Johann Gottfried Herder - Song Loves the Masses: Herder on Music and Nationalism

Herder was there in the moment I realized my life journey would be that of an ethnomusicologist. Fall 1976, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Music 317, Folk Music. Bruno Nettls introductory course was at once new, even exotic, as my first course in ethnomusicology, and familiar, even intimate, as a moment of recognition, Erkenntnis. I had not known that I had lived with folk music all my life, but it became clear the moment I recognized the sounds of worlds close to home and far away. Herder was there because he had given all this a name, Volkslied , folk song. It, too, had always been there, just not called folk song. Herders folk songs, too, were intimate and exotic, but in that moment of recognition they cohabited the worlds of self and other. In that moment, captured in Herders folk songs, music changed for me. It is that moment that I attempt to capture in this book.

Herder has accompanied me on an intellectual journey of almost forty years. Beginning with ethnographic studies of the familiarfolk music in my home state of Wisconsin, which led to collections that would become the substance of my masters thesis and first publicationsI traveled with Herder farther and farther into worlds that were unknown to me, to Israel and the Middle East, to the folk song landscapes of Eastern Europe, to India and beyond. If he began with folk song, Herder himself journeyed to the far shores on which it provided the ontological energy and ethnographic agency that made music far more than itself.

I have had important guides during these travels with Herder, and I acknowledge them with gratitude. Bruno Nettl first pointed me to Herder, and in one of the most recent papers that contained ideas I use in this book, the 2014 Bruno and Wanda Nettl Distinguished Lecture in Ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois, I was able to sustain the level of my indebtedness. Over many years, my teachers and colleagues in ethnomusicology encouraged (or, more commonly, tolerated) my interests in folk music. Most of all, I was never dissuaded from recognizing that folk music was always there, be it in the anthologies and collections of Jewish folk songs that I was able to plumb at the Jewish Music Research Centre at the National and University Library of Israel, or in the Deutsches Volksliedarchiv in Freiburg im Breisgau. During those early years after my graduate studies, I benefited enormously from the guidance and wisdom of Israel Adler and Amnon Shiloah in Jerusalem, Rudolf Pietsch in Vienna, and Otto Holzapfel in Freiburg. Otto, especially, knew that folk song was always there, and in different ways, so too would he be as I expanded the musical seas across which I journeyed, not least those whose shores were recognizable through religion. I am particularly thankful that Otto continues to be a fellow traveler.

Several fellowships over the course of the past forty years have allowed me to return to Herder and the worlds of folk song and folk music that his writing and thought made recognizable. Among the most important were a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Fellowship to Israel (198182); an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship in Germany (199091); a Fulbright Guest Professorship at the University of Vienna (199596); a senior fellowship at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna (1999); and a Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy of Berlin (2003), during which I began the translations that would come to fill the pages of this book. I am very grateful indeed for such support for my research.

Herderian topics were relatively rare in my teaching, but they were particularly important in the ways they punctuated my pedagogy. In 1984, at the University of California, Berkeley, Alan Dundes asked that I teach a course on folk music, which became the point of departure for many discussions on Herder for the two of us over many years, beginning with my first book, The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World (1988), which Alan commissioned, and leading in 2006 to one of the lectures that would draw my thoughts on Herder together for the present book, which I delivered at Berkeley in Alans memory. During guest professorships in Freiburg im Breisgau, Vienna, and Berlin, folk music came to occupy entire seminars or substantial modules, which in turn led me to the other Herderian subject of this book, nationalism. For its generous support of this publication I thank the Music in America Endowment at the University of California Press; I also received an AMS Publication Grant from the John Devario Endowment of the American Musicological Society. The confluence of music and nationalism in my work has been grounded in Europe, but increasingly moves to more global shores and beyond the present. I am particularly grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a fellowship that now leads me through the present Herder project to the study on music after nationalism upon which I now embark.

Students and colleagues at the University of Chicago have followed this book through a journey of many years, indulging my passion for its remarkable relevance and modernity. It would require too many pages to thank everyone at the university to whom I owe some kind of debt, but I do wish to acknowledge the students in my Herder seminar in 2010. Jennie Horton was an especially resourceful and thoughtful research assistant. Various departments of the Regenstein Library were essential for original editions from the eighteenth century, as well as for most of the illustrations in the book. Special thanks go to the staff of Special Collections and to Christopher Winters, who provided the several riches from the Regenstein Map Collection.

Herder frequently undertook publication projects that were different and even experimental in his day. He was able to do so because of colleagues willing to spend time with his ideas, critically so, and because of editors and publishers willing to place their faith in him. It is surely fitting that this project, which is rather uncommon as a monograph in music scholarship, benefited from a similar investment of trust at the University of California Press. I thank Lynne Withey for encouraging me to undertake this project in the first place, and I am particularly grateful to Mary Francis for employing a patience that simultaneously urged me to quicken my pace. Raina Polivka embraced the book with enthusiasm, and conveyed that enthusiasm to her colleagues during production, especially Zuha Khan and Francisco Reinking. Lindsey Westbrook turned keen eyes and ears toward the task of copy editing, improving the book with every suggestion and correction. The presss readers, too, responded with a thoughtfulness that inspired me to do everything possible to realize the remarkable breadth of Herders intellectual world for twenty-first-century readers.

Of the many sea changes that we witness in Herders writings on music and nationalism, none is more significant than his integration of music as object into the subjectivities of the collective. Song loves the masses because it grows from the agency of individuals and communities. I have always found my inspiration from musics communal ontology, from the few and the many making music together. I have been particularly fortunate, moreover, that such inspiration in the community of my family has been as abundant as it is familiar and intimate. Like folk music, my wife, Christine Wilkie Bohlman, has always been there, and my children, Andrea and Ben, always will be. I thank all three of you, with love, for just being there.

Berlin and Oak Park