Ralph Vaughan Williams and Leoš Janáček as Folk Song Collectors
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Vaughan Williams and Folk : 150th anniversary essays |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Keywords | Leoš Janáček; Ralph Vaughan Williams; folk song; folklore; phonograph |
| Description | This essay comprises two comparative studies between two composers and folk song collectors from different regional, social, and generational contexts. The first addresses Vaughan Williams’s and Janáček’s methodological approaches to folk song collecting – in particular, the revised Hints to Collectors of 1904, which was updated by Vaughan Williams and his fellow workers, and Janáček’s folk song collecting instructions from 1906, which was also a revision of sorts. The comparison elucidates similarities, as well as differences, between their collecting practices and between their overall conceptions of folk song and fieldwork. This first section of the essay concentrates on the theoretical frameworks underlying the contemporaneous concepts of two researchers who most likely had no idea about each other, or at least about their shared activities. The second section deals with their approaches to the use of technology in folk song collecting. The time frame covers the first ten to fifteen years of the twentieth century, when the institutions within which Vaughan Williams and Janáček were working were most active. |
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