Song Loves the Masses: Herder on Music and Nationalism
336
Song Loves the Masses: Herder on Music and Nationalism
336eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520966444 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 01/31/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was a theologian, philosopher, ethnographer, and historian of the late Enlightenment, whose writings on music have been widely influential during the two centuries since his death.
Philip V. Bohlman is Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he is also Artistic Director of the ensemble-in-residence, The New Budapest Orpheum Society.
Read an Excerpt
Song Loves the Masses
Herder on Music and Nationalism
By Johann Gottfried Herder, Philip v. Bohlman
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96644-4
CHAPTER 1
Folk Song at the Beginnings of National History
Essay on Alte Volkslieder (1774)
Philip V. Bohlman
Wen sangen die Deutschen? / Whom did the Germans sing?
— JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER, Von Ähnlichkeit
In the beginning there were folk songs. Starting from the preface to the first of its four books, Johann Gottfried Herder's Alte Volkslieder (Ancient Folk Songs) possesses the character of Torah, a set of law-giving principles for hearing a nation's past and present in song. From the beginning, Herder makes the conditions of his search for "old folk songs" clear. Though beginning at least as early as the formative era of a German culture with Charlemagne, the search for songs with German character remains inchoate. It lags behind the histories of song in other peoples, those whose identity largely depends on language and culture, as well as those for whom language provides the basis for a national, political identity. Herder's admiration for the English notwithstanding, the Alte Volkslieder is a call to action: the old folk songs of all peoples deserve to be gathered. Together, they should be compared to understand both the distinctive character of individual peoples — and nations — as well as the universal wellspring of culture they have in common. They should be afforded a place in the present so that the character of their origins can be translated and transformed to shape the future. Herder's folk song project, at its own beginnings in 1774, becomes a bold response to this call to action.
With the Alte Volkslieder we find ourselves in the midst of Herder's first laboratory. He approaches song as complex empirical material, adapted for experimentation, allowing him to locate folk song in history, hence establishing several levels of narrative meaning. Herder gathers songs as fragments, particularly because of the ways they might be fitted together in different, even unexpected ways, above all at the crossroads between story and history at which identity, especially national identity, itself still inchoate in the waning Enlightenment, is forming.
The tools with which Herder approaches experimentation in Alte Volkslieder include the following: 1) an anthology consisting of four volumes in which folk songs from different peoples coalesce as common historical discourses; 2) the transition from oral to written tradition, with all the theoretical issues that determine that transition (e.g., translation, the core question in the second book, in "Would Shakespeare Be Untranslatable?"); 3) comparisons of texts and historical contexts, the most striking of which reflect Herder's positions on the relation of language to nation; 4) classification and categorization, which establish genre and social function; 5) translation as critical for integrating songs into the history of Germany; 6) writing with fragments, no less than including songs as fragments, often deliberately retaining their jagged edges.
Like its contents, Alte Volkslieder appeared in a publication project that was in many ways fragmentary. Each of the four books begins with a substantial introductory essay, which, however, stands on its own. The introductory essay was to be followed by a modest section of song texts. Herder refers to these as "the planned collection" (JGHW3, 12), and he lists most songs in that collection quite specifically, by song title or genre. There are fifteen songs each for the first two books, twelve and thirteen for the third and fourth books. The songs, which were left in manuscript form, both do and do not illustrate the specific theme of the introductory essay. The songs that would have followed pick up some themes from the introductions — some songs in the third book exemplify the similarity between English and German — but others deliberately expand the theme to broaden the foundations on which Herder's folk song project is taking shape. The "Nordic songs" of the fourth book, which Herder takes to propose a way of "approaching the songs of foreign peoples," thus provide a critical framework for a more fully developed theory of music and the nation.
The reasons that the different parts — complete introductory essays, songs left in fragmentary manuscripts — did not appear in a single publication in 1774 or soon thereafter are not entirely clear. Publication in fragments, as in chapter 4 on Ossian in the present book, was not uncommon in the eighteenth century, especially for anthologies of literary and musical works from the past (see also chapter 8 on El Cid in the present book). The serial publication of books, too, was widespread in the late eighteenth century, especially for publications meant to reach a broad readership. The folk song volumes of 1778 and 1779 (see chapter 2), for example, appeared serially, and then were gathered as two larger volumes (Volkslieder [Folk Songs] in the first edition, and Stimmen der Völker in Liedern [Voices of the People in Song] in the 1807 posthumous edition). The fragmentary nature of the sections of Alte Volkslieder, it follows, does not itself serve as evidence that Herder left this initial stage of his folk song project unfinished. Quite the contrary, the themes and songs of the four books coalesce as an increasingly focused discourse, which Herder will sustain through the folk song project of the 1770s, and throughout the writings on music in the course of his life. Both "Edward" and "Die Jüdin," for example, were to appear in the first book, even as both would assume an important position in Herder's later collections (see Bohlman 1992, 2010b).
The question of an anthology as itself providing the cultural and historical gathering point of folk song is particularly important to consider in the discourse that Alte Volkslieder sets in motion. There are important Enlightenment issues at work in the collection of linguistic and historical artifacts as an anthology (e.g., Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie). Anthology also represents a form of ontology, and this goal of the anthology would guide Herder throughout his life. Critically important for the ways folk song enters the history of ideas, Alte Volkslieder provides the first model for collection and anthology, which would thereafter come to underlie the entire history of folk song at one of its most critical moments, the passage from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Herder recognized that the anthology was a way of transforming the differences of oral tradition into the commonalities of written tradition. A folk song anthology realizes the nation by affording a presence for national language in a shared repertory. German ballads, given such an important position in book three, for example, emerged as a genre for German literary and folklore scholars, in which the texts were only in High German.
The four books of Alte Volkslieder are in most ways independent, each with a distinct theme of its own, but they are also linked in many ways, especially in how they move from the more universal nature of folk song to its national characteristics. Book one has no title as such, but in the "planned contents" for the book Herder refers to it as "English and German." Herder's language describing song and the nation is particularly rich with metaphors in the first book, and he uses this language to lay the groundwork for a historical understanding of folk song that grows from the soil of the past. Book two ("Songs from Shakespeare") is the best known of the four books in Alte Volkslieder because the introductory essay ("Wäre Shakespear unübersetzbar?") has found its way into many different areas of Herder studies. From a modern perspective, there is little in the book about folk song, for it largely contains translations of well-known passages from Shakespeare, as often without reference to song and music as with such connections. The focus of the book really is translation, and with that focus Herder locates his own critical work as a translator at the center of his musical, theological, and philosophical work.
With book three ("Englisch und Deutsch") Herder turns to the specific question of Ähnlichkeit (similarity). His point of departure, as evident in the title, is the linguistic similarity between English and German throughout their long histories as European literary languages. To illustrate this similarity he turns to the musical and literary genre of the ballad, signaling the establishment of narrative genres — ballad and epic — as the most broadly historical European folk song practices. Finally, with book four, "Nordische Lieder" (Nordic Songs), Herder trains the focus of Alte Volkslieder on music and the nation. The book is both historical and comparative, allowing Herder to move from Greek music and poesy to that of the Nordic peoples, which he claims to be more natural and hence more expressive of their way of life. Herder reaches an important conclusion about the comparison of differences that establish the cultural (and musical) integrity of what he increasingly refers to as the nation.
Herder's aim in the fourth book of Alte Volkslieder is to sketch a method that will allow song to provide a means of understanding cultures that contrast with the culture of enlightened selfness shared by his readers. In the course of the essay, he designates the people inhabiting these cultures with four different terms: fremd (literally, foreign), unpolicirte (literally, without political organization), wild (primitive), and Natur- (literally, living in nature, glossed a century later in comparative musicology as "primitive"). In the most general sense Herder uses these terms interchangeably, intending even to convey a sense of difference and nuance in the cultural otherness that is the subject of the essay. There are instances also in which he incorporates history into his descriptions, recognizing the ways in which language, "ways of thinking," and songs represent processes of development. Peoples that are primitive ("wild" or "Natur-") display a cultural distinctiveness endowed by nature; those who have embarked upon paths of historical development ("fremd" or "unpolicirt") have shaped their own distinctive traditions, for example, of songs.
Herder also employs several terms for describing the societies or cultures in which other peoples live: Volk (literally, people) and Nation (literally, nation). At this point in his anthropological thought, however, Herder is not trying to make the distinctions that would increasingly emerge in his later writings and then in the nineteenth century. Already in 1774, Herder recognizes and evokes a distinction between peoples who are not politically organized ("Volk") and those with a political identity determined by geography and language ("Nation"). The slippage within this distinction begins to give way to a more specific concept of culture and nation already in the fourth book of Alte Volkslieder, not least reflecting Herder's growing assertion that folk song forged a common space between Volk and Nation.
In 1774 Herder's terminology for otherness, however, remains unspecific and uneven, and my translations do not try to ascribe more accuracy than I believe Herder himself would have understood. It is clear, nonetheless, that Herder's sense of otherness increasingly bears witness to cultural encounter, with its concomitant contrast of self and other. In the fourth book of Alte Volkslieder he accounts for the encounters of both missionaries and academics, in both cases describing a goal that privileges sameness rather than tolerates difference. The vocabulary that we witness taking shape in 1774, therefore, reveals the increasingly complex anthropological perspectives that are developing around his writings about folk song.
Throughout the course of the four books Herder considers two different issues about the historical origins of folk song, particularly as these pertain to the nation: 1) Why does early song demonstrate the Germans to be different — indeed, more impoverished in their cultural history? We see here a concern with origins influenced by monogenesis, culture and history arising from a single origin. Herder's response to this question in the early books looks primarily at issues of self — German-ness as a measure of his relation to the reader — albeit in comparison with others (e.g., the question of Shakespeare's translatability). And 2) the question of similarity (Ähnlichkeit in book three) reflects an Enlightenment understanding of polygenesis, culture and history arising from multiple origins, and in Alte Volkslieder it shifts the discourse on folk song toward difference ("Lieder fremder Völker" [Songs of Foreign Peoples], in book four, translated below). Alte Volkslieder closes, therefore, by reflecting on otherness, concluding with an affirmation also of the selfness of each nation and its songs. Therein lies the beginning of the modern study of folk song and world music.
From Alte Volkslieder/Ancient Folk Songs
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER, TRANSLATED BY PHILIP V. BOHLMAN
FIRST BOOK
All those whom I need to thank should still let themselves be known. The man who is pleased by everything will never hear my book. ... One cannot raise an individual to feeling whom God has not already ordained, he would be more useful than am I.
— Preface to Sachsenspiegel
Preface
1. There could hardly be a more patriotic wish than to gather the bards that Charlemagne had gathered. What a treasure for the German language, poetry, customs, thought, and the awareness of the past this could be, if it only would not always remain just a desire! There was once a time when the latest news about the presence of these pieces was made so easy, because they were there for the taking. And now, when they are so much desired, praised, sung, and wanting for models to imitate, where are they?
I think it only right that if enough of these sought-after treasures of the fatherland could be located, they would still hardly provide us with folk and patriotic songs in the strictest sense. One need but look at the Schilter collection from the late Carolingian era to know that the language at the very least leaves no doubt. Even the grammar of the German language has changed so much over the course of many centuries that it would be all the same if we were reading poems from the old French Romanesque poets or those in German. We are always concerned about the magical form of previous eras, mirrored by the scholars and through the quotations from antiquity. These are not folk songs of our own time! One knows just how much the most curious readers fail to understand in the research, clarity, and artistry in this way. If they could but experience more directly with the senses, they would acquire the potential to see with the eyes and understand with the heart. They would know that what touches the people is the most important. Just as Ulphila's evangelists could stir no wonder when only present in the church, so too there remains little from the bards and their circle. We are left only to make judgments from whatever hearsay survives, or, more maddening, might we expect something else! ... Nothing less than an Ossian.
"Why not?" The most probable answer to this question has no place here. The word itself remains the crux of the problem.
2. The fortune, whereby the old can be transformed into something new that ultimately moves us the most, had already been granted to us in the second, bright period of German poetry: the poets of the Swabian times. This was not brighter than the source itself, except the tales of the minnesingers, who were the first to express humor, as well as some other sagas still around, retained from the Old German bards. They inherited the poetry as it appeared in the Codex Manesse. Who is able, from all times and places, to claim that, in a single moment and at very little expense, such a treasure trove of language, poetry, delightful customs, morals, and light shed on the fatherland appeared in such volume as in the volumes produced by Schöpflin and Bodmer from the Codex Manesse [see, e.g., Bodmer 1781]? If Schöpflin and Bodmer had done no other service to Germany, their creative output of sources and reprints alone would be reason to rescue them from obscurity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Song Loves the Masses by Johann Gottfried Herder, Philip v. Bohlman. Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
Note on the Text
Note on Translation and Commentary
Prologue: Again, Herder
PART I. THE ONTOLOGY PROJECT
1. Folk Song at the Beginnings of National History: Essay on Alte Volkslieder (1774)
Translation from Alte Volkslieder / Ancient Folk Songs
2. The Folk Song Project at the Confluence of Music and Nationalism: Essay on Volkslieder (1778/79) and Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (1807)
Translation from Volkslieder and Stimmen der Völker in Liedern / Folk Songs and Voices of the People in Song
Appendix A: Introduction to the Folk Song Texts
Appendix B: Translation from the Folk Song Texts
3. Singing the Sacred Body: Essay on Lieder der Liebe (1778)
Translation from Lieder der Liebe: Die ältesten und schönsten aus Morgenlande / Songs of Love: The Oldest and Most Beautiful from the Orient
PART II. THE HISTORY PROJECT
4. The Nation and Its Fragments: Essay on “Briefwechsel u¨ber Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker” (1773)
Translation from “Briefwechsel u¨ber Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker” / “Correspondence about Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples”
5. Songs of the Enlightenment Bard: Essay on “Homer und Ossian” (1794)
Translation of “Homer und Ossian” / “Homer and Ossian” 6. Redemption through Sacred Song: Essay on Letter 46, Theologische Schriften (1780/81)
Translation of Letter 46, Theologische Schriften / Theological Writings
PART III. THE NATION PROJECT
7. The Shores of Modernity: Essay on “Wirkung der Dichtkunst auf die Sitten neuerer Zeiten” (1777)
Translation from “Wirkung der Dichtkunst auf die Sitten neuerer Zeiten” / “The Influence of Poetry on the Customs of Modernity”
8. The Epic as Nation: Essay on Herder’s Der Cid Translation from Der Cid / The Cid
9. Music Transcendent and Sublime: Herder’s “Von Music” (1800)
Translation of “Von Musik” / “On Music”
Epilogue: Herder’s Journey
Notes
Bibliography
Index