The following covers the use of both terms Folk and Traditional Music. The names mentioned should give a start.

Folk music
1. Definitions and scope.
Volkslied ('folksong') as a term was coined by the German cultural philospher, theologian and writer Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and established by his publication 'Stimmen der Völker in Liedern', Volkslieder (1778–9). Among its characteristics, he posited the necessity of its production by 'communal composition' and an aesthetic of 'dignity'. German scholars have extensively debated the ontological status of the concept, its characteristics and delimitations, and the effectiveness of its replacement by the term 'traditional' (see Germany, §II).

From the late 19th century onwards, the concept became increasingly crucial to the debates on nationalism. Those seeking to identify or create their own national musics, ranging from individual composers and collectors to totalitarian régimes, used 'folk' as a synonym for 'nation', interpreting the concept to fit their needs (see below, §5). Across Europe, the 'folk' were intially identified as peasants and rural artisans. The Merrie England movement and the Irish and Scottish Gaelic Revivals of the 1880s were fuelled by notions of a lost 'golden age' of innocence symbolized by the music of the 'peasantry' and song airs, song texts and dance tunes of rural working people were idealised in contrast to the artiness of élite society or vulgar products of the industrial poor. Although preoccupied with the collection and classification of rural music, the Hungarian composer, pianist and collector Béla Bartók included urban popular forms within the rubric of 'folk music'. For the English folksong collector Cecil Sharp and for others in the first British Folk Music Revival, folk music was perceived as only produced by artisan and labouring rural people. Sharp argued that continuity, variation and selection were the three vital components of folksongs and that anonymous composition and oral transmission were defining elements (1907) (see Ethnomusicology, §II, 2(iv) and England, §II). Broadside ballads did not fit happily into this definition since they were published and sold in urban contexts for popular consumption. They were, however, embraced as 'folk music' by the folk music revivals of both North America and Britain.

The English Folk Dance and Song Society was formed in 1932 by the amalgamation of the Folk-Song Society and the English Folk Dance Society (the latter founded by Sharp in 1911). The International Folk Music Council (IFMC), founded in 1947, attempted a definition of 'folk music' at its conference in São Paolo (1955) that incorporated Sharp's three criteria and the notions of 'tradition' and 'oral transmission'. Folk music was 'the product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission'. The concept embraced only music that had evolved within a community uninfluenced by 'popular' and 'art' music. The IFMC dispensed with Sharp's ideas about anonymous composition, rather folk music might originate with an individual composer but must have been absorbed subsequently into the unwritten living tradition of a community. The definition did not cover composed popular music that had 'been taken over ready-made by a community' and remained unchanged as it was the re-fashioning and re-creation of the music by the community that gave it its 'folk' character.

Although at the time Sharp had defined 'folk music', he used it as coterminous with 'traditional music', the IFMC changed its name in 1981 to the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) in response to concerns about the concept 'folk'. The identification of 'folksong' and 'folkdance' (in Ireland 'Irish song' or 'Irish dance') by collectors of the early years of the century was reassessed in the later years of the 20th century, noting that the terms promoted often heavily edited and reconstructed items, through music publishers, live concert performance and state education systems (e.g. Harker, 1985). From the 1960s onwards, North American increasingly extended the meaning of 'folk music' to include the musics of ethnic and racial communities.

CAROLE PEGG: 'Folk music', The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 22 Nov. 2002),
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