Old Stones, New Music: Material Culture, Music, and Central Europe

Presenting the past in terms of conceptual tools and manners of dealing with cultural material in order to understand the present is the purpose of this book. This book engages with a mental landscape that dealt with particular things, relationships, that is, things within connection, and movement between these things-all exemplified in the past, as well as today, in music. This volume brings the insights of an educational system that remained in place for two millennia-from Latin antiquity to the twentieth century-together with constructional attributes of what is known as folk song using the immense archival resources of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute for Musicology as exemplary of these ways of constructing and bringing into relationship music/textual material. Three general themes are presented: 1) that medieval explanations of place as determinate, perhaps even outweighing any other consideration, should be taken seriously; 2) people and music contain internal properties, propensities for movement, habit, and aggregation, as well as potential for actualization, development and completion, fulfillment, and/or perfection; 3) a music culture is unified, that is, the distinctions between art, popular, or folk music are arbitrarily imposed primarily for ideological reasons. Finally, as stated above, we can learn from the past, not so much in terms of a historical development, arriving, finally at the insights of the present, but rather, that their insights, earnestly sought out in the intellectual inquiry and written communication of centuries, bring concise terminology, conceptual differentiation, and authentic explanatory implementation to questions that are relevant today.