Rhizomatic thinking and traditional music as difference-in-itself : a virtual historical revision of England's Victorian/Edwardian folk revival

Abstract

This dissertation problematizes the principle of identity in the contemporary understanding and evaluation of traditional music in international contexts. Through a virtual historical revision of England's folk revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I ask whether it is possible to rethink the concept of traditional music in terms of what Gilles Deleuze called difference-in-itself. The orientation of my historical revision is informed by Deleuze's concept of the virtual, which concerns the relationship between the past, as it exists in the present without being actual, and the actual as it exists in the present as a particular state of affairs. The concepts which Deleuze developed, often in collaboration with Fe'lix Guattari, are employed throughout the dissertation to open a path towards new ways of understanding and evaluating traditional music as a distinctive mode of musical creativity. I begin by showing how a romantic nationalist interpretation of folk music's cultural significance emerged during the revival and came to shape the way that traditional music is defined by bodies like the International Council for Traditional Music and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation. I then demonstrate that these ideas were developed in contradiction to the existence of various minoritarian influences within the revival, including Celticism, Romani music, and sea songs and chanties. Descending from the level of traditional music's relationship with communal cultures, I undertake an analysis of its impact in the lives of two prominent revivalists, Frank Kidson and Lucy Broadwood. This analysis shows that the principle of deterritorialization, which is to say difference and becoming, is more appropriate for understanding and valuing individual engagements with traditional music than the principle of identity. Finally, I examine the way that Darwinian evolutionary concepts were drawn into the influential theory of traditional music that was expounded by Cecil Sharp in 1907, arguing that contemporary evolutionary concepts offer a radically different and much more nuanced theoretical foundation for thinking about traditional music.

Date of Award	2019
Original language	English