the tradition
to do so.
(Allen 1983: 42)
Slobin’s students have studied this type of transethnic adoptive folk revivalism in
Ireland and Appalachia. In both cases, we find “tourists,” who are occasionally and mar-
ginally involved in soaking up an exotic tradition, and “immigrants,” who attempt to
adopt what they perceive to be the traditional lifestyle of a given culture and develop
apprentice-acolyte relationships with “old masters,” who have bona fide organic con-
nections with the communal tradition in question; these “immigrants” typically serve in
mediating and interpretive roles between the “tourists” and the “old masters” (43). Here
again, we can see that transethnic cultural relationships based on affinity, on shared
common interest, can often supplement and even come to replace classical communal
relationships grounded in kinship and territoriality. The interaction of grassroots pres-
ervationists and folk romantic revivalists creates new social institutions that selectively
reconstruct an idealized cultural past. As such, both forms of folk revivalism have a
great deal to tell us about the meaning, function, and value of folk traditions to people.
As Slobin puts it, “they come close to the heart of folklore studies in complex societ-
ies whose patterns of affinity-grouping, taste-making and self-conceptualization are
extremely fluid and highly stimulating” (43).
The folk romantic movement, or folklorismus, has been continuously vital since the eigh-
teenth century. Rejection of the hegemony of urban-industrial-commercial-bureaucratic
values and return (symbolic, periodic, or actual) to an idealized rural-pastoral-spiritual-
organic community has manifested itself in various forms, including the development of
academic folklore itself. To quote Anthony D. Smith once again:
To regenerate the community, and endow it with an original personality, writers and
artists institute periodic folk revivals; they go out among the peasants and farmers,
commune with nature, record the rhythms of the countryside, and bring them back
to the anonymous city, so that rising urban strata may be “reborn” and possess a clear
and unmistakable identity.
(1981: 106)
Modernization does not inevitably lead toward cultural homogeneity; instead, pressures
toward hegemony generate regional, ethnic, and nationalistic separatism. The emer-
gence of voluntary associations devoted to the active preservation and perpetuation of
traditional cultures is a commonplace in the modern world. Contrary to Alan Lomax’s
dire predictions, the advent of new communications media does not necessarily result
in “cultural grey-out,” marginal cultures being eclipsed by the mainstream. Instead, we
see all sorts of special interest groups actively producing their own media networks in
response to their dissatisfaction with mass culture.
Are musical special interest groups on the internet real communities? I would say
yes: They are communities based on shared values and concerns that create very real
bonds between participants.
These are my basic observations concerning musical communities on the internet:
1. Participation in these music-oriented common interest groups fulfills a need for

communion with like-minded others.
2. A number of fiddlers associations and traditional dance music groups in the
United Stated, Canada, British Isles, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Italy,
and Australia have developed web pages and websites that are extensions of pre-
internet organizations specifically established to preserve and promote fiddle
music (“place-based”).
3. However, various individual fiddle enthusiasts have also set up Usenet groups,
websites, listservs, blogs, web rings, and specialized social networks. The com-
position of fiddling communities on the internet has changed as the technology
has evolved (“cyberspace-based”).
4. Fiddling enthusiasts participate in social networking websites such as Facebook,
taking part in informal exchange networks sharing favorite videos, particularly
from YouTube, and sound recordings in various digital formats from the numer-
ous special interest websites devoted to their favorite forms of music. These
internet-based informal exchange networks are an extension of tape-swapping
networks in the past, when the home reel-to-reel tape recorder enabled enthu-
siasts to copy old recordings and exchange them with others. It is safe to predict
that devotees of fiddling and traditional dance music will make use of new plat-
forms and applications as they come online.
5. While geographically based fiddlers clubs and associations have increasingly
made use of the resources of the internet, they are now part of a global constel-
lation of internet-based musical common interest groups focusing on various
types of fiddle music. Local, regional, national, and transnational musical tradi-
tions have become the focus of globally distributed common interest groups.
This trend will expand as internet and personal computer-based technology
continues to develop. Contacts made on the internet can lead to real friendships
and visits with these new friends in other parts of the world. (I have personally
experienced this.)
The subjective perception that valued aspects of traditional culture are in danger of
dying out prompts efforts to revive them. It really does not matter if these traditions are
actually in danger of disappearing or not. If people believe this to be true, then they will
take active steps to revive them, actually reinventing and reconstructing them in the
process.
Revitalization and revival stem from the same Latin root and mean the same thing: “to
bring back to life.” Cultural anthropologist Francis L. K. Hsu’s (1971) concept of “psy-
chosocial homeostasis” (jen = 人) basically states that human beings need to maintain
coherent and meaningful connections with members of in-groups who share their val-
ues, concerns, and modes of communal expression, including language and music.
When such meaningful connections are threatened, we respond by attempting to
revive them, constructing a new steady state or gestalt in attempting to restore an older
one. In practice, revitalization movements transform or reinvent the cultural traditions
they set out to preserve. As I stated earlier, Anthony F. C. Wallace’s revitalization move-
ment theory provides a powerful and very useful explanatory framework for under-
standing the development of postrevival culture: “[T]he culture of this state will probably
be different in pattern, organization and Gestalt, as well as in traits, from the earlier
steady state; it will be different from that of the period of cultural distortion” (1956: 275).
Summary and Conclusion
Folk revivals in the Western world are historically a compensatory response to mod-
ernization. They first arose as part of the Romantic movement in the early eighteenth
century. Following the lead of Antonio Gramsci, folk revivals can also be interpreted as
counterhegemonic movements, expressions of resistance to loss of identity stemming
from the assimilation of a dominant culture. This is a very complex subject, and there
are many possible alternative theoretical explanations of the development of such cul-
tural revivals.
Historically speaking, though, it is indisputable that musical instruments like the
harp, bagpipes, and fiddle have been the symbolic focus of revitalization movements
from the beginning of the eighteenth century up to the ethnographic present of this
essay, the early twenty-first century. Chris Goertzen’s study of Norwegian fiddling
(1997) and Peter K. Marsh’s account of the twentieth-century revival of the Mongolian
horse-head fiddle (2009) are particularly relevant in this regard. Revivals of fiddling in
the United States go back to the post–Civil War era. There was a wave of fiddlers’ asso-
ciations and contests in the late 1800s and early 1900s connected, at least in part, with
former Confederate sympathizers, notably Colonel Henry Gilliland, who played with
his fellow Texas fiddler Eck Robertson on one of the very first Victor records of early
country music in 1922. There were fiddlers’ associations and contests in the northern
United States prior to World War I as well.
In my 1975 study of the rise of the Old Time Fiddlers Association movement in the
United States (Blaustein 1975) I proposed that people who were emotionally attached to
older forms of country music featuring the fiddle responded by forming voluntary asso-
ciations devoted to preserving and promoting older forms of music that were meaning-
ful to them; these movements are international in scope.
And the fact is that genuine grassroots efforts continue to preserve cultures and lan-
guages perceived to be in danger of disappearing. The romantic adoption and adapta-
tion of the cultures of idealized exotic others has also been going on for a very long time.
Regardless of what folkloristic purists may think, the urban folk revival movement’s his-
torical impact is very real and consequential; it should not be dismissed out of hand.
Participating in a musical common interest group situated in cyberspace enables peo-
ple to commune with significant other people around the world who share their passion
for particular types of music such as fiddling.
The composition of fiddling communities and networks on the internet will inevi-
tably change as communications technology continues to develop. In the end, though,
my basic position is the same as it was when I first stumbled on the Old Time Fiddlers
Association movement in the United States in the mid-1960s and realized that it could
be explained in terms of Anthony F. C. Wallace’s revitalization movement theory. These
movements compensate for social and cultural changes threatening our subjective
attachments to particular communities and landscapes. Sense of community is strongly
related to sense of place, evoked by forms of traditional music such as old-time fiddling.
What do these grassroots cultural revitalization movements share in common?
1. They stem from a collective sense of discontent with an unsatisfactory status quo
and the consequent belief that forms of cultural expression embodying mean-
ingful connections with significant others are in danger of disappearing.
2. This belief leads to the selective reinvention of an idealized collective past rep-
resented by particular forms of expressive culture that provide the basis for the
formation of new common interest groups.
3. These groups avail themselves of any and all modes of communication available
to them to maintain meaningful connections with significant others.
At the end of my essay in Transforming Tradition, I asserted that the historical authen-
ticity of reinvented traditions is beside the point; we need to appreciate the emotional
authenticity of the personal and social needs these musical revitalization movements
fulfill. The proliferation of special interest groups like the old-time fiddlers associations
in the United States and their counterparts in other countries challenges the inherent
validity of Alan Lomax’s pronouncements concerning cultural grey-out. Instead of pas-
sively succumbing to mass culture, members of these groups at the beginning of the
second decade of the twenty-first century are using personal computers and the internet
in creative ways to share their devotion to musical styles that bolster their sense of dis-
tinctive identity and community.
As Mark Slobin observes in “Micromusics of the West: A Comparative Study,” revivals

of traditional music were taking place throughout much of the world in the late twen-
tieth century: “[traditional musical styles] have not disappeared, despite the dismal
forecasts of earlier commentators. If anything, they are proliferating today as part of a
great resurgence of regional and national feeling and with the rapid deterritorialization
of large populations, particularly in the Euro-American sphere” (1992: 1). These cultural
movements are still vital and growing. Studying them in an international, comparative
perspective can help students of music and other expressive arts gain a more realistic
understanding of the meaning and value of traditional culture to living people around
the world in the early twenty-first century.
References
Alburger, Mary Ellen. 1983. Scottish Fiddlers and Their Music. London: VictorGollancz.
Allen, Raymond R. 1981. “Old-Time Music and the Urban Folk Revival.” New York Folklore
Quarterly 7 (1–2): 65–82.
Anderson, Robert T. 1971. “Voluntary Associations in History.” American Anthropologist 73
(1): 209–222.
Blaustein, Richard. 1975. “Traditional Music And Social Change: The Old Time Fiddlers
Association In The United States.” Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, Bloomington.
Blaustein, Richard. 1993. “Rethinking Folk Revivalism: Grass-roots Preservationism and Folk
Romanticism.” In Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, edited by Neil
Rosenberg, 258–274. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Cooke, Peter. 1986. The Fiddle Tradition of the Shetland Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Emmerson, George. 1971. Rantin’ Pipe and Tremblin’ String. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press.
Ford, Mr. and Mrs. Henry (actually by Benjamin B. Lovett). 1926. Good Morning. Dearborn,
Mich.: Dearborn.
Chicago Press.
Henry, Edwin O. 1989. “Institutions for the Promotion of Indigenous Music: The Case for
Ireland’s Comhaltas Ceoltoiri.” Ethnomusicology 33 (1): 67–96.
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited
by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hsu, Francis L. K. 1971. “Psychosocial Homeostasis and Jen: Conceptual Tools for Advancing
Psychological Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 73 (1): 23–44.
Linton, Ralph. 1943. “Nativistic Movements.” American Anthropologist 45 (2): 230–240.
Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Earl Raab. 1973. The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in
America, 1790–1970. New York: Harper and Row.
Lomax, Alan. 1968. Folk Song Style and Culture. Washington, D.C.: American Association for
the Advancement of Science.
Lysloff, Rene T. A. 2003. “Music Community on the Internet: An On-line Ethnography.”
Cultural Anthropology 18 (2): 233–263.
Malone, Bill C. 2002. Country Music, U.S.A. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Marsh, Peter. 2009. The Horse-Head Fiddle and the Cosmopolitan Reimagination of Tradition in
Mongolia. New York: Routledge.
Munro, Ailie. 1984. The Folk Music Revival in Scotland. London: Kahn and Averill.
Nettl, Bruno. 1985. The Western Impact on World Music: Change, Adaptation and Survival.
Nordstrom, Byron J. 2010. Culture and Customs of Sweden. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO/
Greenwood.
O’Neil, Francis. 1913. Irish Minstrels and Musicians: With Numerous Dissertations on Various
Subjects. Chicago: Regan.
Rheingold, Howard. 1994. The Virtual Community: Finding Connection in a Computerized
World. London: Secker and Warburg.
Rosenberg, Neil, ed. 1993. Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined.
Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Quarterly 9 (3–4): 37–44.
Slobin, Mark. 1992. “Micromusics of the West: A Comparative Approach.” Ethnomusicology
36 (1): 1–87.
Smith, Anthony D. 1981. The Ethnic Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1956. “Revitalization Movements.” American Anthropologist 58 (2):
264–281.
Wiggins, Gene. 1987. Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy: Fiddlin’ John Carson, His Real World, and the World
of His Songs. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
PA R T V I I I
DIA SP OR A A N D T H E
G L OBA L V I L L AG E
C HA P T E R 26
G E O R G IA N P O LY P H O N Y
A N D I T S J O U R N E YS F R O M
NAT I O NA L R E V I VA L T O
G L O B A L H E R I TAG E
C A ROL I N E BI T H E L L
Situated in the Caucasus, at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, Georgia has often been
portrayed as a polyphonic island in a sea of homophony and (together with neighbor-
ing Armenia) an island of Christianity in the Islamic world. The iconic status of vocal
polyphony in Georgia itself, where it is typically represented as the ultimate expression
of both national character and regional identity, has been reinforced by outside recogni-
tion. Marius Schneider (1940) followed Siegfried Nadel (1933) in proposing that Georgia
might be considered the cradle of European polyphony and its ancient singing tradi-
tions direct precursors of medieval art polyphony. Igor Stravinsky spoke of Georgian
folk polyphony as “a wonderful treasure that can give for performance more than all
the attainments of new music” (Levin 1989: 5), whereas Izaly Zemtsovsky has dubbed
Georgia “the Treasure Island of Traditional Polyphony” on account of the remarkable
diversity of forms and styles concentrated in such a compact territory (Zemtsovsky
2010: 253). In 1977, the song “Chakrulo”—an elaborate table song from Kakheti in
eastern Georgia—was included on the Golden Record sent into space on the Voyager
spacecraft, and, in 2001, Georgian polyphonic singing featured in the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s first Proclamation of
Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.1
Like cultural icons in many other parts of the world, Georgian polyphony has been
subject to cycles of revival that have coincided with different historical moments. In this
chapter, a selective review of the changing fortunes of folk polyphony during the peri-
ods of Russian and Soviet occupation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and of
the revivalist initiatives to which these developments gave rise forms the foundation for
my more detailed discussion of the most recent wave that gathered force after Georgia’s
574 Caroline Bithell
achievement of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. This latest wave was
marked most visibly by the proliferation of traditional-style performance ensembles, as
well as by renewed scholarly activity, with the capital, Tbilisi, serving as the epicenter. At
the same time, increasing numbers of Georgian choirs—most of them made up entirely
of non-Georgians—were to be found outside Georgia, with the greatest concentration in
Britain, North America, Australia, and France. Georgian songs also began to feature in
the more eclectic repertoires of many community choirs in these same countries. These
networks of (mostly amateur) enthusiasts have helped facilitate the ever more frequent
overseas concert and workshop tours undertaken by Georgian ensembles. Meanwhile,
growing numbers of converts have made the pilgrimage to remote Caucasian villages
to study more intensively with revered songmasters. These trends took on more com-
plex dimensions following the 2001 UNESCO declaration, with investment and pro-
motion now coming from several different sources, both internal and external. In the
post-Soviet era, polyphony has been made to do important cultural work as part of
Georgia’s reimagining and repositioning of itself in the global arena.
The choice of terminology used to describe processes of cultural renewal is often sub-
ject to debate. Georgian scholars employ the term “revival,” albeit with reservations; the
terms “restoration” and “renaissance” are also used. Many are keen to emphasize that
Georgian polyphony has never literally died out and that the post-Soviet revival impulse
is not new but provides continuity with earlier waves of revival. Others argue that since
contemporary performance practices involve the recontextualization and transforma-
tion of what is considered “primary” or “authentic” folklore, they cannot be seen as a
literal revival of past practice. “Revival” is less problematically applied to liturgical
chant, which was formally suppressed during the Soviet period. My purpose here is not
to ascertain whether the Georgian case constitutes a revival in any absolute sense but
rather to identify revival-like features, to probe more deeply into the question of what
exactly has been revived, to examine the mechanisms by which such revival has taken
place, and to consider related issues of recontextualization and transformation as pro-
ductive areas of study in their own right.
More particularly, I wish to view foreign involvement in Georgian singing through
the lens of revival and to examine the internationalization of Georgian folk polyphony
as a postrevival process. In models of cultural imperialism, the act of embracing ele-
ments of another culture’s heritage is all too often represented in wholly negative terms
as a wanton taking of any object of one’s desire and a cannibalistic consumption of a
powerless “other,” as suggested by titles such as Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation,
and the Commodification of Difference (Root 1996). The Georgian case prompts me to
challenge such assumptions by suggesting that the phenomenon of non-native, ama-
teur singers becoming participants in the musical traditions of another culture might be
viewed as an extension of internal revival processes, especially when increasing numbers
of culture-bearers are apparently eager to share their heritage with outsiders. A revival
often involves the translation of musical practices, functions, and meanings from highly
localized, usually rural contexts, where music making is a natural part of ordinary peo-
ple’s day-to-day lives, to translocal, often urban environments where selected genres are
GEORGIAN POLYPHONY FROM NATIONAL REVIVAL TO GLOBAL HERITAGE 575
adapted by a new constituency of music makers—typically younger, more highly edu-

cated, and with a consciously articulated agenda—who may themselves be considered
outsiders to the original tradition. Georgian scholars represent this distinction in terms
of primary and secondary folklore, or folklore’s first and second existence. So-called pri-
mary ensembles are based in villages and operate as an integral part of daily life and
ritual cycles, whereas secondary ensembles operate in professional or semi-professional
contexts, mostly in urban areas, presenting songs from a variety of regions on stage.
From this perspective, the new lease of life enjoyed by Georgian polyphony in the wider
world might be represented as a third existence of folklore, with the shift to non-native
singers being viewed as just one more stage in a series of appropriations and relocations
spreading out in concentric circles from the original nucleus. At the same time, it is in
this shift that the transformative impacts of revival processes are most starkly revealed.
The drama that is to be played out in the pages that follow takes place against a
broader backdrop populated with concepts of global cultural flows, imagined com-
munities, transnational networks, and new world orders. Its actors inhabit a landscape
where borders, both physical and metaphoric, have become increasingly permeable,
where once primordial identities are now seen as fluid and negotiable, where lifestyles
are—for some, at least—as much a matter of choice as of destiny and where the future is
still to be claimed.
Polyphonic Singing Traditions in

Georgia: A Brief Overview
Georgia’s polyphonic repertoire is immensely varied with respect to both song genres
and regional styles.2 Lullabies, laments, healing songs, wedding songs, love songs, work
songs, riding songs, dance songs, historical songs, table songs, joking songs, and rit-
ual songs—some dating back to pre-Christian times—can all be found in multipart
arrangements.3 The majority of these are in three parts, with each of the two upper lines
performed by a single voice, allowing for free variation and improvisation. Georgian
ethnomusicologists map the country into fifteen regional “singing dialects” whose styles
range from the three-part songs of Svaneti, in which the voices are arranged in vertical
block chords (designated “chordal units polyphony” in Georgian writings), to the spec-
tacular table songs of Kakheti, in which two soloists weave elaborate melismatic lines
over a bass drone (“drone polyphony”), to the boisterous and spirited songs of Guria
featuring three or four independent lines that may undergo extensive embellishment
(“contrastive-linear polyphony”). The Gurian tradition is further distinguished by the
yodel-style krimanchuli voice.
A rich heritage of polyphonic church chant, again for three voices, crystallized in the
medieval period. Three regional styles have been preserved through oral tradition and
the efforts of the late-nineteenth-century preservation movement: These are represented
by the Kartl-Kakhetian school in eastern Georgia and the monastery schools of Gelati
and Shemokmedi in western Georgia. Chanting operated as a professional activity, set
apart from the world of folk song by its formalized teaching methods. Accomplished
chanters were appointed to direct church choirs, and master chanters would memorize
all three voice parts for thousands of chants, aided by a system of medieval neumes.
As the monasteries and their schools were put under increasing pressure under foreign
occupation, some master chanters set up private schools in their own homes where stu-
dents would pay to attend lessons. In some regions, the graduates of these chant schools
were also instrumental in the refinement of secular genres.
Part of the appeal of Georgia’s polyphonic heritage to a Western ear lies in its preser-
vation of seemingly ancient modal styles with their distinctive tunings and a penchant
for procedures that have long been proscribed in Western European music—so-called
dissonances, parallel fifths, tritones, and other forbidden pleasures. (Georgian musi-
cologists do not distinguish between consonance and dissonance.) The fifth or fourth,
rather than the octave, forms the basis of Georgian scales, and the ubiquitous 1–4–5
chord (referred to in some early-twentieth-century writings as a trichord or “Georgian
triad” and now most often labelled a fourth-fifth chord) acts as the most characteristic
indicator of the Georgian “sound.” The unusual harmonic sequences that bear no rela-
tion to procedures found in Western functional harmony, together with the untempered
but finely tuned intervals of what some scholars identify as the “Georgian scale,” also lie
at the heart of the national mission to safeguard a sound world that is seen to be authen-
tically and uniquely Georgian.
Cycles of Revival
The ways in which musical practice and scholarship in Georgia have evolved in recent
times have inevitably been influenced by changes in the country’s geopolitical orienta-
tion. Having voluntarily become a protectorate of tsarist Russia in 1783 in an attempt
to escape centuries-long pressure from Persia and the Ottoman Empire, Georgia found
its trust betrayed when, in 1801, Alexander I abolished the Georgian monarchy and
the whole territory was gradually incorporated into the Russian Empire. Following
the October Revolution of 1917, the country enjoyed a brief period of independence as
the democratic Republic of Georgia before falling to the Red Army in 1921 to become
the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1991, Georgia finally broke free of the crum-
bling Soviet regime, once again declaring itself an independent republic, and, in 1999, it
became a member of the Council of Europe.
My purpose in the following sections is to highlight the main factors behind the
revival impulses that emerged in these different historical periods and to outline the
kinds of shifts and innovations that occurred with respect to the musical fabric, modes
of transmission, and the infrastructures that supported musical production, preserva-
tion, and promotion. My particular interest here is in the way in which such trends can
be brought into dialogue with the later adoption of Georgian polyphony by non-native
singers.
Revivalist Trends Under the Russian Empire

My retrospective begins with the revivalist initiatives aimed at protecting and promot-
ing the national heritage that took shape during the years of Russian occupation. From
around 1860, musical activity was closely aligned with the rise of the democratic revo-
lutionary and national liberation movements, and the notion of revival was explicitly
invoked by the patriotic writers of the day. The nation’s “ancient” polyphonic songs were
identified as a central component of the “pure” Georgian heritage that kept alive a glori-
ous past uncontaminated by influences from more recent Islamic incursions. Promoting
the practice of folk song and chant was also seen as a way of achieving national unity.
The latter half of the nineteenth century saw the staging of the first formal concerts
of Georgian folk music, as well as the publication of the first essays and folk song collec-
tions. The Kartuli Khoro (Georgian Choir), founded by Lado (Vladimer) Aghniashvili
in 1885, was the first professional “ethnographic” choir. Aghniashvili’s aim was to col-
lect and perform songs from the different regions as a way of acquainting the popu-
lace with their national heritage. Songs were transcribed from traditional singers and
then retaught to the choir, and a professional Czech musician, Iozef Ratil, was brought
to Georgia expressly to serve as conductor. The choir’s inaugural performance in Tbilisi
in 1886 went down in history as the first concert of Georgian folk music to be staged in
the so-called modern manner. Yet, although the Khoro’s appearance was hailed by some
as a triumphant celebration of the nation’s heritage, for others, it was the beginning of
an inevitable process of homogenization as regional nuances were lost. In this sense, the
Khoro has been seen as heralding the displacement of authentic folklore by folklorism
and the transformation of traditional folk singers into “receiver[s]‌of a ready-made folk-
lore” (Tsurtsumia 2010: 261). It also represented what was for purists a regrettable impo-
sition of Western European aesthetic values and practices. In particular, Ratil would
later be criticized by Dimitri Araqishvili (the “father” of Georgian ethnomusicology)
for “spoiling” and “contaminating” Georgian songs through overuse of the Western har-
monic interval of a third, which he characterizes on one occasion as “the trivial third”
(Tsitsishvili 2010: 101).
Liturgical chant attracted revivalist attention of a different kind. The independent
Georgian patriarchate had been abolished in 1811, and Georgian singing in the churches
was suppressed as Georgian Orthodoxy was replaced by Russian Orthodoxy, with Old
Church Slavonic taking over as the new language of the liturgy. Although the teaching
of chant continued in the private schools and homes of established families of chant-
ers, the oral tradition of chanting was nonetheless in decline, and this prompted the
establishment, in 1860, of the Committee for the Revival of Georgian Church Singing
(sometimes translated as Committee for the Restoration of Georgian Chant, or Council
for the Resurrection of Georgian Church Song—the implied equivalence of “revival,”
“restoration,” and “resurrection” is noteworthy). The committee’s main goal was to for-
malize the transmission process and make the chants accessible to a wider constituency
of practitioners. Dedicated transcribers set to work, collaborating with individuals who
still preserved sizeable proportions of the material in their memories. Between the 1880s
and the 1920s, thousands of chants were painstakingly rendered into Western staff nota-
tion. Among the most prolific transcribers was the opera singer Pilimon Koridze (1835–
1911), who devoted the last thirty years of his life to transcribing nearly five thousand
chants; fifteen hundred copies of his first book of transcriptions were printed in 1895
(Koridze 1895).4
The dawn of the twentieth century saw the beginning of recording activity. The
British Gramophone Company opened an office in Tbilisi in 1901 and assembled a sub-
stantial collection of folk song recordings before it was forced to cease operations with
the outbreak of World War I. Musicologist and composer Dimitri Araqishvili recorded
more than five hundred songs in different parts of Georgia, later publishing transcrip-
tions based on his collection. Collections held at the Berlin Phonogram Archive include
thirty-eight wax cylinders recorded by Adolf Dirr in Georgia between 1909 and 1913
and seventy-one cylinders recorded by George Schünemann in German prison camps
between 1915 and 1918. Like the chant transcriptions, these and other early record-
ings—not all prompted by revivalist impulses but representing invaluable records of
the pre-Soviet sound world—would later constitute a precious resource not only for
scholars but also for the new generation of performing ensembles that would proliferate
in the post-Soviet period, with many being remastered and released in new compila-
tions as part of the explosion of activity that followed the UNESCO declaration (see
discography).
Musical Transformations and Cycles of Renewal in the

Soviet Era
The few years of Georgian independence between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and
the Bolshevik takeover of 1921 saw a flurry of activity as Tbilisi blossomed into a vibrant
cosmopolitan city that attracted artists and intellectuals from other less prosperous and
less tolerant parts of the former Russian Empire (see further Ninoshvili 2010: 55–58). If
this golden age was short-lived, it served nonetheless to put in place some of the struc-
tures that would support musical scholarship in the Soviet years. These included Tbilisi
Conservatoire and Tbilisi State University, established in 1917 and 1918, respectively.
Under the new regime, music making had to adapt to Soviet ideology and to a
state-imposed system that supported particular kinds of approved activity while push-
ing other practices underground. Singing was nonetheless encouraged as a professional
art, with substantial support also extended to amateur musical collectives. Houses of
Culture were established in towns and villages, expert singers and trained conductors
were employed to set up performing ensembles, and the latter were then encouraged
to compete in the national festivals and Olympiads that served as showcases for a new
brand of “modernized folklore.” Ensembles increased in size as different district author-

ities strove to outshine one another, with some of the largest choral collectives number-
ing a hundred voices or more.
These massed choirs, like the more polished, professional performing ensembles
epitomized by the State Ensemble of Song and Dance (founded in 1936), necessitated
changes in performance practice for pragmatic as well as ideological reasons. The two
upper melodic lines, traditionally executed by a single voice, were now sung in unison
by large forces. This called for standardized arrangements that left no scope for impro-
visation. Highly choreographed versions of carefully selected songs were further fixed
through their dissemination via state radio and television. These and other nontradi-
tional practices—among them the use of conductors, the deliberate teaching of individ-
ual song parts, and the addition of instrumental accompaniment with traditional folk
instruments now tuned chromatically—were resented by many not only as Soviet impo-
sitions but also as symptoms of further Europeanization. Viewed in a different light,
these interrelated processes of standardization and Westernization, combined with the
new pedagogical methods, might be seen to have paved the way for the later transfer of
Georgian repertoire to non-native choirs.
The post-Stalin era of the 1950s to 1980s saw a partial return to more traditional,
smaller ensembles, some of which specialized in songs from a single region. The early
trailblazers of this new style were Shvidkatsa and Gordela (established in 1957 and 1961,
respectively), followed by Rustavi (1968). In retrospect, these formations are seen to
occupy a transitional position. On one hand, they adopted methods viewed at the time
as progressive: Members of Gordela, for instance, studied archival recordings, under-
took field trips, and worked with master singers, with the joint aim of cultivating what
they considered to be a more authentic style and searching out lesser known variants
of songs. On the other hand, they continued to reinforce the so-called academic style
of performance of the larger Soviet choirs (e.g., employing trained voices and adding
dynamic coloration). The retention of certain aspects of performance practice otherwise
identified with state control was also to some extent a conscious choice, understood as a
necessary compromise when the objective was to cultivate new audiences overseas (see
Gabisonia 2007).
Questions of national identity and authenticity came to the fore once more in the
1980s, as the Soviet Union began to fail. Two leading figures in the wave of revival that
bridged the pre- and postindependence years were Edisher Garakanidze and Malkhaz
Erkvanidze, both accomplished singers and energetic researchers associated with the
Department of Georgian Traditional Music at Tbilisi State Conservatoire. Both were
also to become popular teachers of Georgian songs in Britain and elsewhere. Their
careers therefore offer valuable insights into the motivations and methods of native
practitioners who teach their songs to outsiders and the way in which this undertaking
relates to their revivalist endeavors within their own society.
Garakanidze is generally acknowledged as having initiated a new return-to-the-roots
movement by shifting the focus back to the villages that provided the primary habitat for
folk music. He undertook regular fieldwork expeditions to remote parts of the country,
in the process amassing a wealth of knowledge relating to indigenous life ways and
beliefs, as well as expertise in interpreting the different styles of song that he recorded
and documented so meticulously. Rusudan Tsurtsumia (director of the conservatoire’s
International Research Center for Traditional Polyphony) writes of how he “tried to rear
a ‘folklore subject’ in his own self, to awaken genetic memory” by spending long periods
living “in village conditions” (Tsurtsumia 2010: 261). Garakanidze’s recognition of the
difficulties of sustaining so-called primary folklore in its natural environment led him
to found the all-male, Tbilisi-based ensemble Mtiebi in 1980, followed in 1986 by the
female ensemble Mzetamze, whose members were fellow ethnomusicologists trained
at the conservatoire. In Britain, Garakanidze is revered for having first introduced
Georgian songs to the amateur singing community, with the help of his colleague Joseph
Jordania, and the thriving network of Georgian choirs there is an important part of his
legacy (see later section “Georgian Singing in Britain and Ireland: The Legacy of Edisher
Garakanidze”).
Other new ensembles came together as part of the movement to reintroduce the
practice of Orthodox chant, live chanting in the churches having been suppressed for
almost seventy years. Malkhaz Erkvanidze is credited with having led this latest chant
revival on both practical and academic fronts; his contribution to Georgian scholar-
ship includes several volumes of chant transcriptions (under the title Georgian Church
Chant) that serve as a rich resource for researchers and singers alike (Erkvanidze 2002–
2011). In 1988, Erkvanidze founded the Anchiskhati Choir, which began by chanting
at the Anchiskhati Church (Tbilisi’s oldest Orthodox church dating back to the sixth
century) and went on to become a leading exponent of Georgian polyphony on the
world stage. Later, in 2006, he formed Sakhioba (Figure 26.1), an ensemble made up of
younger singers (some of them students at Tbilisi Theological Academy and Seminary)
who describe themselves as “members of Georgia’s newest generation of revivalist musi-
cians” (http://www.sakhioba.ge/eng). Like other contemporary ensembles such as
Zedashe, Shavnabada, and Sathanao, Sakhioba again assumed an interesting bridging
role as it directed its energies to the continued promotion of Georgian folk song and
chant both at home and abroad. (See Web Figure 26.01 .)
Independence, UNESCO, and the Turn to the West

The collapse of the Soviet Union gave Georgian scholars and artists, in principle, greater
freedom to pursue contacts with colleagues and audiences in the West. Such aspirations
were, however, severely hampered by the profound economic and political crises into
which the country was plunged after the initial spell of postindependence euphoria.
Military conflicts, uncontrolled banditry, mafia-style corruption, and economic insta-
bility blighted the 1990s, with fuel shortages and widespread power outages seriously
restricting professional as well as domestic life. It was only toward the end of the decade
that Georgian ethnomusicologists were finally able to resume fieldwork expeditions,
some being funded by the Open Society Georgia Foundation (part of George Soros’s
FIGURE 26.1 Ensemble Sakhioba, with Malkhaz Erkvanidze (seated). (Photo: © Gia

Chkhatarashvili).
Open Society Institute).5 In 1998 and 2000, the conservatoire also hosted conferences
on “Problems of Folk Polyphony” and “Problems of Polyphony in Sacred and Secular
Music” (see Tsurtsumia et al. 2000, 2001), the second of these again supported by the
Soros Foundation. These events picked up the thread of an earlier series of international
conferences on folk polyphony that had taken place in Georgia in 1984, 1986, and 1988.
The real turning point in the country’s political fortunes came with the Rose
Revolution of 2003 that unseated President Eduard Shevardnadze in favor of the
younger, U.S.-educated Mikheil Saakashvili. Alongside his many projects aimed at
improving Georgia’s economic prospects and attempting to bolster national security by
realigning the country with Western democracies, Saakashvili would assign significant
sums to the promotion of Georgia’s cultural riches—an investment that was, to begin
with, a requirement of the contract entered into by the state in conjunction with the
2001 UNESCO proclamation of Georgian polyphony as a Masterpiece of the Oral and
Intangible Heritage of Humanity.
Because to secure UNESCO support a case has to be made that the heritage in ques-
tion is endangered, the accompanying plan of action is almost de facto framed in reviv-
alist terms. In Georgia, UNESCO recognition prompted a surge of revivalist activity,
including the preparation of new publications, audiovisual materials, and websites. New
performing ensembles and festivals also appeared. The conservatoire launched a fresh
series of biennial symposia that built on the earlier conference model but attracted a
far wider range of delegates from overseas.6 The First International Symposium on
Traditional Polyphony, held in 2002 and organized in partnership with the nongovern-
mental International Center for Georgian Folk Song, led directly to the establishment,
in 2003, of the conservatoire’s International Research Center for Traditional Polyphony
as part of a major UNESCO-funded project entitled “Safeguarding and Promotion of

Georgian Traditional Polyphony.”7 Running from July 2003 to November 2006, the
project had the explicit aim of “facilitat[ing] the safeguarding of Georgian polyphony
through fostering its inter-generational transmission and its collection and invento-
rying” (UNESCO 2008: 1). The Research Center was equipped with state-of-the-art
audiovisual and computer equipment that allowed it to embark on an ambitious plan
to digitize its archival holdings and create a database, and a new bilingual website
(Georgian/English) was designed with sufficient capacity for these and other materi-
als—including the full published proceedings of the symposia from 2002 onward—to
be made available online (see http://www.polyphony.ge).
Another central component of the program (described in the postproject report as a
“key sustainable output”) was the founding of seven regional Youth Folk Song Centers.
The buildings that housed the centers were provided free of charge by the local munici-
palities and then equipped with teaching materials, audiocassettes, CDs, and sheet
music prepared by the International Center for Georgian Folk Song (ICGFS). The report
emphasizes the use of new media and technology as an important means of making tra-
ditional material appealing to a younger generation. The ICGFS also ran seminars on
teaching methods and use of the equipment for the performers/teachers attached to the
centers. In each hub, a group of between ten and fifteen students received training from
older songmasters in the singing style and song repertoire of that region; many of these
young “graduates” then went on to form ensembles of their own.
Following the initial period of UNESCO investment, four of the centers continued
to operate with the help of local sponsors, and an additional School of Krimanchuli was
opened in Guria, funded jointly by the ICGFS and the Georgian Patriarchate. The terms
used to record these developments offer interesting perspectives on the question of what
might be revived in addition to the music itself: “The notions of social responsibility and
engagement in the private sector and the religious authorities were values and practices
discouraged during the 70 years of communist regime in the country, and are now being
revived and motivated by the international and national recognition of local cultural
value” (UNESCO 2008: 2). Continuation funding was also made available by the new
government. In 2006, a budget of 1.5 million lari (US $867,000) was set aside for cul-
tural development, and Saakashvili launched his “President’s Support for Folklore” pro-
gram with the donation of 2,500 costumes to members of regional folk ensembles across
the country (Ninoshvili 2010: 3). Among other presidential initiatives were an award of
70,000 lari to the Folklore State Center of Georgia to resurrect the folk Olympiad of the
Soviet years, now rebranded as a National Folklore Exhibition-Festival, and the nomi-
nation of Anzor Erkomaishvili (founder of the multi–award-winning Rustavi Choir and
director of the ICGFS) to coordinate a national project to integrate Georgian polyphony
into the school curriculum.
Working alongside the International Research Center for Traditional Polyphony,
the ICGFS issued a number of publications aimed at “specialists and enthusiasts of
Georgian folk song,” including anthologies of musical notation, monographs on folk
singers and chanters, and CDs featuring both archival and contemporary recordings.
A series of teach-yourself-style resources was launched with Let Us Study Georgian

Folk Songs: Gurian Songs, co-edited by David Shugliashvili and Malkhaz Erkvanidze
and issued to coincide with the First International Festival of Georgian Folk Song,
Chven Mshvidoba, held in Guria in 2004. A second set, Teach Yourself Georgian Folk
Songs: Megrelian Songs, again included a songbook with musical transcriptions and lyr-
ics, supported by CDs on which the songs were presented with each part sung separately
as well as in ensemble. Although these materials were intended primarily as resources to
help cultivate a new generation of Georgian singers, foreign enthusiasts were also able to
acquire copies during visits to Georgia or via online platforms.
Although the programs supported by UNESCO were aimed first and foremost at
revitalizing musical activity at the national level, the accompanying commitment to dis-
seminate the heritage to the wider global community, together with UNESCO’s more
general redefinition of regional and national traditions as world heritage, resonated with
Georgia’s postindependence desire to forge new alliances with Europe and America. At
the same time, evidence of the increased recognition accorded to Georgian polyphony
by the international community helped to further raise its status nationally.
The Internationalization of Georgian

Polyphony: Foreign Choirs and Networks
By the time of these latest developments, the phenomenon of foreigners performing

Georgian songs was already well established, as evidenced by the selection of visiting
choirs and ensembles that appeared at the First International Symposium on Traditional
Polyphony in 2002, presented as part of the program of concerts staged alongside the
academic panels. These included Gorani and Golden Fleece from Australia, Kavkasia
from the United States, Darbazi from Canada, Maspindzeli from Britain, Irinola from
France, and Geinoh Yamashirogumi from Japan. Of these, the majority had been estab-
lished in the mid-1990s, although Geinoh Yamashirogumi—the first known foreign
ensemble to adopt Georgian songs into its repertoire—had been active since 1974. A few
of these and other formations that have appeared outside Georgia do include Georgian
emigrants; the trio Golden Fleece, for example, was established by ethnomusicologists
Joseph Jordania and Nino Tsitsishvili following their relocation to Melbourne in 1995,
with Joseph also providing the Georgian expertise for Gorani, a larger Melbourne-based
choir devoted to Georgian and Bulgarian songs (Figure 26.2). Most foreign ensembles,
however, are made up of amateur singers with no ethnic connection to Georgia. (See
Web Figure 26.02 .)
From the foregoing survey of the trajectory of Georgian polyphony within Georgia
itself, we may note a series of trends and developments that helped pave the path by
which these foreign exponents made their entry: (a) the accumulation of archival
recordings, latterly reassembled, remastered, and rereleased, with some being made
FIGURE 26.2 Melbourne-based ensemble Gorani, 2001. Back from left: Nick Weiss, Roger
King, Frank Hajncl, Grant Mathews, Dudleigh Morse, Martin King. Front from left: Philip
Shaw, David Robinson, Joseph Jordania, Jorg Metz. (Photo: © Roger King).
more widely available through online databases; (b) the existence of historical tran-
scriptions informed by an original desire to make the material more accessible; (c) the
more recent addition of teaching materials using up-to-date media and methods and
designed specifically for new recruits who had not grown up in the tradition; (d) the
presence of pioneering researcher-practitioners like Edisher Garakanidze and Malkhaz
Erkvanidze who had embraced the task of revival as their life’s work and had already
successfully initiated a new cohort of practitioners, mainly in Tbilisi; (e) the presence
of older village songmasters who again were experienced in transmitting their art to the
younger generation; (f) the fact that the repertoire itself had already been subject to pro-
cesses of standardization and Westernization as it was adapted for performance by large
choirs and accommodated to Soviet conventions and the assumed tastes of European
audiences; (g) the renewed postindependence desire to bring Georgia’s cultural heritage
to the attention of an international (especially Western) audience, subsequently rein-
forced by the strategies and discourses promoted by UNESCO; and (h) a new wave of
traditional-style ensembles whose well-trained and more cosmopolitan-minded mem-
bers were keen to establish concrete links with musical networks in the West and whose
recordings and filmed performances could easily be found on the Internet.
These national-level developments met with other trends in the places to which
Georgian songs would find their way. Most significant was the appearance of commu-
nity choirs and world music choirs whose repertoires consisted of an eclectic mix of
multipart songs from many different parts of the world, a phenomenon that was espe-
cially prominent in the United Kingdom and parts of the United States. The singers asso-
ciated with these choirs already had a taste for radically different kinds of music, and
they were accustomed to learning by ear and singing in languages that were not their
mother tongue. In the United Kingdom, the community choir scene—itself part of a
broader movement that crystallized around the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network—
was further supported by a culture of weekend workshops and by initiatives such as the
biennial Giving Voice Festival that brought together artists from all over the world for
a program of performances and intensive master classes, the latter typically spread over
several days.
For the next part of my discussion, I step back in time to uncover the more singular
stories of how some of the foreign choirs and ensembles devoted exclusively to Georgian
music came into being. In the process, I seek to probe the motivations of the different
stakeholders and the benefits that they have each derived from these acts of cultural
exchange and to identify further points of articulation between these developments
and revivalist trends within Georgia itself. Particular attention is paid to those who have
acted as intermediaries and to the methods of teaching and learning that have proved
most effective.
Becoming an Ambassador for Someone Else’s

Culture: Converts and Intermediaries
The careers of fellow Americans Carl Linich and Frank Kane offer interesting insights
into the trajectories of non-Georgians who have dedicated themselves to Georgian
music following an initial life-changing encounter and have subsequently been respon-
sible for the induction of large numbers of Westerners into the art of Georgian singing.
The short accounts that follow serve to shed light on (a) the manner in which a personal
relationship with Georgian music has developed; (b) the process of refining teaching
methods for relatively inexperienced singers in the West; (c) the way in which certain
properties of Georgian singing have been linked with broader principles; and (d) the
phenomenon whereby deepening involvement with the music has led to more exten-
sive, long-term involvement in Georgian affairs.
Carl Linich began his Georgian singing journey as a member of the Kartuli Ensemble
(founded by Frank Kane in 1985). In 1994, he joined forces with fellow singers Alan
Gasser and Stuart Gelzer to form Kavkasia. Motivated by the desire to go deeper into
the music in a way that was not practicable for a sizeable amateur group that rehearsed
relatively infrequently, their adoption of the trio format also allowed them to return
to the more authentic practice of having one voice to each part, leaving greater scope
for improvisation. In 1995, the friends traveled together to Georgia “to do our home-
work” and “to be at the source” (Carl Linich, interview, October 8, 2010, Tbilisi). The
five months spent studying the language, as well as the music, was, for Carl, “a turn-
ing point . . . in my life.” In the United States, they had learned songs from transcriptions
and recordings but now they were able to take lessons with none other than Anzor
Erkomaishvili. Learning by ear from someone so well versed in the tradition gave them
a clearer understanding of the ways in which Georgian scales differed from the Western
tempered scale and, on returning home, they spent “countless hours . . . really working
on these very fine nuances of tuning.” Old archival recordings from the early Soviet and
pre-Soviet years also provided valuable models, just as they did for the new generation
of revivalist singers in Georgia itself.8
Carl soon returned to Georgia, which became his main home for the next ten years,
and in 2001 he founded Okros Stumrebi (Golden Guests), a choir for expatriates of dif-
ferent nationalities living in Tbilisi. He had already begun teaching Georgian songs
to a wider network of singers back in the United States when, in 1999, he was invited
to lead workshops for the Vermont-based association Village Harmony. He subse-
quently served as the point of introduction for Village Harmony’s first summer camps
in Georgia, which took the form of singing tours combining study and performance. In
2007, in collaboration with Georgian colleague Maia Kachkachishvili, he launched his
own “songmaster tours,” designed for smaller groups to study intensively with teach-
ers drawn from the older generation of village singers. Carl also went on to collaborate
with Tbilisi State Conservatoire, the Folklore State Center of Georgia, and the ICGFS
on a number of publications, including the teach-yourself anthologies of Gurian and
Megrelian songs referred to earlier. Having been awarded a Silver Medal by the Georgian
Ministry of Culture in 1997, in recognition of his profound knowledge of Georgian folk
music and his achievements in promoting Georgian culture abroad, in 2009, he became
a recipient of the prestigious President’s Order of Merit Award.9
Initially, Carl was following in the footsteps of Frank Kane, likewise a recipient of the
Silver Medal. Frank first traveled to Georgia in 1984 with the Yale Russian Chorus. This
experience inspired him to launch the Kartuli Ensemble, dedicated entirely to Georgian
songs, the following year. In 1988, he moved to Paris to study Georgian at the Institute
of Oriental Languages and sang with a group made up largely of Georgian emigrants
before founding the all-male ensemble Marani in 1993, followed by Irinola, a female
ensemble, in 1997. Under the auspices of the Marani Association, he established a
program of cultural exchange, as part of which he invited songmasters from different
regions of Georgia to lead workshops in Paris (paradoxically, this was at a time when,
because of the troubled political and economic situation, they had very few opportuni-
ties to teach in Georgia itself). Outside France, Frank has built a reputation as a popular
workshop leader in Britain, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the United States,
and Canada.
Frank’s case is especially interesting in respect of the original methodology that he
has developed as a means of helping non-Georgians achieve a more authentic sound.
His conviction that simply listening and repeating was not enough, since what Western
students hear is “put through the filter of their own prior experience and frame of ref-
erence” (Kane 2003: 558), led him to experiment with exercises designed to help his
French students locate the nontempered intervals used in Georgia and improve their
perception of harmonics and vibration. Aided by his knowledge of tai chi, hatha yoga,
and Alexander Technique, he also worked with what he terms the “physical disposi-
tion and intention” of the singers. Careful study of the way in which Georgian singers
stand, open their mouths, move their jaws, and breathe, for example, prompted a series
of revelations about how such factors were implicated in vocal production and timbre.
“By gaining a better understanding of how Georgian singers produce their sound,” he
concluded, “non-Georgian singers are no longer simply imitating a sound, they are imi-
tating the physical gestures and intentions which form this sound” (Kane 2003: 561).
Frank’s deepening relationship with Georgian polyphony also took on more universal
dimensions with his conviction that the vibratory fields produced in the body by this
kind of singing had powerful healing potential. All of these insights informed his pro-
posal that “Georgian singing, as a point of entry to gain a knowledge of the voice, vibra-
tion, and harmony singing, has a pan-human dimension and, like hatha yoga or tai chi,
is a practice that can and should be shared with and available to all humanity” (personal
communication, February 28, 2012).10
Georgian Singing in Britain and Ireland: The Legacy of

Edisher Garakanidze
The case of Georgian singing in Britain and Ireland offers further insights into the man-
ner in which affinity groups and practical networks develop in places far removed from
the original source. In this instance, an almost chance beginning led to quite momen-
tous consequences as dedicated Georgian choirs multiplied and ever-greater numbers
of ordinary singers with no prior knowledge of Georgia were drawn into the wider,
transnational Georgian-singing community. The journey began in 1994, when, on the
recommendation of a recent visitor to Tbilisi, Edisher Garakanidze and Joseph Jordania
were invited to Cardiff by the Centre for Performance Research (CPR) and tasked with
preparing an ad hoc choir to perform a set of Georgian songs at the closing feast of a
week-long conference on the theme “Performance, Food, and Cookery.” For many of
the participants, this was the beginning of a lifelong passion for Georgian culture. With
the help of singer and composer Helen Chadwick, who would later form the London
Georgian choir, Edisher returned to Britain several times before his untimely death in a
road accident in 1998. In addition to leading further workshops for the CPR and other
organizations, he worked with community choirs across the country, many of which
were directed by singers who had been part of the original Cardiff choir, and also with
theater companies and schools (Figure 26.3). In this way, he helped establish a common
repertoire that would be consolidated by the posthumous publication of 99 Georgian
Songs: A Collection of Traditional Folk, Church and Urban Songs from Georgia.
99 Georgian Songs was, in Edisher’s words, intended as a workbook “for singers in the
West who want to learn these songs, but want to know about the meaning, where the
songs come from, singing style and so on” (quoted in Mills 2004: vi). In his introduc-
tion, Edisher spoke of workshop participants becoming “the co-owners of a culture that
stems from the depth of centuries and millennia” (Garakanidze 2004: ix)—a notion that is
FIGURE 26.3 Edisher Garakanidze leading a workshop in a primary school, c. 1997. (Photo: ©
Simon Richardson).
indicative of the ecumenical mindset he adopted and his secure conviction that in sharing
one’s heritage one is not left deprived. Edisher had his own style of teaching that enabled
his British students to achieve a more Georgian sound. Helen Chadwick recalls being
especially struck by how the stories he told to set the songs in context would enable work-
shop participants to imagine themselves in the settings he described, with the result that
“the song would fly in a different way . . . . as opposed to it just being some nice harmonies
and a few words—giving a reason to sing” (interview, February 4, 2008, London). Edisher
deliberately made certain musical and textual adjustments that would make the material
more accessible for beginners. The Georgian language, with its predilection for complex
consonant clusters, initially poses a considerable challenge for foreign learners. Edisher’s
solution was to “select songs with as little text as possible” and to “deliberately decrease
the number of consonants” (e.g., rendering “ganbrtsqinvebuli” as “gatsinebuli”), with
the aim of allowing singers to focus their attention primarily on the music and so make
more rapid progress before returning later to refine their pronunciation (Garakanidze
2004: xv). Musical arrangements also underwent a degree of standardization for reasons
already described. Making such compromises was in keeping with Edisher’s categoriza-
tion of the “authentic” rural performance style as “a higher level of learning which is by no
means compulsory for all of those interested in Georgian music.” Achieving this higher
level “involves listening to authentic recordings, travelling to Georgian villages in different
regions, and establishing personal contact with traditional singers”—a path already taken,
he adds, by some Western singers such as Helen Chadwick and the members of Kavkasia
(Garakanidze 2004: xvi). Since Edisher wrote these words, many more Georgian-singing
converts from Britain, North America, Australia, and different parts of Europe have deep-
ened their knowledge and practice in precisely these ways.
For Edisher’s many British friends, the shock of his sudden loss was combined with an
urgent sense of responsibility to honor the gift of the songs he had shared by continuing
his work. The Georgian Harmony Association was formed to act as a hub for dissemi-
nating information about workshops, concert tours, and other Georgian cultural events
in the United Kingdom; this would later be complemented by the Northern Georgian
Society. Helen Chadwick formed the London choir, Songs of the Caucasus (precursor
to Maspindzeli), initially as a means of raising funds for the medical care needed by
Edisher’s son, the sole family member to have survived the accident.11 A decade into the
twenty-first century, Georgian choirs in Britain and Ireland continued to multiply, join-
ing those already established in places as far afield as Cambridge, Bristol, Aberystwyth,
Leeds, Edinburgh, and the northern Scottish village of Findhorn. Although the most
recent recruits populating (and in some cases founding) these choirs had never met
Edisher, they may nonetheless be seen as part of the legacy of his work. Meanwhile, the
culture that he was instrumental in establishing was now well served by a new wave of
visiting teachers from Georgia. Residential workshops in different parts of the United
Kingdom fulfilled a bonding function for members of different choirs and continued
to add to a shared repertoire. New choirs were also invited to Georgia to perform at the
conservatoire’s biennial symposium or at festivals such as Art Gene and Chveneburebi.
(See Video Tracks 26.01 and 26.02 .)
Georgia’s Transnational Affinity

Groups: From Attraction to Belonging
My discussion thus far has offered support for my initial proposal that we might concep-
tualize the activities of foreign practitioners as being in continuity with internal revival
processes. Stories of the kind just related suggest a further subset of questions that war-
rant further probing. What does it mean to become part of someone else’s revival or
an ambassador for another culture? How does this articulate with notions of identity,
ownership, and belonging? Is there a sense in which Georgian singers in Britain and
elsewhere are involved in a local or personal revival of their own? What more might be
said about mutual aspirations and rewards?
Many of those drawn to Georgian polyphony describe their first experience of hearing
the music in terms of an epiphany. The prominence of intensely visceral imagery in the
accounts I have gathered is striking: “It was like reaching into my heart and just grabbing
me”—“It was like a key unlocking something in my chest”—“It was like lightning going
down and cutting my body up.” This experience has typically initiated a quest for the
keys to the mystery, which for some has evolved to become part of their life’s purpose.
The new insights that follow resonate in interesting ways with features that often appear
as components of intentional revivals, especially those that originate as part of a social
movement seeking to restore practices and meanings from the past that are viewed as
more wholesome or authentic. Singers from overseas are often struck by the fact that
so many songs still in circulation in Georgia have a specific function: in contrast to life
at home, as one interviewee put it, “[E]very human activity has a song attached to it.” In
the company of their new Georgian friends, they experience a heightened sense of com-
munitas and conviviality that is reinforced in the context of the supra, an elaborate feast
animated by eloquent toasts and impassioned singing. This sense of community extends
to the singing networks they join or cultivate at home. The pre-Christian ritual music
and dance traditions of Georgia’s remote mountain regions hold a particular fascina-
tion for those already attracted to pagan survivals. At a strictly musical level, Georgian
polyphony may relate to a bigger project of reviving older sounds and procedures simi-
lar to those that would have been the norm in Western Europe before the introduction
of equal temperament and functional harmony. In the context of the natural voice and
a cappella movements in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia, with their
conviction that “everyone can sing,” Georgian songs are also part of a broader revival of
oral tradition and this, too, can be framed as a desire to restore the ways things used to
be. In these and other ways, Georgia—whether real or imagined—offers a missing link
to a lost past, a means of revitalizing the present, and a tantalizing glimpse of alternative
futures that may still be within reach.
If such intimations lie at the root of many national revivals, their transformative
potential takes on more complex dimensions in the context of lives lived elsewhere
because they prompt more profound changes that reach to very heart of personal identi-
ties. Affective reactions of the kind cited above are often further described in terms of
an uncanny sense of recognition or homecoming. Joan Mills (co-director of the Cardiff
event where Edisher and Joseph made their British debut) recalls hearing British-Asian
singer Sheila Chandra, whose solo albums include Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices (1992),
talking about how the voices of the ancestors can call you, even if they are not liter-
ally your own ancestors. This is what she herself felt, she explains, when she first heard
Georgian songs (interview, July 24, 2005, Llanrhystud). Many of the American singers
who find their way to Georgia, conversely, do have historical ancestors who came from
different parts of Eastern Europe and so they may be in search of more tangible roots.
Mark Slobin, in elaborating his model of affinity groups as “charmed circles of
like-minded music-makers drawn magnetically to a certain genre that creates strong
expressive bonding” (1993: 98), has written of how “a choice to follow up an affinity leads
to belonging” (1993: 56). This can be pragmatic as well as affective. The notion intro-
duced at the start of this chapter—that the adoption of Georgian traditions by outsid-
ers might be viewed as a “third existence” of folklore and a natural extension of a once
inward-facing revival process—might help to elucidate Edisher’s proposal that work-
shop participants become “co-owners” of a culture. Most pertinent of all is the way in
which the involvement of foreign practitioners has reached far beyond the simple fact
of singing Georgian songs and paying lip service to the rhetoric of honoring Georgian
culture. Many have entered into long-term relationships with the country and its peo-
ple, some becoming part of an adoptive extended family based on personal friendships
and others (like Carl Linich) playing a more direct part in national infrastructures and
histories. These relationships bring a sense of responsibility. Members of the interna-
tional Georgian-singing community have contributed financially as well as practically
to a variety of cultural initiatives and humanitarian causes in Georgia, sometimes on the

basis of a personal connection (leading, e.g., to local collections for a struggling orphan-
age) and sometimes as part of a public response (e.g., following the earthquake that
struck Tbilisi in 2002). As Russian tanks rolled into Georgia in the summer of 2008, an
international rallying call was immediately issued with the tagline “Let’s Sing for Peace
in Georgia.” Members of choirs across the world sang Georgian songs in churches, town
halls, and squares as a statement of solidarity and to raise public awareness of Georgia’s
plight, and donations were raised for the project of recovery and reconstruction. Those
participating in singing holidays in Georgia also contribute, through the monies they
pay for tuition and home stays, to the provision of modern amenities (such as indoor
bathrooms) or the renovation of community buildings in under-resourced villages. This
investment in turn allows local youth to glimpse the possibility of carving out a sus-
tainable future without having to relocate to the cities. Several young Americans who
first visited Georgia to take part in a Village Harmony summer camp later returned on
Fulbright scholarships and became fluent Georgian speakers. Others have relinquished
their jobs back home and established a new life in Georgia.
Away from the capital, the concert stage, and the festival circuit, the task of revi-
talizing local practices in Georgia continues and here, too, visiting singers have been
assigned a role. In 2011, a group of mainly British visitors found their way to Lakhushdi,
a remote hamlet in the region of Svaneti (Upper Caucasus) that is home to extended
families of accomplished musicians (Figure 26.4). It was the latter who issued the invita-
tion for “sympathetic” foreign guests to help revitalize the feast of Limkheri by learning
the pre-Christian songs and dances associated with it, their hope being that this would
“send a powerful message to their own young people—children who have been born
into a modern Georgia and a new generation of ‘virtual’ communications . . . . a clear
message about the intrinsic value of roots, and about the spirit of a shared humanity”
(http://www.braveheartgeorgia.org/). (See Video Tracks 26.03 and 26.04 .) Here, a
message that originated with older family members in the local community was given
added weight by the endorsement of visitors who could be viewed as representatives of
the international community. The funds generated were used to start a cooperative that
would oversee the development of a sustainable community enterprise; the first projects
included filming previously undocumented rituals, launching a new local choir, and
establishing a heritage center. (See Web Figure 26.04 .)
If we wish to make a more direct comparison between the foreign affinity groups that
have formed around Georgian singing and “classic” revival movements as analyzed by
writers such as Tamara Livingston (1999) and Owe Ronström (1996), we may identify
several characteristic ingredients. These include the key roles played by charismatic
leaders or “burning souls,” the circulation of publications and recordings, the establish-
ment of formal networks and infrastructures, performance activity at different points
on the scale from amateur to professional, a quest for authenticity balanced by processes
of recontextualization and negotiation, the acquisition and display of ethnic artefacts
(e.g., embroidered hats and waistcoats), and the adoption of cultural practices that mark
one’s membership in a recognizable subculture (e.g., holding supras). In many ways, as
FIGURE 26.4 Song-learning session in Lakhushdi, Svaneti, July 2011. From left: Imke
McMurtrie, Derek Wilcox, Irene Railley (from Germany, England, and Scotland), with local
teachers Murad (front) and Givi Pirtskhelani. (Photo: © Caroline Bithell).
we have seen, overseas ensembles have also mirrored trends and refinements in per-
formance practice, musical understanding, and research activity that have taken place
in Georgia over a longer timescale. Larger choirs have given rise to smaller ensembles
with one voice to a part, and individual singers have progressed to more intensive study
of the Georgian system of pitches and intervals and the art of improvisation, sometimes
undertaking their own fieldwork expeditions to Georgian villages.
Notably, foreign students of Georgian polyphony have at times had easier access
to the older generation of songmasters than many of their Georgian counterparts,
thanks in part to their superior mobility and spending power. Some have therefore
approached more closely to the inner sanctum of the tradition than have young singers
honing their craft in Tbilisi, where the music is already recontextualized and subject
to a different kind of learning process, and this direct apprenticeship has added legiti-
macy to their efforts. The songmasters have been overjoyed to find such ardent acolytes
with whom they can share a lifetime of knowledge in an age when—UNESCO and
presidential promotional programs notwithstanding—the interest shown by young
Georgians in their own heritage has undoubtedly diminished. The growing numbers
of foreigners who have made their way to Georgian villages or arranged for the song-
masters to travel abroad have also helped fill a void left by the dismantling of the old
Soviet infrastructures by providing these aging singers with a new source of livelihood.
These affinity groups may, perhaps, be viewed in terms of a sympathetic diaspora. In an

age in which discourses of multiculturalism have given way to notions of the transcultural
(Hannerz 1996) and postethnic (Hollinger 2005), diasporas—like national belonging—
can be elective as well as literal. The path taken by outsiders who have penetrated to the
heart of Georgian polyphony might be conceived as conventional diaspora-formation in
reverse. For many, Georgia becomes a surrogate motherland and, for others, quite literally
a second home. At different points in this unfolding drama, the desires and responses of
foreign extras meet with the aspirations of the Georgian lead actors in an exchange that is
directed and produced by cosmopolitan culture-brokers who bridge the insider-outsider
divide. Through this process, ostensible outsiders with no genetic, territorial, or otherwise
logical connection to Georgia become part of a quasi-kinship group that operates as a
community of consent—with the added twist that, although they may not have Georgian
ancestry, a small minority who marry into Georgian families have descendants who do, in
fact, have Georgian blood running in their veins. The case of those who pursue their pas-
sion to its limit, arriving at a depth of cultural understanding commensurate with (or even
exceeding) that of some insiders and sometimes being described by Georgians themselves
as having “become almost Georgian,” contributes important perspectives to debates on
identity, heritage, and belonging in a fluid, postethnic age.
The Postrevival Turn: Transnational

Connections and New World Orders
A decade into the twenty-first century, Georgian polyphony might be considered to have
attained the status of what Anthony Wallace (1956), in his model for revitalization move-
ments, termed a “new steady state” in which it no longer needs to fight for survival but
has become part of a new norm. The transnational Georgian-singing community would
seem nonetheless to have a part to play, at different levels, in ensuring a sustainable future.
A concert given in 2007 by a group of singers from the United States, Canada, the United
Kingdom, France, and Germany, who (with Carl Linich) had spent two weeks studying
with songmasters Islam Pilpani, Polikarpe Khubulava, and Tristan Sikharulidze, prompted
the following response from Malkhaz Gulashvili, president of The Georgian Times:
Foreigners, who are getting acquainted with Georgian culture, certainly need sup-
port. It is our patriotic duty to hold them up, as our culture still lacks populariza-
tion . . . . Our goal is to acquaint the whole world with Georgians and Georgian
culture. For that we need those people, who will promote it.
(Quoted in Kintsurashvili 2007)
Reflecting on the same event, Rusudan Tsurtsumia characterized these developments

as “moving in step with modern times” and “meeting with the new social orders”
(Tsurtsumia 2010: 260). She went on to observe that the “utility value” of polyphony
in contemporary Georgia is further enhanced by its “symbolic value” (2010: 264). This
applies to both internal and external affairs. Like all revivalists, the different stake-
holders in the country’s cultural currency are simultaneously “reaching back” and
“stretching out” (Slobin 1983: 42)—not only for musical sounds and repertoires but also
for meanings and connections, kinship and community, for a sense of the natural or
authentic, the sacred or transcendent—as they negotiate a place for ancient truths in the
contemporary world.
Georgia’s international friends have undoubtedly played a part in the latest cycle of
revival. In both their literal and symbolic manifestations, they may also be configured
as occupying, in some respects, the realm of postrevival. The “post” prefix does not indi-
cate that revival is over and done with. Like the “post-” of postcolonialism, it suggests
that the old world of revival has undergone substantive transformation and is now part
of a far bigger story that needs to be theorized within a different kind of frame and using
a different kind of language. The meeting ground on which the intercultural exchanges
described here are played out might be likened to Homi Bhabha’s (1994) notion of a
“third space” that is emancipatory in allowing personal, social, and political transforma-
tion to take place. As such, it also sits within a broader politics of hybridity and cultural
interdependence.
Ulf Hannerz has stressed that, in the transnational arena, it is not necessarily the cor-
porate enterprises of nations and states that occupy center stage; rather, “the actors may
now be individuals, groups, movements” (1996: 6). Certainly, in Georgia, the formal
advances of the post-UNESCO years are only half the story. The top-down initiatives
that have helped achieve the new steady state have their complement in the continued
potency of grassroots activity. Mark Slobin has pointed out that an intriguing dimension
of the phenomenon whereby musics “seem to call out to audiences across nation-state
lines even when they are not part of heritage or of a commodified, disembodied net-
work” is that this is particularly likely to happen “when the transmission is of the
old-fashioned variety—face to face, mouth to ear” (1993: 68). Again, the Georgian case
offers a striking example, with the space in which national and supposedly global agen-
das meet with individual passions, aspirations, and primordial desires for human con-
tact emerging as the most productive focal point.
Stuart Hall has written of identities as being less about “roots” (where we have come
from) and more about “routes” (where we are going) (Hall 1996: 4). It is in this jour-
ney toward the future, with its connotations of new beginnings rather than neat endings
and its tantalizing promise of self-determination, that the potential of the postrevival
moment lies. When patriotic writer Petre Umikashvili declared (in 1882) that “revival
is . . . when we will hear Georgian singing and chanting at all party dinners and feasts,
indoors and outdoors, in the church and theatre, in streets and on ships” (Tsitsishvili
2010: 59), little did he guess that these same songs and chants would later be heard not
only on concert stages across the world but also on barges and bridges, in castles and
caves, and in countless other unlikely places thousands of miles from their source.
I leave the reader to speculate about how many more acts there may be in this play of
voices before a spacecraft lands, a box is opened, a disc is spun, and the harmonies of
“Chakrulo” vibrate across the landscape of a world yet to be imagined.
Acknowledgments
This study is informed by my association with the Georgian singing network in the
United Kingdom from 1995 and four visits to Georgia made between 1998 and 2011. I am
grateful to the British Academy for the Small Research Grant that funded more con-
centrated fieldwork in 2010–2011. Special thanks are due to Rusudan Tsurtsumia and
colleagues at Tbilisi State Conservatoire and to members of the international Georgian
singing community for their willing collaboration with my enquiries. Joseph Jordania,
Carl Linich, and Frank Kane offered helpful comments on an earlier version of the man-
uscript. I am particularly indebted to the work of Joseph Jordania and Nino Tsitsishvili
for furnishing me with a firm historical foundation. Lauren Ninoshvili’s excellent doc-
toral dissertation came to my attention in the final stages of my writing and helped
fill a few remaining gaps; Carl Linich also shared with me his unpublished paper on
“Authenticity in Georgian Folk Singing.” I owe my own introduction to Georgia to the
late singer and ethnomusicologist Edisher Garakanidze.
Notes
1. Voyager 1 and 2 carry a twelve-inch gold-plated copper disc containing a selection of
sounds and images intended to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth (see http://
voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html). For the UNESCO profile on Georgian
Polyphonic Singing, see http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?RL=00008.
2. For a comprehensive and accessible introduction to Georgian musical traditions, see
Jordania (2000).
3. Christianity was introduced to Georgia in the first century; formal conversion fol-
lowed in 337 CE, making Georgia the world’s second Christian nation (after Armenia).
Pre-Christian, pagan rituals can still be observed in remote mountain regions, and some
old ritual songs include words thought to be the names of ancient gods related to, for
example, the cult of the sun. For an example of a ritual that combines Orthodox Christian
elements with more ancient polytheistic beliefs, see Hugo Zemp’s documentary film The
Feast-Day of Tamar and Lashari (1998).
4. The story of the chant revival as described here is told in the film Knights of Georgian Chant
(2010).
5. For an introduction to the philosophy of George Soros and the work of the Open Society
Foundations, see http://www.georgesoros.com/ and http://www.opensocietyfoundations
.org/.
6. At the 1998 symposium, I had been the only presenter from outside Georgia.
7. The bulk of the funding for this project (just over US$166,000) was provided by the Japan
Funds-in-Trust.
8. See Kavaksia’s highly acclaimed 2006 release The Fox and the Lion for a selection of finely
tuned examples representing Georgia’s diverse song genres and regional styles.
9. Fellow Kavkasia members Alan Gasser and Stuart Gelzer are also Silver Medal holders.
10. For further discussion of Frank Kane’s methods, see Bithell (2012).
11. In 2012, Gigi Garakanidze, who continued his father’s work both in Georgia and overseas,
would also meet an early death at the age of only thirty.
References
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Bithell, Caroline. 2012. “Songs, Sounds and Sentiments in Translation: The Transnational Travels
of Corsican and Georgian Polyphony.” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 21 (2): 333–348.
Erkvanidze, Malkhaz. 2002–2011. Georgian Church Chant. 6 volumes. Tbilisi: Georgian
Patriarchate.
Gabisonia, Tamaz. 2007. “A Song Dies When Young People Forget It.” Interview with Anzor
Erkomaishvili. Bulletin of the International Research Centre for Traditional Polyphony 6
(June): 27–31. Tbilisi: V. Sarajishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire.
Garakanidze, Edisher. 2004. “Introduction.” 99 Georgian Songs: A Collection of Traditional Folk,
Church and Urban Songs from Georgia. Aberystwyth: Black Mountain Press.
Hall, Stuart. 1996. “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” In Questions of Cultural Identity,
edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, 1–17. London: Sage.
Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London and
Hollinger, David A. 2005. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. Tenth anniversary edi-
tion. New York: Basic Books.
Koridze, Pilimon I. 1895: Kartuli Galoba, Liturgia Partitura No. 1. Tbilisi: Sharadze and
Friends Press.
Jordania, Joseph. 2000. “Georgia.” In The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 8: Europe,
edited by Timothy Rice, James Porter, and Chris Goertzen, 826–849. New York and
London: Garland Publishing.
Kane, Frank. 2003. “Learning Techniques for Georgian Singing Used by Georgian Choruses
Abroad.” In The First International Symposium on Traditional Polyphony (Proceedings),
edited by Rusudan Tsurtsumia and Joseph Jordania, 558–563. Tbilisi: Tbilisi State
Conservatoire. http://www.polyphony.ge/uploads/simposium/engl1/kane_learning.pdf.
Kintsurashvili, Mari. 2007. Column in the Culture section of The Georgian Times, June 25.
http://www.geotimes.ge/index.php?m=home&newsid=5286.
Levin, Ted. 1989. Liner notes to The Rustavi Choir, Georgian Voices. Elektra Nonesuch 979224–2.
(1): 66–85.
Mills, Joan. 2004. “Preface.” 99 Georgian Songs: A Collection of Traditional Folk, Church and
Urban Songs from Georgia. Aberystwyth: Black Mountain Press.
Nadel, Siegfried F. 1933. Georgische Gesänge. Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz.
Ninoshvili, Lauren. 2010. “Singing Between the Words: The Poetics of Georgian Polyphony.”
Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, New York.
Root, Deborah. 1996. Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of
Difference. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Schneider, Marius. 1940. “Kaukasische Parallelen zum europäischen Mittelalter.” Acta
Musicologica 12: 52–61.
Slobin, Mark. 1983. “Rethinking ‘Revival’ of American Ethnic Music.” New York Folklore 9
(3–4): 37–44.
——. 1993. Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University
Press.
Tsitsishvili, Nino. 2010. National Unity and Gender Difference: Ideologies and Practices in
Georgian Traditional Music. Saarbrücken: Lap Lambert Academic Publishing.
Tsurtsumia, Rusudan. 2010. “Georgian Multipart Singing and National Identity.” In Echoes from
Georgia: Seventeen Arguments on Georgian Polyphony, edited by Rusudan Tsurtsumia and
Joseph Jordania, 257–267. New York: Nova Science Publishers.
Tsurtsumia, Rusudan, ed. 2000. Problems of Folk Polyphony. Materials of the International
Conference Dedicated to the 80th Anniversary of the V. Saradjishvili Tbilisi State
Conservatoire. V. Saradjishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire, Tbilisi.
——. 2001. Problems of Polyphony in Sacred and Secular Music. Reports of the International
Scientific Conference Dedicated to the 3000th Anniversary of Georgia’s Statehood and the
2000th Anniversary of Christ’s Birth. Tbilisi V. Saradjishvili State Conservatoire, Tbilisi.
UNESCO. 2008. “Safeguarding and Promotion of Georgian Traditional Polyphony.”
New York: Intangible Heritage Section, UNESCO. http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/
index.php?lg=en&pg=00011&RL=00008
Zemtsovsky, Izaly I. 2010. “The Georgian Model: Toward the Ethnogeomusical Approach to the
World of Polyphony.” In Echoes from Georgia: Seventeen Arguments on Georgian Polyphony,
edited by Rusudan Tsurtsumia and Joseph Jordania, 249–256. New York: Nova Science
Publishers.
Discs Cited
Chandra, Sheila. 1992. Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices. Real World CDRW24.
Drinking Horns and Gramophones: The First Recordings in the Georgian Republic, 1902–1914.
2001. New York: Traditional Crossroads 80702–4307–2.
Echoes from the Past: Georgian Folk Music from Phonograph Wax Cylinders. 2006, 2007, 2008.
Three boxed sets totaling sixteen CDs. Tbilisi: International Research Center for Traditional
Polyphony.
Let Us Study Georgian Folk Songs: Gurian Songs. 2004. Tbilisi: International Center for Georgian
Folk Song.
Teach Yourself Georgian Folk Songs: Megrelian Songs. 2004. Tbilisi: International Center for
Georgian Folk Song.
Trio Kavkasia. 2006. The Fox and the Lion. Traditional Crossroads 4331.
Films Cited
Janelidze, Nana. 2010. Knights of Georgian Chant. Tbilisi: STUQO.
Zemp, Hugo. 1998. The Feast-Day of Tamar and Lashari. http://www.der.org/films/feast-day-of-
tamar-and-lashari.html.
An extended discography with recommendations for further listening and an annotated list of
Georgian music websites can be found on the companion website: see Discography and Website
List.
C HA P T E R 27
I R I S H M U S I C R E V I VA L S
T H R O U G H G E N E R AT I O N S O F
D IA S P O R A
SE A N W I L L IA M S
Exploring musical revival among the members of the Irish diaspora requires an exam-
ination of the processes of emigration, the reconfiguration of Ireland as an inaccessi-
ble homeland (as opposed to just “home”), and the multiple modes of connection to
that homeland. The engaged Irish diaspora—that is, the people who are aware of their
Irish heritage and look to Ireland as a source for identity marking—has at its core both
a search for authenticity and an attempt at connection to an Ireland of the imagination.
That sense of authenticity, however, is a moving target, colored by generational interests,
needs, and priorities. For each generation that sees its own position as essential in the
diasporic connection, a specific musical genre emerges that responds to the needs and
priorities of that generation. In addition, the ubiquitous presence of emigration nar-
ratives in story and song, their profound associations with death and with Tír na nÓg
(the Irish “otherworld”), make the issue of revival one that springs from a larger cultural
sense of loss. Each genre of revived music then serves to connect the diasporic Irish with
Ireland and its people through specific signifiers, whether lyrical, timbral, harmonic,
rhythmic, modal, or melodic. These signifiers have changed over time to respond to the
changing needs of the emigrants over time and space.
This chapter connects generations of diasporic Irish with their roots in Catholic
Ireland1 and reveals the ways in which music has played a strong role in each genera-
tional connection. Beginning with a history of emigration from Ireland and continuing
with the essential concepts of isolation, exile, and death—which characterize notions
of home across the diaspora—this first section focuses on sonic and visual cues used
as a type of shorthand for connecting with home. A brief discussion of lyrics (in vocal
music) and timbral and melodic features (in instrumental music) that characterize Irish
music follows. In setting the stage for notions of revival in the diaspora, Ireland and its
people began a long process of engaging with nostalgia and revival at home. Our focus
Irish Music Revivals Through Generations of Diaspora 599
shifts, then, to an exploration of the ways in which music and historical events in both
Ireland and the diaspora have moved in lockstep: each new generation to leave Ireland
developed its own relationship with music abroad.
Members of the diaspora tend to regard Ireland as an isolated island. That sense of
isolation is part of the personalizing effect of seeing it as a homeland: If it is perceived to
be isolated, it must be a lonely place, matching the emigrants’ own perceived loneliness.
That Ireland has long emphasized its rural destinations in its tourism literature (and
the understanding that islands are, in fact, harder to reach than simply traveling across
land) adds to the sense of isolation. In contrast to this view, Ireland’s position in north-
western Europe, with easy access from the Mediterranean (together with its proximity
to the island of Britain), ensured early and continuous contact with other people and
resulted in layers of settlement. It also ensured a continuous outflow of Irish emigrants
into Europe and further afield. Although studies of the early emigrants focus on mis-
sionary efforts by Catholic priests (requiring the departure of many priests from Ireland
and their establishment on the European mainland), later studies reveal that a continu-
ous flow, back and forth, took place over the centuries and continues in the twenty-first.
In many ways, because the diaspora is hundreds of years old, its continuing relation-
ship to the perceived life of the homeland is simultaneously class-based and genera-
tional, varying according to shifting parameters. If we adhered to the strictest principles
of what constitutes the Irish diaspora, then it would include only those people born in
Ireland who currently live abroad. For the purposes of this chapter, however, the Irish
diaspora comprises not only those Irish-born citizens living abroad but also the descen-
dents of all Irish-born citizens who have moved abroad in history, numbering in the
tens of millions. Collectively, the Irish diaspora is everywhere, even if most studies of
this group focus on its transference to elsewhere in the English-speaking world (par-
ticularly North America, but also the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand).
For many people around the world who claim Irish ancestry, that ancestry is only
sometimes “fully” Irish. Irish emigrants left home for many different reasons—both
voluntary and involuntary, depending on economic and political circumstances—
and married specific people abroad for different reasons as well. In some cases, Irish
Catholics sought out other Catholics; in other cases, working or socializing brought
Irish immigrants into contact with non-Irish locals or other immigrants. The reality of
the diaspora is that, of the alleged ninety million (or more) descendents of Ireland who
live abroad, only a very few possess the key credential of having at least one grandparent
born in Ireland—that one element paves the way to Irish citizenship.2
One feature that animates the Irish diasporic imaginary (Axel 2002: 411) is the devel-
opment of a powerful relationship to home that has existed largely in the hearts and
minds of those people for whom a physical connection to Ireland no longer exists. By
this I mean that there is no longer any connection to potential relations in Ireland, and
even the possibility of a visit is remote. This relationship also presupposes, in some ways,
the disappearance of home through the disappearance of representations of home,
including musical representations. Because enough time has passed since the time of the
Great Hunger (the famine of 1845–1850) that led to the death or emigration of more than
600 Sean Williams
half of Ireland’s population, those people in the diaspora whose grandparents might
remember their grandparents’ stories of leaving home have passed away. With that pas-
sage from living memory has come a loss of stories, of songs, and of a real-life connec-
tion, together with its replacement by very different cultural materials. These materials,
often shrewdly marketed to the Irish abroad, tend to reinforce stereotypes while simul-
taneously masking whatever may have been true for the first generations to leave home.
That the diasporic imaginary necessarily contains an ideology of loss is crucial in under-
standing the earliest groups of the Irish who traveled abroad.
The largest period of emigration from Ireland was in the thirty years surrounding
the Great Hunger (or Famine) of 1845–1850 (sometimes referred to as the “Irish Potato
Famine”), when Ireland’s population plummeted from approximately eight million to
three and a half million.3 The proportion of Irish people who died of specific causes will
always be disputed, but the combination of hunger, disease, and loss during passage
abroad contributed to memories of a traumatic event that looms particularly large in
the received memory of the members of the diaspora. Further complicating the events
surrounding the Famine is the concept of deoraí, exile; the Irish language (which many
more people spoke then than they do now) has no word for emigrant (Miller 1985: 105).
Thus, the notion of leaving home as an exile, not as an emigrant, acknowledges both the
permanent ties to a homeland and a shared culture of loss that can sometimes character-
ize diasporic reactions to the representation of Irish history both at home and abroad.
The majority of Irish who left home in the nineteenth century traveled to North
America; from an Irish perspective, factors such as the cost of transport to North
American ports, the presence or absence of relatives in particular cities, and the avail-
ability of a berth on a ship at the right time determined where one ended up. Although
most of North America’s Irish population has been concentrated in the eastern part of
the continent since the early nineteenth century, significant numbers of Irish immi-
grants settled in Chicago, Butte, and San Francisco. Both England and Scotland have
seen waves of Irish immigrants, not only in permanent settlements such as Glasgow,
Liverpool, and northwestern London, but also as seasonal workers. It has been com-
mon for decades for Irish men in particular to travel to Scotland and England for part of
the year, often leaving families behind, and then to spend part of the year at home. The
proximity of Ireland to England and Scotland has made this seasonal migration possible
even during times of economic hardship.
In Australia, approximately one-third of the population claims Irish ancestry.
Although the nation saw its population increase dramatically after World War II, many
of Australia’s Irish and Irish-descended population had already arrived by the end of
the nineteenth century. Perhaps its most famous immigrants were Irish convicts, who
faced transportation to Australia from Ireland for crimes large and small. However,
many more were brought over by the colonial government to work in service indus-
tries. One of the major differences between the Irish in North America and the Irish in
Australia and New Zealand is that the North American Irish started out primarily as
urbanites, whereas the Irish “down under” were found both in cities and scattered across
the Outback. In New Zealand, the largest numbers of Irish immigrants came from
County Dublin and the Ulster region in Ireland, and these settled in Auckland. Unlike
in Australia, which brought in large numbers of Irish Catholics, many of the Irish New
Zealanders were Protestant.
Connected to the members of the diaspora, regardless of where they settled and
where their descendents live, is the possibility of further loss through death, abandon-
ment, forgetting, and replacement. Each of these themes has asserted itself in musical
responses to the diaspora, whether through the presentation of certain song lyrics, the
use of particular musical instruments (but not of others), or the claim that the musical
representation of Ireland is permissible only through idealized “authentic” channels of
authority. These channels might include claiming heritage from a place known for its
wealth of music and dance, having studied or played with an acknowledged expert on a
particular Irish musical tradition, or being related to an important representative of the
tradition. In each case, however, the diasporic Irish must grapple with the understand-
ing that they will always be at least once removed from the source and that the homeland
of their imagination remains, in many ways, tantalizingly out of reach.
With the concept of revival comes its extension: reviving from (alleged) death.
A large part of the connection between the historical Irish diaspora and the concept
of Ireland-as-homeland is this continuing image of death or near-death, which makes
revival an important focus among the Irish abroad. For a number of reasons, one of the
most prominent among them being the concept of family members having been left at
home in Ireland to die, some Irish (and particularly their descendents) in the diaspora
have continually assumed that death and/or old age characterize the people of Ireland.
People visiting Ireland for the first time tend to reserve their most intense culture shock
for the moment that they see the number of young people; expecting a nation of sad old
people (a classic image from song), they are shocked to find a thriving, vibrant youth
culture contemporary with their own, and not just in the city streets of Dublin. One
verse of the emigration song “The Green Fields of America,” by Paddy Tunney, vividly
focuses attention on age and death, contrasting remarkably clearly with direct evidence
of youth and life.
Oh my father is old, and my mother’s right feeble

To leave their own country, it grieves their hearts sore
Oh the tears in great drops down their cheeks they are rolling
To think they must die upon some foreign shore.
Implicit in musical revivalism across the generations, including in this song and many
others like it, has been the primacy of death in the Irish and Irish diasporic experiences.
Although many immigrants from Europe refer to death both at home and abroad,
the Irish have tended to bring up the subject openly through song and poetry. When
emigrants have departed from Ireland, particularly to go to North America, they have
moved in a westward direction. In Ireland, to go west is to die; it is to go to Tír na nÓg
(“the land of the young”), the Irish Otherworld. Even though the Irish have historically
traveled all over the world (and as close as to Wales, Scotland, and England) as part
602 Sean Williams
of their long diasporic journey, there is no question that the metaphoric direction for
departure and death has been west.
When someone dies a physical death, connections are maintained to those who
remain behind through various Irish Catholic customs (e.g., family members might
display photographs or possessions—such as a beloved fiddle—on the western wall).
The body of the deceased is “waked,” which means to gather family, friends, and com-
munity members during the time between when physical death occurs and when the
body is taken to the cemetery. Although no set ritual was fixed across the island, until
the nineteenth century, wakes often included the presence of women who engaged in
ritualized mourning.4 At a wake, the body is present in one room (the parlor or a main
bedroom) and is watched over continually until the burial; visitors pay their respects
and say a prayer and a blessing. In another, larger room within the “wake house”—either
the home of the deceased or of a family member—the community and family members
tell stories, play games and music, sing songs, and dance. These activities celebrate the
life of the deceased, connect the community members, and reaffirm local and familial
customs.
An American Wake is a uniquely Irish way of handling the profound loss to the com-
munity that occurs as a result of emigration. At an American Wake, the person who
was preparing to emigrate was celebrated with songs, stories, drinking, and dancing, all
taking place the night before he or she left the village. In the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, when the Irish emigrated, the chances of someone’s returning to Ireland were
remote. Holding a wake was a way of acknowledging the loss of one’s loved ones, with
the assumption that—as in death—the family members might never see the person
again. For the emigrant, the liminal sense of disembodiment that came from already
being waked but not yet dead was a feature that he or she carried to the place of settle-
ment, wherever it might have been. Because the west was the place of death, songs of
death and loss, together with all of the sonic cues that signaled death and loss in the
homeland, were crucial to maintaining the connection to home.
Visual cues were also a key feature of connecting Irish immigrants of multiple genera-
tions with home. Some images—for example, those on sheet music from the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries—appear to freeze Ireland and its people in an archaic sense of
what constitutes a “real” Ireland of the contemporary imagination: [I]t is rural, its peo-
ple wear peasant clothing, and everyone is hospitable and has the time to chat (using
the Irish language) all day and play traditional music all night. This image of the good
old days of home pervades the music of a particular age demographic: People who were
in their youth during the 1930s and 1940s, and who passed on that set of images to their
children (who have been simultaneously exposed to it through the works of the Irish
film industry). This image is dramatically at odds with twenty-first-century Ireland, in
which anything available in the diaspora is also available at home, few people speak Irish
or play traditional music, and the latest mobile phones outnumber landlines. Because
the diasporic population is diverse in terms of age, degree of connection to Ireland (as
opposed to where they currently live), and distance from Ireland, however, the images of
Ireland are also diverse and have either a closer or further distance from reality.
The Sound of Home: Lyrical and

Musical Features
The lyrics of home, as developed by the Irish abroad, have tended toward the negotia-
tion of Irish identity abroad and what a relationship with the homeland is like (Williams
1996: 4). The irony of that negotiation is that it developed, over time, into something
of a feedback loop in that diasporic hit songs were also popular in Ireland for a time,
and the presence of so many relatives abroad—in whatever diasporic nation—engaged
the imaginations of the Irish at home. These songs were intended to be sung in a bel
canto fashion. In the song “Did Your Mother Come from Ireland” (1936) by Jimmy
Kennedy and Michael Carr, nothing is said of a new context; the only important issue
is the source: Ireland. By offering a particular set of images, presented with a rich, full
vibrato in what is now known as “Irish tenor” style (see “Setting the Stage for Revival in
the Homeland,” below), composers and performers set up expectations in their listeners
of what constituted home:
Did your mother come from Ireland

For there’s something in you Irish
Can you tell me where you got those Irish eyes?
And before she left Killarney
Did your mother kiss the Blarney
For that little touch of brogue can’t be denied.
This type of vocal music, which leans so heavily on the sound and image of the domes-
ticated Irishman (Williams and Ó Laoire 2011: 143–146), came to characterize what it
meant to “sound Irish” so deeply that older vocal timbres and performance practices
were lost in the diaspora. Sean-nós (“old style”) singers—often characterized as free of
vibrato and singing with a reedy, thin sound in the Irish language—have been consid-
ered so far away from the diasporic song repertoire and practices as to no longer be con-
sidered authentically Irish by the Irish abroad.
In Irish instrumental music, its perceived timbre is twofold: It is both scratchy, as rep-
resented by the sound of the fiddles, and reedy, represented by the sound of the pipes. In
a diasporic context, the fiddle does not even need to be producing Irish melodies to alert
the listener that he or she is listening to the “right kind” of timbre that awakens longing;
the timbre alone can do the job. Similarly, the use of the Scottish great highland pipes in
the diaspora triggers timbral signals in the brain, to the point that Scottish pipers in full
Scottish performance regalia, performing American tunes such as “Amazing Grace,” can
make the members of the Irish diaspora awash in tears of longing. It is a specific timbral
signal that appears almost under the radar, but which nonetheless hits its intended tar-
get with considerable emotional power.
Other musical signals can cue the right kind of sonic Irishness. Traditional Irish
music has not been known for its harmonic complexity, particularly in the realm of
604 Sean Williams
song. However, the uilleann pipes include specific keys called regulators; they allow
players to include chordal accompaniment to the melody. In addition, instrumental ses-
sions both in the diaspora and at home may include the use of the guitar as one of the
accompanying instruments. The guitar, often tuned to what is called DADGAD (from
lowest string to highest), eschews most manifestations of major and minor. This allows
tunes that shift rapidly from one mode to another to be accompanied without any jar-
ring discontinuities.
In its overwhelming popularity, the reel (4/4) far outweighs other forms, including
jigs, hornpipes, marches, barn dances, slides, or polkas. However, in the popular imagi-
nation of the members of the diaspora, the jig (6/8) and hornpipe (4/4 with triplets scat-
tered throughout) are perceived to be quintessentially Irish.5 Melodies in Irish music
draw from four main modes: Ionian, Aeolian, Mixolydian, and Dorian. In addition, it is
common for a single tune to draw from more than one mode between sections or to shift
pitches from sharp to natural and back within a single phrase. For example, a tune in the
key of D might include both an f# and an f natural within the same phrase. Melodies—
whether sung or performed instrumentally—that step outside the mainstream bound-
aries of major and minor may pack a larger emotional punch for the diasporic audience.
Setting the Stage for Revival in the

Homeland
Perhaps the first major cultural event in Irish history that alerted the Irish to the pos-
sibility that a genre of music (and the last generations of musicians) might disappear
was the Belfast Harp Festival in 1792. This festival brought together ten of the last sur-
viving eighteenth-century harpers, most of whom were quite elderly, to perform. The
young organist Edward Bunting was asked to transcribe the pieces performed by the
harpers, and his published collections (Bunting 2002 [1796, 1809, 1840]) still serve as a
focus of study for contemporary harpers.6 Singers also use the Bunting collection as a
source of earlier versions of song melodies. Harpers of the nineteenth century played
more than tunes intended exclusively for the harp; many of the tunes transcribed by
Bunting belong to the song repertoire of hundreds of sean-nós singers who perform
in the Irish language. This harp festival coincided with the trend of revival and pres-
ervation that swept Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and which—in
Ireland—found expression in local enthusiasm for folklore and song collecting in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The fact that Ireland was not isolated made a difference in its responses to the
European movement of Romantic Nationalism. The eighteenth-century philosopher
Johann von Herder (1744–1803) spurred a broad interest in the local-as-national. He
regarded the act of collecting and celebrating folkways as an essential key with which to
understand and engage a nation’s authenticity (Bendix 1997: 16). When it seemed that
scholars all over Europe were collecting folkloric anecdotes and incorporating tradi-
tional melodies into symphonic pieces, Ireland, too, was responding by inviting con-
tributions to folkloric collections from the entire island. Although Ireland was not yet a
formally recognized nation (having been joined with England in the United Kingdom
during the Act of Union in 1800), the material collected was unequivocally considered
Irish in content. That this movement coincided with outward migration from Ireland set
the stage for the highlighting of traditional materials in the hearts and minds of those
who left.
In the nineteenth century, Thomas Moore’s collection of songs, the Irish Melodies
(1808–1834), was one of the great standard-bearers of Irish music in the diaspora, for a
certain class of salon-goers. Engaging the searing nostalgia represented by these songs
was a form of trading in authenticity for both listeners and performers. That Moore’s
collection was so directly tied to the salon had to do with the contract with his publish-
ers, requiring that he himself perform these songs in English salons (Davis 1993: 14). The
salon—largely the domain of the feminine in terms of hosting and entertaining—ren-
dered Moore himself a feminized subaltern male and brought with that shift a sense that
the music belonged within that category as well. Moore was the template for what is now
known as the classic Irish tenor; the role captured the imagination of a particular demo-
graphic in Irish diasporic history.
The Irish tenor is—for some members of the Irish diaspora and for non-Irish listen-
ers alike—the paramount sonic representation of the Irish “civilized homeland” in that
both the image and the overall sound combine in the minds of listeners and observers.
The Irish tenor—often depicted as a formally dressed, boyish, slightly rotund man with a
high-pitched voice—sings in English with a steady, broad vibrato. The expected context
of performance is the parlor, which calls to mind one’s imaginary ancestors: at once gen-
teel, cultured, and wealthy enough to afford a home with a parlor. In some cases, those
imaginary ancestors stand in for the homeland, just as images of the homeland and its
aging or dying abandoned people stand in for the ancestors.
Many of the songs that Thomas Moore collected, edited, and altered for publication
bore clear traces of his nationalist tendencies, and, for several generations, his songs
provided a kind of popular backdrop to expressions of their sense of what the homeland
constituted. His songs have been referred to as the most popular (together with those
of American composer Stephen Foster) in the English language during the entire nine-
teenth century (Hamm 1983: 44). As such, the songs’ presence in England, Australia,
North America, and other places where Irish emigrants and their descendants gathered
established its own dominant narrative of nostalgia, survival, and romance in the con-
text of longing simultaneously for Irish independence and for a home that could wel-
come them back.
At the end of the nineteenth century, four societies were founded, each of which served
a different segment of Irish society, and each of which established connections with
members of the diaspora who saw in themselves a need for a particular type of Irishness
in relation to home. In 1879. the Land League focused attention on tenants’ rights and on
the possibility of Home Rule for the Irish. In 1884, the Gaelic Athletic Association was
606 Sean Williams
founded to support and promote Irish-only sports competitions, with an eye toward the
rejection of English sports and the development of physical strength and endurance in
preparation for the upcoming battle for independence. In 1892, the National Literary
Society aimed to develop a strong Irish literary tradition in English; its founding mem-
bers included William Butler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and John Millington Synge.
Last, founded in 1893 by Douglas Hyde, the Gaelic League (in the Irish language,
Conradh na Gaeilge) promoted the continuing use and development of the Irish lan-
guage in poetry, literature, and conversation. Although its primary purpose was to sup-
port the Irish language, it also served to engage people in debate and activities in music
and dance. To that end, Irish music and dance were also to be promoted. Contests would
be held to judge the best and most representative proponents of singing, dancing, piping,
and harping, among other elements. The Gaelic League was not without its detractors,
its internal conflicts, and its political elements. In addition, some of the earliest judges
at music and dance competitions are alleged to have not always been qualified to judge
based on local standards. Nonetheless, it is the initial goals of the Gaelic League that have
seen some of the most dramatic results in terms of musical performance in the diaspora.
The overall idea was to infuse life into Irish nationalism through the revival of its lan-
guage and its literary and performing arts. The League was mainly an urban movement
with connections to the Irish middle class, and its cultural conservatism was deeply con-
nected to the Catholic Church (Williams 2010: 70–71). One of the aims of the Gaelic
League was to foster a culture in which artistic elements that were native and local
would be supported; those that were imported or did not directly support the promulga-
tion of the language would be ignored or actively suppressed. For example, the popular
nineteenth-century custom of set dancing—which came to Ireland from France—was
judged to be a foreign influence and was largely supplanted by what the Gaelic League
referred to as céilí dancing. This form of dancing, in which multiple numbers of couples
dance in large groups or lines, was established as the primary form of social dance in
Ireland by the early twentieth century. In some cases, new dances were created and pre-
sented as traditional forms. In music, specific techniques were upheld while others were
dismissed. As Gedutis explains:
The céilí dances satisfied the revivalist cultural mores of the Gaelic League. The
Gaelic League in London first used the term céilí in reference to dance in 1897; it
felt that the word céilí—a term in use primarily in Ireland’s northern counties to
describe a friendly house visit—would impart a homey feeling and attract a crowd
to an upcoming league-sponsored dance. The dance repertoire, consisting of “Sets,
Quadrilles, and Waltzes to Irish music,” was carefully conceived that evening to cre-
ate a strong image of Irish identity.
(Gedutis 2004: 35)
The Gaelic League competitions had a significant effect on the ways in which Irish
young people in particular regarded such musical activities as singing, piping, and
harping. The first such competition (in Irish, An tOireachtas na Gaeilge) was held in
1897 in Dublin and primarily featured literary work (recitations of poetry, for example),
although song was included. As the Gaelic League branched out across Ireland and the
diaspora, local branches varied strongly in their support of the music. In the twenty-first
century, the Oireachtas competition continues to be a popular draw for singers and old
style (sean-nós) dancers. A different competition, in instrumental music, was founded
in 1896; called the Feis Ceoil, its aim was the promotion of Irish music in all its forms,
including classical, traditional, and in between, with a focus on classical-style competi-
tion. It would later shift to the point at which it included only some music that purists
might regard as traditional.
Because the principles of the Gaelic League were exported into the diaspora, their
essential conservatism and focus on the “right way” of doing things also found a ready
home among those of Irish descent who wished to stay true to what they perceived as
the authentic values and activities from home. In the early twenty-first century, in the
United States alone, more than 50,000 people attend Irish step-dance competitions each
weekend.
In Ireland, the War of Independence (1918–1921) established a foundation for an
important move toward a new wave of revitalization that had echoes in the diaspora.
The Easter Uprising of 1916, during which a coalition of activists from several national-
ist organizations declared Ireland’s independence as a republic, essentially launched the
conflict that led to independence and, later, to Ireland’s division into two nations. The
civil war that followed remains a dark chapter of Irish history, and one that still divides
families and neighbors. A large number of participants in both upheavals emigrated
during or shortly after that time, and family histories around the Irish diasporic world
include references to both male and female relatives “doing their part” to free the home-
land. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Irish at home worked with what they felt to be Irish
heritage materials to establish the new nation, and that included folklore collection.
In the late 1930s, the Irish Folklore Commission collaborated with the Irish National
Teachers’ Organization and the Department of Education to engage Irish schoolchil-
dren as folklore collectors. Known as the Schools’ Folklore Scheme, for several years
the project consisted of schoolchildren being given weekly writing assignments that
included interviewing their older relatives and neighbors about specific topics (songs,
tales, customs, etc.). The result—known as the Schools’ Manuscript Collection—was a
staggeringly large collection of half a million entries, all housed at the University College
of Dublin.7 Its growing availability to online scholars is an exciting development. As an
exercise in nation building by enlisting the new nation’s youngest members to interview
its oldest, the Schools’ Folklore Scheme ensured at least a temporary—although pro-
found—connection between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It connected
a nation of the imagination in the past with a nation of genuine political standing in the
present of 1930s Ireland.
In essence, the colonial territory of Ireland had to symbolically die so that it could
be reborn as an independent republic, and the focus on folklore collection before it
was “too late” contributed both to an understanding of the death of the colony and to
608 Sean Williams
its ultimate revival as a thriving homeland. In addition, the entire political premise of
nation building came to rest on the national acceptance of the perceived nobility of
Ireland’s rural past, as evidenced by a famous speech by Éamon de Valera, Ireland’s first
Taoiseach (head of government) in 1943:
That Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued mate-
rial wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal
comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit—a land whose country-
side would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joy-
ous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of
athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides would be forums
for the wisdom of serene old age.
(de Valera 1991 [1943]: 748)
Although this image of an idealized rural Ireland that could thrive in the twenti-
eth century through hard work, the unity of families and communities, and local
industry has been critiqued, De Valera’s speech encapsulates the ideal of a contin-
ually reviving Ireland as many in the National Literary Society had envisioned it
decades prior.
Tamara Livingston emphasizes that very often revival musics (as promoted in events
like the Belfast Harp Festival) are “social movements which strive to ‘restore’ a musical
system believed to be disappearing or completely relegated to the past for the benefit of
contemporary society” (Livingston 1999: 66). In the case of the harps, they were indeed
nearly gone, along with their performers. As part of her colonization campaign, Queen
Elizabeth I gave the order to “hang all harpers where found” and to destroy the instru-
ments (O’Boyle 1976: 10). A similar campaign had been carried out in Wales in 1568, in
which the Queen decreed that she intended to “rid Wales of numerous vagraunt and idle
persons naming theim selfes mynstrelles Rithmers and Barthes” (Suggett 2003: 157). If
the Belfast Harp Festival had not occurred before the last generation of harpers died, or
if Edward Bunting had not been available for transcription purposes, it is questionable
that a future revival of the instrument could have taken place. This event, however, not
only set the standard for future revivals but also set in place the idea that Irish perform-
ing arts were perpetually in danger—as was Ireland’s grasp on the possibility of future
independence from the English.
The Performance of Irishness in the

Diaspora
In the United States, both the minstrel show and the vaudeville stage were important
locations for the representation of Irishness, and this included blackface minstrelsy
(Ignatiev 1995: 42). Many of the minstrel and vaudeville performers were Irish immi-
grants; some wore blackface to enact stock scenes to represent African American life,
and some dressed in drag, playing the role of Bridget or Nora, the clumsy Irish maid.
Songs about freedom from British rule, weepy exhortations to remember “Ireland,
Mother Ireland,” and trade in any of the stock Irish caricatures (the sweet colleen, the
weeping mother, the weak son, or blustering father) were all part of both the minstrelsy
and vaudeville repertoires, and burnt cork on one’s face could signify Irishness almost
as easily as it signified a kind of one-step-removed blackness. In these performances,
Ireland was frequently represented as needing a savior because it was somehow close to
death. Ironically, it was an American touring minstrel show in the late nineteenth cen-
tury that brought both the banjo and the bones to the Irish traditional music instrumen-
tarium. The combination of emotional delivery, the image of the downtrodden nation,
and the need for a savior all pointed toward death. The revivalist agenda of that moment
in American (and, by extension, Irish) history, then, served the purpose of “reviving” a
nation that was not yet a nation.
As the international marketing of Irish music shifted from sheet music—and the
songs published by Thomas Moore—to the recording medium (wax cylinders and 78
rpm gramophone recordings), it was Irish immigrants to the States whose tunes were
captured, packaged, and resold both abroad and at home. The Sligo fiddlers Michael
Coleman, James Morrison, and Paddy Killoran made many recordings, and these
became quite influential, resulting not only in record sales but also in the spread of
the Sligo sound to other parts of Ireland and throughout the diaspora (Gronow and
Saunio 1998: 47). The rich connection between these (and many other) instrumental-
ists and musicians in Ireland and elsewhere marked a different approach to the sound
of Ireland. Whereas the popularity of, for example, Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies
was predicated on the popularity of song, these recordings focused attention on tunes
performed for dancing. Directly relevant to players, not just auditors, these seminal
recordings were purchased by many, despite the poor quality of the piano accompa-
niment. The excitement that they generated on both sides of the Atlantic meant that
individual Irish fiddle styles in both Ireland and North America began to shift toward
a Sligo-based sound as players sought to emulate the new “international” sound of the
three men.
The large east coast cities of North America included enough Irish immigrants and
new arrivals that a critical mass—sustainable due to its large numbers—was in place.
The standard tripartite configuration of Irish-led political wards, unions, and parishes
served to maintain some of the most outwardly visible aspects of Irish life. Dance halls
were among these visible elements of Irish social scenes; to dance at a hall was to lis-
ten to live music, see people that one might know, meet new people, and be Irish in
America. Rather than function as a planned revival site, with its implication of reviv-
ing something that has died or is close to being lost, however, the dance halls were a
primary social outlet for first- and second-generation Irish to perform their identity
in contemporary, socially acceptable ways (Gedutis 2004: 59). The music performed at
these halls included both traditional tunes and songs in English (both popular songs
610 Sean Williams
from Ireland and contemporary or recent songs popularized by the American Tin Pan
Alley composers).
Dance hall music, both in Ireland and abroad, included what, from a
twenty-first-century perspective, might be considered a remarkable combination of
musical instruments. In addition to the fiddles, button accordions, banjos, and other
stringed instruments that would later be considered traditional session instruments,
the dance hall sound included horns (trombones, trumpets, and other wind instru-
ments), a piano, and drum set (Gedutis 2004: 165). Because the music revival of the folk
bands in the 1960s and 1970s served to nearly obliterate the memories of the dance hall
scene through the bands’ popularity, enhanced by recordings and tours, the use of horn
instruments became associated with an older generation of performers and listeners.
The American east coast was also a place in which the vestiges of vaudeville survived
in the form of the Irish family band. Tight-knit family groups, such as the McNulty
Family, would tour major cities and perform (McGraw 2010: 451). The fact that these
were members of the same family allowed men and women to appear together onstage
and in recordings. In addition, the tours would allow—just as later tours by Irish super-
groups allowed—those of Irish descent and of non-Irish descent alike to know some-
thing of what it meant to be Irish by seeing its representation onstage.
The organization that has continually fostered the development of traditional
music through competition and festivals is Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (Gathering
of Musicians of Ireland), which founded the Fleadh Cheoil—an annual festival of tra-
ditional Irish music—in 1951. It has expanded into many local branches, including
throughout the diaspora, and most branches are connected to the home organization
through shared values and the sponsorship of competitions and festivals. The strength of
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann has served to reinforce an inherent conservatism through
competition. However, the dramatic expansion of which musical instruments may enter
into competition gives the lie to the outward appearance of conservatism; instruments
as diverse as piano, harmonica, and bouzouki are all a welcome part of the annual fleadh
(festival). The ideals of Comhaltas also continue to be disseminated through the mainte-
nance of a website carrying audio and video recordings, among other resources (http://
www.comhaltas.ie). The fact that Comhaltas continues to be relevant, decades after its
founding, through its festival and competition sponsorship and the ready accessibility
of materials on its website, reveals it to be capable of change in ways that some of the
generation-specific organizations and genres may not have been.
After decades of continued out-migration—particularly by Ireland’s young peo-
ple—and the economic gloom that accompanied that migration, the 1960s saw the first
steps of an economic revival in Ireland. The newest wave of folk song revival that was
gathering pace in England—and that included numerous Irish performers, such as the
sean-nós singer Joe Heaney of Connemara—then spread to North America and other
diasporic regions. The Clancy Brothers initially came to the United States to find work in
acting but quickly discovered the market for their particular brand of staged folk song.
They, in turn, paved the way for other Irish musicians to be welcomed abroad, and tours
of Irish performers (especially singers or instrumentalists whose performances included
songs) characterized much of the late 1960s and 1970s. The Dubliners—who got their
start in Dublin’s Abbey Tavern—offered a more politically engaged type of sound with
a rougher edge to it, and they, too, toured extensively. For many years, the two groups
connected with international enthusiasts of the folk song revival and focused audience
attention primarily on song, particularly songs in the English language. As audience
members sang along, learned the songs and guitar chords themselves, and passed the
songs among themselves, the Irish songs began to take on a life of their own among sing-
ers with no Irish heritage connection at all.
One of the most remarkable developments to occur during the 1960s and 1970s was
the tremendous upswing in what are sometimes referred to as “revival groups.” In 1963,
a group was formed from an ad hoc collection of players and became known as The
Chieftains. Later credited with being Ireland’s first supergroup, The Chieftains trav-
eled all over the world, inviting local musicians to perform with them and making doz-
ens of recordings. They were largely responsible for the initial contact of the non-Irish
world with careful arrangements of traditional instrumental tunes and songs. Other
Irish groups formed during this time, such as Sweeney’s Men, Planxty, The Bothy Band,
and Dé Danann, were responsible for thousands of musicians around the world—both
of Irish descent and of other heritages—taking up the fiddle, uilleann pipes, and other
instruments. These supergroups of the 1960s and 1970s offered a sharp contrast to the
Irish tenors and céilí bands of the 1930s and 1940s, appealing to a new generation of
musicians and listeners who themselves had been raised largely on rock’n’roll. The qual-
ity of the recordings in particular—in contrast with the inept piano accompaniment on
the early Sligo fiddler recordings—led not only to strong record sales but also to the
appearance of these specific arrangements at music sessions. These recordings and
bands were therefore particularly influential in setting the standard for the generation of
diasporic musicians born in the 1950s and 1960s.
The growing popularity of all things Irish—as a result of media attention, “heritage
films” (e.g., The Dead [1987], The Field [1990], The Secret of Roan Inish [1994]), and the
relative ease of traveling to Ireland from points abroad—led to the increasing establish-
ment of places in the diaspora for Irish music sessions to occur. Very often, the sessions
would involve several melody players (on fiddle, accordion, uilleann pipes, and banjos),
often with an accompanying instrument like a guitar, playing a collection of jigs, reels,
hornpipes, slides, and polkas in heterophonic style. (Songs were comparatively rare.)
The increasing presence of Irish musicians at these diasporic sessions—because they live
in the diaspora themselves, having been born in Ireland—has led to the creation of Irish
music groups with their membership drawn from potentially anywhere in the world.
The growing popularity of Irish music among Irish Americans and others who have
attached themselves to Irish culture as an “ethnic option” (see Waters 1990: 123) has
led to an increased interest in festivals celebrating Irish culture. In North America, the
four-day Milwaukee Irish Festival, established in 1981 and held every August, draws
thousands of people, as do dozens of other Irish festivals in nearly every province of
Canada and every state in the United States. Some of these are held in conjunction
with St. Patrick’s Day, but others (like the Milwaukee Irish Fest) occur in the summer.
612 Sean Williams
In Australia, Irish-themed festivals began appearing in the 1990s. The Koroit Festival
began in 1997, with the town of Koroit billing itself as “Australia’s greatest Irish town”;
smaller festivals occur in Jindabyne, Tullamore, and Gundagai. In the United Kingdom,
dozens of Irish-themed organizations host concerts and festivals.
North American adult music camps devoted to Irish music first appeared in the 1980s,
increasing significantly in number from the 1990s. Among these are the Friday Harbor
Irish Music Camp, the Augusta Heritage Irish/Celtic Week, the Swannanoa Gathering
Celtic Week, and the Catskills Irish Arts Week. At these camps, usually lasting several
days to a week, students participate in intensive classes and workshops with (mostly)
Irish and Irish-American musicians. Like the festivals, these camps have served to dra-
matically enhance the connections between members of the North American diaspora
and Irish musicians. Since the attendees have many opportunities to communicate
with, play with, and study with Irish musicians, many of the features that character-
ized older connections between musicians and listeners of the diaspora in the past have
been enhanced. In addition, the fluid nature of contemporary teaching and learning has
served to place the musicians of the diaspora and the musicians of Ireland on a much
more equal footing; musicians from either place may be considered equally skilled.
Another phenomenon of the 1990s was the stage show Riverdance, which began as a
seven-minute intermission performance during the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest. Irish
American dancers Michael Flatley and Jean Butler (in combination with thunderous
drumming and newly composed music) impressed audiences with a style of Irish dance
that moved beyond traditional step dancing and focused attention on Irish performing
arts in ways that had not yet been encountered either at home or abroad. The worldwide
success of Riverdance was aided by multiple touring groups (three touring simultane-
ously); these included very large dance ensembles whose members, for the first time in
Irish history, had steady employment performing a version of traditional dance. The show
also succeeded in its re-imagining of the Irish body for a multigenerational audience.
Several elements made Riverdance different from other forms of Irish dance and music.
Musically, the compositions of Bill Whelan drew freely from a variety of traditions, includ-
ing familiar jigs and reels, but also flamenco, Russian folk music, newly composed choral
songs, and African American gospel (Carby 2001: 325–349). It was the first fully staged
show that acknowledged Ireland’s musical and other connections with non-Irish tradi-
tions and forms. It also included connections to the diaspora through the enactment of
an American Wake and a departure scene. The initial lead dancer, Michael Flatley, raised
his arms away from his sides, smiled at the audience, and emphasized his chest through
the use of costuming and arm movement. The shocking contrast between this stance and
the rigid, downward-pointing arms and straight body of dancers favored by the Gaelic
League was the subject of conversations, reviews, and internet debates. Rows of dancers
onstage, none of whom wore the heavy, appliquéd dress or tightly curled wigs featured in
contemporary Irish-American step dance competitions, were likewise a revelation.8
This was Irish dance as it had never been seen before: an unashamedly spectacular
display which, for once, accepted the sexual undertones of the dance and reveled in
its power. The sound was magnified to a volcanic rumble by the combined power of
the dancers’ feet. . . . The result was electrifying. Ireland was agog. The familiar had
been utterly transformed.
(Brennan 1999: 155)
Riverdance received both praise and criticism from audience members and scholars,
and academic essays explored the simultaneous explosion of its popularity and the
economic upswing now known as the Celtic Tiger (see, e.g., Lin 2010). It reframed the
Irish as international, sexy, and cutting edge. In doing so, it became emblematic to many
members of the Irish diaspora of how cosmopolitan and contemporary this new type of
performance could be.
The final major element of this opening up of Ireland was the direct acknowledgment of
the presence and importance of the diaspora by Ireland’s seventh president, Mary Robinson,
during her inauguration in 1990: “There are over seventy million people living on this globe
who claim Irish descent. I will be proud to represent them” (Harris 1999: 16). Robinson’s
explicit references to the diaspora throughout her presidency signaled a shift in the ways
in which both the Irish and the Irish-descended people abroad regarded the connection
between themselves. In her famous 1995 address to the Irish Oireachtas (governing body)
titled “Cherishing the Irish Diaspora: On a Matter of Public Importance,” she noted: “The
men and women of our diaspora represent not simply a series of departures and losses. They
remain, even while absent, a precious reflection of our own growth and change, a precious
reminder of the many strands of identity which compose our story.”9 Irish cultural national-
ism had shifted during the 1990s to include, rather than exclude, the extended diaspora.
Irish and Irish-diaspora punk bands such as Flogging Molly (Los Angeles), the Saints
(Brisbane), Dropkick Murphys (Boston), the Pogues (London), and many others have
performed almost exclusively outside of Ireland. Their popularity among the teen and
college-age set abroad has set up a kind of secondary diaspora in which audience members
turn to diasporic musicians (the punk bands) for their connection to Ireland. Common
themes in Irish punk lyrics include working-class issues, nationalism, and Irish and Irish
American history; musical elements include the infusion of traditional Irish instruments
and forms (jigs, reels) among the standard punk instruments of guitar, bass, and drums.
What makes Irish punk part of the musical revival scene is twofold. First, it appeals to a
generation of working-class people for whom the possibility of travel to Ireland is remote
at best—hence their reliance on a secondary connection. Second, some of the songs—such
as the Pogues’ “The Sick Bed of Cú Chulainn”—refer directly to events from Irish history or
mythology and combine them with contemporary events, building the same connection
that previous musical revival groups had built with listeners’ parents and grandparents.
The mid-1990s marked a dramatic change in the nature of relations between Ireland
and its diaspora: use of the internet became widespread on both sides; the economic
powerhouse referred to as the Celtic Tiger dominated the media and presented a dra-
matically different image of Irishness to the diaspora and the rest of the world; large
numbers of Irish people and their descendents began moving back to Ireland in
response to economic opportunities at home and moribund conditions abroad; Ireland’s
614 Sean Williams
improved economy led to an upswing in tours by Irish musical groups, including Solas,
Lúnasa, Danú, Dervish, and Altan, which led to increased sales of CDs; and the stage
show Riverdance opened. Each of these elements also signified a dramatic change in
the mechanisms of musical revival. In particular, the increased ability to communicate
instantly and effectively with musicians and family members in Ireland from anywhere
in the (internet-capable) world changed the entire dynamic of Irish/diasporic relations
into one that was immediate, vibrant, and up-to-date.
The opening of parts of Ireland and the rest of the English-speaking world to the inter-
net quickly led to the development of international themed discussion groups, inter-
net bulletin boards, and listservs. Because of the relatively anonymous nature of these
internet groups, within a comparatively short time, the notions of authenticity, authority,
and correct performance practice became a topic of continuous and sometimes vitriolic
debate. At the same time, musicians of the generation inspired by the revival groups of the
1970s were able to connect with a number of like-minded people, make new connections,
set up their own bands, and tour in the diaspora, as well as making pilgrimages “home”
for infusions of experience. However, the explosion of these new forms of international
connections meant that one could have no Irish blood at all and still long for “home.”
What does it mean when a listener with no familial connection at all to the Irish
homeland has chosen to become a member of the Irish diaspora? In Japan, for exam-
ple, it is common to join a group of enthusiasts in activities supporting and promoting
a particular type of music or dance. For those Japanese who have chosen to join the
Irish diaspora through their enjoyment of Irish music and dance, the historical con-
nection between Irish songs and the songs disseminated through the newly emergent
post-Meiji national school system in nineteenth-century Japan created a sonic template
that continues to link the two disparate nations. By engaging in the creation of nostalgia
for a homeland that was never theirs, the Japanese simultaneously create community
through their shared emotional reactions to Irish music (Williams 2006: 110), which are,
in turn, bound up in their own history of loss and change.
The development of social networking sites such as Facebook has connected Irish and
diasporic musicians and their followers across the globe in ways that could not have been
anticipated even in the Celtic Tiger/Riverdance days of the 1990s. That musicians and danc-
ers who themselves may or may not be of Irish descent make recordings and videos, give
lessons in Irish music and dance, and travel to and from Ireland regularly is a testimony to
the homeland’s accessibility to the diaspora and the diaspora’s accessibility to the homeland.
The result of this dramatic increase of connection and communication, then, has been the
melding of a quite mobile and informed Irish population with a diaspora that is simultane-
ously fluid, of mixed heritage, and of multiple generations and levels of contact with “home.”
Dying to Be Reborn
Despite the fact that the Irish and their descendents have traveled everywhere, the sheer
size of North America has led to the invention of almost a secondary homeland for the
Irish in the diaspora. The word “America” might even be said to stand in not only for the
United States and Canada, but also for the sense of an Ireland that stretches all the way
across the globe. As O’Toole argues:
America and Ireland represent not opposites, not a dialogue of modernity and tra-
dition, but a continual intertwining in which far from Ireland being the past and
America being the future, America can constitute Ireland’s past and Ireland can
invent America’s future. When we deal with this relationship, we are dealing not with
something final and closed, but with something obsessive, repetitive, continually
unfinished, all the time renewing itself in old ways.
(O’Toole 1997: 33)
Ireland has such a long history of emigration that much has been made of the ways in
which families are scattered and relations are counted off in Australia, America (either
the U.S. or Canada), New Zealand, Glasgow, London, and elsewhere. These are all the
famous locations of the Irish diaspora. However, Irish people also live and perform
music in St. Petersburg, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto, and Bangkok. These places,
too, are an essential part of the diaspora. What looks at first like a network of places in
which English is the first and only language shifts with consideration into a network of
Irish people who work and play abroad, but who frequently return home. For the people
whose ancestors left Ireland well over a century ago, Ireland remains tantalizingly within
reach, particularly in comparison to its accessibility in the nineteenth century. We might
speak of the Irish in America, but perhaps it is more appropriate to think of Ireland as a
location on land and in the mind.
The interconnectedness of Ireland and “America,” in its global sense, has been fos-
tered by their shared pasts as well as by their two-directional musical links over several
centuries (Wells and Sommers-Smith 2010: 395). Even though it may be helpful in some
surface-level ways to think of Ireland as remaining in the rural past and the diaspora as
hovering in the urban future, such a dichotomy is inaccurate. In many cases, musical
developments have happened almost simultaneously. Consider the shipment of Sligo
fiddler recordings back to Ireland, the shifting of Irish-American hits (1912’s “When
Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” for example) from American parlors to Irish musical contexts,
and the relatively new development of the “country Irish” genre: original country songs
in the style of Nashville songwriters, but sung in the Irish language. Neither Ireland nor
the diaspora has the upper hand on who is influencing whom.
The moving target of generational authenticities has shifted auditory attention—
not only of Irish emigrants but also of non-Irish people—through an array of signify-
ing sounds in the diaspora over time. From creative combinations of ensembles to the
shifting identities of audience members, Irish and diasporic identities have engaged in
a dynamic relationship for several hundred years. The issue of music revivals connects
directly to Irish and diasporic considerations of death and loss; however, most contem-
porary Irish and diasporic musicians might argue that Irish music never died and there-
fore doesn’t need a revival. Note that the presupposition of the emigrant traveling west
to meet his or her fate alone no longer applies. That the emigrants and their descendents
616 Sean Williams
“died” in the diaspora and kept memories of an aging and/or a dying Ireland fresh in
their minds and their song lyrics belies the fact that emigrants represent a healthy,
vibrant interchange with a living homeland. In the process of connecting and returning
in the twenty-first century, they find that Ireland continues to move forward. The vaude-
ville singers, dance tune fiddlers, family bands, balladeers, supergroups, and punks that
have piqued the interest and nostalgic needs of each diasporic generation have in turn
led to mutual cycles of popularity, norms of performance standards, and equally influ-
ential exchange. The diaspora has become the world of the Irish.
Notes
1. Although contemporary diasporic people of Irish heritage do not always identify specifi-
cally as Catholic—and many do not self-identify as adhering to any particular religious
practice—the Ireland of the imagination among the diasporic Irish tends to be Catholic.
The Catholicism of the homeland does not appear to faze many members of the diaspora,
whether Protestant, atheist, or simply religiously unaffiliated.
2. Among those who could have claimed Irish citizenship are Che Guevara and
Muhammad Ali.
3. All terminology surrounding the Famine is contested. See, for example, “Famine
Memories,” in Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and
Memory (Ó Gráda 1999: 194–222), and “Singing the Famine,” in Bright Star of the West: Joe
Heaney, Irish Song-Man (Williams and Ó Laoire 2011: 71–88).
4. Breandán Ó Madagáin offers a vivid and interesting discussion of the act of “keen-
ing”—ritualized mourning—and its powerful impact on the community (Ó Madagáin
2005: 81–88).
5. It is not unusual for a diasporic Irish session band to be asked to “play something Irish,”
by which the person making the request means that they hope for a jig, ideally “The Irish
Washerwoman.”
6. June Skinner Sawyers offers some specifics of who attended the Harp Festival in her book
Celtic Music: A Complete Guide (Sawyers 2000: 33).
7. Some of this material has been digitized and is available through the Irish Virtual Research
Library and Archive (http://ivrla.ucd.ie/ivrla/home).
8. The use of leather pants, among other costuming choices in Riverdance, has been referred
to in various ways as being “not your grandparents’ dancewear.”
9. See http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~irlker/diaspora.html, accessed March 30, 2012.
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C HA P T E R 28
R E V I V I N G T H E R E LU C TA N T
A RT O F I R A N IA N DA N C E I N
IRAN AND IN THE
A M E R I C A N D IA S P O R A
A N T HON Y SHAY
In this chapter, I look at the various ways in which different individuals—Iranians,

Iranian immigrants in the West, Americans, and other non-Iranians—participated in
several revival Iranian dance movements, beginning in the 1930s and continuing into
the twenty-first century. The new interest in dance that began in this period coincided
with a period of incipient modernity and its need to find ways in which to construct
a modern national identity. As increasing numbers of Iranians made their way to the
West, first as students and ultimately as immigrants and refugees, they discovered that
dance as a representational field dovetailed with their need to forge an ethnic identity
as Iranians both inside and outside of Iran. Dance, which once constituted a scandal
when performed in public, became a new, often glamorous vehicle with which to bur-
nish Iranian identities to new publics.
I open the chapter by discussing the problematic terms “revival” and “revivalist”
and by explaining the theoretical and conceptual frameworks I employ to frame
my topic. I then provide a brief overview of the historical and cultural context for
traditional dance forms in Iran before moving on to describe the creation of new
hybrid forms in early twentieth-century Iran and dance performances in both Iran
and the diaspora. Finally, I describe and analyze the three broad modes of reviv-
alist dance creation and performance throughout the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries.
Reviving the Reluctant Art of Iranian Dance 619
What Is Revival Dance in an

Iranian Context?
I characterize the use of the term “revival dance” in the context of this chapter as “unfor-
tunate” because the stagings of Iranian dance that occur in the diaspora, and those
which occurred before the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran itself, are not, strictly speak-
ing, revivals of a tradition. The traditions themselves are very much alive. Peasants and
tribesmen continue to perform their dances, and urban Iranians perform solo impro-
vised dance both in Iran (albeit clandestinely) and in the diaspora, as evidenced by inter-
net videos on YouTube. Thus, the use of the term “revivalist” addresses the performers of
those choreographic forms that are derived from the bricolage of regional folk dances,
solo improvised dance performed in social gatherings, the movements of former pro-
fessional dancers, and Western ballet. The dances performed in public contexts, often
labeled Persian classical or folk dance, such as those seen in dance concerts and festival
settings in Europe and the United States, are often individual creations and constitute, in
Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) terms, “invented traditions.”
Only half of the population of Iran can be considered Persian, if by “Persian” we mean
an individual whose mother tongue is Persian (Farsi). There exists no dance that is spe-
cific only to that ethnolinguistic group. Although a Persian classical music tradition
exists for which the vocal portions are sung in Persian, no analogous classical dance
tradition exists (see Ameri 2003).
The term “revival” is saturated with too many meanings and contexts, most of which
may seem inappropriate to the phenomena that many scholars characterize with this
term. Basically, the term “revivalist” dancer or musician, as used especially by folklorists
and ethnomusicologists, refers to any outsider performing music or dances not of their
own culture; that is, someone who is not a native performer to the tradition. In other
words, it is a euphemism used to refer to performances and individuals that the speaker
considers “impure” and inauthentic.
Most individuals, including many scholars outside of folklore and ethnomusicology,
understand the meaning of “revival” in either of two ways. First, they may understand
the term “revival” as it is used to describe movements like the great “religious revival”
that occurred in the United States in the nineteenth century. Or, second, they may
understand “revival” as it is used in the arts and popular culture: for example, “reviv-
ing” a work by Vivaldi that has fallen out of the repertoire or staging a “revival” of The
Sound of Music. These acts revive a work that has laid dormant for a period, and, usually,
an attempt is made either to perform the work in the same way that it was performed
earlier or else to stage a modern reinterpretation of the work. However, in the parlance
of folklorists and ethnomusicologists, the term “revivalist” applies to “individuals who
celebrated traditions not their own” (Jackson 1993: 73). Furthermore, in matters of pub-
lic funding for folk and traditional dance and music (in the United States, at least), the
620 Anthony Shay
presence of revivalist performers constitutes grounds for denying funding to these per-
formers who are not of “pure blood.” (See Nooshin, c hapter 13 in this volume.)
The discourse among folklorists and ethnomusicologists, although moderat-
ing recently and consequently growing less strident (Rosenberg 1993), almost always
involves issues of ethnicity, authenticity, romanticism, and appropriation. Having lived a
life as a “revivalist”—that is, as a professional choreographer and dancer performing, for
more than fifty years, dances that are not native to my Anglo-American background—
I know from personal experience that this label—“revivalist”—is not a neutral one. It
is often accompanied by a smug expression of superiority from many purist folklorists
and ethnomusicologists who seem to have forgotten that they often came to their cho-
sen field through their own revivalist performances. Ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon,
who has served as a panelist on the National Endowment for the Arts Folk Arts panel,
stated: “Folk Arts did not fund revivalists. Some panel members felt that the presence of
revivalists tainted the project” (1992: 220). Titon found it ironic that, while serving as a
panelist, he often worked with “mostly lapsed revivalists” (1992: 222).
Folklorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett writes even more forcefully in describing
the funding of folk artists, their participation in folk festivals, and the rejection of reviv-
alist artists:
Underlying much celebratory diversity is an affirmative racialism coded in the terms

of culture. It reveals itself in the privileging of origins . . . and authenticity, especially
when linked to primordial claims.
(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994: 236–237)
This “racialism” results, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett indicates, in separating the pure from

the impure: “Quivering with issues of authenticity and iconicity, these events tend to
make a clear distinction between doers and watchers. Mainstream Americans are the
designated watchers and ‘ethnics’ and ‘natives’ are the doers” (1991: 424).
Yet another notion of “revival” is bound up in the idea that any dance or genre of
music that is performed outside of its original context of village or tribal wedding or cel-
ebration, even if by native performers, becomes “revivalistic” because of the alterations
required by a specific performance. And although many revivalist individuals have, not
infrequently, developed an original and professional level of artistry within a tradition
in which they were not born but in which they have participated for most of their lives,
there is the suggestion that they can never achieve what a native performer can.
The term “revivalist,” then, covers far too much scholarly territory. I write here as an
unreconstructed and unrepentant revivalist artist, and I combine these different under-
standings of “revival” for the purposes of this chapter.
If we understand the phenomenon of revival dance traditions as being those perfor-
mances that anyone other than a native to a particular tradition in his or her own normal
cultural context performs, we can see that several layers exist. In this tradition, I would
include those Iranian peasants and tribesmen performing regional folk dances in festi-
val settings (in which the context is significantly altered from the normal circumstances
in which they spontaneously perform their native dances), as well as dancers in the pro-
fessional urban genres of so-called Persian classical dance. Thus, “revival” Iranian dance
in its presentational form constitutes several layers; here, I use the term “revival dance”
to refer to dance performances that occur in any decontextualized context outside of
dance in the field.
I identify three periods in which these revivalist presentational styles may be seen
to fall: (1) the beginnings of the so-called national dance style from the late 1920s
until the late 1950s, (2) the state folk dance ensemble model period of 1958–1990, and
(3) what I call the “new vision” period (a term I borrow from Iranian choreographer
Jamal) that began in the 1990s. It is important to stress that not only do the three
periods overlap but that all three styles continue as modes of presentation into the
twenty-first century.
Theories, Concepts, and Viewpoints
To analyze and describe revivalist Iranian dance, I use five conceptual approaches. First,
anthropologist David M. Guss, following Richard Handler (1988), provides a concept
of “cultural objectification,” one of the results of which I use to illuminate aspects of the
staged dance productions analyzed in this chapter:
The aesthetic makeover required in order to translate these forms into national
spectacles shares many features cross-culturally. The privileging of the visual,
accomplished through colorful costumes and dramatic choreography, com-
bines with technical excellence and virtuosity to present a cheerful, unceas-
ingly optimistic world. This increased theatricalization abjures any mention of
true historical conditions and replaces them with the staged creation of a mythic
detemporalized past.
(Guss 2000: 14)
Here, Guss encapsulates the way in which technical aspects of staged performances—of
all three styles but especially the first two—produce the kind of choreographic and stag-
ing strategies used in the production of Iranian dance by revival performers and chore-
ographers, both Iranian and non-Iranian, to achieve the effects and results described.
Second, Jane C. Desmond offers insight into the crucial way in which dance and other
movement systems not only reflect but are constitutive of ethnicity and identity:
So ubiquitous, so “naturalized” as to be nearly unnoticed as a symbolic system,

movement is a primary not secondary social “text”. . .. Its articulation signals group
affiliation and group differences. Movement serves as a marker for the production of
gender, racial, ethnic, class, and national identities.
(Desmond 1997: 31)
622 Anthony Shay
The Iranian government during the Pahlavi years grasped this concept and used dance
as a vehicle to construct Iranian national identity and to cultivate nationalist emotions
(Meftahi 2007).
Third, because Iranians regard the public performance of dance, historically asso-
ciated with prostitution and homosexuality, with considerable ambiguity, I utilize my
concept of “choreophobia” from an earlier study (Shay 1999) to theorize how Iranians
and others turned to dance as a means of creating a vehicle of cultural representation.
I show how choreophobia haunts these performances (Shay 1999: 1, 123–150). Thus,
I refer to dance as the “reluctant art” because many Iranians regard it in a negative light
and do not consider it as proper behavior, much less an art form.
Fourth, I use the concept of “parallel traditions” that I developed in an earlier study
(Shay 2002a). Because there are multiple ways in which Iranian dance is presented in a
staged fashion, it is necessary to separate the threads of this intricate garment to see its
cultural, aesthetic, and social structure. We may distinguish, then, dances performed
by villagers and tribal people in the Iranian world (what Theresa J. Buckland [1999] has
termed “dance in the field”) from a wide variety of other manifestations, including per-
formances by tribal groups on public stages in Tehran and regional cities; performances
by Armenian Iranians who began teaching dance in Western-style classes and recit-
als; so-called national dance performances or stagings created for the former Pahlavi
state-supported national dance companies (the Mahalli Dancers and National Folklore
Organization); performances by Iranian students in the United States and other coun-
tries; performances in tourist settings; performances for weddings and other celebra-
tory occasions in the Iranian diaspora; and performances by non-Iranians of various
Iranian dance genres. These constitute only a suggestive list of possible layers.
In the past, many scholars have been reluctant to engage with anything but “authen-
tic” dance in the field, regarding all else as “fakelore.” Dance ethnographers Georgiana
Gore and Maria Koutsouba encapsulate this attitude: “Any representation of traditional
dance outside its customary context is not more than ‘imitation’ and may be seen as an
artificial and adulterated version of the ‘original’ ” (1992: 104). To fruitfully analyze and
theorize dance contexts, apart from dance in the field, I created the concept of parallel
traditions (Shay 2002a) to avoid invidious comparisons between the various layers and
without making elaborate scholarly excuses to undertake the study of different dance
genres. As artificial, slick, or cheesy as some of these layers may appear, each is worthy
of study because each layer contains social and political messages regarding ethnicity,
class, and gender, and each raises deeply complex issues of authenticity, appropriation,
and ownership. In addition, the individuals who spend hours perfecting their perfor-
mances generally believe deeply in the choreographic activities in which they partici-
pate and thus endow these performances with a kind of authenticity.
Fifth, and finally, I utilize Edward Said’s (1978) concept of orientalism From the outset
of the creation of a new Iranian dance genre (Iran’s “national dance”), the term “oriental-
ism” was most often used as a synonym for “character dance” in the classical ballet classes
in which it was taught and performed from the late 1920s. Orientalist images flooded
those performances and still characterize many contemporary performances (Shay
1999: 156–170). Character or national dances combined classical ballet vocabulary with

elements of folk or urban dances of a particular country, and they were popular because
they responded to the nationalism that was spreading throughout Central and Eastern
Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth
century. The degree to which actual folk and urban elements are utilized alongside classi-
cal Western ballet vocabulary varies a great deal in individual performances and choreog-
raphies. Because most choreographers, Iranian and non-Iranian, claim that their work is
authentic and true to the dances in the field, it is important that we look briefly at dance in
the field. First, however, I will contextualize these parallel traditions by providing historical
and cultural background for the changing uses, meanings, and practices of Iranian dance.
Historical and Cultural Background
The dance traditions found in Iran reflect its ethnic diversity. These dances are also
found in neighboring jurisdictions such as Iraqi and Turkish Kurdistan, the Republic
of Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Turkmenia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, which
together form a larger Iranian world in cultural and historical terms, sometimes referred
to as the “Persianate.” There are two major choreographic traditions in Iran: solo impro-
vised dance, which is associated primarily with urban areas but is also found in specific
movement traditions in rural districts, and regional folk dances, which are largely group
dances, although they may occasionally be performed as solos and which are stylisti-
cally specific to certain ethnic groups or geographic areas.
Historically, Iran has had a long history of multiethnic, multilingual, and religious
diversity, and many of the populations, such as the Arabs, Kurds, Baluchis, Turkmen,
and Azerbaijanis of Iran, constitute parts of ethnic and linguistic groups that extend well
beyond the political borders of the contemporary Iranian state into neighboring states.
Iranians lived under three different regimes during the twentieth century: the Qajar
dynasty (1785–1925), the Pahlavi regime (1925–1979), and the Islamic Republic (1980– ).
Each of these regimes held a different stance toward the phenomena of both professional
and private dance performances.
During the Qajar period, dancing boys and women constituted part of profes-
sional entertainment groups known as motrebs. These were large and small groups,
urban-based and ambulatory. The companies during this period were frequently all
male or all female. Motrebs played music, danced, and acted, among other performance
expressions. To this day, the word motreb constitutes an insult to performers, espe-
cially serious musicians. Most individuals in Iranian society regarded public dancers
of both sexes as prostitutes, and these performers occupied the lowest possible social
rung. Nevertheless, their performances permeated all classes of society, including the
court, and their presence was regarded as de rigueur for major celebrations and happy
occasions, such as weddings. In addition, dance constituted an important aspect of
urban women’s social lives, in which they danced, acted, and sang theatrical playlets to
624 Anthony Shay
entertain themselves in the privacy of the women’s quarters, well into the Pahlavi period
(‘Enjavi-Shirazi 1972; Shay 1995b, 1999).
The two Pahlavi sovereignties, but especially that of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi,
turned to a new dance genre—(mis)named “national dance”—that was practiced
throughout the 1930s and beyond and that served, alongside regional folk dances per-
formed in concert format, to build a sense of Iranian nationalism among the multieth-
nic population and to represent Iran culturally at international events such as world fairs
and concert tours (Meftahi 2007).
One of the first acts of the Islamic Republic was to prohibit dance in all forms,
although the ban on folk dance was later lifted. Dancing professionally ended, and,
even into the new millennium, dancing solo improvised dance in private carried the
potential for harsh punishment if discovered. Because of the ban, which continues into
the twenty-first century, I argue that solo improvised dance now constitutes a form of
resistance to the Islamic regime because many Iranians continue to dance in secret, as
well as to use solo improvised dance as a means of taunting the regime in public spaces
(Mahdavi 2009; Shay 1999, 2008b).
Dance in Iran
If one thinks of folklore as denoting “expressive forms, processes, and behaviors (1) that
we customarily learn, teach, and utilize or display during face-to-face interactions,
and (2) that we judge to be traditional” (Georges and Jones 1995: 1), then both of these
choreographic traditions, regional folk dances and urban solo improvised dance, must
be considered as forms of folklore since they are both “traditional” and overwhelm-
ingly learned in “face-to-face interactions” rather than in formal educational settings,
although diasporic Iranians attend classes in growing numbers to learn to dance.
Regional Folk Dances
Throughout Iran, dancing constitutes an appropriate form of expression for celebratory
events such as weddings and, less often, circumcision ceremonies. Dance is never a part
of religious observances, a point that cannot be overemphasized in an Islamic context.
This is a crucial observation because many of the Shi’ia religious rites are character-
ized by specific movement systems that must not, in an Islamic context, be confused
with dance (Shay 1995a, 1999). In rural areas, regional folk dances, which are frequently
performed in large groups, are generally performed out of doors due to the small size
of houses (see Figure 28.1). For full descriptions of regional folk dances, see Hamada
(1978), Hasanov (1988), Shay (2002b), and Shay and Sellers-Young (2005: 5).1
In addition to celebratory occasions, during the Pahlavi period, young dancers
in Bojnurd, a town in Eastern Iran, also formed amateur performance groups that
FIGURE 28.1 “Raqs-E Chupi” Qashqa’i folk dance. Choreographed by Anthony Shay. Photo
by Darren Young, Los Angeles, 1978. Courtesy of the AVAZ International Dance Theatre.
appeared on national holidays or other special occasions. These dancers only performed
the dances of their region and specific ethnic group. As is common in the more familiar
festival circuits of Eastern Europe, the dancers would arrange the order and length of the
dances and rehearse them for festival appearances in front of audiences in a formal set-
ting, but they did not choreograph the dances in the manner of state-supported profes-
sional folk dance ensembles, a practice that thus constitutes a separate parallel tradition
(Hamada 1978: 58).
I saw village groups that appeared in a series of exhibitions held at the Golestan Palace
in Tehran during the Pahlavi era, in which the arts and crafts—including dancing and
music—and folk arts of the various provinces were displayed to introduce the capital’s
population to the expressive cultures of the villages and tribes of Iran. In addition, vari-
ety television shows, like those hosted by Feridun Farrokhzad and Parviz Gharib-Afshar,
also frequently hosted performances by rural dancers. These performances also consti-
tute a parallel tradition because, although the peasants and tribesmen who appeared in
these performances were the authentic inhabitants of their respective areas, perform-
ing their own dances, the circumstances were very different: They rehearsed for these
performances rather than performing spontaneously, the performances were timed,
they were oriented toward an audience, the performance space was restricted, the danc-
ers were all young, and they used the finest dancers of their respective regions. Thus,
these performances were already removed from dance in the field in a number of ways
that constitute a different parallel layer. And, although these performances are certainly
626 Anthony Shay
closer to dance in the field than a performance by a state-supported ensemble, they are,
nevertheless, qualitatively distinct.
Urban Solo Improvised Dance

Although examples of solo improvised dancing abound in rural areas such as the Persian
Gulf, tribal regions, and the Caspian Sea provinces, these dance genres exhibit specific
regional styles, with emphasis placed on the repetition of specific movements such as
the twirling of kerchiefs in the dances of Fars or the pelvic and shoulder shimmies of the
Persian Gulf or Gilan. The urban solo improvised dance genre, sometimes referred to
as majlesi (meaning party or social gathering, after its most common venue of perfor-
mance) in its domestic form, derives its aesthetic impulses from different sources: the
visual world of the Iranian city with its rich images of geometric forms, and improvisa-
tion, which underlies all forms of Iranian cultural expression from calligraphy to story-
telling, architecture to music (Shay 1999).
Like the visual arts, dance is linked to geometry and is, in fact, an embodied mani-
festation of the geometry found in the calligraphy, architecture, and architectural
decoration that permeate urban life (Hill and Grabar 1964; Pope 1964–1965a,b; Shay
1997). Like theater and music, as well as the visual arts, as shown by Gülru Necipoglu’s
magisterial study (1995) of architectural scrolls (tumar), improvisation is a key ele-
ment in the production of dance as well as calligraphy, architecture, Islamic deco-
ration, and music. All of these forms, visual and performing arts, depend on the
learning and assimilating of brief choreographic, visual, or musical motifs; the art-
ist then combines and recombines these elements to create new and fresh composi-
tions—architectural, decorative, musical, or choreographic. Hill and Grabar propose
that “[t]‌he more significant facts about the geometric units used seem . . . to be first,
their constant mobility in time and space” (1964: 80–81). It is this flowing move-
ment that characterizes all of the arts, and above all it is embodied in solo improvised
dance. This element of improvisation maintains the freshness of expression in the
most gifted performers. (For descriptions of solo improvised dance, see Ameri 2003
and Shay 1999.)
Choreophobic Environment
Historically, throughout the Middle East, both male and female professional
dancer-entertainers plied their trade in large urban centers and as itinerant performers.
As was the case for most public entertainers, their mode of expression was nearly always
associated with prostitution by the population at large. This choreophobic attitude con-
tinued unabated into the twenty-first century (Shay 1999). The following observation,
made a century ago by the Qajar princess Taj Al-Saltana (died 1937) in her diaries, sums
up most Iranians’ attitudes toward public dancers, even today, when such performances
are banned:
That night ‘Abdi Jan’s troupe had been called so that the harem occupants could
watch the show. Of course, you remember ‘Abdi well. Let me, nonetheless, give
you a description of his looks. He was a lad of about twelve or thirteen, with large,
black eyes, languid and incredibly beautiful and attractive. His face was tanned and
good-looking, his lips crimson, and his hair black and thick. Renowned throughout
the town, the boy had a thousand adoring lovers. Being a dancer, however, he was
unworthy of being anyone’s beloved.
(Al-Saltana 1993: 163)
Theater historian Bahram Beiza’i notes that dance constituted the basis of traditional
comic theater, a frequently highly ribald form of entertainment (1965: 169). In this con-
text, the dances were basically highly elaborate, virtuosic, and athletic versions of the
domestic form of solo improvised dance. These athletic feats are depicted in paintings
of the Qajar period (Falk 1972; Diba and Ekhtiar 1998). With the lack of royal and aris-
tocratic support after the beginning of the Pahlavi era, this dance tradition faded away,
and the new forms of professional dance, the so-called national dance, no longer fea-
tured the daring virtuosic feats of the finest dancers of the old traditional style.
Although traditional motrebi music and dance (named for the traditional entertainer,
the motreb) persisted in the more traditional parts of Tehran, the loss of its former
patronage doomed it to a slow death. The advent of the Islamic Revolution (1979) caused
its final demise because of clerical hostility toward these forms of entertainment. Both
Imam Khomeini and Ayyatollah Khamene’i pronounced in their fatwas that “Motreb
music is illicit” (Fatemi 2005: 19). All dancing in public ceased, and the government
attempted to ferret out parties in which solo improvised dance occurred, meting out
severe punishment to those it caught (Mahdavi 2009; Shay 2008b).
The Beginning of Revival Iranian

Dance: “National Dance”
After the beginning of the Pahlavi era (1925–1979), the government and educated
elites increasingly ignored traditional dance and theater, turning instead to Western
forms such as classical ballet, which represented the modernity they craved. The first
teachers and choreographers of ballet performances based on Iranian themes or fea-
turing performances in which Iranian traditional movements were mixed with ele-
ments of ballet, were Armenians who immigrated to Iran. Prominent among these
were Madame Yelena, Madame Cornelli, and Sarkis Djanbazian, all of whom had
been trained in Russian ballet before coming to Iran. The introduction of Western
628 Anthony Shay
forms of music and dance resulted in a division between the northern, more
Westernized half of Tehran and the southern, more traditional and conservative
areas of the city. This division continues today (see Mahdavi 2009). New contexts,
such as proscenium arch theaters, began to appear to provide space for Westernized
choreographic forms, whereas, in the southern districts, traditional performers
continued to perform in traditional settings, for example, on planks thrown over a
garden fountain (ru-howz), a stage that constituted one of the most common perfor-
mance sites for traditional dance and music. Traditional theater (ru-howzi), which
included dance and music, took its name from this practice. (See especially Fatemi’s
2005 study.)
From the beginning, the newly established Armenian teachers created a new hybrid
choreographic form in which ballet was combined with traditional Iranian move-
ments and other choreographic elements—a form that would later be referred to in
Iran as “national dance.” As Meftahi describes it, “[Following] the popular concept
of ‘national dance’ in Europe [the Armenian choreographers, and later the American
Nilla Cram Cook] adapted some movements from Iranian dance in their perfor-
mances and re-crafted their own classical dances with Iranian movements” (Meftahi
2007: 149). Although some individuals or companies performed en pointe, most per-
formed Iranian character or national dance in bare feet or with special slippers or
character shoes.
Knowing that they inhabited a choreophobic environment, the early choreogra-
phers chose to link their productions with poetry and bucolic or historical themes
as a means of gaining support and cultural legitimacy among the more liberal and
better-educated elements of the population. They did this by using images well known
from Persian poetry, such as those of the rose and the nightingale, by turning to
heroic, pre-Islamic themes as found in old Persian mythological sources such as the
Shahnameh, or by choosing “innocent” themes from an idealized peasant life in which
happy villagers go to the well for water or dance after a harvest. Such strategies recall
Guss’s concept of cultural objectification. Nesta Ramazani, a dancer in these early bal-
let productions, states: “I moved easily from performing a Zoroastrian temple dance
to interpreting mystical Sufi poetry and to portraying the love of a rose and a nightin-
gale” (2002 xv). She observed of one of the first dances she performed in the role of a
village girl:
Through pantomime we conveyed such activities as sifting flour, kneading bread,

washing clothes, and playfully splashing each other with water. Our work finished,
we beautified ourselves, preening while coquettishly swinging one hip. Picking up
our chiffon handkerchiefs, we coyly twirled them overhead or from side to side,
occasionally flipping them into the air, while spinning rapidly around and around.
Unlike the dress of real village girls, our bodices were brief, revealing a bare midriff,
and garnished with baubles and bangles that glinted in the stage lights.
(Ramazani 2002: 5)
Elsewhere she writes: “My longings and desires found expression through music and
dance based largely on Western fantasy images of the East, images reinforced by my
dance teacher, Mme. Cornelli, in whose choreography the Orient was represented
as a magical land filled with flimsily clad dancing girls” (Ramazani 2002: 75). Thus,
these dance performances embodied the essence of Said’s notion of orientalism as
well as Guss’s concept of cultural objectification—the choreographic depiction of a
dream-like world in which fantasy images of great luxury, sensuality, and an ahistori-
cal Orient served to create a nostalgic never-never land past and a fantasy present.
Such choreographic images continue to be popular in the Iranian diaspora, where,
for example, in 1997, thousands of Iranian Americans flocked to the Orange County,
California autumn Mehregan Festival to watch local community members dressed (in
incorrectly rendered Sasanian clothing) as the “Iranian royal family” view a series of
imagined dances, including those of a group of scantily clad, modern cabaret belly
dancers.
Ramazani frequently refers to the choreophobic atmosphere in which she first per-
formed: “For me, it was a simple matter: Dancing filled me with joy. For Tehran soci-
ety, however it was scandalous. Good girls did not perform in public, baring their legs
for all to see, putting themselves in the limelight to attract the lust of strangers” (2002:
1). This is a theme that Ramazani frequently reiterates throughout her narrative. And,
indeed, in the beginning, due to this corrosive atmosphere, most of the performances
were invitation-only, private recitals held in ballet studios rather than in public concert
spaces.
In 1946, American Nilla Cram Cook founded a group that was supported by the
Iranian government and toured several neighboring countries from 1947 to 1953 (Kiann
2000; Ramazani 2002). Cram Cook became an influential figure in the Iranian Ministry
of Culture and served as a censor of Iranian theaters and cinema (Ramazani 2002: 171).
Although her dance group performed the newly created genre, which mixed ballet with
traditional movements, Cram Cook represented herself as reviving old historic tradi-
tions (Ramazani 2002: 76, 147, 170, 172–174), naming her dance program “The Revival of
Ancient Iranian Arts” (Kiann 2000).
As part of an attempt to legitimate dance, Medjid Rezvani, one of the earliest revivalist
performers active in Paris from the 1930s, wrote a history of dance aiming to prove the
existence of a “classical” Iranian dance tradition complete with formal rules of perfor-
mance and training (see especially 1962: 150–159). He concluded that “they are guarded,
right up to our own times, the rules of the classical dance, even if a few old dancers
are the only repositories of them” (Rezvani 1962: 159). Rezvani’s fantasy of a classical
dance tradition using codified movements (which he invented for his book, together
with names for some eight steps and movements in the style of Western ballet) has been
effectively shattered by ‘Ameri’s study (2003). In effect, Rezvani attempted to create an
ancient history for a recently created dance genre.
In 1954, the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Arts opened the National Academy of
Ballet with its performing arm, the Iranian National Ballet. For this project, the ministry
630 Anthony Shay
brought in several American and British teachers, such as Ninette de Valois, who contin-
ued the practice of creating ballets with Iranian themes drawn from poetry and history.
In this way, traditional music and dance genres that were mixed with Western elements
found official government patronage and new performance venues such as radio and
later television, as well as newly constructed concert halls and theaters.
In 1958, the Iranian government established a state folk dance ensemble, the
Iran National Folklore Organization, under the direction of Nejad Ahmadzadeh.
In the late 1960s, Robert de Warren, an English ballet dancer and choreographer,
was invited to direct a similar group, the Mahalli Dancers, again using this style of
mixed Iranian and Western elements. The companies performed staged versions of
both solo improvised dance and regional folk dances based on historical and poetic
themes.
In 1966, Abdollah Nazemi, who trained in the National Academy of Ballet and danced
for several years with the National Iranian Ballet, formed his own company, the Pars
National Ballet, which was associated with National Iranian Radio and Television.
According to his printed program, the company’s repertoire consisted of an eclectic
mix of staged folk dances, Persian poetry and historically themed ballet, conventional
Western classical ballet works, and modern works with both Western and Iranian musi-
cal scores. After the Revolution, Nazemi founded a group of the same name, but greatly
reduced in size and scope, in southern California.
Thus, in these early performances, the use of Orientalist motifs, costumes, and stag-
ing strategies somewhat mitigated the choreophobic atmosphere, at least for the more
Westernized Iranians. Nevertheless, choreophobia never disappeared, in spite of later
Pahlavi government efforts to use dance as a means of constructing a national identity,
as Jane C. Desmond has suggested. One of the first acts of Ayyatollah Khomeini in the
Islamic Revolution (1979) was to ban all public performances of dance.
Revival Dance in the Diaspora
It is important to emphasize that most individuals who see Iranian folk dancing,
including both Iranian city dwellers and foreigners, view it in the context of per-
formances by the professional and semiprofessional dance ensembles found in
pre-Revolution Iran and in the diaspora, rather than in the context of the village.
In other words, they are exposed only to revival dance traditions. This style of cho-
reography is still found in dance performances in which, as Guss describes in his
concept of cultural objectification, a fantasy world of nostalgia is created. The mul-
titude of displaced Iranians crave this choreographic nostalgia that revival dance
provides.
Of the few Iranians who lived in the West before 1979, the vast majority were stu-
dents and more than 90% were male (Shay 1999). A few Iranian and non-Iranian
FIGURE 28.2 Qajar dance. Choreographed by Ixchel Diemetral-Maerker. Photo by Darren

Young, Los Angeles, 1978. Courtesy of the AVAZ International Dance Theatre.
choreographers and dancers outside of Iran utilized this same combination of

Westernized ballet and Iranian character or “national” dance begun in the 1930s in
Iran. Several untrained Iranian students simply elaborated the solo improvised dance
that they had learned at social gatherings, dressing up in fantasy costumes that owed
more to Hollywood than to Iranian history to lend their performances an exotic
aura. Later, after the formation of the diaspora in 1980, new styles evolved in which
social dances such as hip hop and salsa were added to the already eclectic mix (see
Figure 28.2).
The Iranian dancers and choreographers who left Iran after the 1979 Revolution
found several non-Iranians already at work. Sometimes they cooperated and per-
formed together; at other times, they found themselves in competition. The early per-
formances from the 1930s featured Iranian character dance. This revival dance genre
from the 1930s remains among the most popular genres in the diaspora down to the
present day. Beginning in the late 1950s, choreographers in Iran who worked with the
government-sponsored companies and non-Iranians in the United States began using
choreographic strategies based on the state folk dance ensemble model, using, for the
632 Anthony Shay
first time, large numbers of musicians and dancers. In a final phase, during the late
1990s, we see some bold Iranian artists, like Jamal, Banafsheh Sayyad, Ida Meftahi, and
Sashar Zarif, begin to create serious works of art, using an even more eclectic fusion of
elements that include modern dance, flamenco, and tai-chi, as well as traditional Iranian
themes and movement vocabulary.
The First Known Performances Outside Iran

The first documented performances of Iranian dance outside of Iran occurred in the 1930s,
when Medjid Rezvani (1900–1962) moved to Paris with his Iranian wife, Nahide, and the
two performed frequently in Paris and other French cities (Décoret-Ahiha 2004; Rezvani
1962). The first known performances in the United States occurred in the early 1950s,
with performances by Nasrin Hekmat Forough, Homa Mojallal, Mahin Shahrivar, Leila
Bedalian, Assad Torfeh, and Najmeh Najafi. These dancers generally performed as soloists.
FIGURE 28.3 Classical Persian dance. Soloist Lynette Houston. Choreographed by Jamal.
Photo by Darren Young, Los Angeles, 1996. Courtesy of the AVAZ International Dance
Theatre.
Nasrin Hekmat Forough occasionally trained small groups, often relying on non-Iranians
because of the reluctance of Iranians, especially men, to perform in public. I learned and
performed my first dances from Hekmat Forough in 1954. Large repertory ensembles
only came into existence in the 1960s, following the first appearance of Eastern European
companies like the Moiseyev Dance Company in the late 1950s, and these were almost
all founded and directed by Anglo-Americans. No attempt to create revivalist versions of
regional folk dances for the stage occurred before the late 1960s, and choreographers and
dancers exclusively used stage versions of solo improvised dance (see Figure 28.3).
The music that was available for dance in the period before 1980 was extremely lim-
ited. Although a few students were able to play dance music on violins, tars (long-necked
lutes), santurs (hammered dulcimers), accordions, and tombaks (goblet drums) for spe-
cial occasions, most performances were accompanied by classical rengs (dance melo-
dies) and folk tunes played by small urban orchestras on delicate 78 rpm records. These
recordings were few in number.
In Iran and in the diaspora, poetry is the most important and beloved form of cul-
tural expression. Its ubiquitous presence in a wide variety of social, political, and
spiritual contexts attests to its popularity, even if its linguistic specificity limits its use-
fulness outside of Persian-speaking contexts. However, Iranians coming abroad as stu-
dents quickly grasped that dance constituted one of the most popular representational
forms of culture in the West and that it was more accessible to the general public than
musical or verbal forms of expression. This was especially true in the United States,
where several events caused folk and traditional dance performances to become enor-
mously popular. Beginning in the late 1920s, cities and towns across America began
to host large-scale annual international folk dance concerts and festivals (Shay 2006).
Colleges and universities, which—especially after World War II—had large numbers
of foreign students, also provided many concert opportunities. Later, ethnomusicol-
ogy departments offered numerous music and dance performances. In addition, the
international recreational folk dance movement that had begun in the 1930s expanded
significantly in the 1950s and 1960s; the hundreds of thousands of individuals who
now participated in this movement provided large audiences for international folk
dance performances. In the late 1950s, following the appearances of professional state
folk ensembles from Yugoslavia and the Moiseyev Company of the Soviet Union, pro-
fessional and amateur performances of folk dance became more popular than ever
(Shay 2002a, 2006, 2008a). It was during this period in Iran and the United States that
attempts were made to stage regional folk dances that had remained largely unknown
to urban dancers prior to this period, thus bringing to life Guss’s notion of “cultural
objectification.”
Autoexoticism
Beginning with Medjid Rezvani and Najmeh Najafi, Iranians quickly understood that
coming from Persia carried the cachet of the romantically exotic, and they began to spin
634 Anthony Shay
pungently spiced exotic tales about solo improvised dance that appealed to the oriental-
ist fantasies held by many Westerners. Najmeh Najafi, for example, wrote:
Many of our dances tell stories: some are survivals from a very ancient time, like the
Zoroastrian Dance of Fire. Some came from the Islamic influence. At first I used to
dance just as I felt; but later I learned the traditional dances, blending my emotion
with the emotion of the dance story. In our dancing the movement of the hands tells
special things. There is a language of motion, and people who know this language
can interpret the story as well as if it were in spoken words. People in America who
have seen me dance say, “Your hands are so graceful!” Hands must be graceful in
order to be talking hands. . . .
Maybe one of our traditional dances will explain this. It is the story of a dancer
who was loved by a prince. He could not marry her because she was a dancer, so she
went away with a broken heart. Without her he could not be happy so he found her
and told her that he would give up being a prince in order to marry her. If there were
a choice between the kingdom and her, he had made that choice. But she knew that
he must be a prince and later a king for the good of his people, so she told him that
her broken heart had been healed by another and that she no longer loved him.
(Najafi 1953: 28–29)
Najafi’s colorful and meretricious account of Iranian dance had perhaps been inspired
by examples of Indian classical dance forms, such as the bharata natyam or kathak,
which do utilize narrative hand movements. However, Iranian dance is not a narrative
art form but an abstract one. There is no form of codified movement such as that found
in bharata natyam. Iranian dancers created these orientalist tales to make their perfor-
mances more appealing. Thus, we can see in this example and in the earlier descriptions
of Ramazani’s performances that Said’s notion of orientalism constitutes a persistent
feature of many of these revival dance performances.
Rezvani’s book on Iranian dance (1962) is likewise filled with a fantasy history and
descriptions of a nonexistent, pre-Islamic classical dance tradition that he claimed was
guarded in secret by certain families throughout the Islamic period. He and his wife are
depicted in this book and other sources, romantically costumed as “villagers” or dressed
as pre-Islamic historical figures (Décoret-Ahiha 2004; Rezvani 1962).
Individuals who claim to utilize Persian miniatures as the basis of their dances have
developed another form of exoticism and autoexoticism. Robert De Warren, the English
former director of Mahalli Dancers, stated in a printed program:
Collection of his [the poet Nezami’s] works. . . also contain a rich tapestry of minia-
tures. . . the representation of the dance is very evident, the Safavid [1501–1725] ver-
sions being the richest in movement and style. Not only has it been possible to trace
actual dance movements, but also musical and percussion instruments that have
long been lost. . .. Each step and gesture is a reproduction of the real traditional paint-
ing. Choreographed after almost two years of research.
(Program of the Mahalli Dancers of Iran, 1976)
In an interview, De Warren stated that he was able to lay “twenty or so of them [Persian
miniatures] side by side” to recreate an authentic production of dances performed dur-
ing the Safavid period (1501–1722) (1973: 29). (For the problems of using historical visual
art as a source for dance reconstruction see Lawler 1964.). This kind of autoexoticism
and exoticism continues unabated in many performances, and Americans and other
non-Iranians continue to make their performances more interesting to geographically
challenged Americans by giving them orientalist flavorings from The Thousand and One
Nights, as mediated through the lens of Hollywood.
Some Americans and other non-Iranians who participate in the world of Iranian
dance, especially those who came to it through the performance of belly dance, are often
as prone to exoticism as the early Iranian dancers and choreographers, as Cram Cook’s
choreographic plots and De Warren’s quotation demonstrate.
The State Folk Dance Ensemble Model

In the 1950s, the Moiseyev Dance Company from the Soviet Union and other
state-supported dance ensembles from Eastern Europe created a revolution in the
presentation of folk dance as a field of representation for ethnic identity and diversity.
Nation-states as politically diverse as the Philippines, Greece, Venezuela, Mexico, Iran,
Egypt, and Ghana scrambled to follow the example set by Igor Moiseyev (Shay 2002a).
Iranian dance was almost exclusively performed solo, both traditionally and in the early
ballet dance performances in Iran. Each of the dancers in the new ballet productions had his
or her role, and there is little description of dances performed as ensemble productions using
synchronized choreographies. The early dancers I encountered in the diaspora, such as Nasrin
Hekmat Forough, Mahin Shahrivar, Leila Bedalian, and Homa Mojallal, all danced solos that
were largely improvised and used costumes exhibiting various degrees of orientalism.
The appearances of the Moiseyev Dance Company, Kolo, the Serbian State Folk
Dance Ensemble, Tanec, the Macedonian State Ensemble, and later LADO, the Croatian
State Folk Ensemble, altered that trend and provided choreographers like myself with
a new vision of how dance could be presented in a more spectacularized fashion. In
1960, I founded the UCLA Village Dance Group, and, in 1963, I changed the name to the
AMAN Folk Ensemble. I began choreographing Iranian dances for the stage using the
types of choreographic strategies that I saw in performances by the Eastern European
companies, rather than those used by Iranian companies. (See Web Figure 28.1 for a
photograph from my choreographed piece “Savaran.” )
Americans involved in Iranian dance differed from Iranians in two significant ways.
First, we did not feel compelled to confine our interest to the nation-state of Iran and
its contemporary borders. I found examples of Uzbek classical dance on films that the
Soviet Embassy, and later the Committee for Friendship and Cultural Relations with
Foreign Countries, generously provided me. I found an interest in the vibrant dances
of the ancient Iranian cities of Bukhara and Samarqand, renowned in Persian poetry,
that my Iranian colleagues never did. From 1960, together with my co-artistic director
636 Anthony Shay
in AMAN, Leona Wood, I produced many choreographies from Iran, as well as from
surrounding areas such as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.
I continued this work with the AVAZ International Dance Theater, which has boasted
a large Iranian-Central Asian repertoire into the twenty-first century. In 1990, Jamal
joined AVAZ and in 1995 became its sole director. (See Figure 28.4 for a photograph
from an Azerbaijani dance that I choreographed, and see Web Figure 28.2 for a photo-
graph from my choreographed version of a piece from Samarqand. )
The second way in which Americans differed from Iranians was the Americans’
intense interest in authenticity. This resulted in many American choreographers con-
ducting research through field work; taking classes with experts; attending events, con-
certs, and festivals in which dancing took place; and acquiring books, films, and other
documentation. Many learned the requisite languages for conducting fieldwork. In gen-
eral, their choreographic works were informed by this intensive research.
Although in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s the academic concept of appro-
priation had not yet appeared in the world of folk dance, American choreographers
nevertheless felt the need for accuracy and authenticity to show respect for the people
whose culture they were representing in public venues, even while creating works that
were theatrically arresting.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Americans—in contrast to most post-Revolution Iranian and
European performers—founded very large ensembles, frequently numbering sixty to
eighty performers. This serendipitously coincided with the search for ethnic heritage
and “roots” that was one of the most important characteristics of that period. Other
Americans who joined the counterculture had deep feelings of anomie toward the con-
sumerist, middle-class values and political conservatism that characterized the period
following World War II. Becoming Balkan or Middle Eastern peasants, garbed in color-
ful costumes, answered their search for experiences that would give meaning to their
lives. This meant that large numbers of talented college and university students, as well
as members of the international recreational folk dance movement, were eager to devote
the many hours of rehearsal required to perform at a professional level the Balkan and
Middle Eastern dance genres they had recently discovered (Shay 2008a, 2008c). These
ensembles, many of which lasted for decades, created new repertoires and often toured
widely.
During this period, following the strategies of the national companies, choreographers
like myself produced large-scale productions, often featuring dozens of dancers accompa-
nied by live orchestras. Simple folk dances were combined into suites, the time frames of the
dances were compressed, and improvised dancing was synchronized and formed into orga-
nized choreographies. In the 1990s, these large companies either closed or faded into smaller
ensembles because the social basis that permitted the formation of these large ensembles that
characterized the 1960s and 1970s disappeared. Americans and Europeans became attracted
to disco and other dance genres, and the recreational folk dance movement contracted.
In the Iranian diaspora, however, many smaller dance companies continued to grow
and proliferate. These companies have become an important vehicle for those in the
FIGURE 28.4 “Dasmali” Azerbaijani dance. Choreographed by Anthony Shay. Photo by

Darren Young, Los Angeles, 1980. Courtesy of the AVAZ International Dance Theatre.
diaspora to create representational fields for their identity, particularly since dance is
banned in Iran—and this provides an added urgency for young Iranian Americans to
perform. In contrast to the American concern for authenticity, many Iranian choreog-
raphers and dancers—especially those who came after the Revolution—felt that because
they were of the heritage, they already knew enough to create works based on their var-
ied knowledge. As one informant told me, “I dance Persian dance perfectly because it’s
in my blood” (quoted in Shay 1999: 20). These dance companies were overwhelmingly
smaller than those of their American counterparts.
In addition, the Iranians—especially those like Abdollah Nazemi, who had directed
and choreographed work in Iran—found an entirely new environment in the U.S. dias-
pora community. First, Iranians of the diaspora overwhelmingly sought entertainment
rather than art. They wanted dancers to entertain at weddings and parties. The entire
popular music industry of Iran moved to the Los Angeles area and quickly began to
make videos in which dance became an important background element. Since most
Iranians were reluctant to perform publicly, they found American dancers who could
be trained by the few Iranians who eagerly sought work in this new environment.
Communications scholar Hamid Naficy described the result of using American dancers:
638 Anthony Shay
Recent sexist videos by male Iranian singers feature white leggy dark-haired Anglo
female dancers who try to pass as Iranian, using their physical similarity to Iranian
women as well as imitations of the Iranian dancing style. If the former qualities favor
their inscription as Iranian women, the inexactness and exaggeration of their imita-
tions give away their “inauthenticity.”
(Naficy 1993: 180)
As in Iran, the dancers and choreographers, both Iranian and non-Iranian, divided into
two separate spheres: the artists who appeared in theaters and concert settings, and the
entertainers, in the manner of Mohammad Khordadian, who carried on the motreb tra-
dition of southern Tehran by appearing in weddings, cabarets, and videos. The former,
like the AVAZ International Dance Theater, are generally sought to represent the Iranian
community in formal settings, particularly to the outside world, whereas the latter pro-
vide sources of entertainment within the community. More recently, Iranian student
groups have formed across the United States on college and university campuses, and
these groups eagerly post their work on YouTube.
The New Vision
In the 1990s, non-Iranians and some Iranians alike continued to follow the state
folk dance model, aided by the availability of video recordings of former Iranian
state-supported dance ensembles, whose choreographies they often copied. Several
Iranians of the diaspora who began to encounter new dance genres, such as jazz and
modern dance, experimented with fusion and hybrid forms of their own creation. Many
of them turned to historical, spiritual, and poetic sources, and the work they produced
varied widely.
Since the works of the mystic poet Jallal-ad-Din Rumi have become popular in the
West, Sufism serves as a source of inspiration for several choreographers like Jamal, the
artistic director of the AVAZ International Dance Theater; Nima Kiann, artistic director
of the Ballets Persans; and soloists Banafsheh Sayyad, Shahrokh Meshkinghalam, and
Sashar Zarif.
In this final section, I analyze the work of Jamal, since I am most familiar with his
choreographic output. After having choreographed a large repertoire of regional folk
dances and solo improvised dance, he declared:
I do not want to carry any more baskets and scarves on the stage. I want to create
work that is more contemporary. I am an artist of the twenty-first century and I do
not wish to be depicted as a primitive man at the dawn of time wearing a robe and
beating on a frame drum.
(Interview, Los Angeles, June 14, 2004)
FIGURE 28.5 Guran, choreographed by Jamal. Photo by Sallie D’Ette Mackie, Luckman
Auditorium, California State University Los Angeles, 2003. Courtesy of the AVAZ
International Dance Theatre.
He began to add new and different works to the group’s repertoire. His first work to
constitute a departure was a choreography of Shateri in 1994, an earthy solo improvised
dance traditionally performed by working-class men in South Tehran. Jamal, for the
first time, refashioned the dance for a large group, mostly female, performing in unison.
The Iranians of the diaspora loved this piece, and it has been widely emulated by college
and university student groups. (See Web Figure 28.3 for a photograph of Shateri choreo-
graphed by Jamal .)
The next year, he created Soug, an impressionistic piece based on the unusual prac-
tice found in some regions of the Iranian province of Luristan in which people dance at
funerals. He later enlarged this piece as an outdoor work to commemorate the events
of September 11, 2001. This time, dozens of performers from several Los Angeles dance
companies participated; the performance was staged in an open air plaza and drew hun-
dreds of onlookers. Other dance companies around the United States performed the
work precisely at noon on September 11, 2012, a year after the horrific terrorist attack on
the Trade Towers of New York City
Next, he created Charkh (Turning), inspired by the spiritual character of Sufism and
the universal message of Rumi’s inspirational work. However, he chose to avoid creating
640 Anthony Shay
orientalist images by avoiding a direct recreation of Sufi ceremonies, using only the
turning technique found in the Mevlevi spiritual gatherings as the basis of the piece.
In 2004, Jamal created a full-evening, narrative work based on a scene from the
Shahnameh, the epic history of Persia. However, instead of the usual telling of the tale
from the royal viewpoint, Jamal chose to tell the story from the viewpoint of the animals,
especially the gur (wild ass), who were the favorite prey of Bahram-e Gur, a Sasanian
prince famous for his hunting prowess. The piece, Guran, caused a sensation in the arts
community, with the Los Angeles Times dance critic Lewis Segal calling it “one of the
most distinctive achievements of the Southern California dance community” (Segal
2005: E3). (See Figure 28.5 and Web Figures 28.4 and 28.5 for photographs of Guran cho-
reographed by Jamal .)
Conclusion
Throughout this chapter, I have attempted to demonstrate my concept of the paral-

lel traditions that characterize the many and varied performances of revival Iranian
dance, both in Iran and in the diaspora. The creation of large dance companies, both
in Iran and abroad, characterized by large, spectacular choreographies and costume
displays based on a dance tradition created in the 1930s and continuing into the
twenty-first century, reflect Guss’s notion of “cultural objectification.” The Iranian gov-
ernment’s use of these dance companies to foster a positive Iranian identity among
its citizens underscores Desmond’s observation that dance is “constitutive of iden-
tity.” The content of many of these performances brings to life the fantasy images that
Said utilized in his idea of orientalism. The concept of “choreophobia” that I devel-
oped around Iranian attitudes toward dance generally clashed with the Iranian gov-
ernment’s attempts to utilize orientalist choreographic works to create a positive and
romantic image of the Iranian state that paradoxically created a space of resistance to
the regime.
Thus, dance, in less than a century, has moved from solo performances of socially dis-
reputable public performers, tribal celebrations, or sexually segregated private perfor-
mances, to become a multilayered phenomenon that engages Iranians and non-Iranians
alike. The use of dance in Iran constituted a governmental attempt to build pan-Iranian
national identity at home and to use it as a vehicle for displaying Iranian culture through
performing folk dance companies. In the Iranian diaspora, dance began as a means of
displaying Iranian identity on American university campus events and festivals, and,
more recently, it has constituted a vehicle for the Iranian community to display itself in
holiday attire. Revival dance has grown increasingly complex on many levels—as art, as
representation, and as celebration.
Iranians of the diaspora increasingly attend dance concerts and send their chil-
dren to dance classes as a way of affirming their Iranian identity. Thus, after an initial
reluctance to use dance as a field of representation for Iranian identity, Iranians of the
diaspora increasingly turn to dance in a variety of formats to create positive images
of Iranian national identity. Both in Iran, where dance constitutes a vehicle for resis-
tance, and in the diaspora, dance has increasingly become the sought after, not the
reluctant art.
Note
1. For video examples, search on www.youtube.com with the keywords “dance” and “Iran”
(or “Azerbaijan”) followed by the name of a region or ethnocultural group (e.g., Gilan,
Mazanderan, Zabol, Kurdish).
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Chapter 29
M usical Rem e mbra nc e ,

E x ile, and th e Re ma ki ng
of Sou th Af ri c a n Ja z z
( 1960–197 9 )
Carol ANN Muller
For me this conscious kind of South Africanism came in exile. It was

caused by homesickness and a certain disenchantment with [Europe
which] from South Africa had seemed a magic and distant world—we
realized we had our own movement and began insisting on our roots.
—Chris McGregor cited in McGregor (1995: 104)
Diagnosed with a terminal illness, literary critic and political exile Edward Said
decided to write his life story, Out of Place: A Memoir (1999). A work of memory, Out
of Place is “a record of an essentially lost or forgotten world,” a personal story written
against the backdrop of decades of transformative world events (1935–1962): World
War II, the loss of Palestine and the formation of the State of Israel, political changes
in Egypt, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Oslo peace process (1999: Preface). It is also a
story forged out of the uncertainties of incessant movement and is integrally tied to the
politics of the Middle East. Although his parents were Coptic Christians living in Cairo,
Egypt, they traveled to Jerusalem for Said’s birth in 1935. At the time, Jerusalem was
located in Palestine, and the Said family moved regularly between Cairo and Jerusalem
for much of Edward Said’s childhood.
There are several striking elements in this memoir: first is the formative and recur-
ring presence in Edward Said’s book of his first twenty-seven years in shaping the rest
of his life spent in exile. Second, through mostly political circumstances, almost all of
his family and certainly most of the places in his story no longer exist. Third, Out of
Place is essentially the revival of a forgotten world through the act of writing, and it is
REMEMBRANCE, EXILE, AND THE REMAKING OF SOUTH AFRICAN JAZZ 645
motivated by the shadow of impending death, a kind of final moment of loss. Fourth,
Said comments on the challenge of remembering and translating particular experiences
in a context of bilingualism: from an early age he spoke both Arabic and English, but in
writing at the end of his life, he recognized the gaps incurred by translating experience
from one language to the other. Fifth, we have to consider why Said felt the need to write
this book, what it was in his new contexts he thought needed explanation and instantia-
tion. Finally, Said remarks in the early part of the story on the instability of place and
geography and on the burden of his “unsettled sense of [inhabiting] many identities”
that characterized a lifetime of being and feeling “out of place” (1999: xii).
Each of these elements in Said’s Out of Place resonates with the stories of musicians
who migrated out of South Africa, ending up in cultural and political exile in Europe
and the United States from the early 1960s through the late 1970s. First, the longer musi-
cians stayed in Europe and were unable to return home, the stronger the force of music
from their early lives became in the music made in exile. Second, the political power of
the apartheid regime in South Africa increasingly destroyed communities and intimi-
dated groups in South Africa, rendering the country less and less familiar to musicians
abroad. Music from home inserted into music made abroad was one strategy for not
forgetting the past. Third, in the context of increasing loss at home, musicians in Europe
began to search for a way to recreate the sounds of home in a medium, genre, and con-
text that would be comprehensible to new audiences—for Said it was a book, for South
Africans it was in collaboratively constituted live and recorded performances. Fourth,
Said’s struggles with translating personal experience from Arabic to English resonate
with the challenge to South African musicians using the generic possibilities offered by
the language of American derived jazz as a specifically South African narrative strat-
egy. Fifth, there is the issue of audience—Europeans and often at the time, African
American jazz musicians didn’t always believe that jazz could come from “Africa” and
knew very little about South African jazz. In other words, the lack of recognition forced
South African musicians to insert the sounds of home they remembered hearing earlier
in their lives, into the very fabric of their music-making in exile. In some senses this
authenticated their rights to participate in the world of European and American jazz.
Finally, the adoption of American-born jazz to South African musical ends in the 1950s
in South Africa and its expansion as a musical language by South Africans in Europe
and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s speak of the possibilities of identity and
identifying. This was clearly an experimental and uncertain moment in South African
political and musical history, and Europe in particular constituted a place for exploring
the multiplicity of possible identities forged through the sounds of home in jazz.
While conventional thinking about musical revival presumes a coherence, rootedness,
and singularity of identity, being out of place opened up musical possibilities (expressed
in the ideas of “free” jazz) while incorporating more and more of the sounds of a lost
home. This doubleness is implicit in Said’s notion of being “out of place:” it engenders a
certain ambiguity depending on which word is accented in the phrase. If one lays empha-
sis on the word “place,” a measure of comfort is suggested: Here is a repertory or style
that comes out of a particular place; it is grounded in its site of origin. If, however, we
646 Carol ANN Muller
emphasize the “outness” of the person/thing from a place, we are introduced to a certain
lack of fit, and, in its extreme manifestation, to the condition of exodus, diaspora, and even
exile. Such a condition pushed musicians first to explore the sounds of “freedom” and
then to restore the sounds of home away from home into the more open musical textures.
And, although it is Said’s overwhelming sense of the condition of exile in the latter part
of his life that dominates his remembrance, he writes that what surprises him in recalling
his early life is the acute and detailed memory he has of childhood places and people. In
contrast, the South African invocation of the sounds of home is less particular—it creates
instead what Diane Taylor (2003) calls “scenarios”—the sounds as produced by the mem-
ories of several musicians looking for musical utterances that can be jointly produced in
the present, and not the exact replication of sounds individually recalled from a range of
places back home in the past. They were, after all, not writing in isolation as was Edward
Said, but creating music as a collaborative and collective enterprise.
The most prominent South African jazz ensembles that left South Africa were the
Dollar Brand Trio and Chris McGregor’s Blue Notes; Bea Benjamin (known as Sathima
Bea Benjamin from the 1970s) left South Africa with Dollar Brand (known as Abdullah
Ibrahim from late 1960s) but would lead her own ensembles starting in the 1980s.1 These
musicians initially departed for Europe: Dollar and Bea, in February 1962, were followed
by Johnny Gertze and Makhaya Ntshoko, who filled out the Dollar Brand Trio in 1963 in
Switzerland; in 1964, the Blue Notes left from Johannesburg by train traveling to Maputo
(formerly Lourenco Marques), Mozambique, where they boarded an airplane for Paris.
Like the Dollar Brand Trio the year before, the Blue Notes had an invitation to perform
at the Antibes Jazz Festival. The invitation promised the opportunity to expand musical
horizons and extend musical networks in Europe and perhaps even the United States,
just as opportunities to perform were becoming harder to come by in South Africa. They
would soon discover that the transnational world of jazz performance was a difficult,
competitive, and at times unwelcoming one. After Antibes, the Blue Notes ended up in
Zurich, Switzerland, living in the basement of an international student house under the
care of Dollar and Bea. This small community of musicians, initially leaving in search
of professional opportunity, ultimately found themselves possessed by an inconsolable
longing to return home at a time when it was becoming increasingly difficult to do so,
largely because of the growing repression of the South African apartheid regime toward
people of color. Each of these musicians spent his or her life making music in a state of
feeling and being “out of place.” Inserting music from their past into the live music mak-
ing in Europe and the United States was a common strategy for these musicians as a way to
restore a feeling of “home” in the music, as a way to educate their audiences about where
they had come from, and to authenticate their membership in a global jazz community.
In this chapter, I examine music created “out of place” and in the context of the South
African exodus/exile to Europe and the United States by the musicians from these two
ensembles from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s as a particular kind of musical
revival and remembrance. In the first section, I discuss the transformation of South
African jazz in the music produced by the South Africans just mentioned, and I suggest
three distinct phases in this process, all illustrated with specific musical discussion.
Before leaving South Africa, all these musicians were experimenting with recordings of
American jazz, particularly the works of Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie
Parker, on one hand, but also aware of the need to develop individual voices as jazz
musicians on the other. When they left South Africa in the early 1960s, all were exposed
to the “free jazz” movement in Europe and were able to meet several of its key African
American exponents living in Europe at the time. These included Albert and Don Ayler,
Don Cherry, and Cecil Taylor. This musical freedom of free jazz clearly resonated with
the South African desire for political and personal freedom from the apartheid regime,
and both Chris McGregor and the Blue Notes and the Dollar Brand Trio harnessed the
expressive possibilities of the genre to their own purposes. This was a period in which
“free jazz” provided the vehicle to move from the hardbop of their South African music
making to a more distinctively South African big band sound in the late 1960s. By this
time, Dollar Brand had converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdullah Ibrahim,
and he was no longer performing with the Dollar Brand Trio. He began to experi-
ment with a more transnational community of musicians, including Blue Notes bass
player Johnny Dyani, to create a stronger feeling of “home” in his music. From the late
1960s and through the 1970s, Brand/Ibrahim and singer Sathima Bea Benjamin2 began
to compose music more directly tied to the space of a new kind of African diasporic
consciousness. Most of the musicians from McGregor’s original Blue Notes big band
had dispersed throughout Europe and South America, and McGregor himself formed
a new band, The Brotherhood of Breath, partnering with several other South African
and British free players. In 1975, however, Blue Notes saxophonist Mongezi Feza died
unexpectedly. The remaining Blue Notes musicians gathered together to mourn his
death and memorialize his life and their journey with him in a spontaneous recording
sessions lasting close to four hours, a process discussed later.
In the second part of the chapter, I locate the South African story of music making in
exile as a particular kind of musical revival, and I begin with a cursory overview of the
elements of musical revival as outlined by Tamara Livingston (1999). Although, in many
ways, the use of South African music in the context of jazz performance and composition
resonates with Livingston’s model, I suggest that the condition of exodus/exile produces
a particular set of challenges to this paradigm that may resonate in similarly constituted
communities elsewhere in the world. In response to these challenges and striving for a
more inclusive paradigm, I use Diana Taylor’s ideas about archive and repertory in the per-
formance of cultural memory, and specifically her notion of scenario, to address the more
complex social fabric underpinning musical revival that the South African story requires.
South African Jazz Out of Place: At

Home and Abroad
It felt like both the best and the worst of times in South Africa in the late 1950s and
early 1960s. On one hand, it was the worst of times. The Afrikaner Nationalist govern-
ment had come to power in 1948, and they spent the 1950s putting into place the key
legislation that created the system of “separate development” or apartheid. In the 1960s,
the decade of what came to be known as Grand Apartheid, they enforced these laws using
government-controlled radio transmission, the police, and security forces to subdue
all forms of resistance to the regime. All urban areas were reserved for “white” South
Africans; everyone else was either moved to their own “group area” or exiled in what the
regime called “independent homelands” or Bantustans. Black South Africans were only
permitted in white urban areas if they were employed there full-time. If they were not
so employed, they could visit urban areas for no longer than seventy-two hours. A key
part of the post-Sharpeville legislation was the 1963 Entertainment and Censorship law
that created racial separation in all entertainment venues and heavy censorship of books,
films, and theater performances; this had a devastating impact on inter-racial jazz venues.
Even more disturbing were the laws against “terrorism.” The 1967 Terrorism Act No. 83
legalized indefinite detention without trial, without access to a lawyer or any person who
was not a magistrate assigned to the prisoner. A “terrorist” was basically anyone thought
to have committed any kind of crime. A black person coming into town without the cor-
rect documentation could constitute such a crime. In the same period, the Treason Trials
sent African National Congress (ANC) leaders like Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, and
Walter Sisulu to Robben Island prison with life sentences for attempting to overthrow the
government, and the regime banned all liberation organizations, including the ANC, the
Pan Africanist Congress, and the South African Communist Party. In response, the ANC
Youth League constituted Umkhonto we Sizwe, its armed wing, which ignited its first
bomb in December 1961. It was clear that anything—such as jazz—that enabled South
Africans to mix across the Color Bar would become unsustainable, making the decision
to leave the country or give up performing inevitable for many musicians.
Conversely, these were exciting years for the growth of an international and interra-
cial community of progressive jazz musicians and audiences, initially in Johannesburg,
but increasingly in several venues in the city of Cape Town, particularly, although not
exclusively, focused around the music made by the Jazz Epistles and Chris McGregor’s
Blue Notes. (For background material and examples of South African jazz, see the list of
links and bibliography on the Companion Website. ) Although the University of Cape
Town (UCT) and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg hosted
jazz performances on occasion, there were no formal music programs for jazz studies
until the early 1980s. Chris McGregor studied at the School of Music at the University of
Cape Town in the early 1960s, although his training was in conventional European clas-
sical music, its history, performance, and theory. A person classified by the apartheid
regime as “Cape Coloured,” Dollar Brand was refused entry to UCT.
For the majority of jazz and dance band musicians, wartime entertainment corps
experience, dance band performances, imported recordings, and radio transmission
from South Africa and neighboring Mozambique comprised the main sources of knowl-
edge transmission in jazz and popular music performance. South Africans were pas-
sionate listeners and very precise imitators. Musicians listened closely to jazz recordings
imported from the United States, mostly in groups in public library Jazz Appreciation
clubs, at each other’s homes, and in after-hours venues. Many of these musicians read a
wide range of literature by and about African Americans, and some watched films about
the black experience in America. Bea Benjamin, for example, recalls the impact that
reading Billie Holiday’s autobiography had on her as a woman of color and a singer.3
Pianist Henry February remembers watching a film about the tragic life of Charlie
“Bird” Parker, wishing it had more music and less tragedy.
In addition to a range of dance bands and other more commercially viable groups
(often with a singer), the two most significant progressive jazz bands to form in the late
1950s were the Jazz Epistles and the Blue Notes. The former included Dollar Brand on
piano, Hugh Masekela on trumpet, legendary alto saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi, and
Jonas Gwangwa on trombone. Although they did some recording in South Africa, the
Jazz Epistles didn’t last more than about six months—mostly because the personnel
left to travel abroad—Masekela and Gwangwa to the Manhattan School of Music and
Moeketsi to perform abroad with King Kong. Dollar Brand took a little longer to get a
gig together in Europe. The Blue Notes, a name innocuous enough to deflect any official
awareness of the interracial nature of the group, were led by white South African com-
poser, arranger, and pianist Chris McGregor and included a range of black and so-called
“Coloured” South African musicians before the group made plans to leave the country.
Those of the Blue Notes who left in 1964 included McGregor, alto saxophonist Dudu
Pukwana, trumpet player Mongezi Feza, bassist Johnny Dyani, drummer Louis Moholo
Moholo, and tenor saxophonist Nick Moyake.
These musicians spoke a variety of languages and came from several different com-
munities in the Eastern and Western Cape. Dollar Brand was born in the “Coloured”
township of Kensington in Cape Town and grew up in the context of African Methodist
Episcopal church music transmitted by African American missionaries from
Philadelphia, dance bands, carnival music, and some piano lessons. In his early twen-
ties, he spent a year woodshedding his compositional and performance skills in a garage
created by a friend. Of St. Helenian and Filipino descent, Bea Benjamin’s story has
been told extensively elsewhere (Muller and Benjamin 2011; Rasmussen 2000). Suffice
to say she grew up listening closely to popular songs on radio, read literature by and
about African Americans generally and musicians specifically, and fell in love with the
sounds of Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. Less is known about the early stories of
Makaya Ntshoko and Johnny Gertze. Chris McGregor grew up in the rural parts of the
Eastern Cape/Transkei on a mission station, where he heard much traditional and reli-
gious music from that region, and he listened to jazz records at night while studying
the European classical tradition. Johnny Dyani was born in Duncan Village near East
London, and Mongezi Feza grew up around Queenstown in the Eastern Cape; Louis
Moholo was born in Cape Town, Dudu Pukwana in Port Elizabeth, and Nikele Moyake
was also from the Cape. Each of these musicians would draw on musical memories of
their lives in South Africa before they left, using these memories to creatively shape their
sounds in Europe and the United States.
In February 1962, after finding the country increasingly limited in what it offered
for emerging professional musicians, Brand and singer Bea Benjamin left South
Africa for Europe. Encouraged by Swiss graphic designer, jazz record collector, and
performance organizer Paul Meyer, who lived in Cape Town in the late 1950s and
early 1960s, these two musicians traveled to Switzerland. They arrived in Zurich and
began looking for work. After playing popular music in Zurich’s cafes and coffee bars,
with Meyer’s help, they secured some work at the Club Africana, remembered as a
lively hub of jazz performance in the 1960s. In February 1963, while the Trio was
at the Africana, Benjamin persuaded Duke Ellington, who was performing in the
neighborhood, to come and listen to the Trio. As a result, they all recorded with Duke
Ellington and Billy Strayhorn in Paris a week later. Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar
Brand Trio, released in Europe and the United States, would launch Brand’s interna-
tional career although this was not the case for his singing partner, Bea Benjamin.4
Ellington’s support of and friendship with Brand and Benjamin would open doors for
them in the international jazz world in ways that were not available to McGregor and
the Blue Notes musicians, which perhaps explains the distinct musical paths of the
two groups in this period.
Several significant national jazz events were held in South Africa after Benjamin
and Brand left, including performances by McGregor-led groups at the second and
third Castle Lager Jazz Festivals in 1962 and 1963, respectively; recordings were made
and have been reissued of some of these performances. By late 1963, however, it was
clear that it was time for what was becoming the septet known as the Blue Notes to
look farther afield. Travel in South Africa’s townships was becoming increasingly dif-
ficult and dangerous, and inter-racial groups like the Blue Notes were ultimately not
permitted to perform together in the cities or be broadcast on the racially segregated
South African Broadcast Corporation’s stations. Leaving the country was, neverthe-
less, a major undertaking because most of the musicians did not have passports, and
the apartheid government made it almost impossible for a black South African to
acquire one. Chris McGregor’s partner, Maxine, made it all happen after an invita-
tion to the Antibes Festival in 1964. Two weeks before the Antibes Festival, the Blue
Notes Septet and Maxine McGregor arrived in Paris, finally free of the burdens of the
apartheid regime.
In Europe and the United States

I was away from South Africa, away from the chains. I just wanted to be free, totally
free, even in music. Free to shake away all the slavery, anything to do with slavery,
being boxed into places—one, two, three, four—and being told you must come in
after four. . .. Free is it man, it’s so beautiful. The word “free” makes sense to me. . .. Let
my people go. Let my people go! And that’s interlinking with politics: they embrace
each other. It’s a cry from the inside, no inhibitions.
(McGregor 1995: 216)
The sense of freedom from apartheid bondage and the thrill at seeing American musi-
cians perform live, however, was soon replaced by new kinds of alienation and despair.
Despite high hopes that they would make the necessary connections to the European
or American jazz scene at Antibes, the Blue Notes found themselves stranded on the
beach at the end of the event. They called Brand and Benjamin, who arranged for the
group to stay in the basement of their student house in Zurich. The Blue Notes arrived
and did some playing together with Brand and Benjamin in Zurich and Geneva, but, by
1965, with an invitation to play at Ronnie Scott’s club for two weeks, the group moved to
London, with the Dollar Brand Trio and Benjamin following soon after.
These South African musicians spent much of the 1960s experimenting with musical
possibilities in several important venues, including the Club Africana in Zurich, where
Ellington heard Benjamin and the Dollar Brand Trio in 1963, an encounter that resulted
in a recording session in Paris a week later for the Trio and Benjamin (no parallel sup-
port was accorded the Blue Notes in 1964, other than from Brand and Benjamin); and
in London at the Transcription Center5 headed by Dennis Duerden, a U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA)-funded center for recently arrived African musicians,
poets, and writers, established in February 1962 as a Cold War bulwark against Africans
becoming communists. Brand was briefly appointed musical director there, and
Maxine McGregor actually worked for the center for a few years as a writer. Another
venue was Ronnie Scott’s Old Place, also in London, where, for a short time, less estab-
lished musicians were provided a space to experiment musically after Scott opened a
newer space for more conventional performances. In addition, the Café Montmartre
in Copenhagen, Denmark, was an extraordinary venue for meeting American musi-
cians in the free jazz movement; these included tenor saxophonists Stan Getz, Dexter
Gordon, and Ben Webster; pianist Kenny Drew and bassist Oscar Pettiford; pianist
Cecil Taylor; tenor saxophonists Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp; and trumpeter Don
Cherry. These musicians and their thinking proved key in shaping a greater sense of
musical freedom for Dollar Brand, but perhaps even more importantly for Chris
McGregor and the Blue Note musicians. Throughout this period, South Africans
moved between a variety of venues and studios across Europe, the United States, South
Africa, and even Argentina. And they began to explore the collective remembering of
the sounds of each other’s home—rural, and urban, European, Xhosa, mixed, male and
female.
The Blue Notes didn’t last long as a group in London initially because they had
to be resident in the country for a full year before they could become members of
the Musicians’ Union, making securing gigs and financial support almost impossible
for the whole group,6 and also because individual musicians in the ensemble were
invited to perform with other musicians, both in the United Kingdom and Europe
at large. Within a year of leaving South Africa, tenor saxophonist Nick Moyake had
returned to his home country, and he died there shortly afterward. Once the Blue
Notes split up, Chris and Maxine McGregor moved out of London and the coun-
try, and, by the end of the 1960s, they had purchased a dilapidated old water mill in
rural France, which they restored and where Maxine still lives. In 1966, Johnny Dyani
and Louis Moholo joined American Steve Lacy and Argentinian Gato Barbieri on a
disastrous tour to Barbieri’s home country, Argentina. Left destitute, the two South
Africans returned to the United Kingdom after a year in Argentina when a friend
found the money for their return fares.
While the McGregors made London their base for much of the decade until they
moved to France and the other Blue Notes dispersed around Europe, Dollar Brand and
Bea Benjamin were rarely in any place for longer than a few months. In the 1960s, they
traveled extensively around Europe; attended the Newport Jazz Festival in 1965 with
Ellington; went to New York, where Brand had a Rockefeller grant to study arranging
with Hal Overton at Julliard; traveled back to South Africa in 1968; and regularly moved
between southern Africa, Europe, and the United States through about 1975. Their son
Tsakwe was born in Swaziland in 1970, and Brand/Ibrahim also recorded several tracks
with South African musicians in the early 1970s, including the famous and controversial
tune “Mannenberg” with Basil “Mannenberg” Coetzee and others. In early 1977, Dollar
(now Abdullah Ibrahim), Bea (now Sathima Bea Benjamin), their son Tsakwe, and
their baby daughter Tsidi moved permanently to New York City, in a kind of “strategic
retreat” until South Africa was liberated.
Musical Diaspora, Transformation, and Remembrance

With Johnny Dyani I touched the Xhosa tradition, and it’s massive what you can
do with it. We experienced it and expanded on it and it opened a freedom for us. It
allows you space.
(Abdullah Ibrahim to Rasmussen 2003: 79)
I have to keep a tradition, you know, in order to recognize myself, because when I was
born I was born in a tradition. I was taught tradition, how to behave, how to move,
how to eat, how to survive. That’s part of the tradition, so the music I’ve heard, I have
to keep it with me wherever I’m going . . . that’s what’s given me my life, my being.
(Johnny Dyani to Ib Skovgaard, in Rasmussen 2003: 234)
While in the late 1950s there was a close connection between music produced by African
American bebop-oriented musicians and the sounds of the South African ensembles, the
Blue Notes and Dollar Brand’s ensemble and solo performances gradually transformed
through their experimentation with ideas of freedom, spontaneity, and the use of a wide
range of South African traditional music well into the mid-1970s. Initially, while still
in South Africa, diasporic ties were generated from the outside with an Afro-modern
sensibility in the language of American jazz—with the arrival of literature, recordings,
films, sheet music, and radio broadcasts by and about African American experiences. In
the postwar era, Dollar Brand, Dudu Pukwana, Louis Moholo, Bea Benjamin, and Chris
McGregor heard American popular music and jazz and began to form their own musi-
cal groups and develop an individual musical style modeled on the bebop and big band
music created by Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gillespie,
Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and others, all heard on records available in South Africa.
A small international community of passionate jazz consumers supported these perfor-

mances, and there was some very limited opportunity for the two groups to record.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Dollar Brand organized several recording sessions
in Johannesburg with musicians from both Cape town and Johannesburg, most notably
with his short-lived group the Jazz Epistles. The earliest such recordings with the Jazz
Epistles, Verse 1 (1958) and Jazz in Africa Volume One (1959 and reissued on CD in 1992),
incorporate American pianist John Mehegan and three additional South Africans.7 They
are bebop in style and, although the compositions are predominantly local, the music
would probably have been identified as “American.”8 This was before Brand traveled
abroad and began to think in new ways about his South African musical past. The Blue
Notes were recorded live at two jazz festivals as well: McGregor’s septet appears on the
Cold Castle National Jazz Festival (1962, Gallo), and, in 1963, he produced a full record-
ing of his own band, Chris McGregor and the Castle Lager Big Band, on an LP titled
Jazz: The African Sound (Gallo). Particularly on the latter recording, bebop origins are
evident, even though the recording included local compositions created by McGregor,
alto saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi, and Dollar Brand.
As such, one hears in the music of bandleaders Brand and McGregor musical ties
forged with what is now often termed the “old” African diaspora—a musical and increas-
ingly political identification with African American musicians whose history was cre-
ated from the transatlantic slave trade. Apartheid was the twentieth-century parallel to
slavery. I have termed this first stage of the new musical diaspora “musical surrogacy,” in
which the recordings travel and work as substitutes, standing in for the musicians them-
selves who do not travel to South Africa but whose music creates very close feelings of
familial connection for South Africans in this period. It was in this period that “South
African” jazz was already defining itself in relation to a foreign source: American jazz.
After leaving South Africa, the two groups began to expand their musical horizons
into a more transnational realm as they met and occasionally performed with American
and European free jazz musicians in Europe. In this context, the second stage of South
African jazz style began to be defined more tangibly in terms of musical and political
freedom, to the point at which Johnny Dyani cynically recalled that the musicians were
often treated as political rather than musical representatives while abroad. Certainly,
when they left South Africa, they were seeking freedom from the growing repression of
apartheid legislation and practice, and bebop offered one means to such freedom and a
certain assertion of black creativity and technical skills.
In this context, the 1960 and 1970s might be thought of as decades of musical and
political exploration of the possibilities and limits of freedom for these musicians,
and it was the free jazz movement’s Don Cherry, John Tchichai, and Don and Albert
Ayler, active in Europe at the time, who fostered personal relationships with the South
Africans. At the same time, these musicians were self-consciously searching inside for
a sound that connected them back to South Africa and the wide range of musical lan-
guages and practices recalled from their homeland—a place that just wasn’t that easy to
return to. In many ways, harkening back to African American forms of diaspora, both
groups generalized their longings into a space called “Africa,” which wasn’t necessarily a
particular place, but rather a way of being in the world that was markedly different from
what they experienced after leaving South Africa. Once they arrived in Europe, Brand
and McGregor followed distinctive paths in articulating their musical styles. As such,
I discuss music made after leaving South Africa separately though both explored at
length their ties to a definition of African music from the southern part of Africa. Theirs
was a different kind of musical sound and remembering than that created by African
Americans.
Dollar Brand/Xahuri/Abdullah Ibrahim and Bea/Sathima

Bea Benjamin
With the 1963 Paris recording of Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio, we
already begin to see an opening up of acoustical possibilities with local South African
references: a hauntingly beautiful ballad pays tribute to South Africa’s own Charlie
Parker, Kippie Moeketsi; there are lively, upbeat performances in “Dollar’s Dance,” “The
Stride,” and “Jumping Rope,” as well as a moderately paced interpretation of Monk’s
“Brilliant Corners.”
Two recordings made at Copenhagen’s Café Montmartre—Round Midnight at the
Café Montmartre (1965) and Anatomy of a South African Village (1965)—plus a third
from the same year Reflections (1965) were all recorded by the Dollar Brand Trio.
Performed on January 30, 1965, Round Midnight and Anatomy of a South African Village
present a more complicated jazz identity. These titles suggest a growing bifurcation in
Brand’s musical portfolio: Round Midnight and Reflections ostensibly pay tribute to the
old African diaspora, whereas Anatomy references the contemporary (South) African
experience. In terms of improvisation and compositional style, however, Brand is
beginning to sound far more like an independent voice in jazz. And, although Round
Midnight references the music of Thelonious Monk, whom Brand admired and later
met, there is also a Danish twist to the title: in the early 1960s, performing in the coveted
10 p.m. slot was an honor accorded to American musicians; playing “around midnight”
in Copenhagen’s Montmartre was the lot of musicians considered less skilled—the
non-American and Danish musicians. Dollar Brand had finally been elevated to the
place regularly assigned to Americans and so was scheduled to perform in the early slot
on January 30, 1965—until American Ben Webster arrived in town unexpectedly. To his
chagrin, Brand was summarily moved to the later shift to give Webster the more presti-
gious time slot. Brand began playing his session sometime around midnight.
In 1965, Brand and Benjamin were invited to perform with Duke Ellington’s band at
the Newport Jazz Festival, after which they decided to stay in the United States and, with
Ellington’s help, acquire permanent residence. Assisted by Dennis Duerden and his con-
nections in the United States, in 1966, Dollar Brand was offered a Rockefeller Foundation
Fellowship to study composition with Julliard composer Hal Overton, which he took up
for a full year. It is from this point on that we see Brand work, once again, as an individual
artist, occasionally providing Bea Benjamin with some space in which to sing during his
live gigs. Here, his focus is on solo piano recordings, with occasional collaborations with
other musicians. This enabled Brand to grow personally as a musician, but also provided
the freedom to travel wherever and whenever work became available.
The 1968 Hamba Kahle/Confluences Brand recording with Argentinian Gato Barbieri
in an Italian studio speaks of a greater internationalism and inclusiveness in musical
composition. Each musician presents two compositions, and they improvise on each
other’s materials. The confluence or solidarity engendered between the two artists
takes place in Europe but, by circumventing American musicians, it is clearly a polit-
ical and musical statement about jazz and the Global South in a musical language of
Afro-modernity from the North.
The definitive statement of 1960s Dollar Brand, however, is the 1969 release of his
recording, African Sketchbook, a project that sets the stage for a far greater focus on all
things “African” in the 1970s: One thinks, for example, of the recordings African Piano
(1969), Ancient Africa (1974), African Space Program (1974), African Marketplace (1979),
African Sun (1994), African Suite (1999), African Magic (2002), and so forth. Much like
a visual artist, Brand creates a series of piano/flute solo sketches of those pieces of South
African music and culture that he remembers or wishes to bring to the attention of his
listeners: from the “Air” on flute reminiscent of his great grandfather’s Scottish heritage,
to his Khoisan grandmother’s lineage in “Krotoa,”9 “Slave Bell,” and “Tariq,” to the Xhosa
and Chopi sounds in “Nkosi” and “Machopi,” to the senses of place and home embodied
in “Tokai,” “Mamma,” “The Dream,” “The Aloe and the Wild Rose,” and “African Sun,” and
all framed by the three-language greeting “Peace, Salaam, Hamba Kahle.”10 In live perfor-
mance as on record, these musical paraphrases interweave into a linear exposition of a
range of experiences that reconfigure the first diasporic history of slavery. “Krotoa,” “Slave
Bell,” and “Tariq” tell new narratives about South Africa’s own slave past, one derived from
Malaysia and Indonesian Muslim princes sent into exile in the Cape of Good Hope.
While the late 1960s and 1970s proved to be rich in recording opportunity for Dollar
Brand/Abdullah Ibrahim, it was his 1973 recording together with Blue Notes bass player
Johnny Dyani that created a musical meeting place that most powerfully articulates the
search for a specifically South African sound in jazz. In 1972, the two musicians began to
perform together in Abdullah Ibrahim’s international group, Universal Silence, which
included Don Cherry out of the Ornette Coleman school, Nana Vasconcelos from
Brazil, Benjamin, and Dyani “to bring this broad range of genres together into some
new sound. Later we added Carlos Ward who originally came from Panama, to join us,”
Ibrahim told Lars Rasmussen (2003: 79). Dyani joined their “African Space Program”
tour in 1973. Ibrahim recalls:
There we really thought about that expansion from tradition, the full circle of
experience, swing and bebop, and the African experience. . .. After that I started
duo work with him. That really opened up a whole lot of stuff because we could
delve into the traditional sounds . . . the idea of vocalizing the songs, like Ntsikana’s
Bell. In a sense it was not only playing the music, but reaffirming history. We were
actually sort of consolidating our background experience, our history. And we

found that it was valid . . . not our individual experience, but our national, African
experience.
(Ibrahim to Rasmussen 2003: 79–80)
Two recordings came out of the African Space Program, a big band recording with
the same title and Good News From Africa (1973). The six tracks of music are all South
African originals: “Ntsikana’s Bell,” “Msunduza,” “Good News,” “Adhan and Allahu
Akbar,” “The Pilgrim,” and “Moniebah.” Both Ibrahim and Dyani had recently converted
to Islam, but the recording itself speaks to a far greater complexity and layering of South
African and individual histories. “Ntsikana’s Bell”11 is one of the oldest Xhosa-language
Christian hymns, a core piece transmitted orally in many parts of the Eastern Cape prov-
ince; “Good News” similarly has a religious tone to it, as does the idea of “The Pilgrim”
and the Islamic call to prayer, “Adhan,” and religious invocation, “Allahu Akbar”—
meaning “Allah is the greatest.” Furthermore, the overtone-rich, untrained sounds of
the two male voices remind listeners of the central place of the human voice in south-
ern African traditional ritual and performance. Good News From Africa conveys a com-
plex, profound, and deeply moving story about contemporary forms of diaspora in the
call-and-response, overlapping cries of these two exiled musicians in the non-European
languages of Xhosa and Arabic.
Chris McGregor and the Blue Notes: Legacy (1964), Very Urgent

(1968), In Concert (1977), and Tribute to Feza (1978)12
Recording opportunities proved to be very different for the Blue Notes than they were
for Ibrahim, largely because of the latter’s chance meeting with Duke Ellington and
persistent letter writing, constantly looking for work. Ibrahim wrangled with promot-
ers and producers and built alliances with a number of key figures (including Dennis
Duerden at the Transcription Center in London and others in positions of power willing
to help); his friendship with Duke Ellington opened a range of doors to him in the mid
1960s. Because McGregor preferred to write for and perform with a big band rather than
do solo piano performances, his performance and recording opportunities were more
limited. Ibrahim clearly privileged solo piano in the 1960s, working and developing as
an individual artist who occasionally collaborated with others.
That said, from 1968 through the late 1980s, Chris McGregor managed to organize a
handful of recording gigs that released his music (there were others in which the music
remained unissued). London-based South African-initiated record label Ogun Records
provided the richest archive of Blue Note performances. The 2008 Blue Notes reissue
compilation includes a recording from the Blue Notes’ 1964 farewell tour in Durban,
South Africa that parallels the discussion earlier; two commemorative musical tributes
to Blue Notes musicians, one to trumpeter Mongezi Feza recorded in 1975 and one to
Johnny Dyani from 1986; and a celebratory recording of the group in 1978. In reflect-
ing on the issues of diaspora and exile, I take a look at two of these, the 1968 Very Urgent
recording and the commemorative recording made after trumpeter Mongezi Feza’s
tragic death in London, in December 1975. They provide two contrasting statements
about musical process and African diaspora in the Blue Notes performance during this
period.
In 1968, Chris McGregor secured the first record date abroad for the Blue Notes, and
their first European album, Very Urgent, was released on Polydor records. The lineup
included McGregor on piano, Dudu Pukwana on alto sax, Mongezi Feza on pocket
trumpet, ex-South African Ronnie Beer on tenor sax, Johnny Dyani on bass, and Louis
Moholo on drums. There are four tracks, two with double titles, making six composi-
tions in all. While, the first, “Marie My Dear,” uses a simple melody in a moderate
tempo—a tempo not fully suited to the Blue Notes’ explosively energetic playing, the
recording picks up quickly in “Travelling Somewhere,” moving into high-energy, free
playing that is reminiscent of the works of Albert Ayler but with even greater rhythmic
and emotional intensity. Although the horns remind one of Ayler’s playing, the rhyth-
mic lines—McGregor on piano, played percussively, Dyani on bass, and Moholo on
drums—sizzle, to put it mildly. In all remaining tracks—“Heart’s Vibrations,” “Sounds
Begin Again/White Lies,” and “Don’t Stir the Beehive,” one has the clear sense that these
musicians are completely in tune with each other; they listen, respond to, and put the
sounds together in the moment and without inhibition.
The energy of the music conveys an urgent drive. While the liner notes don’t explain
“very urgent” as a title, two tunes on track three, “The Sounds Begin Again/White Lies,”
musically suggest the urgent need for the international community to pay attention to
South Africa’s political situation. The extreme measures of the Blue Notes’ spontaneous,
deeply emotional outbursts of expressive freedom become musical analogies for the
attitude or transformation of consciousness needed to break the chains of apartheid that
would enable all South Africans to begin to imagine the possibilities of a more just social
and political order. The “traditional” theme of “Don’t Stir the Beehive” warns the apart-
heid regime that if they push too hard, the effects of “stirring the beehive” will erupt.
The hallmark Blue Notes “free” performances of their own compositions characterize
all subsequent recordings currently available: They play originals written by band mem-
bers and arranged by McGregor. There is some overlap in tunes between recording ses-
sions, but most of the material is unique to a particular recording. All tunes have titles,
composers, and arrangers individually named.
The 2008 Ogun reissue that contains a two-CD musical tribute to trumpeter Mongezi
“Mongs” Feza is different from the other recordings made by the Blue Notes. In
December 1975, Mongezi Feza died of pneumonia. He had suffered a mental breakdown
and was taken to a British hospital where he was treated for the breakdown, but not the
pneumonia. Aged thirty, he was basically left to die in a hospital bed.13 The Blue Notes
recording was made a few days after Feza’s funeral, when Johnny Dyani (bass, voice,
bells), Dudu Pukwana (alto sax, voice), Louis Moholo (drums, percussion, vocals),
and Chris McGregor (piano) walked into a rehearsal room in London and recorded for
Mongs. They didn’t talk about what they would do beforehand; they just turned to their
instruments and began to play. Running almost 160 minutes, one hears the outworking
in four movements of a wide range of styles, emotions, and textures. In this extended
musical voyage, the musicians string together a series of references to the collective
memory of their South African homes and the move into free jazz these South Africans
made since leaving, while lovingly paying homage to their friend and fellow musician.
The tribute to Feza warrants closer scrutiny here, in much the same way as the Brand/
Ibrahim African Sketchbook and Good News From Africa recordings do, although,
unlike Ibrahim’s recordings, this is an intimate moment, a conversation among friends
who remember a brother in the music, where he and they come from, and they journey
they have traveled together. What stands out most starkly, however, between the tribute
to Feza and the other Blue Notes recordings is that there is no clearly identifiable list of
compositions; the three CDs simply contain four “movements”—labeled numerically,
they each run between thirty-six and forty-three minutes in length. No words are used
to describe what they are doing, simply identifying numbers. All the other recordings
list the tunes included, so we are able, for example, to listen comparatively between one
version of “Funky Boots” and another. We are given clues about sources and origins
on the other recordings: “Abalimange” “We Nduna,” and “Kudala” on the 1978 concert
recording (In Concert in the Ogun 2008 reissue) are listed as “traditional” but arranged
by Dyani, McGregor, Moholo, and Pukwana. This is music to honor the dead, and, like
all music for African ritual, it is played collectively, without individual attribution or
ownership, for this is a liminal space. This is not a recording that will define a place in
jazz history for themselves, there is no ego here; rather, this is a moment to remember
Mongezi and to celebrate his extraordinary contribution to the free jazz movement in
1960s and 1970s Europe.
And the music does more than simply ensure safe passage in the moment of death
into the cosmos, a practice reminiscent of traditional South African ways. On this
recording, the musicians acoustically invoke the sounds and feelings of the Eastern
Cape rural environment, not as exact repetition or authentic revival of a past musical
tradition; instead, the memory of home is recast through fleeting musical references
passing through the minds of musicians. One hears for example, the clanging cowbells
that sound as reminders of Eastern Cape boy herders; at times, the musical texture is
as open and airy as the landscape of the Eastern Cape; and then one suddenly becomes
aware of repeating rhythms in the bass and drum, recurring riffs that create a momen-
tary reminder of home and habitat. At several points in the musical tribute, Dyani sim-
ply names Mongezi Feza, repeatedly calling out his name as if refusing his death; a little
later, he actually speaks to Mongezi in Xhosa as he imagines Feza’s journey to the spirit
world. At times, both the bass and drum function as human voices, singing and riffing,
remaking for these diasporic musicians the familiar but forgotten sound of ritual and
tradition, sounds only ever heard in the music made by the Blue Notes brothers, sounds
that reorient them to their roots, sounds that no one else can produce in their absence.
One captures the feeling of profound loss in this music, equally for the tragic death
of their comrade and friend “Mongs” Feza, as well as for the sorrow associated with
the pain of exile. In grieving alone in London, they are reminded of the wrenching
absence of South African friends and family to share in the mourning, although they
evoke their presence musically at the start of the recording. They compensate for the
absence of collectively voiced lamentation in the ways in which bass and alto sax imitate
the high-pitched ululation of grieving women in the Eastern Cape. At times, the emo-
tions in the music are somber, uncharacteristically for the Blue Notes, controlled and
pensive: there is no doubt about the depth of sorrow and despair they convey for the
sudden loss of Mongezi Feza. In other moments, their sound has greater energy and
exuberance, as they freely riff on 1940s marabi or 1950s kwela rhythms and groove to
celebrate the joy and love they have for their friend. And then there are clear moments
of the more recently developed “free” playing of the Blue Notes, a style informed both
by their European exposure and by the sheer joy of playing together. In other words, we
are not only hearing sounds of the past, but are, indeed, bearing witness to what else has
happened in their lives since leaving South Africa.
And here I suggest that what we hear musically in this moment is South African musi-
cians assessing their position as South Africans in exile. They left the country as the Blue
Notes; in the mid-1960s, Chris McGregor formed a second ensemble, the Brotherhood
of Breath. This was not just a group of musicians reviving South African traditional
music in a free jazz context. Rather, with McGregor in the lead, and frequently with the
contribution of English and European musicians, this band of free musicians collec-
tively breathed into being new forms of collective engagement with traces of past South
African music woven into its contrapuntal textures. Only when they grasp their sense
of historical and cultural connection to South Africa, collectively through memories of
African musical iteration, are the musicians able to project forward into new forms of
political dispensation.
In 1975—a year prior to the 1976 Soweto uprising in South Africa and the consoli-
dation of an international antiapartheid movement outside the country—the music of
the Blue Notes was not positing a narrative of politics in the way that the history of this
period would be written. What we can hear was achieved in that moment is a model of
practice: musically speaking, the mode of musical engagement is participatory democ-
racy in action. In the music, we hear traces of the past, played in a democratically con-
stituted, participatory, and equal way. The white pianist and leader of the band, Chris
McGregor, has no more aural presence on these recordings than its three black mem-
bers—Johnny Dyani, Louis Moholo, or Dudu Pukwana. If anything, the performance
hinges on the three black musicians; the pianist is often heard in a more distant posi-
tion. What we hear in this mode of musical engagement is the promise of freedom, the
practice of equality of voice, and a taste of things to come. This is a musical capsule in its
European milieu giving birth to new South African musical, social, and political pos-
sibilities, and it does so first by looking back into the archive of past South African per-
formance histories.
In sum, I have argued in this chapter that, on one hand, Brand, who by the late 1960s
had converted to Islam and renamed himself Xahuri and then Abdullah Ibrahim, cre-
ated music in a singular, curatorial, Ellingtonian manner: in doing so, he revealed an
untold story of South Africa’s people by invoking a contemporary African diasporic

discursive sounds in his music making. Politically, the Brand/Ibrahim process reso-
nated with South African Black Consciousness Movement Steve Biko’s ideas embod-
ied in the phrase “I write what I want” (2002[1978]). In contrast, McGregor’s musical
position privileged a participatory, democratic modus operandi and a commitment
to equality of voice and collective compositional process for all members of his band.
I propose that these more inclusive musical practices resonated with the thinking and
writing about participatory democracy espoused by Biko’s friend South African politi-
cal scientist Rick Turner (1972). These musicians were imagining new ways of being
South African, both in the world at large and in a future, more democratic dispensation
by restoring a process and history into their music making that was distinctly South
African. These ideas were executed from their diasporic positions abroad but created
in parallel with radical political ideas at home. Tragically, both Biko and Turner were
assassinated in the late 1970s, their ideas deemed too extreme for the apartheid regime.
Similarly, the new political dispensation came into being after most of the musicians
involved in creating this new form of South African music had already died in exile.
Only one member of the original Blue Notes remained to witness the realization of a
democratic political dispensation in South Africa—Louis Moholo. Johnny Dyani died
in 1986; Chris McGregor and, shortly after him, Dudu Pukwana both passed away in
1990. Ibrahim made his return to South Africa in the early 1990s; Benjamin took a lit-
tle longer because both her children were still living in New York City. She reluctantly
agreed to finally go home in 2011, with her son Tsakwe. Fortunately, the recent reis-
sues of this group of musicians’ recorded archive bear testimony to their extraordinary
vision, courage, creativity, and pride in their South African roots that were articulated
musically despite despair about apartheid inside their country and their daily struggles
to survive in exile abroad.
The Exodus of South Africans and

Memorialization of the
Sounds of Home
What, then, do we learn about musical revival from the story of South African jazz in
exile? I begin with a cursory overview of the elements of musical revival as outlined
by Tamara Livingston (1999). Livingston defines musical revival as a social movement
whose goal is to restore a musical tradition believed to be dying or already lost in the
past. The movement strives to recuperate lost values using a discourse of authenticity
to stand in cultural opposition to prevailing mainstream culture. She argues that these
revivals are not random, that the traditional music selected depends on the feasibility of
restoration, availability of sources, and the views of the revivalists themselves. Revival
depends on social, political, and economic circumstances.
Livingston provides six specific ingredients of musical revivals across a range of

places and communities: (a) an individual or a small group of key revivalists, always
from the middle class, often but not always reviving music of other communities;
(b) the availability of informants or original sources, usually recordings rather than
live performances; (c) an ideology or discourse of revival, historical truth, or authentic-
ity, and a balance between tradition and innovation; (d) followers who constitute the
revivalist community; (e) a series of revivalist activities—festivals, competitions, new
recordings—for spreading the word across distances; and (f) either nonprofit and/or
commercial interests involved in the marketing of revivals; often a revival will involve
musicians teaching the next generation about the music of a past world.
While Livingston’s model resonates with the South African practice of musical res-
toration, or of reviving the sounds of home driven by the torment of separation and
imminent loss, I suggest that the condition of exodus/exile produces a particular set
of challenges to this paradigm that may resonate in similarly constituted communi-
ties elsewhere in the world. These limits include, first, the near absence of any retriev-
able recorded archive of prior South African musical performance on which to form
a basis for the sounds of revival and a complete reliance on human memory. Second,
each individual musician brought a wide range of experiences in terms of race/ethnic-
ity, class, gender, religion, education, language and histories—in other words, one single
source for musical restoration does not exist. Instead one hears in this restoration of
Africanness as a blended representation, collectively created by those with vivid memo-
ries of place and home. Third, the community of listeners was not South African, so the
revived music is conveyed as an “authentic” representation of past practices because it is
performed by people who come from the musical traditions, it is also recontextualized
in a transnational context and articulated in a musical discourse that suits its European
or American audience. In this frame, the duality of jazz as a musical language provides
a nest for the individually expressed but also improvised, transnationally understood
language for articulating sounds of another, related African heart and home.
In other words, while there is a clear insertion of the sounds of South African music
into the jazz compositions and performances of exiled musicians in Europe, the drive
was a response to the European mainstream who didn’t believe that jazz could come
from South Africa, and to the pressing urgency and desire to insert the full range of
South Africa’s musical heritage into the historical record—to create a feeling of home for
exiled musicians in the music itself and to mobilize support for the political cause in a
manner that Europeans would understand. Jazz composition and performance became
the vehicle of South African musical transport and solace. Clearly, however, this is not a
kind of revival that produces an authenticity of similitude, of pure and untainted repli-
cation of sound. That was impossible because recordings of the music of a South African
childhood simply didn’t exist. Rather, like the details of Said’s memoir, the music pro-
duced by these South Africans was pulled from individual memories of home, family,
community, and neighborhood, fundamentally transformed by the contingencies of
exile: on one hand, shaped by the need to communicate to new audiences, to perform
alongside musicians from a range of unfamiliar places; and, on the other, extracted from
both the specific and the generalized acoustical memories of people and places one
hadn’t been in contact with for many years. And there were multiple sites of memory
retrieval.
Because of the multiplicity of sources for musical memorialization and quotation,
rather than a single source, and its retrieval out of the constant flux of human memory, it
is useful here to invoke the notion of “scenario” posited by performance studies scholar
Diana Taylor (2003:28–30). Taylor interrogates ideas about the relationship between the
archive and the repertoire to examine ways in which performance studies can become a
more inclusive and useful field of global inquiry. While the archive, associated with the
permanency and immutability of writing and thus of history, is in constant interaction
with the repertory—the often oral, mutable, and bodily transmission of live knowledge—
it is the repertoire that enacts embodied memory. Such transmission enables a kind of
individual agency, a performance of knowledge accrued by having been there. And it
was by means of the repertoire that South Africans carried the embodied memories and
sounds of home when they exited South Africa and moved abroad. It was as embodied
memory that musical and cultural knowledge was transferred across large territories. In
this context, the repertoire “allow[ed] for an alternative perspective on historical pro-
cesses of transnational contact and invited a remapping of [South African music history],
this time by following traditions of embodied practice” (Taylor 2003: 20). In the absence
of a fixed, recorded archive of prior performance, South African musicians could only
revive and perform this music abroad by transferring memories of home in the act of per-
formance. To do so, they created a series of musical scenarios suggestive of a wide range
of musical representation and history: an “Anatomy of a South African Village”; “Krotoa,”
the first translator for the Dutch colonist Jan Van Riebeeck; “Slave Bell,” in memory of
older forms of timekeeping from the Cape of Good Hope; “Tokai” (the forest); “Khoisan,”
and then more generally, “African Sketchbook,” “African Marketplace,” “African Piano,”
“In My Solitude,” “Very Urgent,” “Funky Boots,” and so forth. In such recreations of musi-
cal scenarios—the reiteration not just of sound but, indeed, of entire cultural practices
and epistemologies conveyed in a single musical item—these South African musicians
in exile collapsed the distinction between archive and repertory. Theirs was the repertory
reconstituted out of human memory that came to stand for the nation as a whole, some of
which would be recorded and released for wider consumption. It was this repertory artic-
ulated in embodied performance, and then recorded, which now stands as one archive of
South African jazz history for this period.
Notes
1. There is a growing body of web-based archival material pertaining to South African jazz,
and the Blue Notes are no exception. See for example, http://www.mfowler.myzen.co.uk/
(accessed May 20, 2013), a website titled: The Blue Notes, The South African Jazz Exiles.
There is the ongoing creation of a South African audio archive, http://www.flatinterna-
tional.org/current.php (accessed May 20, 2013) intended to present a visual record of
South African recording artifacts.
2. Brand and Ibrahim left South Africa together, although Brand was still married to his first
wife at the time. Prodded by Duke Ellington, Brand divorced his first wife and married
Sathima in London in 1965. They were divorced and remarried in the 1970s. They later
divorced a second time.
3. See Muller and Benjamin (2011).
4. She would finally find the original tapes and release an album in 1997, in New York City.
Called A Morning in Paris, the recording showcases her singing accompanied on different
tracks by the Dollar Brand Trio, with Billy Strayhorn or Duke Ellington on piano.
5. Run in parallel to the U.S. “Democracy Tours” of jazz and gospel musicians to places threat-
ened by communism, the Transcription Center was “funded by the Paris-based Congress
for Cultural Freedom (itself a CIA front), and its official brief was to record interviews
with African or Caribbean writers, artists, and intellectuals, in London and elsewhere.
Recordings or transcripts of these interviews were to be made available to radio stations in
Africa, the Caribbean, or anywhere else where interest in them was expressed. . . . In prac-
tice however its activities under its director, Dennis Duerden, proved to be much wider
than this: branching out into the making of television films, radio plays, and music record-
ings, or the sponsorship of art exhibitions, concerts, stage productions, and wide-ranging
discussions of many contemporary topics. It became something of an informal club for
all black artists visiting London and a powerhouse for many of their activities” (Moore
2002: 167).
6. Maxine McGregor (1995) comments that while the Musicians’ Union initially granted the
group refugee status so they could play a two-week gig at Ronnie Scott’s new club, this kind
of concession didn’t yield much for the musicians beyond the initial two weeks of work.
7. He recorded at the core commercial studios, such as Gallo, but, according to discogra-
pher Tom Lord (1992: B739-746, cited in Rasmussen 1998: 228), he also released recordings
under the labels of Soultown, Kazz, Giganti del Jazz, Europa, and Mandla, a mix of both
South African and European labels.
8. There are fourteen tracks in all on this recording; five have American attribution, and the
rest are South African—three each by Moeketsi and Brand, one by Masekela, and two
traditional African arrangements. Masekela’s piece is titled “Dollar’s Mood” and Dollar
responds with “Blues for Hughie.” Moeketsi’s “Scullery Department” references the rac-
ist treatment of black musicians in 1950s South Africa—at intermission, after they had
entertained the white clientele, they were sent to the kitchen or “scullery” to eat. On one
occasion, Brand and Moeketsi complained to the restaurant owner, who then organized a
table for them in the main dining room to eat. This was an act in defiance of apartheid law.
9. Krotoa was a Khoisan woman who was an interpreter for Dutch settler Jan Van Riebeeck
in the seventeenth century. Many Afrikaners claim her as an ancestor. (Http://blog.oup.
com/2009/05/south-africa/ accessed May 20, 2013.)
10. There are examples of Chopi traditional sounds to be found at http://www.disa.ukzn.ac.za/
samap/category/people/chopi (accessed May 20, 2013); Hugh Tracey’s original recordings,
as well as a book on Chopi musicians, are housed at the International Library of African
Music (see http://www.ru.ac.za/ilam/ilam/ accessed May 20, 2013). In addition, Chopi and
Khoisan music from the Kalahari can be found through the “Music Online” audio archive
by typing “Chopi Music,” “Kalahari,” or “Xhosa Traditional” into the search window.
11. The International Library of African Music has a recording of “Ntsikana’s Bell,” avail-
able through Smithsonian Folkways. (Http://www.folkways.si.edu/TrackDetails.
aspx?itemid=40204 accessed May 20, 2013.)
12. With the exception of “Very Urgent,” listed separately in the References section, all of these
recordings were reissued in the Ogun compilation (2008).
13. Some have drawn a parallel between the cruelty of his death and that of Black Consciousness
leader Steven Biko. Both came from Queenstown in the Eastern Cape and died within a
couple of years of each other—both unnecessarily and far too young.
References
Biko, Steven. 2002 [1978]. I Write What I Like: Selected Writings. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
(1): 66–85.
McGregor, Maxine. 1995. Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath. Flint,
MI: Bamberger Books.
Moore, Gerald. 2002. “The Transcription Center in the Sixties: Navigating in Narrow Seas.”
Research in African Literatures 33 (3): 167–181.
Muller, Carol, and Sathima Bea Benjamin. 2011. Musical Echoes: South African Women Thinking
in Jazz. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Rasmussen, Lars, compl. 1998. Abdullah Ibrahim: A Discography. Copenhagen: Booktrader.
——. 2000. Sathima Bea Benjamin: Embracing Jazz. Copenhagen: Booktrader.
——. 2003. Mbizo: A Book About Johnny Dyani. Copenhagen: Booktrader.
Said, Edward. 1999. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books.
Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Turner, Richard. 1972. The Eye of the Needle: Toward Participatory Democracy in South Africa.
New York: Orbis Books.
Discs Cited
Abdullah Ibrahim. 1974. Ancient Africa. Sackville Records, SKCD-2 3049

——. 1994. African Sun. Camden International.
——. 1999. African Suite. Enja Records.
——. 2003. African Magic. Enja Records.
Chris McGregor’s Blue Notes. 2008. Blue Notes: The Ogun Collection. Five CD set including Blue
Notes For Mongezi (two CDs), In Concert, Blue Notes For Johnny, and Legacy: Live in South
Afrika 1964. London: Ogun OGCD 024-028.
——. 1968. Blue Notes: Very Urgent. London: Polydor.
Cold Castle National Jazz Festival. 1962. Johannesburg: Gallo. NSL 1010.
Dollar Brand and Gato Barbieri, 1974. Confluences. LP, Arista, AL 1003.
Dollar Brand. 1965. Reflections. Germany: Black Lion BLP 60127.
——. 1969. African Piano. ECM Records.
——. 1973. African Space Program. Enja Records.
——. 1974. Good News From Africa (1974) Enja Records, CD 2048-2.
——. 1979. African Marketplace. New York: Discovery.

——. 1992a. Round Midnight at the Café Montmartre. CD, Black Lion, BLCD 760111.
——. 1992b. Anatomy of a South African Village. CD, Black Lion, BLCD 260172.
——. Nd. (1974) African Sketchbook. CD, Enja Records, Enj-2026 2.
Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio. 1997 (1964). CD, Reprise, 2-6111.
The Jazz Epistles. 1958. Jazz Epistles, Verse One. LP, Gallo, unknown.
——. 1992 (1959). Jazz in Africa, Volume One. CD, Kaz Records CD 24.
Jazz: The African Sound. 1963. Johannesburg: Gallo, NSL 1011.
“Ntsikana’s Bell.” International Library of African Music archive recording. Smithsonian
Folkways. http://www.folkways.si.edu/TrackDetails.aspx?itemid=40204.
Sathima Bea Benjamin. 1997. A Morning in Paris. Enja Records, Enj-9309 2.
Websites Cited
Allen, Siemon, curator. 2012. Flat International: South African Audio Archive. http://www.fla-
tinternational.org/current.php.
Fowler, Mike, compiler. 2012. The Blue Notes: the South African Jazz Exiles. Wordpress Project.
http://blog.oup.com/2009/05/south-africa.
“Chopi.” SAMAP South African Music Archive Project. Digital Innovation South Africa,
University of KwaZulu-Natal. http://www.disa.ukzn.ac.za/samap/category/people/chopi.
International Library of African Music, Rhodes University. 2012. http://www.ru.ac.za/ilam/
ilam.
C HA P T E R 30
RE-FLECTIONS
M A R K SLOBI N
As interpreters of culture, we are always playing a chess game against an ambiguous

opponent who constantly shifts strategy as we try to gain ground and capture pieces.
Often, our expectations are too high. We hope to move a lowly analytical pawn to the
end of the board, where it will turn into a mighty queen of theory, so we can proceed
confidently to the endgame. In fact, we never make it to the last square before history
shakes the board and knocks over the pieces. We might consider the cultural relativ-
ity of the rules themselves. When I played chess in Afghan bazaars, a pawn that made
it to the end converted only to the piece of the square it landed on, a bishop, knight, or
castle, allowing more tactical flexibility to extend the contest with ambiguity. The wide
set of places, issues, and approaches represented in this book often offer these supple
strategies rather than a master strategy. Without extending the chess metaphor beyond
the reader’s patience, I want to deploy three gambits, multiple openings for the game of
interpretation, in this case of “music revival.” I’m guided by the precedent of the liter-
ary critic Viktor Shklovsky (2005), who wrote eloquently around 1920, in a state of exile
where he had to imagine how to continue his work, by taking “the knight’s move.” It is
a metaphor based on how that chess piece must proceed: by stepping both forward and
sideways.
The Dictionary Gambit: Re-
The foregoing essays take a re-turn. It seems that re- has re-placed post-, the favored pre-
fix of the late twentieth century, which makes surprisingly few appearances in this vol-
ume. True, “postrevival” seems reasonable enough, and was even briefly considered for
the title of the book, but what comes after a postrevival stage? Another re-turn? Here are
just some of the combination words that follow this fateful prefix: revitalization, recla-
mation, reimplementation, recreation, reproduction, restoration, rediscovery, revision,
resurgence.
Re-Flections 667
Our Anglo-Saxon convention of turning to the Oxford English Dictionary for guid-
ance—if not consolation—can help to map out this verbal territory. But before turning to
the English that serves as common tongue for the varied authors here, I should observe
that reis unusual in being so widely applicable to a number of European languages,
unlike many ethnomusicological terms adapted from English, sometimes awkwardly: It’s
a cosmopolitan prefix that suits our interpretive moment. And it is a complex one. The
OED begins by saying that “the extent to which this prefix has been employed in English
since the nineteenth century, and especially from the latter half of it onwards, makes it
impossible to attempt a complete record of all the forms resulting from its use.” Indeed,
the OED goes so far as to say that “the number of these is practically infinite,” quite a
concession for lexicographers to make. But they very helpfully go on to say that all uses
belong to only three classes, each of which has some relevance for my present purposes.
(1) re- stipulates that “the action itself is performed a second time, and sometimes
that its result is to reverse a previous action or process, or to restore a previous
state of things.”
This seems striking, in two ways. First, does re- have to specify only a “second time,”
or can this be the third or more times that people have considered whether today’s
resources are sufficient for their needs? This sense of the prefix does not accommodate
the cyclical, spiral, or folded nature of musical change. Second, can the prefix work to
describe cultural action that might both reverse and restore “a previous state of things?”
Here the OED is being prescient. The essays here do in fact speak to both kinds of moves.
In the interests of communing with earlier times, people may drop or downplay some of
what they do. Suddenly, they see accepted styles and repertoires as kitsch or overbearing,
musical objects to be put in the closet to clear the clutter. They might also take out and
polish tarnished pieces, now understood as musical sterling. They can do both as part of
the same cultural gesture, so the OED should have used “and/or” instead of a simple “or.”
(2) reis used to denote “ ‘making (of a certain kind or quality),’ ‘turning or con-
verting into——’: ‘Tarantino re-Americanized the French hybrids, reclaiming
them, as it were.’ (2004)”
This is indeed a different sensibility, where we are dealing not with restoring or revers-
ing but with taking back something that has been taken away, literally or metaphori-
cally. Musically, small groups often need to find ways to overcome the appropriation of
their resources. The superculture’s unending drive to simulate, and perhaps sell, people’s
vernacular material differs from outright suppression or neglect of musical resources.
Micromusics have to turn imitations into originals, so to speak, not just raid the closet
for neglected traditions.
(3) reis used to “denote fitting, equipping, supplying, or treating with something.

‘Seeing this grand old hotel being refleshed and reboned gave Mary a twinge.’
(1990)”
668 Mark Slobin
This third sense of re- offers more neutrality, less affect. “Fitting, equipping, supply-
ing”—these are efficient and technical approaches to a change to a former state. Just a
makeover, not a rebuild. What’s there has not been torn down, and already has a solid
enough structure: The grand old hotel of music can be made ready for customers with
just workmanlike attention. No imaginative leaps over historical chasms, no new foun-
dation-building on an old half-forgotten site. It’s a matter of turning an eyesore into an
eyeful. This mode of cultural re- activity is less romantic and more technocratic, and cer-
tainly suits a wide range of practice in many of the systems this book describes.
The Parallel Musics Gambit
This book deals with what are usually called “heritage” or “roots” musical systems.
Meanwhile, our colleagues are charting similar transformations in parallel musical sys-
tems that are themselves now based on memory, nostalgia, or a fresh consideration of
the past. The critic Simon Reynolds has written a polemic against this sensibility in a
book called Retromania, which includes this litany of re- isms; the OED could not have
done it better:
The first ten years of the twenty-first century turned out to be the “Re” Decade. The
2000s were dominated by the “re-” prefix: revivals, reissues, remakes, re-enactments.
Endless retrospection,” [leading to] band reformations . . . groups reuniting for nos-
talgia tours in order to replenish . . . bank balances or as a prequel to returning to the
studio to relaunch their careers as recording artists . . . rampant recycling: bygone
genres revived and renovated, vintage sonic material reprocessed and recombined.
(Reynolds 2011: xi)
Reynolds does not see this trend of the early 2000s as re-freshing but as a slowdown
of creativity: “[T]he sensation of moving forward grew fainter as the decade unfurled.
Time itself seemed to become sluggish, like a river that starts to meander and form
oxbow lakes . . . the pulse of NOW felt weaker with each passing year.” (x) For him, this
current is a threat to popular music’s need to surge forth into the future: “could it be that
the greatest danger to the future of our music culture is . . . its past?” (ix) His position
stands in contrast to the stance of the writers in this book, who sometimes approach
versions of musical re- at worst with a kind of skeptical detachment but mostly evalu-
ate musical shifts as a neutral or even positive phase. Ethnomusicologists seem to view
these moments as just one turn in a long history of aesthetic, political, or ideological
movements that may shift the banks of music’s flow but do not dam up creativity, to use
Reynolds’s metaphor of the river.
Perhaps Reynolds’s pugnacious position responds to the many artists he has inter-
viewed, since musicians themselves do not necessarily want to call attention to the
fact that they rely heavily on earlier forms and formats. Sometimes, though, they can
be nudged into re- ist discourse by journalists looking for re- moments. To take a ran-
dom example, the Alabama Shakes says that “they aren’t treating their bluesy soul as a
Re-Flections 669
fashion statement or an antiquarian re-enactment. . .. Ms. Howard soaked [it] up when

she spent time with her grandmother, and the other band members learned about [it]
from their parents.” This singer is quite adept at re- terms herself: “[W]e’re not trying to
recreate anything. I would hear what people call soul music, but it didn’t make me feel
like anything. It was regenerated, regurgitated, like ‘This is what soul music is supposed
to sound like’ ” (Pareles 2012a).
Another musician deploys a more poetic discourse, an abstract sense of revisiting
musical pasts that inspires an analytical gambit from the theoretically minded critic
Jon Pareles: “perhaps it’s not just retro but meta-retro: a 21st-century take on an already
self-conscious late-1970s reclamation of the ’60s.” Ethnomusicologists might call this
postrevival. But the singer in question, Asa Taccone, has a more poetic take on this gam-
bit: “ ‘Something perished, past and gone away/And nothing ever lasts that hesitates,’ Mr.
Taccone observes, cryptically” (Pareles 2012b). Artists can be theorists, too. Is a musical
re- moment a “hesitation” rather than a claiming of a stake in the present through the
past, with little concern for the future? It is worth looking across our ethno-fences to see
how other musicians and writers struggle with the issues raised in this book.
The Sister Disciplines Gambit
We might also move our pieces forward a bit if we survey the strategies in fields of study
that are so close to ours as to intersect and even overlap. Among those, one has rein its
name: language revitalization. Leanne Hinton, a leading figure in this domain, defines
the core term as “the various ways in which people are working to keep their languages
alive or bring them back into use” (Hinton 2001: 5), which sounds pretty close to the
main thrust of many of the essays here. It’s useful to think of revitalization as possibly just
keeping something alive as well as bringing something back into use, and such thinking
might push aside some of the problems that “revival” puts in the path of progressing our
pawns. No need to insist on the from-scratch or from-memory points of departure.
Language revitalization has other suggestive re- terms, such as Joshua Fishman’s
“reverse language shift” (RLS; 1991). Though I don’t think Fishman means to use an
automobile metaphor, the RLS reminds me of the process of shifting into reverse gear.
You want to change direction, but in a way that involves looking over your shoulder as
you move purposefully: it’s awkward and hard to accomplish without veering as you
go. You might bump into objects as you go backward, making you think carefully about
your position, all of which suits many of the situations raised in the essays here.
Another appealing language revitalization approach is the questioning of whether
any language actually dies or goes extinct, something we grapple with constantly, since
music evaporates easily into the air. Revivalists do talk to surviving specialists but often
fall back on written and recorded texts, so as to create canons. This might seem to bypass
the problem, since so many instruments, styles, genres, and repertoire do appear to have
vanished, but seems too easy an off-ramp from the risky highway of history. Hinton put
670 Mark Slobin
it this way: “I prefer the less final metaphor of ‘silence,’ or L. Frank Manriquez’s ‘sleep’ ”
(Hinton 2001: 413). The “silence” or “sleep” of music might be developed a bit further in
ethnomusicology. To what extent are we watching the rise and fall of breath of a slum-
bering system, or are we helping to kiss a music awake from dormancy through activism
and advocacy? Are we hearing murmurs, amplifying echoes, or giving voice to silence?
Our neighbors in language revitalization mull over another question of method: the
need to distinguish between linguistic microsystems in small areas of a country—often
“endangered”—versus those that might potentially be “national” or “state” languages,
for example Irish, Welsh, Hawaiian, and Maori (Hinton 2001: 101). The latter stand a
better chance of success for various reasons—large population, symbolic importance,
the possibility of monolingualism, the greater ease in implementing social policies, his-
tories of literacy, and so on. This perspective also covers many of the musical contexts
discussed in this book: scale, scope, and planes of analysis shift with size, clout, and
political potential.
Finally, Hinton has always been on our side. She consistently points to the impor-
tance of song in language rediscovery, education, and maintenance projects. Music can
act as the stone around which the snowball effect of revitalization can cohere so it can
gain momentum. But what makes the linguists’ work so supportive is the realization
that yes, song helps internal cohesion, but it also enables crossgroup interaction patterns
that language might disallow. This is an issue that crops up in this book, but it sounds a
bit different coming from an anthropological linguist. In an essay explicitly titled “Song;
Overcoming the Language Barrier,” Hinton declares that “words are barriers to unity;
words separate people . . . but music unifies. . .. Unification through song has been going
on for centuries” across tribal California (Hinton 1994: 32). This recognition of the dual
action of musical re- work deserves our attention as a knight’s-move: simultaneously
forward and lateral.
Now that this anthology has suitably summarized the state of revival, what happens
to the term? I imagine we appreciate its long years of service, and we move on. The word
itself will continue to be an object of “re-flection,” the title the editors proposed for this
afterword. Its base—read as “flexion”—implies the supple articulating of joints through
muscles, tendons, and tissue, through space and time, here as extensions of the inter-
pretive body. Elbows can’t move too far backward, and knees can’t flex too far forward.
To stay in sync and stride steadily, we need tactile, tactful, and tactical strategies from
our own ethnomusicological understandings, our interdisciplinary kin, and our closest
musical collaborators.
References
Fishman, Joshua. 1991. Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of
Assistance to Threatened Languages. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.
Hinton, Leanne. 1994. Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages. Berkeley,
CA: Heyday Books.
Re-Flections 671
Hinton, Leanne, and Hale, Ken. 2001. The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice.
San Diego: Academic Press.
Pareles, Jon. 2012a, April 8. “Cinderella Treatment for Unvarnished Soul.” New York Times,
www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/arts/music/alabama-shakes-unvarnished-soul-on-
shiny-new-album.html?ref=todayspaper, accessed May 13, 2013.
Pareles, Jon. 2012b, May 5. “Recharging Retro While Pondering the Ambitions and Choices
of Today.” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2012/05/05/arts/music/electric-gu
est-at-bowery-ballroom.html?ref=todayspaper, accessed May 13, 2013.
Reynolds, Simon. 2011. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber.
Shklovsky, Viktor. 2005 [1920]. Knight’s Move. London: Dalkey Archive Press.
Index
Abdollah, Mirza, 283 African Sketchbook, 655

Abdullah, Jamal, 377 “African Space Program” tour, 655–56
Abdurahimova, Feruza, 265–66, 268–69, 270 Afrocreolization, of Garifuna, 350–51, 355–57
academia: and ancient music, 78, 82–83; Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Afghanistan,
Bastin’s research on blues tradition in 384–85
Southeast, 104; and cultural politics, Aghniashvili, Lado (Vladimer), 577
102–3; disaffection with impurity of ancient Akbar, Maulana, 377
traditions in, 206; folklore as independent Alabama Shakes, 668–69
discipline in, 73, 95–96; and hyperglobal Ala-Könni, Erkka, 401–2
perspective, 475; perception of authenticity Alburger, Mary Ellen, 560
in, 20; and postrevival, 105–6; recent revival Algonquians, 76, 80
studies in, 107–10; and revival as paradigm, alienation, 562
101–2; revival scholarship, 5–8, 99–100, 101; Alimatov, Turgun, 275n8
Rosenberg’s experiences in, 96–99; and Alizadeh, Hossein, 288
Transforming Tradition, 100–101; Uzbek Allen, R. Raymond, 109, 563
musical literacy and, 255, 261–62, 269–72, allotment, 446–47
273. See also conservatories; education; Aloe (NGO), 377–78
transmission “Aman Duniaku Aman” (Secure, my world is
accordion clubs, Scottish, 560 secure), 380
Aceh, Indonesia: differences in revivals in, 385; amateurs: English folk music resurgence and,
distinguishing features of revival in, 374; 497–98; and foreign singers of Georgian
ethnographic research on, 374; following polyphony, 583; pelimanni revival and,
Helsinki Peace Agreement, 380–81; 401–2
posttsunami revival in, 375–80 American Folklore Society, 95
activism: central to American folk movement, American Indian Movement, 448–49
492, 506; in Hungarian dance house American instrumental folk music revival:
movement, 182, 192–94; legitimization assessing, 116–19; Hollow Rock String Band
and, 4; Livingston on revival and, 8; Native and, 120–22; scholar-collectors’ experiences
Americans and social, 300–301, 318, 451; in, 122–29
revival as, 10–12, 350–70, 393–414, 418–36 American student movement, 448–49
Adler, Guido, 82 American Wake, 602
Adorno, Theodor, 141 Americas, as parallel to medieval antiquity,
aesthetization, 46 75–76, 79, 80. See also United States
affinity groups, 552–53, 554, 565, 589–93 Anatomy of a South African Village, 654
Afghanistan: ethnographic research on, 374; Anchiskhati Choir, 580
revival in, 382–85, 386 ancient music: as departure for experimental
Afghanistan Institute of Music (ANIM), 383–84 improvisation and personal expression,
Afifuddin, Afeed, 377 404–13; Finnish avant-garde folk music and,
Afifuddin, Maulana, 377 415n7. See also early music
674 INDEX
Anderson, Robert T., 556 arts therapy, 379–80, 387n3

Anderson, Tom, 559 Asch, Verna, 450
de Andrade, Mario, 423 Ashrafiy, Muxatar, 261–62
Andreev, Vasiliy, 257 Askew, Kelly, 233
Anglicism, 207 Asplund, Anneli, 406
Anglin, Joe, 125 Association des Ressortissants de Thionck Essyl
animation, 244–46 (ARTE), 239–41
annual commemorative ceremonies, for 2004 Atkins, E. Taylor, 155n30
tsunami victims, 379 Aubert, Laurent, 456
An Sain, 148 audio recordings: and authenticity of early
Anthology of American Folk Music (Smith), music, 83; of Chickasaw communal dance
105–6 songs, 312, 315; of Choctaw music, 304; of
anthropology, revitalization theories in, 6–7 Chris McGregor and Blue Notes, 656–59;
“anti-nautch” movement, 210, 214 dissemination through, 26; of Dollar
antiquarians: fifteenth- and sixteenth-century, Brand, 655; of Georgian folk polyphony,
6; and revival of early music, 74, 78–80; and 578, 583–84; of Hungarian folk music,
study of medieval antiquity, 74–81, 89–90 197, 199; Iranian classical music and, 278,
antiquity, study of, 74–81, 89–90 282, 287, 293, 294; and Irish diaspora, 609,
apartheid, establishment of, 647–50 611; learning music through, 123–24; as
Arabov, Ilyos, 264 representation of music, 49–50, 103; of
Araqishvili, Dimitri, 577, 578 South African jazz, 653; transcription of, 86
Araújo, Guilherme, 429 August Revolution of 1945 (Vietnam), 165
archaeology: antiquarianism morphs into, 78; Australia: commemorative military music of,
interpretive, 12–13; musical, 90 374; and Irish diaspora, 600, 612
archives: of Afghan music, 382, 383, 386; of authenticity: accepting, of tradition, 125; of
ancient music, 409; Archives of Folk and American folk music, 105; of American
Primitive Music, 96; Berlin Phonogram instrumental folk music, 117, 118; of
Archive, 578; Dance House Archive, 182, ancient music, 79–80, 83; anxiety over
192; dissemination and, 25; founded by loss of, 165; authority and legitimacy and,
Herbert Halpert, 96; of kantele players, 407– 19–24; and authority over kathak dance,
8; Memorial University of Newfoundland 220; Bahianos and, 428, 435–36; of bossa
Folklore and Language Archive, 97; and nova, 422, 426; of ca trù, 163; and choro
Recommendation on the Safeguarding revival, 62, 66; criteria for, 6, 36n15, 406,
of Traditional Culture and Folklore, 142; 413; and Croatian revival, 327–28, 333,
repertory and, 662; of runo-song texts, 396; 335, 341; debates over, 117; definitions of,
of South African jazz, 660, 661, 662; Taylor’s 111n5, 297n17; as drive for revival, 434;
theories on, 35, 647 early music and, 83; and emergence of
Archives of Folk and Primitive Music, 96 Casamançais regionalism, 241; emotional,
Aref Ensemble, 292 567; and English folk music resurgence,
Arraes, Miguel, 428 497, 507; and Finnish folk creative process,
arranged folk music (Uzbek): commonalities 413, 414; Georgian polyphony and, 579,
of, with traditional music, 272–73; 585, 586, 588, 589, 591; global hybridity and,
development of, 256–58; history of, 223; Hawaiian search of, 536; historically
254–56; during post-Soviet era, 262–72; continuity and, 45, 67, 68; and historical
promulgation of, in Uzbekistan, 252; sound veracity, 286–91; of Hungarian dance
of, 253–54; State Conservatory as flagship house movement, 197; in Hungarian folk
institution for, 259–62 music, 197; hybridity and, 223; of Iļģi, 479,
INDEX 675
481; importance of, to revival production, Bacone College, Native music added to
46–47; improvement of culture through curriculum of, 447–48
values based on, 61; invocation and Bahianos: alternative path of, 428–30;
manipulation of, 8; in Iranian classical approach of, to revival, 419–20, 435–36;
music, 281, 282–85, 287–88, 295; and background of, 427–28; and emergence of
Iranian dance in diaspora, 620, 622–23, Tropicália movement, 430–32; Nara Leão
634, 635, 636; and Irish diaspora, 598, 601, and, 418–20; as revivalists, 422
603, 604, 605, 614; of Ivana Kupala, 523; of Baily, John, 330, 339, 374
kathak dance, 206, 211, 219, 220, 221, 222; Bakalama, 239–43, 244, 246–47
of Korean intangible cultural heritage, 138– Bakhtin, Mikail, 59n4
39; of Latvian music, 471; legitimization ballet, Iranian national dance and, 627–28,
and, 4, 8, 45, 394, 414; Livingston on 629, 635
tradition and, 453; and Native flute, 449, Ballets Africains, 228, 232–33
451, 452, 454, 459; of neo-traditional Ballgame, Choctaw communal songs and
Senegalese choreography, 229; dances as part of, 304–5
object-oriented criteria for, 6, 20, 326, 491; bans, musical: in Afghanistan, 382–83;
and origin fallacy, 118; person-oriented ethnomusicalogical literature regarding, 373
criteria for, 20–22; and processes of Barbeau, Marius, 85–89, 90
professionalization, institutionalization, Barbieri, Gato, 655
commercialization, and commodification, Barker, Simon, 149, 155n27
63–64; process-oriented criteria for, 22–23; Bartók, Béla, 192
and promotion of folk music, 6; of public Bartók Ensemble, 184–85, 186, 188, 193
folklore, 105; quality and, 47; of radif, Bastin, Bruce, 104
297n13; and re-creation of ancient music, bát âm orchestra, 175
406; and rejection of revivalist artists, 620; Baumann, Max Peter: on categories of
reproduction as measure of, 14; revival performing musicians, 449; continuum
processes and cultures as, 6; and sceptic of, 16, 277, 292; on fusion processes, 476;
perspective of globalization, 473–74; on revival and cycles of change, 393; on
sceptics versus transformationalists and, syncretism model of music revivals, 450–51;
477–78; of Skandinieki, 469; of South on utopias of past and future, 294
African jazz, 661; in “The Birth of Hawai‘i,” bayadères, 208–10
539, 543; theorizing of, 9; tradition BBC Radio 2, 500–501, 504, 505
and, 453; tradition characterized by, 55; Bealle, John, 108
traditions bound to rules governing, 28; Béart, Charles, 230
in Uzbek performance, 270; William Beck, Jean-Baptiste, 87–89, 90
Thomas’s theorem on, 43. See also purity Beck, Ulrich, 473
authenticity police, 36n13, 291 von Becker, Reinhold, 397
authority: authenticity and legitimacy and, Belfast Harp Festival, 604
19–24; and kathak dance revival, 216, 220; du Bellay, Joachim, 74
in “The Birth of Hawai‘i,” 543; on traditional Benga, Féral, 231
Native American music, 301 Benjamin, Sathima Bea: in Europe, 646,
autoexoticism, 633–35 651, 652; influences on, 649, 652; leaves
Autonomy Law (1987), 360 for Europe, 649–50; music of, following
avant-garde music, Finnish folk, 404–13, departure from South Africa, 647, 654–56
415n7, n11. See also bossa nova; Tropicália Benjamin, Walter, 44
movement Berán, István, 197
Azizboev, Salohiddin, 271 Berkeley folk revival, 107–9
676 INDEX
Bernardini, Jean-François, 29 of, following departure from South Africa,

Bethânia, Maria, 418–20, 427, 428, 431 646, 647, 654–56, 659–60; recordings of, 653.
Bhabha, Homi, 222 See also Ibrahim, Abdullah
bharata natyam, 634 breakdown, of revivals, 28
Bigenho, Michelle, 284 Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of
“Big Fish, Small Pond: Country Musicians and Virginia, A (Harriot), 75fig., 76, 77fig., 79fig.
Their Markets” (Rosenberg), 98–99 Briggs, Charles, 7–8
Bigolo (Seck), 231 Britain: Georgian singing in, 587–89; imperial
Biko, Steve, 660 rule in India, 207, 221–22. See also England;
Bilaniuk, Laada, 524 Scotland
bilyi holos, 520, 522 Britons, ancient, 76
Binkley, Thomas, 83 broadcasting, Iranian classical music and,
“bird calls,” 445 279–80. See also BBC Radio 2; “Birth of
“Birth of Hawai‘i, The”: configuration of Hawai‘i, The”; Radio Tehran
culture in, 539–44; embedded in Hawaiian Brocken, Michael, 500
culture, 530–31; grounded in Hawaiian Brotherhood of Breath, 659
Renaissance, 532–37; as Hawaiian mainstay, Brown, LaDonna, 313, 314, 315–17
544–46; history and making of, 537–39; Brown, Michael, 21, 462
significance of, 546–48 Browner, Tara, 443, 447, 455
Bitka na Neretvi (Battle of Neretva), 330 Brunvand, Jan, 563
Black Arisin’, 364, 368 Bunting, Edward, 604
Black Caribs, 350, 370n2 Burney, Charles, 78
“Black History, Black Culture” (Soul Butt, John, 13
Vibrations), 368
Blacking, John, 328 Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern
block flute, 443–45 California (DeWitt), 107
blood heritage, 263–64 California Choctaw Gathering, 311–12
Blue Eagle, A. C., 447 Camara, Toumani, 242
bluegrass, 96, 100, 123, 129 Cambridge Folk Festival, 500–501
Bluegrass: A History (Rosenberg), 99 Camden, William, 78
Blue Notes, 646–47; in Europe, 651; formation Camp, Charles, 105, 106
of, 649; music and recordings of, 653, 656– Canada: instrumental folk music revival
59; transformation and diaspora and, 652 in, 128; and Native relations, 446; revival
Boal, Augusto, 426, 427, 431 dialogue in, 109–10
Bohlman, Philip: on embeddedness, 167; on Cantometrics, Lomax’s theory of, 35n2
historicism, 327; and musical creativity Cape Breton, 118, 128
continuum, 454; on new symbols in revival, Cape Bretonish, 54
287; on revival and community, 426; The Carlos, Roberto, 431
Study of Folk Music in the Modern World, 7 Carthy, Martin, 479
Borumand, Nur Ali, 283, 286, 288–91, 296n11 Casamance, Senegal, 235, 237–48
bossa nova: evolution from, to Tropicália, de la Casas, Bartolomé, 76
422–25; Nara Leão and, 418–20 caste, and kathak dance revival, 214–15,
Boym, Svetlana, 13, 273, 274 219–20
braid, of Yulia Tymoshenko, 513 ca trù: etymology of, 165–66; historical
Brand, Dollar: education of, 648; in Europe, ontologies of, 166–70; as intangible
649–50, 651, 652; and formation of Jazz cultural heritage, 160, 161–63, 177; revivalist
Epistles, 649; influences on, 649, 652; music discourse on, 163–65; revival of, 160, 170–76
INDEX 677
Ca Trù Thái Há Ensemble, 171, 173, 175–76 under Russian occupation, 576, 577–78;
Ca Trù Thăng Long Club, 174–75, 179n16 and transnational affinity groups, 589–93;
Ca Trù Thăng Long Theater, 174 transnational connections and, 593–95. See
Cazimero, Robert, 534, 543, 548n2 also church music, Croatian
Cazimero, Roland, 534 Charkh, 639–40
cells, 104–5 Charles, Terence, 367–68
Center for the Development of Human, Civil, Chateaubriand, François-René, 78
and Autonomy Rights (CEDEHCA), 364 Chi Ch’unsang, 144
Center for the Preservation and Propagation Chickasaw: and Choctaw communal songs
of Iranian Music, 281–82 and dances, 306–7; history of, 302–4; music
CFA (come from away), 109–10 and dance revivals of, 301–2, 312–18
Chadwick, Helen, 587, 588 Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe, 313–15, 316
Chandra, Sheila, 590 Chickasaw Social Songs and Stomp Dances, 312
change: acceptance for, 19; in art and cultural Chieftains, The, 611
production, 141; and Brazilian popular “Chieu Phu Tay Ho,” 179n18
music, 423, 424, 425, 429, 435; ca trù and, children: arts therapy for, 378–79, 387n3;
175, 176; causes of, 21; and Choctaw and assimilation of Native, 446; English folk
Chickasaw music revivals, 318; constructed music workshops and activities for, 502–3;
through revival, 3–4; consumption and, 105; and Native flute, 445
as core of modernity, 55; cycles of, 393; and Choctaw: Chickasaw communal dance songs
development of revival organizations, 556; and, 313–15; history of, 302–4; music and
economic, in Hungary, 195–96; effected by dance revivals of, 301–2, 304–12, 317–18
Kathaks, 214–15; effected through revivals, Choctaw-Chickasaw Dance Songs, Volumes I
66, 69; and Garifuna revival, 365–66; to and II, 309
Indian policy, 301; and Iranian classical Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee,
music, 279, 286; and Irish diaspora, 613, 306–11
614; and kathak dance revival, 206–7; in Choctaw Gathering, California, 311–12
Korea, 136, 140; versus loss, 354; and Native Ch’oe Insŏ, 151
flute, 453, 454, 459; of Newfoundland’s folk Ch’oe Sangil, 144
revival, 97; past and creation of cultural, choirs: Anchiskhati Choir, 580; church, 576;
394, 395, 413; Pelimanni music and, 400, community, 574; foreign, of Georgian
409, 410; politics of, 101; revival and polyphony, 583–89, 591; Georgian, 574, 577,
reconstruction as separate from, 223; of 580, 592; Rustavi Choir, 582; Soviet, 578–79
revivalists, 229; Slobin on, 450; survival Cho Kongnye, 144–45
through, 18; through transmission and Chŏng Chaeguk, 151
dissemination, 25–26; traditional music Chongmyo (Royal Ancestral Shrine), 149
revivals as responses to, 562–66; tradition Chongmyo cheryeak, 149–50
and, 12, 28, 55–56, 297n24, 532; uncovering Ch’ŏngsŏnggok, 151–52
processes of, 47. See also cultural change; Chŏng Yŏnsu, 137
economic change choral singing, Latvian, 470
Chang Sahun, 138 choreophobia, 622, 626, 628, 629, 630, 640
chant, revival of: following independence, Choron, Alexandre, 78
580–83; foreign involvement in, 574–75; choro revival, 61–62, 66
internationalization of, 583–89; and musical choro roda, 62
transformations and cycles of renewal in Chosŏn wangjo kungjung yori, 141
Soviet era, 578–80; overview of, 575–76; Cho Ŭlsŏn, 144, 145
revival and, 573–74; and revivalist trends Ch’ŏyongmu, 150
678 INDEX
chronotope, 59n4 conga, 368

Chu Hà, 171 conservatories: Honarestan-e Ali-ya Musiqi
church music, Croatian, 332. See also Georgian conservatory, 278; Open Society Georgia
polyphony Foundation, 580–81; pelimanni revival
church revivals, 117 and, 401; Tbilisi State Conservatoire,
Cissé, Ousmane Noël, 234 578, 579, 580, 586; Uzbek, 252, 253, 255,
Civil Rights movement, 300–301, 448–49 267, 269–71; Uzbek State Conservatory,
Clancy Brothers, 610–11 259–62; Vietnamese, 164. See also academia;
classicization: and cultural reclamation, 221; of education; transmission
Indian classical dance genres, 210–13, 220; Consolidated Amusement trailer. See “Birth of
of kathak dance, 215–19, 223 Hawai‘i, The”
classification, redefined, 103 constellations, 554
Clifford, James, 344 consumption, 105
clothing: for Chickasaw communal dance, contra war (1983-1987), 359–60
315–16; of Choctaw communal dance, Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible
310; hula, 536 Cultural Heritage, 143
Cohen, John, 102 Cook, Nicholas, 36n6
Cohen, Sara, 339 Cooke, Peter, 559
Coloff, John, 445 core revivalists, 65, 525
Comanche Flute Music Played by Doc Tate cosmopolitan cultural formations, 64–65
Nevaquaya, 449, 450, 454 Cozad, Belo, 445
comfort, music as, 329–30 Cram Cook, Nilla, 629
Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann (CCE), 561–62, Craven, David, 358
610 creative process: attributing innovation to, 421;
commemorative ceremonies, for 2004 as marker of authenticity, 23, 406, 412–13,
tsunami victims, 379 415n7; “musicking” as, 483; and reimagined/
commercialization: and English folk music, reinvented tradition, 228, 408; rock fusions
491, 492–93, 506; globalization and, 471–72; as, 483. See also creativity
hybridity and, 479; as necessary aspect creativity: and American instrumental folk
of revival, 63–64; process of, 16–18; and music revival, 116, 123; authenticity and, 23;
transition to post-revival, 28, 453 continuum for musical, 454; discriminatory,
Committee for the Revival of Georgian 454, 455; Finnish music revival and, 410,
Church Singing, 577–78 412–13; integrative, 454, 455; kathak dance
commodification: and Iranian classical music, and, 219; and Korean cultural heritage, 135,
283; as necessary aspect of revival, 63–64, 136, 138, 139, 140–41, 144, 153n2; limitations
219; process of, 16–18 on, 409; opportunities for, through
common interest groups. See special interest transformation, 17; and pelimanni revival,
groups 402; and post-revival turn, 29; preservation
community/communities: defined, 554; and, 152–53; rationalized, 454–55; revivalist
dilemma posed by idea of, 104; and activities prioritizing, 11; Reynolds on
Georgian polyphony, 589–93; Internet slowdown of, 668; and syncretism, 23;
special interest groups as, 565; and Irish tensions surrounding, 19, 21, 28; tradition
diaspora, 614; revivalist, 66, 100. See also conveyed through, 547; ubiquitous, 454, 455.
traditional dance music communities See also creative process
competitions: English folk music resurgence Creoles: and dialogic space between Garifunas
and, 504–6; Irish music and dance, 607, 610 and, 363–69; Garifuna cultural rescue
“El Cóndor Pasa,” 142, 154n14 and, 353; Garifuna relations with, 351, 356,
INDEX 679
361–63; Garifuna’s history with, 350, 369; Aceh, 376; preservation of Croatian, 327–28;
heritage of, 370n3 revival of Croatian, 338. See also tradition(s)
Croatian revival: and music as comfort Cutting, Jennifer, 481
and torture, 328–31; overview of, 325–26, cyberspace-based special interest groups, 554
343–45; and postwar articulations of cycle(s): cultural history as, 119–20; in Finnish
traditional music, 335–43; and post-war folk music, 393; of music-cultures, 393; of
tradition-based popular music, 331–35; revival and Georgian polyphony, 576–83;
spiritual, 236–38 revivals as, 28–29, 116–31, 533; time as, 301,
cross-cultural transmission, 26–27 319n2
Crumbo, Woody, 445, 447
Csoóri, Sándor, 188 Dai Bozhe, 519–20
Csűrős Banda, 198–99 Đại Lâm Linh, 175–76
cultural change: versus cultural loss, 354; dainas, 470
effected through revivals, 3–4, 66–68, dance halls, and Irish diaspora, 609–10
69; emotional trauma of, 556; isolation Dance House Festival, 194
from conditions causing, 20–21; kathak Dance House Guild, 194–95
dance revival and, 206–7; as motivator of dance house movement, Hungarian:
scholar-revivalists, 6; pelimanni revival institutionalization of, 194–96; integration
and, 400–404; and preservation of Korean of activism and scholarship into, 192–94;
cultural heritage, 140; revivals as responses interethnic and multistate character of,
to, 562–66; traditions as springboards 187–89; intimate connection of, to dance,
for, 56, 297n24; Wallace’s revitalization 184–87; as music and dance revival,
movement theory and, 567. See also change 184; music revival fostered by, 196–200;
cultural exchange, kathak dance revival and, overview of, 182–84
221–22 đàn đáy, 169
cultural formations, cosmopolitan, 64–65 Daniélou, Alain, 286, 288
cultural grey-out, 551, 565 Daniel Sorano Theatre, 233
cultural heritage. See intangible cultural đào nương, 168
heritage Đào Trọng Từ, 164
culturalization, and Croatian revival, 338 Dávila, Arlene, 544
cultural objectification, 621, 628, 629, Davis, Rosita, 356, 359
633, 640 de Andrade, Mario, 423
cultural politics: and American folksong death: and Irish diaspora, 601–2, 609; of
revivals, 102–3, 106; effects of, on American language, 669–70; revival from, 43, 117
revival studies, 107–10; impact of, 107–10; as decapitation ceremony, Croatian, 327
inherent in revivals, 101–2; mobilization of decline, musical: in Aceh, 375–81; in
folklore in American, 95; music-dominated Afghanistan, 382–85; conclusions on
festivals as means for advancing, 99; of revivals following, 385–87; following human
Soviet Union, 471 and natural disasters, 12; indicators of, 373;
Cultural Property Preservation Law, 136 literature on revivals in societies suffering
cultural society, Croatian, 336–38 or recovering from, 373–75; in Sri Lanka, 381
cultures: and adoptive identity, 562–63, 567; as decontextualization: dissemination
dynamic, 118–19 through, 25; freedoms provided by, 394;
custom(s): Communist campaign against malleability through, 434; preservation
Uzbek, 267; and Garifuna cultural rescue, through, 4; revival as, 31, 44. See also
355, 356; and Irish diaspora, 602, 606; and recontextualization
Ivana Kupala revival, 520; in posttsunami defiance, music as, 330
680 INDEX
de Graça, Maria, 418–20 Dollar Brand Trio, 646–47, 652, 654. See also
dehumanization, music as tool of, 330–31 Brand, Dollar; Ibrahim, Abdullah
de la Casas, Bartolomé, 76 Domingo, 437n12
de la Halle, Adam, 89 dorageh, 286, 288
Đeletovci, 338–40 Dorson, Richard M., 6, 95
de Mello, Jack, 537 Đỗ Trọng Huề, 167, 168
de Mello, Jon, 537–42, 546–48 do Vale, João, 426
demonstrations, of Korean students, 139, Drayton, Michael, 75
147–48 Dryden, John, 80
Densmore, Frances, 446–47 du Bellay, Joachim, 74
Desmond, Jane C., 621 Dubliners, The, 611
“Detroit Schottische,” 127 Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio,
devadasis, 208–10 650, 654
de Valera, Éamon, 608 Dulsori, 147
development organizations, folk, 502–4 Dundes, Alan, 95, 98
development(s): Garifuna-Creole integral, Dungan, James, 560–61
366, 368, 369; invigorating Nicaraguan Dung Linh, 175
indigenous resurgence, 354–55, 361, 362 Duprat, Rogério, 430
De Vos, George, 563 Durkeim, Emile, 556
De Warren, Robert, 634 Dvořák, Antonín, 447
DeWitt, Mark F., 107 Dyani, Johnny, 649, 651–53, 655–59
Diamond, Beverley, 443, 458 Dylan, Bob, 102, 106
diaspora(s): as elective, 593; Internet and, 27;
Iranian dance in, 630–40, 640; loss through, early music: defined, 73; and postindustrial
601; South African jazz and, 652–54; university, 81–83; restoration of, 78–80;
tradition and transformation and, 19. See revival of folk music and, 73, 84–89, 90
also Irish diaspora Early Music: defined, 73; and postindustrial
Diatta, Aline Sitoe, 241 university, 82–83; revival of, 73–74; use of
“Did Your Mother Come from Ireland” term, 81–82
(Kennedy and Carr), 603 Early Music Movement, 287
Dillion, Quincy (“Quince”), 119 Ecole Normale William Ponty, 228, 230–31
Diouf, Abdou, 238 economic change: of Choctaws and
disasters. See decline, musical Chickasaws, 318; impact of, Hungarian
discriminatory creativity, 454, 455 dance house movement, 195–96; and
dissemination: of bossa nova, 424; Senegalese cultural revival project, 237–38;
changes in nature of, 24–27; of Choctaw in Ukraine, 512, 521
communal dance songs, 309; of English economic space, folk festivals as, 496–97, 499
folk music, 501–2; of fiddling, 126; of Edinburgh Strathspey and Reel Society, 560
Georgian polyphony, 579; of kathak education: and Casamançais regionalism, 240,
dance, 211, 219, 220; methods and 241; development of Finnish folk music,
infrastructure for, 4; of revived art forms, 399, 401, 410, 415n9; and English folk music
219; of runo-song, 398–99; of samba-song, resurgence, 492, 502–6; fiddling in Shetland,
423; transformation and, 18; of Uzbek 559; “grandparent,” 119–20; of Indian
traditional music, 258; of Zimbabwean cultural reformers, 221; Iranian musical,
popular music, 473 278, 282; music, in Afghanistan, 374, 383–84,
Đỗ Bằng Đoàn, 167, 168 386; music in American, 69; promotion of
doers, shift from knowers to, 47–51 Hawaiian culture through, 533, 534, 535; and
INDEX 681
rise of postindustrial university, 81–83. See identity, 531–32, 544; and Hawaiian
also academia; conservatories; transmission Renaissance, 535, 545; and Hungarian
Edwards, K. D., 450 dance house movement, 187–92; hybridity
“Eggs and Marrowbones,” 127 and, 480; Iranian dance and, 618, 623, 636;
Eighth National Congress of the Vietnamese in Ivana Kupala, 522–23; Ivana Kupala
Communist Party, Resolution 5 of, 162 and Ukrainian, 512, 514, 517, 519, 522–23,
“El Cóndor Pasa,” 142, 154n14 524; and Latvian identity, 470; movement
electric folk fusions, 471–72 systems constitutive of, 621–22; music as
electric folk revival, 468, 476, 477–80 emblem of, 562, 563; as person-oriented
Elizabeth I, Queen, 608 criterion for authenticity, 21; and Senegalese
Ellington, Duke, 650, 651, 654, 656 neo-traditional performance, 235; and
embeddedness, 160, 167–68 Sinhala-Tamil conflict, 381. See also
Emmerson, George, 559, 560 nationalism
Engels, Friedrich, 55 ethnic purity: as person-oriented criterion
England: Irish immigrants in, 600; revival in, for authenticity, 21–22; restoration of, as
467, 477–78 motivation for revival, 11, 562, 563. See also
English folk music resurgence: competitions racial purity
and folk development organizations and, ethnomusic, Croatian, 333–35
502–6; festivals and, 495–99; historical ethnomusicology: and alterations to
context of, 490–95; media and, 499–502; Ukrainian tradition, 521; defined by Study
overview of, 489–90, 506–7 Group for Applied Ethnomusicology of
ensembles: Georgian polyphony, 578–79, 580, the International Council for Traditional
583; and Iranian dance in diaspora, 635–38; Music, 373; and history of revival
pelimanni, 403–4, 414–15n6; primary, 575 scholarship, 8; and Hungarian dance house
environment of revival, 16–17 movement, 191; and political significance
epic songs, Romantic nationalist of collected musical folklore, 523–26; and
transformation of Finnish, 396–400 postindustrial university, 82; and theory
“É proibido proibir” (Veloso), 431–32 of Cantometrics, 35n2; views on musical
Eriksen, Anne, 55–56, 297n14 fusion processes in, 471–72
Erkomaishvili, Anzor, 582, 586 Europe: development of folk music in,
Erkvanidze, Malkhaz, 579, 580, 584 47–50; Dollar Brand and Bea Benjamin
Erwinsyah, Edy, 379 leave for, 649–50; South African exile to,
Escobar, Arturo, 351, 354 646–47; South African jazz in, 650–52;
Estrada, Isabel, 358, 365 thick globalization and revival in, 467–68;
ethnicity: and adoptive cultural identity, traditional dance music communities in,
562–63, 567; authenticity and, 118; 556–57. See also Britain; Croatian revival;
bolstering, as motivation for revival, 11; in Finland; Georgian polyphony; Hungarian
Brazil, 427, 433; bridging, through Choctaw dance house movement; Ireland; Ivana
and Chickasaw dance, 311; Chetnik and Kupala, St. John’s Eve (Midsummer’s Eve)
Ustasha nationalistic movements and, 330; (Latvia)
classification by, in Croatia, 340–41; and L’Exil d’Alboury (Ndao), 236
Croatian identity, 327; dance as constitutive exile: of Edward Said, 644–46; and Irish
of, 621; and development of Uzbek arranged diaspora, 600. See also South African jazz
folk music, 257–58; and emergence of “expansive globalization,” 467
Casamançais regionalism, 238–44, 246; and experimental improvisation, ancient music as
Garifuna cultural rescue, 357–61, 364–65, departure for, 404–13
368; in Hawai‘i, 548–49n9; and Hawaiian Eyerman, Ron, 17, 266
682 INDEX
fakelore, 6, 95, 622 nationalist transformation of epic songs,

Farhat, Shahin, 286 396–400
Fauchet, Claude, 78 fishing rituals, Korean, 148
Fayaz, Mohammad Reza: on Borumand, 289, Fishman, Joshua, 669
290; on historical purity, 291; and influence Flatley, Michael, 612
of Western musicologists, 285–86; on return fleadh cheoil, 561–62, 610
to fundamentals of purity, 284; on revival of “Flop-Eared Mule” tune, 127
Iranian classical music, 281 flute. See Native flute
Fayzullayev, Boboqul, 275n6 Flute Songs of the Kiowa and Comanche
Feintuch, Burt, 13, 24 (Ware), 450
Feis Ceoil, 607 Fodor, Sándor “Neti,” 198
festivals: American instrumental folk music, FolkArts England conference, 489
129–30; BBC Radio 2’s involvement in, Folk Arts Panel, 449–50
500–501; Belfast Harp Festival, 604; folk clubs, 26, 492–93, 495
Croatian folklore, 341–43; economic impact folk development organizations, 502–4
of, 496–99; English folk music resurgence Folk Industry and AFO Conference, 489
and, 489–90, 495–99, 500–503, 505–6; Folk Industry and Association of Festival
Finnish folk, 395; Georgian polyphony, Organisers Conference, 505–6
578–79, 581, 582, 583, 585, 589; and folklife movement, 105
Hungarian dance house movement, 185, folklore: collection of Irish, 607; Croatian,
194; Irish music, 610, 611–12; Međunardona 325, 335, 336, 341–43, 344; dance as form of,
smotra folklora, 327, 330; in post-Soviet 624; development of academic, 564; and
spaces, 512–13; and revival of ca trù, 175, development of Uzbek arranged folk music,
179n17; and shift from knowers to doers to 257, 267; documentation of Korean, 137;
marketers, 50; transmission through, 26. See ethnomusicology and political significance
also Cambridge Folk Festival; Ivana Kupala, of collected musical, 523–26; fakelore
St. John’s Eve (Midsummer’s Eve) (Latvia); and, 6, 8; Finnish, 399, 406; and Georgian
Kaustinen Folk Music Festival polyphony, 574–75, 577, 580, 590; growth
Feza, Mongezi, 649, 656–59 of public, 105; historical-reconstructional
Fiddler Magazine, 129 approach of Asian, 137; and Hungarian
fiddling. See American instrumental folk dance house movement, 189, 195;
music revival; fiddling communities and preservation of Vietnamese, 162; primary
associations; pelimanni music; Sligo and secondary, 575; revival of, 101;
fiddlers and revival of folk music, 95–99, 101;
fiddling communities and associations: scholar-revivalists and, 6, 118; scholarship
from eighteenth century on, 559–62; on, 7, 19, 23; and theory of cultural
emergence of, on Internet, 552–55; and evolution, 6; Ukrainian, 512, 519–20, 522;
grassroots revitalization of traditional urban folk revivalism and, 563
music and dance, 557–58, 567; Internet, as folklorismus, 564
real communities, 565; and new steady state folk music: American, 448–49; authenticity
phase of cultural revitalization, 555–57 and, 21; and change from tradition to
Filene, Benjamin, 8 heritage, 52–54; concept of, 47; consumption
Finland: ancient music as departure for of American, 105; Croatian, 326, 333;
experimental improvisation and personal defining, traditions, 16; development of,
expression, 404–13; pelimanni music and in Europe, 47–50; early music and, 84–89;
rejuvenation of rural culture, 400–404; English, 468, 478; ethnic purity associated
revivals in, 394–95, 413–14; Romantic with, 11; European, 47–48, 53–54, 73; Finnish
INDEX 683
avant-garde, 393, 395, 404–13, 415n7, n11; Freire, Paulo, 358

folklore and revival of, 95–99; Georgian, French-Canadian folk songs, 85–89
577, 579, 586; and heritagization, 53–55; and Frente Única, 430–31
Hungarian dance house movement, 184–85, Frisbie, Charlotte, 102
192, 195; Irish, 560–61; issues surrounding functional harmony, 278, 576, 590
contemporary, 102; Korean, 141; landscape funeral songs, Korean, 140
of, 51–52; Latvian, 469, 470, 480, 481, 482–83; fusion and fusion processes, 197–98, 471, 476;
mediaization of, 49; nineteenth-century Baumann on, 476; bossa nova and, 423–24;
collection of, 6; popularization of, 48; of choro with jazz and rock, 66; colonialism
post-revival, 105–10; preservation of, 559; and, 219, 222; Finnish music and, 405; and
professionalization of, 50; rebranding Hungarian dance house movement, 197–98;
contemporary interpretations of, 26; Iranian dance and, 631–632; and Ivana
recontextualization in, archetype, 16–17; Kupala revival, 522; Latvian electric folk,
recording of Hungarian, 194; in regions of 471, 475, 478, 479, 481; Laurent Aubert on,
former Soviet Union, 474; and rejuvenation 456; and modern thick globalization, 468.
of rural culture, 400–404; resurgence in See also hybridity; syncretism
English, 28–29; revival of American, 94, Fuzzy Mountain String Band, 121–22
100–101, 563; revival of early music and,
73, 79–80, 84–89, 90; structural changes Gaelic Athletic Association, 605–6
in, 51; as symbol of national identity, 474; Gaelic League, 606–7
transmission of, 25, 90; Vietnamese, 165. Gal Costa, 418–20, 437n12
See also American instrumental folk music Galeano, Eduardo, 358
revival; arranged folk music (Uzbek); English Gambacc, 241
folk music resurgence; traditional music Garakanidze, Edisher, 579–80, 584, 587–89
Folk Music Department, Sibelius Academy, Garfish Dance, 314, 317
395, 405–6, 410–11 Garifuna cultural rescue: Afrocreolization and
Folk Music Movement (Finland), 395 culture loss and, 355–57; characteristics of,
“Folk Music Revival in Europe” (World of 352–55; and dialogic space between Creoles
Music), 8 and Garifunas, 363–69; overview of, 350–52,
folk songs: Georgian, 576, 577, 578, 580, 369–70; trajectory of, 357–63
582–83; popular versus local, 154n15; Garifuna Power, 364, 365
preservation of Korean, 143–45; Romantic Garmarna, 480
nationalist use of Finnish narrative, Gaultier, Juliette, 88fig.
396–400; Sharp’s definition of, 490 Gedutis, Susan, 606
Folksongs and Folk Revival (Guigné), 109 gender: analysis of, in revival contexts, 511;
Folkworks, 503–4, 505–6 kathak dance and, 208–10, 222. See also
food, preservation of Korean court, 141 women
foodways, study of, 105 Georgian Harmony Association, 589
Ford, Henry, 557–58 Georgian polyphony: following independence,
Ford Foundation teaching program, 173–74 580–83; foreign involvement in, 574–75;
Forsyth, Megan, 54 internationalization of, 583–89; and musical
Forte, Maximilian, 354–55 transformations and cycles of renewal in
Foucher, Vincent, 230–31, 239 Soviet era, 578–80; overview of, 575–76;
Frank, Robert, 102 revival and, 573–74; and revivalist trends
free jazz movement, 647 under Russian occupation, 576, 577–78;
Freeland, Jane, 360–61 and transnational affinity groups, 589–93;
freezing of cultural artifacts, 135, 140, 152, 602 transnational connections and, 593–95
684 INDEX
Gertze, Johnny, 649 Grand Apartheid, 648

giáo phường, 169–70, 179n15 Grande Liquidação, 437n13
Gibbon, John Murray, 89 grandparent education, 119–20
Gil, Gilberto, 418–20, 428–31, 432 great boom, 100, 106
Gilberto, João, 423, 437n6 Green, Archie, 100
Gilliland, Henry, 566 groundnut farming, 242
Gillis, Verna, 450 Guava Jam, 533–34
Ginsberg, Allen, 102 Guigné, Anna Kearney, 109
“Girl with the Blue Dress On,” 127 Guilbert, Yvette, 89
globalization: analysis of historical Gulashvili, Malkhaz, 593
development of, 466–67; application Guran, 639fig., 640
of perspectives on, 477–82; combining Guss, David M., 621
perspectives on, 482; commercialization Gwangwa, Jonas, 649
and, 471–72; defined, 466; effect of,
on Indian performing arts, 206; and Hahn Man-young, 151
Hungarian dance house movement, Hahoe mask dance drama, 138
196–97; hybridity and, 479–82; hyperglobal Hainari, O. A., 406–7
perspective, 474–75; identity bolstering hair, of Yulia Tymoshenko, 513
motives linked to, 11; and Latvian revival, Hall, Stuart, 594
469–71; of local products, 46; post-revival de la Halle, Adam, 89
and, 30; and revival in Europe, 467–68; Halmos, Béla, 183, 184–86, 187, 193
of revivals and related movements, Hamba Kahle/Confluence, 655
62–63; sceptic perspective, 473–74; hanbok, 141
and shift from tradition to heritage, 54; Hannerz, Ulf, 594
“thick globalization,” 467–68, 483; “thin Hanoi Ca Trù Club, 171, 179n16
globalization,” 467; as threat to Vietnamese Harkin, Michael, 350
intangible cultural heritage, 162; harmony: functional, 278, 576, 590; link
transformationalist perspective, 475–77; between modernity and, 266–67
understanding perspectives on, 472–73. See harp societies, Irish, 561
also Westernization Harriot, Thomas, 75fig., 76, 77fig., 80
Goertzen, Chris, 274n1, 556 Hassan, Marzuki, 376
Goldblatt, David, 466–67 hát ả đào, 164, 166–67, 170, 175, 177
Goldstein, Kenny, 100 hát ca công, 166–67, 178n4
Gonazalez, Clarence, 364 hát chơi, 166–67
Gone to the Country: The New Lost City hát cô đầu, 166–67
Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival hát cửa đình, 164, 166–67, 171–72, 174, 175, 177
(Allen), 109 hát cửa quyền, 166–67, 175
Good News from Africa (Ibrahim), 656 hát nhà tơ, 166–67
Gorani, 583, 584fig. hát nhà trò, 167
Gordela, 579 hat nói, 170
Gore, Georgiana, 622 hát thi, 167
Gottlunch, Carl Axel, 397 Hawai‘i: ethnicities in, 548–49n9;
Gow, Niel, 560 self-determination of, 535, 548n5
Grabar, Oleg, 626 Hawaiian, as ethnic group, 531–32
de Graça, Maria, 418–20 Hawaiian Renaissance, 531, 532–37, 541, 545–46
Grammy Awards, 459 Haynes, Bruce, 84
Grančica, 338–40 Heap, Steve, 499–500
INDEX 685
Held, David, 466–67 184–87; of Hungarian folk music, 197; of

Helsinki Peace Agreement (2005), 380–81 Iranian classical music, 277–80; Iranian
Henry, Edwin O., 561–62 cultural, 623, 629; Irish diasporic, 604, 605,
Herat, Afghanistan, 382 607, 615; Jola, 240, 241; of kathak dance,
Herder, Johann Gottfried von: on Baltic songs, 211–15, 217–18; musical and choreographic
469; romancero and, 84–85; romantic theatre and creation of seductive versions
nationalism and, 6, 396, 604; term “folk” of, 229; of Native Americans in Oklahoma,
coined by, 21 302–4, 446; reconfiguring identity and,
heritage: American and European usage of, 27; reinterpretation of, 4, 20; reissues and,
59n5; authenticity of Croatian local, 341; 103; of scholars’ involvement in revival
Brazilian, 422; Canadian, 109; change from processes, 5–6; and South African jazz,
tradition to, 31, 51, 52–54; Chickasaw, 316–17; 655–56, 662; of Upland South, 123; use of,
and cultural error, 14; cultural imperialism 12–15, 44, 266; of Uzbek arranged folk and
and, 574; endangered, 581; exalting ancient, traditional music, 254–62, 273–74; veracity
11; Finnish, 396, 397, 399; Georgian, 576, of, 286–91. See also past
577, 583; history and, 163; and Iranian dance Hobsbawm, Eric, 7, 12, 35n1, 558
in diaspora, 636; and Irish diaspora, 611; Hodjaeva, Ro’zibi, 272–73
of maqom traditions, 258; modernity and, holders, of culture, 137–39
56; music as, 55; Native flute and, 459, 460; Holladay, Stella, 124
preservation of, 331–32, 447; production Holland, Jerry, 118
of, 56; protection of, from exploitation, Hollow Rock String Band, 120–22, 127
21; restoration of Croatian folklore, Hommes de la Danse, Les (Huet & Keita), 237
336–38, 340; and Senegalese neo-traditional homogenization: effects of, 45–46; problems
performance, 231, 232; Uzbek national caused by, 54–55
musical, 255, 256, 263–64. See also Hsu, Francis L. K., 566
Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee; Huet, Michel, 237
intangible cultural heritage hukai pō, 540
heritagization, 53–55 hula: position of, before Hawaiian
Hernandez, Bharath, 354 Renaissance, 533; and reclamation of
Herzog, George, 96 Hawaiian culture, 535–37; taught in
Heywood, J., 491 Hawaiian universities, 534; in “The Birth of
Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies (ISEB), Hawai‘i,” 530–31, 541
425 Human Cultural Properties, 137
Highwoods Stringband, 109 humanness, music and, 330–31
Hill, Derek, 626 Hungaraton series of Hungarian folk music,
Hinton, Leanne, 669–70 197
Historic Cities Program, 385 Hungarian Academy of Science’s Musicology
historization, in revival production, 46 Institute, 194
history: of African American musicians, 653; Hungarian dance house movement:
becoming part of, through revival, 69; institutionalization of, 194–96; integration
of Berkeley folk scene, 108; of Brazilian of activism and scholarship into, 192–94;
musical movements, 420–28, 433; of ca interethnic and multistate character of,
trù, 160, 163, 166, 168; cyclical patterns of 187–89; intimate connection of, to dance,
cultural, 119–20; of early music revivals, 184–87; as music and dance revival,
73–74, 89–90; of Garifunas and Creoles, 184; music revival fostered by, 196–200;
350, 352; of Hawai‘i, 531, 533; heritage and, overview of, 182–84
163; of Hungarian dance house movement, Hungarian Heritage House, 195, 199
686 INDEX
Hương Thanh, 179n18 imagination: of Ireland, 598, 601, 602, 603,

Hurricane Katrina, 374 604; and re-creation of ancient music, 404,
hybridity: authenticity and, 22, 223; in Brazil, 406; and representations of past, 11, 13–14,
297n18; and English folk music resurgence, 409; in supplementing historical sources,
493; financial impact of musical, 481; 80, 409, 411; tradition as territory of, 24
globalization and, 468, 473; Iranian national improvisation: ancient music as departure
dance and, 628; in kathak dance revival, for experimental, 404–13; in art therapy,
208, 222; and “new aesthetic,” 16; and sceptic 378–79; in ca trù, 173–74, 176; creativity
criticism, 479–82. See also fusion and fusion and, 23; in Early Music performances,
processes; syncretism 84; in Finnish music education, 415n9; in
hyperglobal perspective of globalization, Georgian polyphony, 575, 579, 585, 592; and
474–75, 483 Hungarian dance house movement, 184;
hypermedia, 475 in Iranian classical music, 283; in Iranian
dance, 619, 623, 624, 626–27, 633, 635, 636,
Ibrahim, Abdullah, 646, 647, 652. See also 638; musicking and, 483; on Native flute,
Brand, Dollar 452, 455, 458; in participatory music, 67; in
identity: adoptive cultural, 562–63, 567; South African jazz, 654, 655; Stravinsky on,
Bahiano, 428; bolstering, as motivation for 290
revival, 11; Brazilian national, 422–23, 426; India. See kathak dance and revival
Chickasaw communal dance songs and, Indian Flute Songs from Comanche Land, 450
316–17; Choctaw communal dance and, 311; Indianists, 447
and Croatian revival, 326; defining Native Indian Removal Act (1830), 303
cultural, 301; destabilized by moments indigenous resurgence: Forte on, 354–55;
of crisis, 434; and development of Uzbek of Hindu tradition, 208, 221; of Korean
arranged folk music, 257–58; and dialogic intangible cultural heritage, 136; and
space between Creoles and Garifunas, 363, metaphor as means of understanding
365–68; and emergence of Casamançais processes and dynamics, 63. See also
regionalism, 242–44, 247; folk music as Chickasaw; Choctaw; Garifuna cultural
symbol of national, 474; Garifuna, 350–51; rescue; Native flute
Georgian polyphony and, 579; globalization industrialization: of Finland, 400; and revival
as threat to, 470; Hawaiian, 531–32; and of early music, 74, 81–83
history of arranged folk versus traditional innovation: authenticity and, 23–24; and
music in Uzbekistan, 254, 256; Indian, Brazilian modernism, 423; ca trù and, 176,
207–8; Iranian dance and, 618; Ivana Kupala 177; causes of, 435; and Finnish ancient
and ethnic, 524; kathak dance revival and, music, 404; of Finnish folk music, 394,
222; Latvian, 470, 482–83; movement 395, 413–14; and Hungarian dance house
systems constitutive of, 621–22; music and, movement, 199; importance of, 267;
355, 562; nature of gender, 511; negotiation of influences appearing as, 17; introduced
Irish, 603; preservation of Iranian, 284–85; into folklore, 257; kathak dance and, 219,
reassertion of Choctaw and Chickasaw, 220; Lönnrot and, 397; and Native flute,
318–19; revival and reclaiming indigenous 454–55, 457, 458; preservation and, 8, 19,
cultural, 300; of revival participants, 511; 292; protest bossa nova and, 425; resistance
and shift in Uzbek nationalism, 262–64; and to, 12; revival and, 393, 421, 433; revival
South African jazz, 645; of Soviet republics resulting in, 5; and study of participatory
and later independent nations, 275n6 aspects of revivals, 68; tradition and
Iļģi, 469, 471, 475–82 transformation and, 18–19, 28; valued by
Ilinskaja Pjatnica, 482 Soviet institutions, 266
INDEX 687
institutionalization: of Early Music, 73–90; movements in, 294–95; influence of

effects of, 45; of English folk and traditional Western musicologists on, 285–86; musical
music, 504; of Hungarian dance house modernizers in, 277–80; second revival
movement, 194–96; of Indian classical movement in, 291–94
dance genres, 210–11; of kathak dance, 213, Iranian dance: and autoexoticism, 633–35;
215; as necessary aspect of revival, 63–64; and choreophobia, 626–27; conceptual
process of, 16–18; transmission through, 27; approaches to, 621–23; in diaspora, 630–31;
of Uzbek traditional music, 255, 260–61 first known performances of, outside Iran,
intangible cultural heritage: ca trù as, 160, 632–33; historical and cultural background
161–65; global perspectives on, 142–43; of, 623–24; national dance, 627–30; new
Korean court music as, 149–52; Korean vision of, 638–40; regional folk dance, 624–
folk songs as, 143–45; Korean percussion 26; “revival” and “revivalists” in context of,
bands as, 145–47; Korean shaman rituals as, 619–21; solo improvised dance, 626; and
147–49; preservation of, 135; preservation state folk dance ensemble model, 635–38
of Korean, 136–42, 152–53. See also ca trù; Iranian National Ballet, 629
Hungarian dance house movement Iran National Folklore Organization, 630
integrative creativity, 454, 455 Ireland: characteristics of Irish music, 603–4;
intentional fallacy, 118 Georgian singing in, 587–89; history of
interculturality, 351 emigration from, 600–601; as homeland,
International Center for Georgian Folk Song 599–600; images of, 602; isolation of, 599;
(ICGFS), 582–83 revival in, 467, 604–8; traditional music
International Centre for Music Studies revival activities in, 559, 560–61. See also
(ICMuS), 504 Irish diaspora
International Council for Traditional Music, Irish diaspora: history of, 600–601; loss
140 through, 601–2; overview of, 598–99,
internationalism, and Uzbek arranged folk 614–16; and perceived life of homeland,
music, 267–69 599–600; performance of Irishness in,
internationalization, of Georgian polyphony, 608–14; revival and, 604–8
574, 583–89 Irish Melodies (Moore), 605
International Music Conference (1961), 286 Irish tenor, 605
International Native American and World Istrian Peninsula, 333–35, 343
Flute Association, 452 Ivana Kupala, St. John’s Eve (Midsummer’s
International Research Center for Traditional Eve) (Latvia): ethnomusicology and
Polyphony, 581–82 political significance of, 523–26; following
Internet: dissemination through, 27; Ukrainian independence, 517–19;
emergence of fiddling and traditional dance government sponsorship of, 512–13; in
music communities on, 552–55; English folk Kharkiv, 521–23; in Kyiv, 519–21; political
music resurgence and, 501–2; hypermedia and social symbolism associated with, 514;
and, 475; impact of, on revival, 551–52; and as revival, 514–16, 526–27
Irish music and dance revival, 614; special
interest groups on, as communities, 565; Jabbour, Alan, 13, 68
traditional music organizations on, 556–57 Jackson, Bruce, 84
interpretive archaeology, 12–13 Jamal, 638–39
invented tradition, 7–8, 35n1, 619 James, Simon, 474
Iranian classical music: first revivalist Jamison, Andrew, 17, 266
movement in, 280–85; and historical Jamo Jamo Arts, 247
veracity, 286–91; implications of revivalist Japan, and Irish diaspora, 614
688 INDEX
Järvelä, Mauno, 404 Kelemen, László, 193

Jászberény Camp, 194 Kéti, Zé, 426
Jazz Epistles, 649, 653 Khaleqi, Ruhollah, 278
Jeu de Robin et Marion (de la Halle), 89 Kharkiv, Ukraine, Ivana Kupala in, 519, 521–23
Jiminez, Amanda, 366–67, 368–69 Kiani, Majid, 279–80, 282, 296n11
Jobin, Tom, 424 Kihune, Heali‘i, 543
Johnson, Meredith, 313, 317 Kim, Chongho, 148
Jola, and emergence of Casamançais Kim, Yong Woo, 144–45
regionalism, 238–44, 246 Kimble, Taylor, 123–24
jongleurs, 86 Kim Kŭmhwa, 148
Jordania, Joseph, 587 Kim Sŏkch’ul, 148, 149
Joutsenlahti, Leena, 406, 408–9 Kim Sŏngjin, 151
Jylhä, Konsta, 401, 403 Kim Taerye, 148
Kim Yŏlgyu, 147
Kabul, Afghanistan, 382, 383 King Arthur (Dryden), 80
Kalevala, 397, 399 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 43–44, 50,
Kañaalen, 241, 242, 244 620
Kanahele, George, 532–33, 535, 536, 545 klapa singing, 332, 345n2, 346n9
Kane, Frank, 585, 586–87 klezmer music, 54
Kanggangsullae, 144–45, 154n16 Klymenko, Iryna, 525
Kangnŭng tanoje, 147 knowers, shift of, to doers, 47–51
Kangnyŏng mask dance drama, 138 Koch-e-Kharabat school, 385
Kang Sanggi, 137–38 Kodály, Zoltán, 192
Kanté, Facelli, 232 Kodoba family, 198
kantele players, 406–8 Kokil Music College, 384
kaona, 539–40 Könczei, Csongor, 194, 199
Karomatov, Faizulla, 260, 261–62, 263 Korea. See South Korea
Kartomi, Margaret, 297n18 Koridze, Pilimon, 578
Kartuli Khoro, 577 Koskoff, Ellen, 28
Kashgar rubab, 261 Koutsouba, Maria, 622
Kastinen, Arja, 406–8, 409 kulturno-umjetnička društva, 325, 335–41
Kathakas, 217–19 kumpanjija, 327, 346n5
kathak dance and revival: characteristics of, Kunanbaeva, Alma, 257, 267
220–21, 222; classicization of, 215–19, 223; Kupalo, 515–16, 520
in context of Indian independence and Kurdish music, influence of, on Iranian
nationalism, 207–11; cultural exchange and, classical music, 292–93
221–22; description and history of, 211–13; Kürti, László, 189
overview of, 205–7; roots and histories of, Kyhälä, Jouko, 412
213–15; social class and, 220 Kyiv, Ukraine, Ivana Kupala in, 519–21
Kathaks: as authorities of kathak dance, 216,
220; caste shift of, 214–15; identity shift of, “Lady of the Lake,” 126
222; as story-tellers, 218 Laitinen, Heikki, 395, 402, 405–6, 408–12
Katrina, Hurricane, 374 Lajtha, László, 185, 192
Kaustinen Folk Music Festival, 400–401 Lake, Ma‘iki Aiu, 534
Kavkasia, 585–86 Lakhushdi, Georgia, 591, 592fig.
Keawe, Lia, 542 Lakota flute songs, 445
Keita, Fodéba, 228, 231–34, 237, 249n7 Land League, 605
INDEX 689
Landowska, Wanda, 75, 79–80, 81 purpose of revival, 393; on revival, 280; on

language revitalization, 669–70 revival and modernity, 283; and revival as
Latvia: adaptation of performance techniques activism, 10; on revival breakdown, 28; on
of Russian minorities in, 482; globalization revivalists, 274n1, 288; on revival musics,
and revival in, 469–71; hybridity and, 481 608; theoretical model of, 8, 61–66, 101–2,
Law 961 (Korea), 136 660–61; on tradition, 446
Leão, Nara, 418–22, 426, 434–35 Lloyd, A. L., 477
Lê Đức Mao, 168 localness, 545
Lee Hyegu, 155n34 Locke, Kevin, 443, 445, 450, 453–54, 455
legitimacy: authenticity and, 8, 28, 45, 223, 301, Lomax, Alan, 35n2, 329, 551
394; authenticity and authority and, 19–24; Lönnrot, Elias, 397–99, 404
and cultural change, 393; and emergence Lopez, Frank, 351
of Casamançais regionalism, 241; of Lord, Albert, 23, 406
English folk music, 507; of folk orchestral loss: following war and natural disasters, 331,
performance as academic pursuit, 270; in 339; of Garifuna culture and identity, 350,
Georgian polyphony, 592; hybridity and, 351, 355–57, 369; grandparent education and,
16; Iranian dance and, 628, 629; of kathak 119–20; of Iranian identity, 293; of Iranian
dance, 214, 219, 222; of post-colonial elites, musical tradition, 284; of Korean cultural
229; and promotion of revival materials, 26; heritage, 136, 137; of Latvian identity,
of protest bossa nova, 420; recognition of 470; nostalgia and, 274; in South African
past as source of, 12; in revival, 4 jazz, 658–59, 661; through diaspora, 598,
Lengyel, László “Türei,” 198–99 600–602; of Ukrainian tradition, 521; of
Lê Thị Bạch Vân, 172, 174 Vietnamese cultural identity, 162, 165. See
Leupp, Francis, 447 also Croatian revival; decline, musical;
Levin, Theodore, 253–54, 271, 273 Garifuna cultural rescue; natural disasters;
Levy, Bertram, 120–21, 125–26 war
Liedes, Anna-Kaisa, 411 love, as theme in Native flute songs, 457–58
Lieurance, Thurlow, 447 love flute, 445
Lindberg, Ulf, 20 Lowenthal, David, 13, 163
Linich, Carl, 585–86 Lundberg, Dan, 476
Linton, Ralph, 5, 558, 563 Lysloff, Rene T. A., 552
List, George, 96
literacy: of Canadian jongleurs, 86; Määtälä, Viljo, 400
fetishization of musical, 259; of Gascogne MacColl, Ewan, 477
peasants, 79; importance of musical, 255; Mackinnon, Niall, 13
nostalgia and, 90; Soviet valorization of, Mahalli Dancers, 630
262; at University of Tehran, 282; Uzbek majlesi, 626. See also solo improvised dance,
musical, 269–72; Western notation and Iranian
notions of musical, 254. See also notation Muktupāvels, Māris, 471
Living Human Treasures, 19, 142 Malm, Krister, 414–15n6
Living Hungarian Folk Music, 197 Manding Mousso, la Révolte de la Femme
Livingston, Tamara: on authenticity, 284, Mandingue (Camara), 242
287; on authenticity and tradition, 453; Mané, Fodé, 247
on core revivalists, 525; on ideologies in Marcus, Greil, 95, 106
North America and Western Europe, 9; on Markaz-e Hefz o Eshāeh-ye Musiqi-ye Irani,
popular culture component of revivals, 451; 281–82, 285, 294
on preservation and innovation, 292; on marketers, shift of doers to, 47–51
690 INDEX
Martin, György, 185, 186, 192–93 mindscapes, musical, 52–53, 56

Martins, Carlos Estevam, 425 Ministry of Development and Reconstruction
Marušić, Dario, 334 (Croatian), 336
Marx, Karl, 10, 55 minstrel shows, and Irish diaspora, 608–9
Maryna, 515–16 Miskitu, 360
Masekela, Hugh, 649 mobility, revival and transnational, 246–48
Mather, Cotton, 117 modernity: authenticity and, 287; effect of, on
MBalia, 243 Indian performing arts, 206; and Iranian
Mbaye, Alioune, 231 classical music, 277–80; motion of, 55;
McAllester, David, 443, 452 revivals as reaction against and product of,
McGregor, Chris: on conscious South 283; tradition and, 55–56, 265–68, 279, 284,
Africanism, 644; education of, 648; 297nn14,24
influences on, 649, 652; on life outside of Moholo, Louis, 649, 651–52, 657–59
South Africa, 650; music and recordings of, Moiseyev Dance Company, 635
653, 656–59. See also Blue Notes Mo Manhwa, 137
McGregor, Maxine, 650, 651 Montaigne, Michel de, 76, 79
Medaglia, Júlio, 430 Moon, Peter, 534
media: English folk music resurgence Moore, Thomas, 605
and, 499–502; and evolution of musical Moray, Jim, 494
movements, 434; and growth of bossa nova, motrebs, 623, 627
424; growth of Brazilian, 437n8. See also Mouvement des Forces Démocratiques de
“Birth of Hawai‘i, The” Casamance (MFDC), 238–39, 244
mediaization, of Swedish folk music scene, Moyake, Nick, 649, 651
49–50 Muminova, Mehrihon, 264
mediated intimacies, 512 Munaf, Sherina, 376
medieval music. See early music Munro, Ailie, 560
Međunarodna smotra folklora, 327, 330, 342–43 Muravskyi Shliakh, 522
Meeker, Lauren, 165 musical literacy, Uzbek, 269–72
Meftahi, Ida, 628 musical mindscapes, 52–53, 56
Meili, Max, 83 music camps, Irish, 612
Melnyk, Taras, 525 “musicking,” 483
Melucci, Alberto, 328 “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory”
Memorial University of Newfoundland, (Livingston), 60, 61–66, 101, 660–61. See
96–97, 110 also revival model of Tamara Livingston
Memorial University of Newfoundland Musikologie, 82, 90
Folklore and Language Archive Musikwissenschaft, 82–83, 90
(MUNFLA), 97 musiqi-ya ’elmi, 279
memory, and South African jazz, 661–62 Musique ancienne (Landowska), 81
Merriam, Alan P., 96 “Muxamassi Nasrulloi,” 271
metaphor, 44, 63, 117 Muzsikás, 197, 198
metonymy, 44 MySpace, 501
Meusare-sare (Working together), 377–78
Meyer, Paul, 650 Nadel, Siegfried, 573
Mezőség, 187, 189 Naficy, Hamid, 637–38
Middle Ages: included in antiquity, 74; use of Najafi, Najmeh, 633–34
term, 76–78 Nakai, R. Carlos, 443, 451–52, 453, 455
Mills, Joan, 590 naming, 101
INDEX 691
narodnjaci, 332–33, 334fig., 346n3 Ndao, Cheikh Aliou, 236

National Academy of Ballet, 629–30 Neal, Mary, 491
National Ballet, Senegalese, 234–35 Ned, Buster, 305–11, 313–15, 318
national dance, Iranian, 624, 627–30 “Ne dirajte mi ravnicu,” 329
National Gugak Center, 149, 150, 151 Negra, 368–69
National Indian Youth Council, 448–49 Nelipolviset, 406
nationalism: and compilation of epic poetry, neoclassical movement, 36n6
11, 395, 396–97; and development of Uzbek Nettl, Bruno, 82, 533, 562
arranged folk music, 257–58; and Georgian Neuenfeldt, Karl, 451, 452
polyphony, 577, 579, 582; globalization and, Nevaquaya, “Doc Tate,” 448, 449–50, 452,
474; and history of arranged folk versus 454–55, 456
traditional music in Uzbekistan, 255–56; Newcastle University, 504
and Hungarian dance house movement, New Criticism, 118
187–89; and Iranian classical music, 279–80, Newfoundland, 96–97, 109–10
284–85, 293–94; kathak dance revival in New Living Village Music recordings, 197
context of Indian, 207–11; Latvian, 482; as New Lost City Ramblers, 121, 335
motivation for revival, 11, 393, 394–96, 401, New Music Manifesto, 430
413; nostalgia and, 273–74; and Senegalese new steady state, 7, 28, 555–56, 593, 594
neo-traditional performance, 233–37, New St. George, 480, 481
244; shift in Uzbek, 262–64; and Uzbek New World, as parallel to medieval antiquity,
folk orchestras as agents for international 75–76, 79, 80
understanding, 269. See also ethnicity; New Zealand, Irish immigrants in,
patriotic songs, Croatian; patriotism, and 600–601
English folk music resurgence Nghệ Thuật Ca Trù, 171–72
National Literary Society, 606 Ngọc Đại, 175
National Strategy for Music Education Ngô Linh Ngọc, 171
(Afghanistan), 383, 384 NGOs, 377–78
National Theatre, Senegalese, 233, 235–37 Nguyễn Lê, 179n18
Native American Music Awards, 453 Nguyễn Mạnh Tiến, 171, 179n18
Native Americans: Civil Rights movement Nguyễn Thị Chúc, 173
and, 300–301; constraints placed on, 300; Nguyễn Thị Phúc, 170
music and dance revivals of, 301–2; as Nguyễn Thúy Hòa, 166fig.,171, 175–76
parallel to medieval antiquity, 75–76, 79, 80; Nguyễn Văn Khuê, 166fig., 171, 175, 176
suppression and assimilation of, 446–47. See Nguyễn Văn Mùi, 166fig., 171
also Chickasaw; Choctaw Nguyễn Văn Ngọc, 170
Native flute: non-Native involvement with, Nguyễn Xuân Diện, 168, 169
459–62; overview of, 442–43; during Nguyễn Xuân Khoát, 170–71
postrevival period, 453–59; during Nicaragua. See Garifuna cultural rescue
prerevival period, 446–49; during revival Nicaraguan Afro-Garifuna Organization
period, 449–53; traditional, to 1879, 443–45 (OAGANIC), 361–62
Native flute circles, 456–57 Nieminen, Rauno, 405, 407fig., 412
natural disasters: ethnographic research on, 99 Georgian Songs (Garakanidze), 587–88
374; as motivation for revival, 12. See also nongak, 145–46, 154n19
decline, musical non-government organizations, 377–78
nautch girls, 209–10 Nordstrom, Byron J., 556
Nazemi, Abdollah, 630 Nordstrom, Carolyn, 346n5
Nazeri, Shahram, 293, 294 Norwegian traditional music, 556–57
692 INDEX
nostalgia: and “The Birth of Hawai‘i,” 544; and Os Mutantes, 430, 431–32
Iranian classical music, 284; and Iranian O’Toole, Fintan, 615
dance in diaspora, 630; and mobilization Out of Place (Said), 644
of past, 13; patriotic Vietnamese, 163; and outsiders: ethnic, 22; and Georgian polyphony,
preservation of Korean cultural heritage, 574–75, 590, 593; and Hawaiian culture,
136; and revival in post-Soviet spaces, 547–48; legitimacy and, 394; as revivalists,
511–12; and study of medieval antiquity, 73, 15–16, 107, 619; role of, in revivalist projects,
75, 80, 89–90; and Uzbek arranged folk and 343–44
traditional music, 273–74 “Over the Waterfall,” 127–28
notation: publication of, as dissemination, ox decapitation ceremony, Croatian, 327
25–26; and Uzbek musical literacy, 269–72. O’zbek Halq Musiqasi, 258–59
See also literacy
Nova Bossa Velha, Velha Bossa Nova, 418 Pachanga, 239
Novák, Ferenc, 186 Pacheco, Johnny, 239
Ntshoko, Makay, 649 Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza, 278
Nyanyian Tsunami (Tsunami Song), 376–77 Pak Pyŏngch’ŏn, 148
Palacio, Andy, 359
O amor, o sorriso e a flor, 437n6 parallel traditions, 622
Obando Sancho, Victor, 353 Pareles, Jon, 669
objectification: and Iranian classical music, Pars National Ballet, 630
283; as necessary aspect of revival, 219; Park, Mikyung, 148
production of, 45 Park Chung Hee, 136
object-oriented criteria for authenticity, 6, 20, Parker, Logan, 305
326, 491 Parry, C. Hubert H., 491
Obnavljamo baštinu project, 336, 337fig., 340 participation: in choro revival, 62;
obnova, 326, 343, 345n1 consideration for, 60–61; face-to-face, 64;
Observer Effect, 124 motivation for revival, 65; observation and,
Okamura, Jonathan, 545 116–31; significance of, 66–68
Old Fiddlers Association, 557 participatory music, significance of, 66–68
Old-Time Herald, 109, 129 Pashofa Dance, 313
old-time music, American, 96, 102, 108–9, 123, past: ancient, in “The Birth of Hawai‘i,”
129–30, 557, 563 540–41; appropriation of, to reshape cultural
Old-Time Music and Dance (Bealle), 108 environment, 29; borrowing from, 394;
Old Time News, 129 Croatian revival and appropriation of,
Olson, Laura, 257, 471–72 344–45; as danger to future of music culture,
omasta päästä, 408 668–69; Georgian polyphony as restoration
“On Building and Developing a Progressive of, 590; illusion of continuity between
Vietnamese Culture Rich in National present and, 229; mobilization of, 12–15;
Character” (Vietnamese Communist movement to present from, 119; nationalism
Party), 162 and connection to, 263–64; presence of,
O’Neil, Francis, 560–61 287; and present in Croatian folklore, 335;
Orfeu, 437n10 reconstruction and validation of, in Hawaiian
Orientalism, 207–8, 223–24n2, 622–23, 629 Renaissance, 541; representations of, 11;
origin fallacy, 118 revival as drawing upon, 5; transferring
orphans: in Afghanistan, 384; arts therapy for, musical elements from, 4; and understanding
378–79, 387n3 of revival, 43–44. See also history; nostalgia
Ortega, Daniel, 358 Past in Music, The(Ethnomusicology Forum), 13
INDEX 693
patriotic songs, Croatian, 326–27, 329 politics: authenticity and, 20; and
patriotism, and English folk music resurgence, Casamançais regionalism, 246; Choctaw
491. See also nationalism and Chickasaw self-determination and, 303;
Pávai, István, 193 and English folk music resurgence, 494;
Payne, Richard W. “Doc,” 444, 448, 449, 456 Georgian, 580–81; Hawaiian assimilation,
Peacock, Kenneth, 109–10 535; and Hungarian dance house movement,
“Peekaboo Waltz,” 127 190–91, 195; and kathak dance revival, 214;
pelimanni music, 400–404, 413 Kaustinen Folk Music Festival funding and,
percussion bands, preservation of Korean, 401; as motivation for revival, 11–12, 418–22,
145–47 424–29, 433; and protest song movements,
performance: and academic status, 270; 23; of “revivalist” in United States, 109; and
Chickasaw cultural identity through, revival performance in Senegal, 230–37; and
316–17; of Choctaw communal dance South African jazz, 653, 655, 657, 659–60;
songs, 309–10; and English folk music Tamil artistic revival and, 381; Tropicália
resurgence, 492–93, 495–99; goals of, in movement and, 431; Ukrainian, 512. See also
post-Soviet Uzbekistan, 267–68; hybridity cultural politics
and, 480–81; of Irishness in diaspora, “Politics of Culture: Folk Critique and
608–14; of Istrian ethnomusic, 334–35; as Transformation in the State of Hungary,
means of discovery for new audiences, 501; The” (Taylor), 188
new teaching contexts’ impact on, 173–74; polyphony. See Georgian polyphony
pelimanni revival and amateur, 401–2; as Pomazan, Yefrozynia, 515, 516fig.
representation of music, 49–50; revival “Pongjiga,” 145
of, as medium of post-colonial elites, 229; Popular Center for Culture (CPC), 425–26
shift from participatory to presentational, popular music, Croatian post-war
16–17; transmission through, 26. See also tradition-based, 331–35. See also bossa nova;
Senegalese neo-traditional performance protest bossa nova; Tropicália movement
“performance approach,” 98–99 post-colonial regimes. See also kathak dance
Pernambuco, Brazil, 428–29 and revival; Senegalese neo-traditional
Perraton, Jonathan, 466–67 performance
personal expression, ancient music as post-colonial regimes, revival of performance
departure for, 404–13 as medium of, 229, 233–37
person-oriented criteria for authenticity, postfolkore, 468, 469
20–22, 394 post-processual archaeology, 12–13
Petrie, George, 561 post-revival, 28–30; ca trù and, 176; choro
Petrosiants, Ashot, 257, 261, 270 revival and, 66; conceptualization of, 9;
Pham Duy, 170 defined, 4; Finnish revival activities in,
Phạm Thị Huệ, 174, 175, 179n15 395; folk music and, 105–6; and Georgian
Phó Đình Kỳ, 171 polyphony, 574, 593–95; globalization and,
Pickens, Bienum, 307 466, 472, 474–76; and Hawaiian culture,
Picts, 76 545; innovation and, 23–24; Iranian, 295;
Pilzer, Joshua, 339 and Iranian classical music, 294–95; and
place-based special interest groups, 554 Korean folk culture, 152; Native flute and,
Plains flute, 443–45 442, 453–62; and new steady state phase of
Plan Australia, 378, 387n3 cultural revitalization, 555–58; and notion of
poetry: Iranian classical music and, 293–94; continuum, 16; recent studies, 107–10; stage
and Iranian dance in diaspora, 633; following, 666; understanding development
Vietnamese, 170 of, culture, 566
694 INDEX
posttraumatic stress disorder, 378, 386, 387n3 punta, 363–64, 365, 366, 367
present: dissatisfaction with, as motivation punta rock, 364
for revival, 3–4, 10–11; and past in Croatian Purcell, Henry, 80
folklore, 335 purity: of Chickasaw communal songs and
preservation: Bernardini on, 29; of customs, dances, 315; of Croatian traditional music,
327–28; in diaspora, 19; and global 343; and first revivalist movement in Iranian
perspectives on intangible cultural heritage, classical music, 281, 283–85; and historical
142–43; of heritage, 331–32; innovation veracity, 286–91; of Indian performing arts,
and, 8, 19, 292; of intangible cultural 208–10; of kathak dance, 206, 219; and Native
heritage, 135; of Korean court music, flute, 449, 459; and rejection of revivalist
149–52; of Korean folk songs, 143–45; artists, 620. See also authenticity; ethnic purity
of Korean intangible cultural heritage,
136–42, 152–53; of Korean percussion Qahremani, Esma’il Khan, 289, 296n11
bands, 145–47; of Korean shaman rituals, qarbzadegi, 278
147–49; tension between conservation Quách Thị Hồ, 170, 171
and, 28; through decontextualization and quản giáp, 168
recontextualization, 4, 44 Quitzow, Sulgwynn, 108
primary ensembles, 575
process-oriented criteria for authenticity, 20, racial purity, 287–88, 297n18. See also ethnic
22–23, 394 purity
production(s): artistic, as nonviolent radif: authority of, 285, 288, 297n13; Borumand
resistance, 426; authenticity of, 46–47; and, 289, 296n11; increased attention to,
emphasis on, 45; meaning of, 43; social 282–83; Nazeri on, 294; second revival
networks in artistic, 421 movement as reaction against, 295;
product-oriented criteria for authenticity, 20 Shahnazi and, 296n12
professionalization: of English folk music, 493, Radio Tehran, 279–80
497, 498–99, 501, 505, 506; and Finnish folk Rădulescu, Speranţa, 191
music, 395, 403, 406; of folk music, 53–54; Rafly, 376, 379
of Georgian folk polyphony, 578–79; of Raimbergenov, Abdulhamid, 384
Hungarian dance house groups, 197–98; as Rajabi, Yunus, 258–59, 271, 275n6
necessary aspect of revival, 63–64; process of, Ramazani, Nesta, 628–29
16–18; of Roma musicians, 341; of Senegalese Ramnarine, Tina, 400
neo-traditional performance, 237; and shift Ramos, Vernon, 363, 365
from knowers to doers to marketers, 50 Rao, Maya, 217
Program for the Socialization of Peace and Rashid, Ali Mohammad, 286
Reintegration of Aceh, 380 Ras Lila, 214
promotion: changes in nature of, 24–27; of Ratil, Iozef, 577
Korean intangible cultural heritage, 139–40; rationalized creativity, 454–55
methods and infrastructure for, 4 ratôh taloe, 377
Proper Distribution, 501–2 re-, 666–68
protest bossa nova, 419–20, 422, 425–31 Recommendation on the Safeguarding of
psychosocial homeostasis, 566 Traditional Culture and Folklore, 142
Public Enlightenment movement (Finland), “Reconstructing Heritage” project, 336, 337fig.,
394–95, 413 340
Pukwana, Dudu, 649, 652, 657–59 recontextualization: authenticity balanced
p’ungmul, 145–46 by processes of, 591; brings new demands,
punk bands, Irish and Irish-diaspora, 613 394; change through, 28; of Chickasaw
INDEX 695
communal songs and dances, 313; of Resolution 5 of Eighth National Congress of

Choctaw communal songs and dances, the Vietnamese Communist Party, 162
306; documentation and explication of, restoration: and antiquarian nostalgia, 73,
processes, 9, 67; effects of, 394; of English 78–81, 90; in Croatia, 331, 336; of ethnic
folk music, 506–7; of Hawaiian traditions, purity, 11; following disasters, 372–73,
533; inherent processes of, 63; legitimization 377–78; of Georgian polyphony, 574,
and, 4; of primary folklore, 574; of 577–78, 589–90; as important cultural
repertories, 301; in revival, 4; of South phenomenon, 4; of integrity of present
African jazz, 661; transformation and, 15–19; practices, 12; and kathak dance revival,
transmission and dissemination and, 24–25. 207–11; in Korea, 149–50; revivals as, 8, 61,
See also decontextualization 63; in South African jazz, 646, 660–61
recordings. See audio recordings resurgence: in English folk arts, 28–29, 489–
Red Clay Ramblers, 121, 122 90, 494–95, 499–500, 507; and Garifuna
Red Power Movement, 300–301 cultural rescue, 352–55; of interest in
Red River Blues (Bastin), 104 Southeastern Indian cultures, 313; of Iranian
Reed, Henry, 119, 124–27 national consciousness, 294; of regionalism,
re-enactment, 14, 17–18, 668–69 247; versus revival, 493–94
Reflections, 654 reverse language shift, 669
regalia: for Chickasaw communal dance, 315–16; revitalization: of Croatian tunes, 333; Garifuna,
of Choctaw communal dance, 310; hula, 536 350–52, 355; in Hawai‘i, 533; of Irish music,
Regional Dance Group, 364 607; of language, 669–70; revival and, 566;
regulated creativity, 454, 455 of Scottish traditional music, 560; through
reissues, 103 formation and organizations, 557–58
Reizniece, Ilga, 470, 471, 481–82, 483 revitalization movements: Harkin on, 350;
religion: application of “revival” in, 117; and Internet and, 552; Nevaquaya on, 449;
Iranian classical music, 293; Iranian dance studies of, 229; Wallace’s theory of, 6–7, 99,
and, 624; Ivana Kupala and, 514–15; kathak 288, 331, 393, 555–56, 566, 567, 593
dance and, 217 revival: as activism, 10–12, 350–70, 393–414,
renaissance: of English folk arts, 489; in 418–36; authenticity, authority, and
fiddling, 128; of Georgian polyphony, 574; of legitimacy and, 19–24; characteristics of,
Indian dance, 212; in Iranian classical music, 3–4, 8, 9, 10, 12, 222–23, 510–11; contention
291–94; of klapa movement, 332; process of regarding, as label, 4–5, 63, 302; as current
cultural, 223; of Qajar music, 281; use of term, in creation and dissolution of musical
76–78. See also Hawaiian Renaissance movements, 421; defined, 3, 61; as fluid, 229;
repertory: Chickasaw, 315, 316, 318; meanings of, 116–19; and mobilization of
Choctaw, 302, 304, 307, 308–9, 311, 314; past and selective use of history, 12–15; as
discontinuation and renewal of, 301; of paradigm, 101–2; past and understanding
English folk music, 490–91; of Henry Reed, of, 43–44; processes and issues in, 3–4;
126–27; of Hollow Rock String Band, 122; as process that stretches space, 246–48;
integration of cultural artifacts into, 119; purpose of, 61; recontextualization and
memory and, 662; putting away and putting transformation and, 15–19; as response to
to sleep, 319n1; recontextualization of, 301, social and cultural change, 562–66; versus
318; of Southern oldtime fiddling, 116, 121, resurgence, 493–94; scholarship on, 5–8;
122–23, 129; of Taylor Kimball, 124 separating, from other musical processes,
Repo, Teppo, 405, 408 103–4; transmission, dissemination, and
representations: audio recordings as, 49–50, promotion and, 24–27; in twenty-first
103; meaning and function of, 43 century, 9–10
696 INDEX
revivalists: core revivalists, 65, 525; in Russian Empire, Georgian polyphony and
Iranian dance context, 619–21; legitimacy revivalist trends under, 576, 577–78. See also
and authenticity and, 19, 274n1; and Soviet Union
recontextualization and transformation,
15–16; as transmitters, 25 Saakashvili, Mikheil, 581, 582
revival model of Tamara Livingston, 61–66, Safvate, Dariouche, 281, 288–89
660–61. See also Music Revivals: Towards a Saha, Hannu, 405, 409, 410
General Theory” (Livingston) Said, Edward, 223–24n2, 644–46
revival scholarship, 5–8 Sakhioba, 580, 581fig.
Reynolds, Simon, 668 salvage ethnography, 354
Rezvani, Medjid, 629 samba de morro, 424
Rhodes, Willard, 445 samba-song, 423, 424
Ricardo, Sérgio, 429, 431 Sambola, Kensy, 361–62
rice farming, 140, 242 Sambou, Saliou, 239, 240
Ritual to Confucius, 149 Sampson, Adam, 307, 308, 309, 311
Ritual to Invoke Native Land Consciousness, samullori, 146
139, 148 SamulNori, 146–47, 148
Riverdance, 612–13 Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN),
Roberston, James Stewart, 560 357–60
Robinson, Mary, 613 Sanskritization, of kathak dance, 216, 220
Robles, Alomia, 154n14 Sára, Ferenc, 198
“Rocking the Babies to Sleep,” 126–27 Sarmast, Ahmed, 374, 383–84
romancero, 84–86 scenarios, 646, 662
Romancero du Canada (Barbeau), 85–86 sceptic perspective of globalization, 473–74,
Romania, and ethnic-national identification 477–82
of Hungarian dance house movement, Schneider, Marius, 573
188–89 scholars: American instrumental folk music
romantic nationalism: Finnish, 394–400, 409, revival and, 122–29, 130; authenticity and,
413; Irish responses to, 604–5; as motivator 19–20, 22, 102, 394, 622; Finnish, 399, 400,
of scholar-revivalists, 6 405–6; folklore, 23, 99–100; Georgian,
Ronström, Owe: on authenticity, 24; on 574, 575, 580; and Hungarian dance house
early revivalists, 23; on improvisation in movement, 192–94; and identification of
European folk revivals, 452; on mobilization traditional musical elements, 4; intellectual
of past, 13; on revival, 5, 10, 283; on shifts, 4, trends spurring, 6; involvement of, in
15; on tradition and modernity, 279, 297n24 revival process, 5–8, 130–31; legitimacy and,
Rosenberg, Neil: on invented traditions, 19; and meaning of revival, 619; Ukrainian,
35n1; on revival, 116–17; on revival and 521. See also scholarship
antiquarian studies, 78; on revival and class, scholarship: on British folk music between
220, 291 1950s and 1970s, 492; future directions for,
Rose Revolution (2003), 581 60–61, 68; Georgian, 576, 578, 580; increase
Round Midnight at the Café Montmartre, 654 in revival, 60; on Ivana Kupala, 525–26;
Royal Ancestral Shrine (Chongmyo), 149 and journey of Neil Rosenberg, 94–110;
Rubi, Mahrisal, 379 legitimacy and, 19, 63–64; of medieval
Ruguma, 364 antiquity, 74–81; and postindustrial
runo-singing, 396–99, 400, 414n3 university, 81–83; regarding runo-songs,
rural culture, pelimanni music and 396–97; revival, 5–8. See also scholars
rejuvenation of, 400–404 Schools’ Folklore Scheme, 607
INDEX 697
Schools’ Manuscript Collection, 607 Shrewsbury Folk Festival, 498

Scotland: Irish immigrants in, 600; revival in, Sibelius Academy, Folk Music Department,
467; traditional music revival activities in, 395, 405–6, 410–11
559–60 Sidmouth International Festival, 500
Sebestyén, Márta, 197, 198 Simon, Paul, 154n14
Sebő, Ferenc: education of, 193; on founders of Singer of Tales (Lord), 406
Heritage House, 195; and Hungarian dance Sinhala-Tamil ethnic conflict, 381
house movement, 184–86, 200; and national Sizaret, Frederic, 378
character of Hungarian dance house Skandinieki, 469, 470, 476
movement, 187 Skinner, J. Scott, 560
Seck, Assane, 231 Škoro, Miroslav, 346n7
secondary ensembles, 575 Sligo fiddlers, 609
second folk revival, English, 492–93 Slobin, Mark: on affinity and belonging,
Sédar Senghor, Léopold, 228–29, 231–34 590; on context, 447; on kernel group in
Segal, Lewis, 640 preservation and change, 450; on klezmer
self-determination, Hawaiian, 535, 548n5 music, 54; on perspectives on globalization,
Senegalese National Ballet, 234–35 476; on proliferation of traditional music
Senegalese National Theatre, 233, 235–37 styles, 568; on revival, 4, 5, 285, 563–64;
Senegalese neo-traditional performance: Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the
development of, during colonial period, West, 7; on term “revival,” 63, 446; on
230–33; and emergence of Casamançais transnational transmission, 594
regionalism, 237–46; as revival genre, Small, Christopher, 105, 483
228–29; role of, in cultural revival and Smith, Anthony D., 562, 564
nationalist politics, 233–37; transnational Smith, Harry, 100
mobility and, 246–48 social class: and development of Uzbek
set dancing, 606 arranged folk music, 257; Iranian classical
Shah, Reza, 277–78, 279, 285 music revival and, 290–91; and kathak
Shahnazi, Ali Akbar, 296n12 dance revival, 219–20; and origin of kathak
shaman rituals: and population migration, dance, 214–15; and protest bossa nova,
153n4; preservation of Korean, 425; relationship between revivals and,
147–49 64–65; and Senegalese neo-traditional
Sharp, Cecil, 490–92 performance, 236–37; in South Korea, 153n3
Shashmaqom, 273, 275n6 social networks: in artistic production, 421;
Shashmaqom vol. 1-6, 258–59 fiddling and traditional dance music
Shateri, 638 communities and, 565; and Irish music and
Shelemay, Kay Kaufman, 75 dance revival, 614; and musical movements,
Shetland fiddlers, 54, 559 434. See also Internet
Shetlandising, 54 Sodiqov, Faruq, 268, 270
Shevardnadze, Eduard, 581 Sofyan, Teungku, 377
Sheyda Ensemble, 292 Sog’diana Folk Orchestra, 268–69, 275n10
shifts: decontextualization and Sŏkchŏn taeje, 149–50
recontextualization as, 4; revival processes solace, music as, 329–30, 373, 386, 661
as, 15–16, 45–46 solo improvised dance, Iranian, 623, 624, 626
Shimmen, Phil, 537, 538 Sonar Senghor, Maurice: as director of Daniel
Shklovsky, Viktor, 666 Sorano Theatre, 233; on L’Exile d’Alboury,
Shooting Roots, 502–3 236; and National Ballet, 234, 235; supports
Show Opinião, 246–47, 419, 420, 428 Keita, 232
698 INDEX
Sonevytsky, Maria, 523 student movement, American, 448–49

songmasters, 574, 582, 584, 586, 592–93 Study Group for Applied Ethnomusicology of
Sosiura, Volodymyr, 528n3 the International Council for Traditional
Sotsialistycha Kultura, 515, 516fig. Music, 373–74
Soug, 639 Study of Folklore (Dundes), 95
South African jazz: of Chris McGregor Study of Folk Music in the Modern World, The
and Blue Notes, 656–59; cultural and (Bohlman), 7
historical context of, 647–50; diaspora, stylization, 335, 341, 343, 344
transformation, and remembrance and, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West
652–54; of Dollar Brand and Bea Benjamin, (Slobin), 7
654–56; in Europe and United States, Sufism, 638
650–52; overview of, 644–47, 660–62 Sunday Manoa, The, 533–34
South Korea: court music, 149–52; folk songs, Suny, Ronald Grigor, 258
143–45; as model for preservation and Swanton, John R., 320n9
revival, 142; percussion bands, 145–47; Swing, Pamela, 559
preservation of intangible cultural heritage syncretism: Baumann’s model of purism
of, 136–42, 152–53; shaman rituals, 147–49; versus, 16, 23, 277, 334, 449, 450–51,
social class in, 153n3 476; in colonial context, 222; of Finnish
Soviet Union: Georgian polyphony and contemporary folk music, 413. See also
revivalist trends under, 578–80; and Latvian fusion and fusion processes; hybridity
musical authenticity, 471; revivals in synecdoche, 44
post-Soviet spaces, 511–14. See also Ukraine; Szászcsávás Band, 198
Uzbekistan Szék, Transylvania, 185, 186
space, revival as process stretching, 246–48
special interest groups, 552–53, 554, 565, 589–93 Taech’wait’a, 150–51
Speed, John, 76 Taegŭm chŏngak, 151
spelemannslag, 556–57 “Tajaga Damée” (Watch Over the Peace), 380
spiritual revival, Croatian, 236–38 Taj Al-Saltana, 626–27
Sprat, Thomas, 78 Talai, Dariush, 282, 284
Sri Lanka, revival in, 381, 385–86 Tālibān, 382–83
Stainer, C., 83 tamburitza, 332, 345n2, 346n9
Stainer, J. F. R., 83 Tamil-Sinhala ethnic conflict, 381
standardization: effects of, 45; of Georgian Tanabe Hisao, 150, 155n30
polyphony, 579, 588; of radif, 283; of Uzbek táncház movement, 128. See also Hungarian
traditional music, 258–59, 275n6 dance house movement
Stanton, Gary, 126 Táncháztalálkozó, 194
State Conservatory: Tbilisi State Taruskin, Richard, 287, 291, 406
Conservatoire, 578, 579, 586; Uzbek, 259–62 Tashkent State Conservatory, 260
Stekert, Ellen, 16, 100–101 Tate, Jerod Impichchaachaaha’, 317
Stephenson, Ian, 504 tavayafs, 208–10
stickball, 304–5 Taylor, Diana, 646, 662
“Stony Point,” 123–24 Taylor, Mary, 188, 194, 195
Storey, John, 491 Taylor, Timothy, 24
strategic inauthenticity, 24 Tbilisi State Conservatoire, 578, 579, 586
strathspey and reel societies, 560 teceijas singing style, 471, 483
Stravinsky, Igor, 287, 290, 573 Temple Act (1911), 136
student demonstrations, Korean, 139, 147–48 termination legislation, 303, 319n20
INDEX 699
“territories of difference,” 353 556; organization of, revival activities from

terrorism, South African laws against, 648 eighteenth century on, 559–62; revival and,
“Texas,” 124–25 43–44; and shift from knowers to doers to
Thái Hà Ensemble, 166fig. marketers, 47–51; shifts and, 45–46; Slobin
Thanh Lâm, 175 on revival of, 568; social and cultural change
Théâtre Africain. See Ballets Africains and revivals of, 562–66; South African, 652,
“thick globalization,” 467–68, 483 659, 660; Ukrainian, 523; Vietnamese, 164.
“thin globalization,” 467 See also folk music; Uzbek traditional music
Thionck Essyl, Senegal, 239–41 tradition(s): alterations to Ukrainian, 521;
Thomas, Judy, 313, 317 and “The Birth of Hawai‘i,” 544; change
Thomas, William, 43 to heritage from, 31, 51, 52–54; continuity
Thompson, Bobbie, 120–21 with, 17–18; and Croatian revival, 326, 336,
Thompson, Marko Perković, 332 341, 344–45; defined, 443; evolution of
Thompson, Tommy, 120–22, 126 Croatian, 325; Feintuch on, 24; Hawaiian
Timár, Sándor, 184, 185 Renaissance and, 534–35; Hobsbawm on,
time: cultural transmission through, 119; as 12; invented, 7–8, 35n1, 619; in Iranian
cyclical, 301, 319n2; enactment of cultural dance, 619; Kanahele on revival of, 532–33;
processes through, 130; and geographical legitimacy and, 19; Livingston on, 446, 453;
displacement, 19; heritage and, 56; history manipulation of, 512; modernity and, 55–56,
as change over, 104–5; rebellion against 279, 284, 297nn14,24; modernization of
modern idea of, 14; revival as process ancient Uzbek, 265–68; nationalism and,
stretching, 32; revival’s change over, 246, 263–64; ownership of, 21, 54; parallel, 622;
248; tradition and, 52 preservation of, 327–28; reinterpretation
Titon, Jeff, 105, 449–50 and reinvention of, 563–64; and revival of
Topelius, Zacharis Sr., 397, 399 Senegalese choreography, 228–29; revival
Topic Records, 493 versus, 117–18; as springboards for cultural
torture, music as, 330 change, 56, 297n24. See also custom(s)
Touré, Sékou, 232–33, 249n7 Tran, Nhung Tuyet, 169–70
traditional dance music communities: from Transcription Center, 651, 664n5
eighteenth century on, 559–62; emergence transformation: of bluegrass music, 96; in
of, on Internet, 552–55; in Europe, 556–57; Brazilian popular music, 421–22, 429, 435–36;
and grassroots revitalization of traditional ca trù and, 161; and change to tradition, 28;
music and dance, 557–58; Internet, as real and Choctaw and Chickasaw music revivals,
communities, 565 302, 318; in Croatia, 344; in Finnish folk
traditional music: Afghan, 384–85, 386; and music, 393, 396–400, 412; following revival, 5,
agents of revival, 46–47; authenticity and, 8; and Georgian polyphony, 577, 578–80, 594;
17; Brazilian, 419, 431; creative process globalization and, 466, 472; and Hungarian
and, 23; Croatian, 325–26, 327, 333, 334, dance house movement, 184, 189; of kathak
335–43, 345; decline of, 29; development of, dance, 216, 222; and Korean folk culture, 148–
theories, 27; English, 503–4; festivalization 49; and new steady state phase of cultural
of, 50, 495; fiddle, 552, 556, 557; Finnish, revitalization, 555; recontextualization and,
404, 411; Hawaiian, 533; heritage and, 52–53; 4, 15–19, 574; revivals as, 31, 44, 45, 532; of
heritagization and, 53–54; Hungarian, 187, Senegalese neo-traditional performance,
191, 192, 195; Iranian, 279–80, 282, 283, 629; 229; and South African jazz, 652–54; South
Irish, 602, 609, 610; Korean, 139, 146, 151, African jazz and, 652–54
152; Latvian, 470, 472; mindscape of, 51–52; transformationalist perspective of
Native-American, 301, 311, 459; Norwegian, globalization, 475–79, 480, 482, 483
700 INDEX
Transforming Tradition (Rosenberg), 8, Umikashvili, Petre, 594

100–101 UNESCO: dissemination through, 27;
translation, revival as act of, 25, 44 Garifuna cultural rescue and, 353;
transmission: authenticity and, 22–23; of and Georgian polyphony, 581–82, 583;
ca trù, 169, 173–74, 179n15; changes in Hungarian dance house movement’s
nature of, 24–27; of Choctaw music, 309; inscription into, 183; as mechanism for
cross-cultural, 26–27; of fiddle music, 554, revival, 162; and music as heritage, 55; and
559; following war and natural disasters, preservation of Korean cultural heritage,
374; of Georgian polyphony, 578, 582, 142; Proclamation of Masterpieces of the
594; and “grandparent education,” 119; of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity,
Hungarian dance house movement, 187, 573; and recognition of intangible cultural
193; of instrumental folk music, 123–29; heritage, 177; Urgent Safeguarding List, 160,
of Iranian classical music, 285, 289; Ivana 161, 173
Kupala and gendered networks of, 524, 525; United States: bossa nova in, 424; Dollar Brand
and Ivana Kupala revival, 524; of kathak and Bea Benjamin in, 654–55; fiddle revival
dance, 215; of Latvian music, 470; methods in, 128; Iranian dance in, 632, 633, 635–37; and
and infrastructure for, 4; pelimanni revival Irish diaspora, 608–9, 614–15; and Native
and, 403; Slobin on transnational, 594; American relations, 303, 446; old-time
of South African jazz, 648, 662; of Uzbek fiddling revival in, 68, 555, 556, 557, 566, 567;
traditional music, 272 “old-time” music in, 123; postsecondary
Trần Văn Khê, 170, 171 institutions in, 82; revival dialogue in, 109;
Tropicália, 437n13 South African jazz in, 650–52
Tropicália é proibido proibir, 437n13 universalism, and Uzbek arranged folk music,
Tropicália movement: albums sampling, 267–69
437n13; emergence of, 430–32, 433; Universal Silence, 655–56
evolution from bossa nova to, 422–25; university, early music and postindustrial, 81–83
impetus for, 420 University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 534
“True Picture of a Pict, A” (Hariot), 77fig. University of Oklahoma, Native flute concert
Tsotigh, Terry, 462 at, 461fig., 462
tsunami: effects of 2004, on Aceh, 375–76; University of the Autonomous Regions of
effects of 2004, on Sri Lanka, 381; revivals the Atlantic Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua
following, 385–86 (URACCAN), 361–62
Tsurtsumia, Rusudan, 580, 593–94 Unsan pyŏlshindae, 147
Tuđman, Franjo, 326, 327 UPE (record label), 475
Tupí, 76 Upland South, 123
Turino, Thomas, 64–65, 67, 473 urbanization: of Finland, 400, 413; of Korea,
Turkiston People’s Conservatory, 260 136, 153n3
Turner, Rick, 660 Urgent Safeguarding List, 160, 161, 173
Tymoshenko, Yulia, 513, 528n2 Uzbekistan: history of arranged folk versus
traditional music in, 254–56; post-Soviet
Ubiet, Nyak Ina Raseuki, 380 situation in, 262–72; sound of arranged
ubiquitous creativity, 454, 455 folk versus traditional music in, 253–54;
Új Pátria Final Hours series, 199 state-revived traditions in, 252–53. See
Ukraine: relationship to Soviet past in, 512–13; also arranged folk music (Uzbek); Uzbek
Russian presence in, 522–23. See also Ivana traditional music
Kupala, St. John’s Eve (Midsummer’s Eve) Uzbek State Conservatory, 259–62
(Latvia) Uzbek traditional music: codification and
Ukrainian language, 524 standardization of, 258–59; commonalities
INDEX 701
of, with arranged folk music, 272–73; revival, 469–70; of Western music, 561. See
history of, 254–56; and maintenance of also globalization
ethno-national identities, 275n6; during Western music: availability of, 280; and
post-Soviet era, 262–72; promulgation of, Iranian classical music, 278–79, 280, 285–86
in Uzbekistan, 252; sound of, 253–54; State White Deer, Gary, 313–14, 315, 318
Conservatory as flagship institution for, Wilenz, Sean, 106
259–62 Wilgus, D. K., 98
William Ponty School, 228, 230–31
Väisänen, Armas Otto, 405, 409 Williams, Raymond, 345
Varga, István “Kicsi Csipás,” 198 Wilson, Dorothy, 366
Varga, Zsuzsanna, 198 “wolf assembly,” 338
vaudeville, and Irish diaspora, 608–9 Wollenberg, Charles, 107–8
Vaziri, Ali Naqi, 278–80, 283, 296n4 women: in Afghanistan, 382, 383; in
Veloso, Caetano, 418–20, 428, 429, 431–32, 433, Casamançais performances, 242; Chickasaw
437n12 dance regalia for, 315–16; in Choctaw
vendors, at folk festivals, 496–97, 499 communal dance songs, 309–10; and
Very Urgent, 657 classicization of kathak dance, 216–17;
Vidal, Henri, 231 disenfranchisement of hereditary, 210; image
Vidyarthi, Reba, 217 of Ukrainian, 513; and Iranian classical music,
Vietnam. See ca trù 293; Ivana Kupala and reconceptualization of,
Vietnamese Communist Party, 162, 164, 171 517; and Native flute, 445, 452–53; and origin
Village Harmony, 586 of kathak dance, 213, 214; and purity of Indian
Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 423 performing arts, 208–10; and transmission
Villanen, Juho, 405 of Ivana Kupala, 523, 524, 525; and Uzbek
“Virginians’ Manner of Dancing at their traditional music, 261
Religious Festivals, The” (Harriot), 79fig. Worcestre, William, 74
Vizeli, Balázs, 198 World of Music journal, 8
von Becker, Reinhold, 397 World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), 447
vučarenje, 338
Xahuri. See Brand, Dollar; Ibrahim, Abdullah
Wade, Abdoulaye, 238, 246 “Xẩm Huê Tình”, 173–74, 179n18
wakes, Irish and American, 602
Wallace, Anthony: on importation, 15; on Ye Yonghae, 137–38, 152
purpose of revival, 393; revitalization Yi Pohyŏng, 138–39
movement theory of, 6–7, 99, 288, 331, 393, Yi Sanggyu, 155n33
555–56, 563, 566, 567, 593; and revival as “Yongch’ŏn’gŏm,” 145
activism, 10 Youngblood, Mary, 452–53, 455
Wapp, Edward, 445, 454, 455 Young Folk Award, 505
war: baggage of, 332; music as comfort and Youth Folk Song Centers, 582
torture in, 328–31. See also Aceh, Indonesia; Yu Sangyun, 137
Croatian revival; decline, musical; Sri
Lanka, revival in Zakrzhevskaya, X., 266
Watson, Cheryl, 363 Zé, Tom, 437n13
Westerholm, Heidi, 415n9 Zemtsovsky, Izaly, 257, 267, 573
Westerholm, Pekka, 411–12 Zerkula, János, 198
Westernization: and Georgian polyphony, Zerkula Emlék Zenekár, 198
579, 584; of Iranian national dance, 627–28; Ziyeeva, Malika, 261, 263, 272
and Korean folk culture, 139; and Latvian Zlatni dukati, 326

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PA RT I I â•‡ S C HOL A R S A N D C OL L E C TOR S A S

16. Cultural Rescue and Musical Revival among the Nicaraguan

18. Innovation and Cultural Activism through the Reimagined

20. Bending or Breaking the Native American Flute Tradition? 442

21. Toward an Application of Globalization Paradigms to Modern Folk

Caroline Bithell, Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, University of Manchester, UK

Jane Freeman Moulin, Professor of Ethnomusicology, University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa,

The Significances of Revival

volume, then, we employ the term as a type of shorthand to encompass a range of

Revival Scholarship and

of scholars who, in employing analyses of invented traditions, delegitimize culturally

Revivalists position themselves in opposition to aspects of the contemporary cultural

Rethinking Revival in the Twenty-first Century

society. Representations of the past—often romanticized, sometimes imaginary, and

The Mobilization of the Past and the

as post-processual or interpretative archaeology embraced a notion of the past as sub-

step corresponds to Wallace’s second “choice of identification”—importation—which

Recontextualization and Transformation

Some degree of recontextualization, whether intentional or circumstantial, is inherent

Authenticity, Authority, and Legitimacy

As recontextualizations engender transformations in sound, practice, and context, the

Weisethaunet and Lindberg observe, while authenticity may be perceived by academics

authentication strategies employed by academy musicians and institutions (see also

post-revival phase and historical authenticity is no longer an overriding concern. These

Transmission, Dissemination, and

participatory taster workshops included in many festival programs, intensive summer

The Post-revival Turn: Revival Legacies

The kinds of shifts—recontextualizations, transformations, and innovations—sum-

These case studies, punctuated by ethnographically informed conceptual essays, docu-

and related processes of musical transformation: the sceptic, hyperglobal, and transfor-

Buchanan, Donna A. 2006. Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in

——. 1950. La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (New edition: Albin

Rosenberg, Neil. 1993. “Introduction.” In Transforming Traditions: Folk Music Revivals

Approaching revivals as productions leads us to agents, entrepreneurs, constructors,

From Knowers to Doers and Marketers

profits, raised attention)—represent a new order in the power structures surrounding

Outlines of a Musical Geography

beginning, been a constitutive element of the “folk” or “traditional” musical mindscape

From “Tradition” to “Heritage”

A New Historical Subject?

“In motion”—so could a good deal of “modernity” be summarized. Whole societies

adoption of these concepts and theoretical frameworks in future scholarship on music

A Model for Music Revivals: Summary and

1. An individual or small group of “core revivalists”

I noted in my article that a key component of music revivals is a particular ideology

ethnography of a living tradition. Once I began my research in Brazil, however, my focus

The Model for Music Revivals Revisited

Revivals and Participatory Music: How

including theorizing authenticity and ideologies of renewal, the documentation and

Conclusion: Revivals and Social

This essay explores modern performances of medieval music as a phenomenon of musi-

historians frame their account as a revival beginning in the nineteenth century—either

Antiquity and Its Music

in non-English publications. Jules Michelet’s Histoire de France (1833–1867) is often

finally reached around midcentury, as signaled by Gustav Reese’s landmark Music in

Early Music and the Postindustrial