"Intellectual Intervention" in Folk Music

The "...folk themselves did not tend to study, analyze, and publish their musical folkways" (Slobin 51) the "simple" folk have always played their music with no real thought of really looking into it. But why would intellectuals (the scholars, artists, thinkers, writers, and other upper class people) want to have any part in the music of the simple folk? There was reasoning behind why they wanted to venture in to that land.  It started in the nineteenth century and it all had to do with "...two main trends...identity-seeking and institution building..."(Slobin 51).    2.

Modernism "... disrupted and reorganized Euro- American life...made peasants into proletarians, and raised the bourgeoisie above the aristocrats". While all of this shifting was taking place in the modern world the "...small, educated, and artistic elite scrambled to find new identities" (Slobin 51) , their places where no longer required in society and they needed a new way concentrate their skills. The standard of modern living brought with it the advancement of science and technology, which caused the "passions" (scholars, artists, writers) to turn to the countryside as a place for "...personal and group grounding...". The "...composers whipped out their notebooks to catch local tunes they could weave in their works. Scholars searched for origins of modern languages in antique song texts, and writers turned folk song into high-culture poetry..." (Slobin 52), which explains the term "intellectual intervention". The intellectuals of society needed a way of identity and they used the folks music as an outlet to use their skills in modern society. From there sparked the fire of ethnomusicology. Focusing on the folks way of life and language was another instance of intellectual intervention without music.

1.

But with the study of the simple folk from the perspective of the intellectuals, there are bound to be misinterpretations and bias.  As culturalist  Olive Dame Campbell once advocated, with any study of a people it  "involves presumptions and judgement about the worth of disparate cultural systems' (Campbell 126). No matter who you are studying you are always going to have images and presumption of a cultural would could cause you to be bias on the data that you collect. An example of this is when Campbell (who was from New England) held has an image of what southerns were like when she went down to the Appalachian with her husband to study the people. She passed judgment on the southern folks tobacco chewing ways. The way Olive Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp (ethnomusicologist that study the folk of the Appalachians) shared somewhat similar attitudes of ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore in regard to the fact that they all did pass judgment on what they studied (The Sioux for Densmore and the Appalachians Folk for Campbell and Sharp), They did not let the folkway speak for it self, instead they put themselves into their data therefore causing the data to be "tainted. 
Intellectual intervention brought folk music into the lime light of modern society.No longer did the music of the folk stay with the simple folk, it was brought before the modern world. Intellectuals jumped on to the folkways of the common people to gain a new identity when they lost theirs with the shifting of social systems.


1. https://www.folkschool.org/BrasstownCarvers/images/justOlive_small.jpg
2. http://janeaustensworld.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/20-lavish-lifestyle.jpg
3. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/HatfieldClan.jpg