Between the Field and the Salon

Some interconnected musical phenomena mark the enhancement of a process: collections of folk songs that appeared in Spain and England; the growing number of publications of instrumental variations on popular songs that spread in European salon music-making. This chapter traces the ways in which a musical folk idiom metamorphoses from its original, unadulterated manifestations into a skilfully composed, polished, ‘artistic' musical work. It reviews the historical evolution of two seemingly unconnected antinomies through the paradigm of Russian culture- folk versus art and West versus Russia- over the last 300 years, and observes the ways these two processes relate to each other. One kept its ‘traditional' role as popular entertainment in salon music, while the other appeared charged with nationalist ideological meaning, marking the emergence of the musical nationalism. The veneration of music in general and of folklore in particular was a product of the Enlightenment and came into being in the last third of the eighteenth century.