If archaeology is the science of antiquities, then the most immaterial, ephemeral antiquities are sound, that is, the word and music in the oral tradition, preserved by human memory.
The depth and vitality of folk music is amazing. Its history is the history of human thinking and the collective memory of communities. All these areas are currently being studied by ethnomusicology a science that not only records the artifacts of oral culture, but also analyzes its historical, philological and ethno-cultural contexts where a living tradition is.
To “read” a folk text, it is necessary that the music becomes part of the historical picture. The time is ripe for look at folklore as a phenomenon of human activity.
What does the term “folklore” mean, which become ingrained in the lexicon of modern life?The history of the word’s origin and the evolution of its meaning are quite unusual.
For the first time, the new word “Folk-lore” was proposed to the reading public in England in 1846.Spread around the world, as a scientific term, it united many people around the subject of study designated by it a subject that is rather unstable in outline and constantly expanding the scope of its content.
An Englishman, William Toms, the son of a humble official, began his service in the hospital chancery in Chelsea.Then his career took him to work of a clerk in the House of Lords.
Throughout his life, in addition to the service, Toms’ main hobby was medieval literature and oral literature.He published the heritage of antiquity in specialized collections, thereby expanding the circle of lovers of antiquity.
However, the main thing which with Toms entered the history of the humanities was, of course, his “folk-lore”.
Toms suggested one of the most widely read magazines in England, the Athenaeum to open a column where subscribers could send their memories of ancient customs, reports on traditions, beliefs, etc. After receiving endorsement, he turned to the readers of the Athenaeum magazine with an explanation of the tasks of his section.
Briefly, this explanation was called “Folk-lore”, and, published in the issue of August 22, 1846, marked the birthday of the term of world significance.
Toms published his terminological innovation not under his own name, but under the pseudonym Ambrose Merton. This step, which is quite common among journalists, is simply explained: he did not want to confuse himself an official of the House of Lords, with himself the editor of the Athenaeum magazine.
In modern interpretation, the term “folklore” includes such capacious concepts as “oral creativity”, “folk music”, etc. However, under the term “folk-lore” created by him the author himself kept in mind quite another thing: curious facts that are remained in the memory of people from old times.
As for the age of such information, its antiquity, the author of the famous article did not offer any criteria. The concept of “tradition”, and even “oral”, was not associated with folk-lore in any way. According to Toms, this concept did not concern no music and dance, no songs with melodies.
Continuing his journalistic career, Toms left The Athenaeum and founded his own magazine, Notes and Questions.In 1850, the first issue of this magazine was published, and soon subscribers demanded to resume the Folklore column there (in Notes and Questions this word was written without a hyphen).
In 1878, the readers founded the first Society of Folklorists in England, and William Toms became its honorary director, serving on this position until his death at the age of 82.
Toms repeatedly spoke on the pages of the publication, trying to preserve folklore in its original, proposed meaning. This was not possible even in England. Having the most expressive external form, the word “folklore” turned out to be extremely mobile, malleable to changes in its internal form.
Its semantic field was changing, the word was used in new areas for it, and it no longer implied what its creator meant. The focus of attention dislocated to oral tradition, replacing names like “folk literature”, and folklore spread to music, singing, and dance.
Discussions about folklore do not stop all over the world.Active scientific conceptualization of the rich folklore material promoted the formation of various approaches and methods of study.
Attention to the living process of intonation of the oral tradition works, taking into account the numerous points of perception of folklore and the diversity of traditional life processes, which include the phenomena of folklore are the fundamental scientific attitudes that modern ethnographers and ethnomusicologists rely on in their research.
The 19th century for musical folklore was the century of the first observations on the culture of oral traditions and acquaintance with its ethnic diversity. The 20th century has already marked a period of active expedition activity of ethnologists of different profiles, a time of accumulation and publication of valuable materials.
And nowadays, the oral folk tradition is far from being fully understood by the sphere of human culture, which lives and develops according to its own laws and has different languages of expression.
Thus, the word “folklore”, which first appeared in England more than a century and a half ago, spread around the world as a scientific term, combining the spheres of activity of people who are different in their work profile, different in their life interests and goals.
The “ancestor” of folklore, William Toms, could not keep the term within its original boundaries. The new word occurred wider than they were. Even today, the study of folklore phenomenology can no longer be imagined outside of their multidimensional cognition: philological, ethnographic, ethnomusicological.
What was the folk-lore like when it was born? Nothing more than a tiny article, actually a newspaper paragraph. And this paragraph gave birth to a whole science and educational structure with their research sectors, expeditions and archives, lectures and textbooks.
Only Albert Einstein’s dissertation on the theory of relativity, fitted in one notebook and renovated all modern physics, can compare with the paragraph by William Toms. In this regard, we, folklorists, also have our own theory of relativity, and its name is folklore.