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The study of folksong in Czechoslovakia became increasingly enmeshed with research on race and ethnicity through the twentieth century. Folk melodies appear alongside studies of phrenology and blood type as early as 1905. By the 1920s, the 鈥減urity鈥� of folksong was understood to evidence the 鈥減urity鈥� of a region鈥檚 people and, by extension, their political boundaries. In the 1930s, studies of 鈥渆thnogenesis鈥� in folk music became so charged that they contributed to the deaths of musicologists Vladim铆r Helfert and Gustav Becking鈥擧elfert, following his internment at the Nazi camp Terez铆n and Becking, during Czechoslovakia鈥檚 own post-war cleansing under the Ko拧ice program.
In her lecture, Kelly St. Pierre, Associate Professor of Musicology at Wichita State University, explored the increasing radicalization of Czech folk music research in the early twentieth-century as a means of illuminating the always-charged and sometimes life-threatening consequences of identity construction and鈥攎ore problematically鈥攑rescription. More than establishing a repertoire, these music researchers sought to construct a Czech People in sound. Such twentieth-century folksong studies, then, might best be understood as a tool of the state; an instrument of ethnonationalism not merely descriptive, but delineative of who belonged and who did not.
THIS EVENT WAS PART OF THE 2021 CLEVELAND HUMANITIES FESTIVAL: IDENTITY.