Simon Keegan-Phipps

Performing Englishness: Identity and politics in a contemporary folk resurgence

Performing Englishness examines the growth in popularity and profile of the English folk arts in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In the only study of its kind, the authors explore how the folk resurgence speaks to a broader explosion of interest in the subject of English national and cultural identity. Combining approaches from British cultural studies and ethnomusicology, the book draws on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with central figures of the resurgence and close analysis of music and dance as well as visual and discursive sources. Its presentation of the English case study calls for a rethinking of concepts such as revival and indigeneity. It will be of interest to students and scholars in cultural studies, ethnomusicology and related disciplines.

Identifying the English: essentialism and multiculturalism in contemporary English folk music

ABSTRACT Recent trends in ethnomusicology have included a growing concern with indigeneity. A conceptual alternative to the discipline’s long-standing preoccupations with diaspora, indigeneity is frequently characterised through a narrative in which ‘native’ groups assert their identity in opposition to an invading—historical or contemporary—oppressor. The recent explosion of interest in the expression of an English identity within contemporary, multicultural Britain offers a very different narrative. Amid wider public celebrations of Englishness, and popular concerns about immigration, UK devolution, EU federalisation and US-led globalisation, a resurgence has taken place in the profile of specifically English folk music and dance since around 2000. The last 10 years have seen an emerging movement to reclaim Englishness by the political left, yet the folk arts pose specific problems for such a project—namely, the reification of nostalgia for a rurality that is necessarily pre-multicultural. Through examining some case studies of the current English folk resurgence, this article will discuss how contemporary English folk artists (the majority of whom share left-of-centre politics) attempt to negotiate Englishness in relation to their multicultural and multinational British context.

Traditional Folk Song in Modern Japan; Sources, Sentiment and Society

This book represents the long-awaited culmination of Hughes’ 30 years of research into Japanese folk song between 1977 and 2007. The text is comprehensive, meticulously constructed and accompanied by a CD of 38 well-selected tracks. The min’yō (traditional folk song) culture of Japan has been seldom reported on in the English language, and has undergone considerable change during the course of the last three decades, making this work an extremely valuable resource. Hughes’ vast knowledge of min’yō*past and present*enables an authoritative account of the ‘big picture’ of Japanese folk song culture, and is matched by his enthusiasm and fascination with the topic, while his writing*although sophisticated*is clear and direct. The content of the book is presented in a largely chronological fashion. Chapter 1 (‘Folk Song in Japan: The Background’) provides detailed information covering both the context and content of the genre in general. Exceptional detail is given to defining not only min’yō, but also myriad related terms, which combine to present to the reader the highly complex system of classification within Japanese song culture. The accounts of elements such as instrumentation, metre and mode are both full and clearly laid out, and Hughes is careful to marry the expectations of etic taxonomy with the emic cultural perspectives he is recounting. Chapter 2 (‘Song and Music in the Traditional Village’) is a largely historical account that considers the pre-Meiji rural village as a context of musical encounter, dealing with subjects such as social, class and gender relations, travel and transmission. The historical account continues in Chapter 3 (‘Folk Song in Transition’), which deals with the significant periods of change in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, and discusses in close detail the urbanisation and institutionalisation of folk song. The issue of standardisation is explored through the case study of what Hughes describes as ‘the first modern folk song’ (108). Whilst the earlier chapters make occasional reference to interviews and other fieldwork-based encounters, these become central in the latter chapters. Chapter 4 (‘The Modern Urban Folk Song World’) gives a vivid ethnographic account of the ‘min’yō boom’ that began around the time of Hughes’ first and most extensive period of fieldwork. Attitudes towards the genre are discussed, as are issues of professionalisation and modern min’yō teaching. Chapter 5 (‘The Modern Countryside and the Performing Arts’) considers the contemporary folk song world

Desire, Drink and Death in English Folk and Vernacular Song, 1600–1900

Desire, Drink and Death does exactly what it says on the cover, in drawing together many years of research in this area to provide a comprehensive account of how these culturally significant themes pervade*and are negotiated through*songs across this vast period. Chapters 1, 2 and 3 deal with matters of sex, sexual imagery and the supernatural; chapter 4 provides a substantial survey of the vernacular song’s relationship with drink; and chapters 5 and 6 discuss funerary practices and child mortality, respectively. Gammon, a leading scholar in the social history of the English-language traditional song repertory, shows an encyclopaedic knowledge of the acres of source material with which he engages, as well as an unabating enthusiasm for the tracing of homologies and the mapping of trends within that material. The book therefore represents an engaging and accessible survey of matter and meaning in these darker and sometimes contentious elements of the repertory; it is both relevant to and approachable by all those studying the social history of traditional song, since refreshingly little demand is made upon the reader’s background knowledge in this field. As an analysis primarily of historical documents, this book does not contribute directly to ethnomusicological theory; instead, it offers a valuable folkloristic resource for contextualising the growing body of ethnomusicological research into contemporary English traditional music (such as the many projects being conducted at the University of Sheffield by Jonathan Stock, Andrew Killick, Fay Hield and Wu Xiaorui, as well as the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Performing Englishness in New English Folk Music and Dance at the University of Sunderland). I shall attempt, here, to limit any appraisal of the historical methodology, which Gammon reviews succinctly and reflexively in the introductory chapter: ‘Awareness of the limits of historical understanding and inquiry should be a humbling experience that makes us both reflective . . . and modest in our claims’ (5). Desire, Drink and Death is both of these things, and therefore successful in achieving its epistemological objectives.