Folk Music_A Very Short Introduction

 Web site in Ghana still states this: “If there is any one artistic group that has given credence to the claim that our culture is exportable, it is the National Dance Company of Ghana (Ghana Dance Ensemble).” This group is part of the National Theatre, which describes itself as “professionally equipped to meet world standards  with unique and viable customer-oriented programming in the contemporary and traditional Arts. At the National Theatre, it is  world class all the way,” unconsciously echoing the phrasing of the old Soviet approach.  Within the core socialist states, internal diversity presented problems as well as potential. In Bulgaria and Romania, Romani (“Gypsy”) musicians provided much of the pizzazz of local music-making through their appearances at weddings and festivities. But official ideology made it impossible to define this marginal ethnic group as shapers of what was narodno. So they simply ceased to exist and were folded into mainstream culture. No scholars could study or publish Romani repertoire or identify their contribution. The regimes imposed the same ethnic erasure on all ethnic minorities in both countries: Jews and Muslims, Germans, Hungarians, and Turks. But in the vast multicultural space of the Soviet Union, the cultural commissars had no choice but to let Uzbeks be Uzbeks. The many republics and “autonomous regions” produced their own folk systems, as long as, to use Stalin’s phrase, the resulting music and ensembles were “national in form” only,  but “socialist in content,” whatever that meant to censors and purges at the moment. One of the most intriguing inventions of the bureaucratic brain emerged with the rebuilding or “perfecting” of local musical instruments. For all of Central  Asia, a “ laboratory” in Tashkent undertook to remake lutes, fiddles, and flutes. This meant modifying the local scale systems to suit the standard modern European tuning found on the piano, away from microtonal modalism. Frets were added to fingerboards to ensure conformity. The builders dreamed up 61

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