10 - Johann Gottfried Herder and the global moment of world-music history

Summary

This chapter examines the convergence of historical and anthropological practices that connected vernacular music practices to time and place. It establishes the ways in which the very collections of folk song yielded the possibility for history and history writing that proliferated to form the narratives of nineteenth-century Romanticism, particularly its political forms as nationalism. Folk song entered world-music history eponymously, that is, as narratives about people, the Volk. The chapter explores Johann Gottfried Herder's influence as a translator of epic, direct and indirect, deserved and undeserved, on the synthesis and fragmentation of world-music histories that accompanied the expansion of nationalism into colonialism and the subsequent human crises of modern history in the twentieth century and beyond. As epic, Herder's Cid relies on the language of power that divides Europe from Africa, the history of Europe from that of its other.