ethnomusicologists on parade
Jun. 30th, 2005 10:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacThe reason folk music has been on my mind lately is because I've been reading a new book to which my attention was drawn to by, of all things, Wikipedia: Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music by Britta Sweers. This is a book about bands like Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Pentangle, and the Oyster Band, and if you like them you'll want to read this.
Sweers is a German enthnomusicologist who's come out of wherever ethnomusicologists usually hang out and studied a field that gets ignored from falling into the gap between folk music and American folk-rock, and which in the past has been only written about by music journalists, who are prone to anecdotal history. Sweers brings a full battery of techniques to bear: interviews, library research, socio-cultural analysis, economic analysis, harmonic analysis (I love the meaty technical sections, the like of which I've never seen before on this sort of music), and I learned a great deal. For instance I'd not realized that "the folk clubs" which so many of these performers came out of were not so much venues as events, and bastions for the sort of people who took every whim of Ewan MacColl's as iron-clad gospel: what Tom Lehrer once called "the peculiar hard core who equate authenticity with charm." Now I understand how Tim Hart and Maddy Prior - who began as completely conventional folk-revival singers - were so eager to find a way out of there.
I've put my review on the Amazon listing. I'd like to mention the book in the electric folk topic on Grex, but my password has disappeared from my prompt and the sysops haven't responded to my e-mail, so I can't get in.
Sweers is a German enthnomusicologist who's come out of wherever ethnomusicologists usually hang out and studied a field that gets ignored from falling into the gap between folk music and American folk-rock, and which in the past has been only written about by music journalists, who are prone to anecdotal history. Sweers brings a full battery of techniques to bear: interviews, library research, socio-cultural analysis, economic analysis, harmonic analysis (I love the meaty technical sections, the like of which I've never seen before on this sort of music), and I learned a great deal. For instance I'd not realized that "the folk clubs" which so many of these performers came out of were not so much venues as events, and bastions for the sort of people who took every whim of Ewan MacColl's as iron-clad gospel: what Tom Lehrer once called "the peculiar hard core who equate authenticity with charm." Now I understand how Tim Hart and Maddy Prior - who began as completely conventional folk-revival singers - were so eager to find a way out of there.
I've put my review on the Amazon listing. I'd like to mention the book in the electric folk topic on Grex, but my password has disappeared from my prompt and the sysops haven't responded to my e-mail, so I can't get in.
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Date: 2005-06-30 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-30 07:08 pm (UTC)