Music educafion in societyFOLK MUSIC
AS A SOCIAL BINDING FORCE
by
Maud KARPELES, Executive Secretary of the International Folk Music CouncilIt must be self-evident to everyone that any artistic pursuit is poten-
tially a unifying force and this meeting of music educators knows with-
out being told that this is particularly true of music, the most universal
of the arts. We must, however, realize that some forms of music are
wider in their appeal than others and that the extent of their unifying
power must therefore vary. My purpose today is to put forward the
claim that folk music has the capacity to appeal to people of all walks
of life and to people at all levels of culture.
I would like to tell you of a personal experience which perhaps bears
this out. It happened some years ago when I was collecting folk songs
in Newfoundland. I was visiting a fisherman and his wife in a very
isolated coastal settlement. We had spent a delightful evening together
singing and exchanging songs, and when at a late hour I started to
make my farewells the fisherman turned to his wife and said: ‘It’s very
remarkable that a stranger should be so like ourselves.’ That unlettered
fisherman recognized folk music as a social binding force although
that was not the expression that he would have used.
The pity is that cultivated musicians do not always fully appreciate
folk music because of a certain condescending-I might say snob-
bish-attitude towards it. This is based very largely on a misconcep-
tion with regard to its real nature. It is looked upon as immature
music-raw material which the creative musician can develop and turn
into a work of art, but which in itself can serve only as a pastime for
children and uneducated people. I once heard this view deliberately
expressed by a well-known musician. ‘It would be a pity’, he said, ‘if
with all our training and study we hadn’t got beyond the music of the
ignorant, untrained peasant.’ The mistake is in thinking that artistic
expression is necessarily dependent upon formal instruction. That is
tantamount to believing that man was unable to express himself in
language until the grammarian came along and taught him how to do
so. Of course, people sing and dance because it is in their nature to do