In this chapter, Jon Boden of the band Bellowhead confronts a pervasive element of folk performance that affects reception and yet often escapes notice: spoken introductions. He points out that as a conversational and informal art, folk music shares much with humour. Introductions, he argues, can serve several important purposes, including framing narratives, providing historical context, distancing, and offering a partisan viewpoint. Folk performers often have to balance an audience’s desire for a sense of personal accessibility and communality with the equally necessary demands of entertainment professionalism.

Olivier Messiaen’s vocal music opens a new chapter for the mélodie. Both intimate and expansive, it unites the emotional scope of Wagner with a musical language derived from Debussy, using texts written by Messiaen himself. The present chapter considers the musical, poetic, and personal significance of each work, tracing their rapid evolution through the salon pieces Trois Mélodies (1930), the chamber cantata La Mort du Nombre (1930) and the major song cycles Poèmes pour Mi (1935), Chants de terre et de ciel (1938), and Harawi: Chant d’amour et de mort (1945). Epic in scope, with compelling narrative arcs, each cycle is more ambitious than the last, making exceptional demands of both soloist and pianist. We place each work within the context of Messiaen’s life, and analyse key musical techniques and influences such as plainchant, Indian râgas and Peruvian folksong. We also explore textual and thematic features such as Symbolist and Surrealist imagery, showing how the Catholic mysticism of these mélodies, which intertwine love and death in a yearning for transcendence, allows its cosmic drama to unfold.

Folk music discourses have long held a complex relationship to colonialism. Definitions of colonialism – or the occupation and exploitation of one land by a dominant power – have usually been formulated through the voices of Western colonisers (or those educated within their intellectual traditions). Discourses on folk music have likewise shied away from post-colonial studies, reinforcing Victorian ideas of folk music as a natural art form that somehow exists separately from other, less static or rooted, musical ecosystems. This chapter explores the themes of (1) folk music as a post-colonial alternative to ‘cancel culture’, (2) folk music as a racialised category, and (3) strategies and possibilities for folk music’s decolonial futures. Focusing on British ideologies around the folk, I advocate for placing folk music into a critical dialogue with decolonial and Indigenous systems of knowledge that have the capacity to shift the power dynamics of these discussions away from racialized hierarchies.

This chapter argues that, in order to understand the association between protest song and the modern musical genre known as folk music, we need to contextualize it within a longue durée of protest song and popular politics. It does this by tracing the history of Anglophone and Germanic protest song from the later sixteenth century up to Bob Dylan’s 1965 appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, taking in labourers’ songs, the ballads of seventeenth-century revolutions, the anti-democratic theories of the ancient regime, the emergence of the idealised and self-aware labouring poet in the wake of the French Revolution, and the output of Chartists, Fabians,twentieth-century working-class movements and the Critics Group. These developments are placed within two contexts: the bottom-up struggle for a political voice, and the articulation of an ideology of Volk and folk. The result is to disrupt any implicit affinity between folk as a genre and political protest, introducing instead a more heterodox and responsive understanding of the evolving links between musical style, ideology, and a popular voice.

The composers of the mélodie were often highly literate. They met and befriended contemporary poets and set their work; some wrote verse themselves. This chapter briefly examines the traditional precepts of French versification and how they developed over the 19th and early 20th centuries. The aim is to offer an insight into how composers used their understanding of contemporary poetic practice to read the poems they set and to inform – or not – their musical responses. Topics covered in the chapter include: the differences between French and English versification; counting syllables and scanning the mute ‘e’; common French metres including the alexandrine; stanzaic structures including fixed forms such as the sonnet and rondel; rhyme degree, gender and alternation; the emergence of free verse and the prose poem. The discussion is illustrated by examples taken from song texts by a range of composers.

Folk dance remains a diffuse and contested concept and yet its performances and meanings retain contemporary saliency to many people across the world. This chapter reflects on definitional issues, the relationship of folk dance to ritual and folk dance’s embodied ideology in Europe and beyond. Given that nineteenth-century thinking haunts the later literature and manifestations of folk dance, I re-visit Felix Hoerburger’s concepts of ‘first existence’ and ‘second existence’ folk dance, together with their critique and key modifications by Andriy Nahachewsky and Anthony Shay. I consider contemporary ritual folk dancing that draws upon evolutionist theory for inspiration and discuss examples of folk dance as cultural heritage that bear performative testimony to perceived unbroken connections between land, people, gender, race and nation. I conclude by urging both persistent critical interrogation of folk dance as ideology in a global frame and further investigation of the choreographic and artistic relevance of folk dance to its widespread practitioners and audiences.

The focus is on four important and prolific figures in the mélodie repertoire: Charles Gounod, Camille Saint-Saëns, Georges Bizet, and Jules Massenet.  The mid-nineteenth century mélodie emerged in close association with the romance and in response to the impact of the German Lied on the French scene.  Gounod was a key figure in this development, cultivating a new style through flexible shaping of melodic lines within symmetrical phrases.  Saint-Saëns followed closely in these footsteps, with more elaborate piano writing and looser phrase structure.  Bizet and Massenet did as well, injecting greater theatrical flair and a larger harmonic palette.  That Gounod, Saint-Saëns, and Massenet all began their careers perceived as progressives and ended as musical conservatives accounts in part for their eclipse by the generation of mélodie composers born after 1850, notwithstanding a repertory of over 700 mélodies that contains many pearls.

The chapter analyzes folk music and performance practices in a contemporary Indian and South Asian context. It covers the meaning and deployment of the term ‘folk’, its wider implications relating to caste, class, and taste, as well as its status in existing practices and scholarship. Whereas colonialists saw folk song as part of the enterprise to understand indigenous minds to better control and administer them, nationalists viewed it as a great resource to reconstruct the nation. After India’s independence, the state along with its middle class tried to institutionalize and appropriate folk song to cater to their tastes, however, it remained largely outside of their control and continues to maintain local and communitarian connections. Adopting a decolonial perspective, this chapter also addresses local hierarchies based on caste and cultural dispossession. Finally, it views folk song and music both as part of everyday life as well as a critique of everyday life that opens up an emancipatory discourse for the future.

In this chapter, legendary artist Peggy Seeger draws together, in characteristically virtuosic fashion, the themes of this book as a whole through the trio of song, singer, and community. Communities, she argues, are the social soil upon which human cultures germinate. They breed and support singers who make, sing, and pass on songs, which in turn act as a group glue, thus creating new communities. She portrays herself as a ‘song-carrier’ and a storyteller, pointing out that folk songs provide us with great templates – opportunities for everyone to narrate their own story in their own way.

This chapter traces the role of folk music in the changing mediascape in North America from the 1940s to the 1960s. Beginning from Jürgen Habermas’s well-known notion of the ‘public sphere’, the essay locates the folk revival at the intersection of new spaces (Greenwich Village) and new media (the long-playing record). It shows how the technology of the LP made possible juxtapositions of songs from all over the world. With the Weavers, the Kingston Trio, and Peter, Paul and Mary, we see the emergence of folk music for a largely white college-educated public. This history shifts with the emergence of folk ‘stars’ Joan Baez and then Bob Dylan. At the same time the manipulation of the recording studio, in the work of Paul Simon and the Byrds, gives folk a new relationship to rock music. We then see how the comedy duo of the Smothers Brothers picks up on the political energy of folk music and blends it with the new medium of television at the end of the 1960s. These technological developments shape folk music as a force in the political culture of the era, from Martin Luther King to the Women’s Movement.

Around the turn of the twentieth century the mélodie claimed a new place in French musical life, recognised increasingly as a genre that could exploit the accomplished musicianship of professional and specialist performers, and compel serious critical attention. Evident even in the changing priorities of the quintessential salon mélodiste Reynaldo Hahn, the new status of song would be confirmed in the riotous reception of Ravel’s Histoires naturelles (1907). Ravel’s mélodies are at the core of this chapter, the composer’s preoccupation with the interplay of poetic and musical form, and with the rhythms and assonances of text, offering guiding threads across an immensely varied body of work. Setting Ravel’s mélodies alongside key works by Hahn, Charles Koechlin and Albert Roussel, together with Lili Boulanger’s transcendent 1914 cycle Clairières dans le ciel, the chapter traces some of the continuities of style, practice and influence that sustained French art song across forty years of seismic musical and cultural change.

This chapter explores the sociopolitical significance of folk instruments, positing them as vital embodiments of cultural identity and history. Through a series of case studies (primarily, the banjo and the Appalachian dulcimer), the chapter illuminates the dynamic interplay between tradition and innovation, revealing how folk instruments are not simply static objects but actively evolving symbols of resilience and cultural memory. Through a critique of traditional taxonomies that often marginalize these instruments, the chapter advocates for a more inclusive framework that recognizes and centres the agency of makers and users. Further, by applying a postcolonial lens, it highlights the importance of embodied aesthetics and the complexities of musical practices within folk traditions. Drawing on the work of Kofi Agawu, it explores both the manufacture of instruments as well as their varied use patterns over time and geographical space. Finally, it situates folk instruments in relation to archies and processes of canonization.