Author: Matthew Gelbart
Title: The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner
Year: 2007
Type: Academic book (Cambridge University Press)
The deepest root of the authenticity arguments that run through twentieth-century popular music. Gelbart’s claim is that “folk music” and “art music” are a matched pair of inventions, meaningful only in relation to each other, and that both are barely two centuries old: “folk music and art music are not timeless, objective truths, but very human constructions.” Until the early eighteenth century Europe sorted music by function — church, theater, chamber — and the revolution Gelbart documents is the shift to sorting by origin: “This transfer of emphasis from function to origin made ‘folk music’ and ‘art music’ potentially meaningful ideas.” Once a melody’s value lay in where it came from, two poles opened up. Music from the people became folk; music from the genius became art; and everything the nineteenth century would do with those poles, the collecting and the canonizing alike, follows from the sort.
His signature revision is geographic. The standard story starts with Johann Gottfried Herder coining Volkslied in the 1770s; Gelbart shows the concept arriving a generation earlier in Scotland, where post-Union cultural nationalism was already attributing the country’s songs to ever-older sources, and where James Macpherson’s Ossian forgeries of the 1760s cast the Highlander as Europe’s in-house primitive: “ideas about Scottish music were the initial catalyst in the conceptual polarization that became the folk/art dichotomy.” James Beattie theorized “national music” in English before Herder wrote a word — indeed Herder coined Volkslied in an essay on Ossian — and Gelbart goes further, proposing Herder as “the enemy”: the writer who began subverting the natural music he praised into raw material for a synthetic idea of art. The German side of the pair completes itself in Richard Wagner, for whom the great composer absorbs the folk collective and creates “as the folk” — the universal genius standing on an anonymous foundation pushed discursively out of sight, with the universality quietly conflated with Germanness. The book stops around 1850 because by then the constellation is complete, including its third term: “popular music” splits off as the commercial residue, and folk and art, born as opposites, discover their permanent alliance against it.
That triangle underlies a century of arguments about musical value, and one record shows it seizing up. When Lonnie Donegan took Lead Belly’s “Rock Island Line” to the pop charts in 1956, Skiffle presented a sound whose source was certified folk, whose delivery was pure commerce, and whose audience of British teenagers could not have cared less about the distinction — the 1850 sorting machine jamming on a single record, purists claiming the material while the market claimed the sale. Gelbart also supplies the caution the International Folk Music Council’s 1954 definition deserves: objective definitions of folk music are “doomed to inconsistency, tautology, and ultimately self-contradiction,” because the category was never describing a kind of music, only a relation. The book has its limits — reviewers noted it overstates how uniformly non-German Europe adopted the German synthesis, and it ends where the categories’ hardest work began: the American deployment, where the origin-sort became a race-sort, is the story Segregating Sound picks up on this side of the Atlantic.
Key contributions
- The relational thesis: folk and art music as co-invented categories, each meaningless without the other — the binary itself, not either term, is the historical object.
- The function-to-origin pivot: the eighteenth-century shift from classifying music by use to classifying it by source, which made origin the carrier of musical value.
- The Scottish priority: Ossian and the Scots song collections, a generation before Herder, as the site where “the folk” was first cast as Europe’s internal primitive.
- Nationalism as the engine: origin-classification arose because ethnic identity needed musical property — “Scottish music” precedes and enables “folk music.”
- The third category: around 1850 “popular music” splits off as the commercial other, turning former opposites folk and art into permanent allies against the market — the alignment every later authenticity war inherits.
See also
- Authenticity and its discontents — the ideology’s prehistory: Gelbart dates the machinery of origin-as-value that Romantic authenticity still runs on
- Pop as craft — the third-category split is where craft-for-the-market was first defined as the residue of both folk and art; the revaluation argued there is an appeal against Gelbart’s 1850 verdict
- Romancing the Folk — the American middlemen inherit Gelbart’s categories ready-made; Filene shows them being operated, Gelbart shows them being built
