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Folklore Revival Movements in Europe post 1950. Shifting Contexts and Perspectives.
Stavělová, Daniela
This collection of papers emerges from a symposium on the folklore revival movement of the second half of the twentieth century which was held in Prague in October 2017. As the current findings of ongoing research in this volume demonstrate, across Europe, the performance and investigation of folklore revival movements, especially music and dance, is of vital interest and relevance to understanding their manifestation in the second half of the twentieth century. This present collection opens the door to further critical examination of the power of such cultural practices, their political salience, whether at national, institutional or individual levels, and their deep-seated impact on people who have encountered and evaluated folk revivalism in their lives.
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The Folklore Revival Movement in Former Czechoslovakia: Dichotomy of the Term
Stavělová, Daniela
In the Czech Lands, the folklore movement is used to refer to the existence of folklore ensembles and their stage production. Recently, however, the term has gained negative connotations as it is associated with the era of Communism, especially the ideological pressures of the 1950s. The reason for these negative associations is that folklore was performed as politically harmless entertainment preferred by the ideology of the day, thus, the folklore movement became representative of values associated with the ideology. The paradoxical, and less known, fact is that members of folklore ensembles often used this environment as a refuge that they could escape to from the grim reality of the political system and a meaningful way of realizing their alternative ideas that they were unable to realize in their professional life. The contribution explores this ambivalence through the memories of surviving actors of the folklore movement, therefore, the principal method used here is oral history, with the main focus on an individual human story – a little history in the context of big history.
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Theoretical Concepts in Ethnomusicology and Study of the Folklore Revival Movement: the Case of the Prague Ensemble Gaudeamus
Skořepová, Zita
This chapter discusses two theoretical concepts in ethnomusicology, their applicability to the study of the folklore movement and the potential of these concepts to widen research questions already posed, or to generate new questions. The methodology, based on oral history interviews, focuses on the individual perspective and refl ection of the participants’ activities in the past and present. How might then actors of the folklore movement be characterized as members of a specifi c cultural cohort based on their own narratives and answers to particular questions? The fi rst concept of cultural cohort comes from a book by the American ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life [2008]. Turino views different personal features, “habits”, as formative elements of a particular identity. People with similar confi gurations of these traits (thus similar identities) tend to join cultural cohorts and cultural formations. Another theoretical framework is provided by the concepts of superculture, subculture and interculture by Mark Slobin [2000]. On the one hand, the folklore movement offi cially acclaimed sources and inspirations from musical subcultures (urban people singing and dancing rural songs and dances), but, on the other hand, found its place at a supercultural music level. This concept can thus enrich our understanding of the dynamics between the superculture, subculture and interculture in the research of the folklore movement. Drawing on data concerning the Prague-based folklore ensemble Gaudeamus, the present paper outlines some preliminary fi ndings in accordance with these theoretical concepts.
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