This chapter emphasizes two topics. Firstly, following the lead of Verdery, Anderson and Greenfeld, I highlighted the interplay between cultural policy and state politics in general, general intellectual discourse and the particular fields of folklore and musical folklore as they emerged and received their own institutions over the course of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century. The notion of the nation has a special position within this field. It is one of the few concepts which permeates all of the fields that I am interested in: politics proper, cultural policy and the cultural domain, including folklore, music and folk music. The nation exists in the same meanings in all of these different domains.
Secondly, I highlighted the relationship between folklore research of the 19th century and the emerging new subdiscipline of musical folklore in the 20th century. I looked especially at the legacy of folklore research on musical folklore. These are two stories - politics on the one hand and intellectual history on the other - which have traditionally been kept apart, and which I try to view as two sides of the same coin.136
In this chapter, I challenged the notion that Romanian folklore research began to look at music only after 1913 with the works of Bartók, Brăiloiu or slightly earlier around 1900 associated with names such as Kiriac, Pârvescu and others. Instead, I viewed earlier research in the emerging discipline of folklore since the 1830s as research on music - although this older research was admittedly concerned with music in a different and more vague sense, that we today do no longer consider appropriate for the study of music. Emphasizing that earlier folklore research also had something to say about music, facilitated the comparison of the older and the newer research tradition and helped identifying the changes that occurred around the beginning of the twentieth century when the new subdiscipline of musical folklore emerged. In Bartók's work, I identified a new concept of music which facilitated the development of the relatively autonomous
136 The fact that I can present a single set of conclusions on both topics indicates perhaps that I am successfully
"thinking together" both aspects.
subdiscipline of musical folklore. I assume that Bartók inherited the new music concept from musicology. I also found characteristics which the new subdiscipline of musical folklore inherited from the older "mother discipline" of folklore. In my discussion of Bartók's 1913 publication on Romanian folklore, I argued that this work was significant for Romanian ethnomusicology mainly because it demonstrated a new perspective on folk music, one that transported the new formal concept of music as something audible, recordable, writable and something conceptually separate from other domains of life and of folklore.137 Romanians like Kiriac quickly took up this new concept in folklore research (and quite possibly used the same concept before Bartók published his book), but it took until the mid-1920s that Romanians published several monographs solely devoted to musical folklore and until the end of the late 1920s that new institutions were created which were exclusively devoted to research on musical folklore. In this time, the time of Brăiloiu, finally a full-fledged subdiscipline of musical folklore was established in Romanian academia.
Brăiloiu was not only instrumental in establishing the new subdiscipline in Romania; he also experimented with different approaches of music research, most notably a sociological approach.
From my political perspective in this study, the most significant conceptual import from the older folklore discourse into the new subdiscipline of musical folklore was that of the national matrix. My research shows that the notion of the nation and an associated apparatus of concepts and techniques developed in Romania over the course of the whole 19th century (and perhaps longer) and that significant changes took place between 1848 and 1866. In this time span the national project not only became a growing consensus, it became a political reality, accepted by all major political forces in the Romanian principalities and it became a hegemony which I describe as the national matrix, making it difficult for anyone taking part in Romanian discussions to sustain a different opinion138. Since then the adjective "Romanian" is understood almost always ethnically, i.e. not referring to everyone living in Romania or everyone with a Romanian passport, but to everyone belonging to the imagined community of Romanians, a community thought to be related by blood relationships. After independence, the apparatus of the nation became increasingly associated with cultural homogeneity; other religious, ethnic groups received no or less attention in the discourses of folklore and musical folklore. For example, the participation of Roma in Romanian folk music was nearly always only understood as one of performers who perform Romanian folklore. They were not completely written out of the discourse but their contributions was systematically downplayed, for example, by denying them creativity, agency, or, in other words, a productive role in Romanian folklore and folk music. In the examples that I looked at from early 20th century I found a spectrum that ranged from a benevolent quasi-colonial perspective to that of outright contempt for Roma musicians.
137 It is not at all unlikely that this new formal concept of music was already known in Romania before Bartók's publication. One can make the case that it was already employed in Cordoneanu's transcriptions in Pârvescu 1908, for example. After all, the new concept was not a secret, but accessible to anybody following Western musicological discourse. But the fact remains that it was a Hungarian composer who first put together a whole folk music collection of Romanian folk music based on the new concept and published it in Romania.
138 In chapter 4 I discuss the most significant challenge to the national paradigm in socialist Romania which occurred during the late Stalinist period (1948-1953).
In this spectrum and in the period of the 1920s and 1930s, Brăiloiu holds perhaps the most minority-friendly position that I was able to identity – and that although he rarely if ever seriously deviates from the patterns of the national matrix. Although he generally adopted and refined Bartók's methodology, Brăiloiu rejected parts of Bartók's broad historical conclusions139. I am not aware of any statements Brăiloiu made that express disrespect for any minority, nationality or ethnic group inside and outside of Romania. But even Brăiloiu did not significantly challenge the national matrix. By and large he accepted the notion of Romanian folk music as the music of the Romanian peasant, although he at least mentions alternative concepts in theoretical contexts. In his own ethnomusicological studies concerning Romanian he mostly collected, studied and researched and published the music of Romanian peasants.
An incident that involved Brăiloiu inviting Bartók to Romania in the 1930s became a scandal of national proportions (cf. Cosma 1995a). In this confrontation nationalists – including Brăiloiu's old rival Breazul - protested against the visit by the Hungarian composer. Meetings involving Brăiloiu and high-ranking politicians were the result and Brăiloiu was pressured not to invite Bartók again. This case indicates that Brăiloiu generally did not side with the more nationalistic camp in the music research of his time, but it also suggests that Brăiloiu was not able to deny the nationalist climate around him and that he already pushed the boundary to an extent where his reputation was in danger.
In my discussion of the nation in this chapter, I began with a terminological restraint, focusing on simple terms such as the nation and rejecting derived terms such as nationalism, but while discussing debates involving the nation, my vocabulary evolved. Firstly, I insisted on a perspective which views the nation not only as an identity concept, as much of the existing ethnomusicological scholarship on nationalism does, but also as a political project. In large parts of 19th century Romanian intellectual discourse, the nation was associated with the liberal goals associated with the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, signifying, for example, sovereignty of nations, a constitutional system and the separation of power. Over the course of the 19th century and especially in the first half of the 20th century a different and more authoritarian political project attached itself to the nation. Perhaps this other authoritarian model is based on Napoleon, as an influential proponent of the nation, a reformer, but also a dictatorial autocrat. In the 20th century, this political project takes the form of a fascist authoritarian rule under King Carol II and Antonescu. The nation was then construed increasingly not only ethnically, but explicitly racially.
Secondly, given my interest in the discourses of folklore and musical folklore, I looked at nationalism mostly inside the scholarly domain. My discussion of Bartok's work indicates that at least in the politically more moderate times, such as the period before World War I, nationalism was often expressed in the intellectual domain in aspects of representation. In my discussion of Bartók's 1913 publication on Bihor, for example, I took the choice of languages, translations, place names etc. into consideration to argue that this publication did not make overt nationalistic claims. In my reading this work does not express any claims of (national) superiority, not that of
139 In my reading Brăiloiu acts here in much the same way as Merriam who later rejected historical conjecture based on evolutionary thought or diffusionist theory (cf. Merriam 1964:283–286).
Romanians over Hungarians nor that of Hungarians over Romanians. Explicit and perhaps, more importantly, implicit expressions of superiority emerged here as important indicators that separate a simple, not malicious national sentiment from a chauvinistic type of nationalism that coincides with contempt of other people.
Also, it appears that some people in the early 20th century, possibly including Bartók, distinguished between fellow nationalities and those people who did not belong to nations (in their view), such as Roma and Jews. I stress this observation because it contradicts contemporary thought, but may explain the actions and writings of intellectuals at an earlier time.
One may wonder why I insist on a chapter that reaches as far back as the beginning of the 19th century in a work that focuses on the socialist period. There are two reasons for why I insisted like so many other studies of postsocialist ethnomusicology on an historical perspective that takes the time before socialism into account (e.g. Rice 1994, Buchanan 2006). Firstly, it is well-known that the national and nationalistic component was an important feature of Ceaușescu's communism.
Instead of looking at the entanglement of ethnomusicology and national politics in his era alone, I opted for a historical perspective which takes the historical moment into account when the relationship between politics and academy over the national project was first established.
Secondly, I wanted to demonstrate that my political perspective does not only apply to the socialist period, but to other periods as well. In doing so, I wanted to avoid what I perceive as
"exotification" of socialism: analyses which single out the socialist experience only in terms of difference, disregarding parallels to other political forms, a perspective that I find reminiscent of the reductionist black-and-white outlook of Cold War scholarship.
In this chapter, I also discussed the use of ethnomusicological knowledge mostly in abstract ways and I focused on uses in relation to the national project. I showed that the knowledge produced in the debates on Romanian folklore served quite specific purposes in political debates in support of the nation and in pursuit of independence and I argued that ethnomusicology later inherited a similar role within the discourse of the nation.
I also alluded to the connection between folklore research and the political will for agrarian reforms in later periods as another context where the knowledge of (musical) folklore was perhaps applied in the realm of politics, although I did not elaborate on this connection.
In this chapter I did not, however, foreground the applied activities outside the ivory tower of academic music scholars, although those existed as well. Examples include Brăiloiu's trips to London where he repeatedly presented a group of calușări (dancers of the caluș, an acrobatic dance; Marian-Bălaşa 2000a:184), the Maria Tănase's performances at World Fair in 1939 in New York (Roşca 2000:I 142-4; II 348), to name a few international examples of public ethnomusicology from 1930s, or appeals to the Romanian public to collect folk songs and contests where amateurs were encouraged to send in transcriptions, to name a few domestic examples.
All of these applied activities have a national dimension: Romania (or its parts, such as a specific village) was being represented in these events either on a stage or by a text and in the context of these performances folklore represents the renown of Romanian peasant culture or, more generally, the Romanian nation at large. In the next chapter, I will look more closely at examples of the interplay of ethnomusicological knowledge and politics and my focus will be
especially on activities where the knowledge produced in the "ivory tower" of academic research was applied in the domain of cultural policy.