Folklorism and Nationalism in 20th-Century Music
Folklorism
Those who write in German from the 1960s to 1980s on Eurocentrism are influenced by what we found in the theories. The studies are from the point of view of the Germans, not Europe. Folklore is a societal interest in popular and traditional culture. There are two types of listeners:
- Assets: Retrieves the folkloric to incorporate into a work
- Liabilities: The listener hears and supports. He identifies with music that he has not heard before.
- Ideas, attitudes, and values included under the basic concept of ideational globalizing.
- Product level. Units of formal or practical achievements in folklore can be observed.
- Constructive level of traditional product updates.
Folklorism cannot be understood without reviewing studies of the early folklorists. They said that they consider peasant melodies a pure copy of the old songs learned. This signifies the problem between the dichotomy of religion and popular culture. They obey subjective value criteria. The border between them is illusory. The theory of production is opposed to the reception theory.
Identification of a national mission, picturesque, social diversion in the nineteenth century transitioned into the assimilation and fusion of genuine elements of popular music in the twentieth century, creating a modern language alternative to the Impressionists and futuristic trends and atonality.
Folklore contributes to neo-nationalism (1910):
- Emancipation and exaltation of rhythmic aspects
- Discovering new tonal frameworks: polytonality, bitonality, modes
- Using popular elements of Folklore: entatonismo, exotic scales, whole-tone scales
- Employment of orchestra instruments characteristic of popular music with peculiar timbre and articulation.
Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967)
Zoltán Kodály was born in Kecskemét, Hungary, on December 16, 1882. He died in Budapest on March 6, 1967. His musical style went through a post-Romantic Viennese phase and evolved towards its main feature: the mixture of folklore and complex harmonies of the twentieth century, aspects it shares with Béla Bartók.
Kodály studied in Galánta, the city to which they devote their famous dances, and Nagyszombat. Later, in Budapest, he entered the Ferenc Liszt Music Academy in Budapest, where he was an alumnus of Koessler. In 1906, after receiving his doctorate in letters, he made a study trip to Berlin. That same year he began to research Hungarian folklore, a task that he would later share with Béla Bartók. He came to collect up to about 100,000 Hungarian folk songs, which he recorded on phonograph cylinders.
In 1907, Kodály joined the music theory faculty of the Ferenc Liszt Academy, where he also came to teach composition. His worldwide recognition as a composer arrived in 1923 with the release of Psalmus Hungaricus. (A psalm with text translated by a poet drawing parallels between the suffering of King David and the Hungarians under Turkish occupation). Shortly before (1919) he had been appointed Assistant to the Hungarian Academy of Music, to which he would later add other titles and appointments. Kodály’s ethnomusicological research also provided material for his comic opera Háry János, based on folk tales, from which he extracted an orchestral suite, which is now his most frequently performed work, with brilliant instrumentation and sometimes surprising harmony.
As for his Cello Sonata, this is a work dedicated to virtuoso cellist Jenő Kerpely and was released by the same cellist in 1918. It is one of the most important scores for the instrument and explores very advanced techniques of interpretation and effects influenced by Hungarian folk music. The Dances of Galánta, from 1933, is based on a compilation of popular dance tunes (verbunkos, a Hungarian tradition). Kodály presents the 5 dances in rondo form with alternating lassú-friss (slow-fast). Some people consider it a symphonic poem.
Nationalisms
In the context of modernism, a new nationalism appears around 1910 with other principles: the scientific interest in musicological research and folklore, the presence of foreign cultures. The work of the first systematic ethnomusicologists was decisive for the formation of nationalist consciousness among composers and to lay the basis for a new musical language alternative to the atonality of Impressionism and Expressionism.
This change of function of folklore from national identification, social picturesqueness, and entertainment in the nineteenth century to the assimilation and fusion of genuine elements of popular music in the twentieth century to create a modern and alternative language to the Impressionists and the avant-garde tendencies gave rise to a movement that was based much on the neoclassicism of the interwar period. Twentieth-century musicology has little interest in nationalism, in opposition to politics, which has a strong interest in ethnic conflict, threats to national identity, and the integration of migrations. Scholars like Hotchiran and Smith started the debate with a critical eye to the U.S. and Anglo-Saxon literature on music. Smith says that musicological studies cannot turn their backs on nationalistic movements and that music cannot be decontextualized. There are two views: “Universalism of nationalism, identity, based on historical data and supported by politicians and protectionist interests, which identify the individual with the power of the nation. There would be two categories based on the nations: 1. Culture. Based on true cultural heritage, common language, literature, religion. 2. Politics. Based on the unifying force of common history and politics. Lines inherited from the French Revolution, ideas of self-determination and sovereignty.
There are other models of nationalism by Hans Kohn: 1. Occidental. Political nationalism but based on culture, language, and religion. UK, France, Holland, Switzerland, USA, and its dominions. 2. Oriental. It is a modern phenomenon but a matter of protest against the employer in the state. The national concept of citizenship is substituted by the German humanist Eastern Europe and Asia.
The origins of nationalism and its development are debatable. Sociology studies people and their social behaviors, giving very interesting explanations. Smith offers flexible models between civic/territorial and ethnic/family. The distinction is based on geopolitical criteria and applies to the versions that are in conflict within the nation. The origins of nationalism are dubious. In Gellner, it is associated with modernism, and nations should be regarded as the crystallization of new social units. Nationalism propagated the myth that the nation had existed since the mists of time and that nationalism was the rebirth of sleeping nations. Nationalism is the result of a new form of social organization based on high cultures.
Deception and self-deception are practiced by nationalism. It is the imposition of a high-society culture where it is assumed that it has previously taken over most or almost all of the population. For musicology, nationalism is methodologically inconsistent. The methodology comes principally from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The history of music relates the object based on historical and musical relations. It is a narrative history of music that does not methodically place the artist within a social and political context. Nationalisms incorporate exotic elements of musicology but not as an important stylistic breakthrough (rule of romance). After the 1950s, nationalism is an independent movement with important stylistic issues in musicology. The use of nationalism is free.