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Institutionalized Folklore and Helvetic Ideology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Sylvie Bolle-Zemp and
Barbara Thompson
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Extract

Anyone who wonders about the aesthetic process behind convincing artificiality—its methods, functions and status—would scarcely find a more topical example than musical regionalism and, in French Switzerland in particular, representations linked to a domain of vocal music commonly described as “popular”, “folk”, “traditional” or even by the name of the region to which it refers. This music, which is performed by a large number of lay and religious choirs, is, as we shall see, one of synthesis. It lies on the border of verisimilitude because it is cast in a poetic and fictional vein, yet is evocative of past aspects of peasant song at the same time, through the incorporation of religious (Roman Catholic) and classical musical elements in simplified form. It has generally been accepted as revelatory of a specific culture, though in actual fact it derives from a patchwork of images of rurality (flashes), fractured in time and space, which court the brief impulse for escapism, for exotic sensations, to the point where its adepts become less mindful of how difficult it is to think out musical culture today.

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Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 22 , 1990, pp. 127 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by the International Council for Traditional Music

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Footnotes

1

This article is a substantially revised and augmented version of a paper given in Schladming in July 1989 at the 30th World Conference of the International Council for Traditional Music. The research is based on a body of texts assembled in the course of 1988 and 1989. The Fonds musical abbé Joseph Bovet of Fribourg University Library contains the manuscripts of Bovet's compositions and a large number of documents of different kinds (posters, programmes, press-cuttings from 1935 to 1947, texts published on and by him) and files by subject. We also consulted the archives of the Bishopric of Geneva, Lausanne and Fribourg, the Gruyère Museum in Bulle and the Joseph Bovet Association in Pontenet. The oral sources consist of field surveys and observations made in different cantons of French Switzerland (45 hours of recorded interviews) and sound recordings from the archives of Radio Suisse Romande and the National Sound Archives in Lugano.

As a sequel to earlier research on folk song in Gruyère (Bolle-Zemp 1985 and 1987) this is also the fruit of work in progress, financed by the Fonds National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique and carried out under the direction of Jürg Stenzl, Professor at the Institute of Musicology of Fribourg University. The research further matured at Isaac Chiva's seminar on the “Ethnology of Peasant Societies” held at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. My thanks go to Hugo Zemp for kindly reading the manuscript and for the many comments he has made.

References

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