Dan Lundberg:"Swedish folk Music - from village greens to concert platforms" [excerpt]

Dan Lundberg, Director of Svenskt visarkiv (Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research) and a professor in music and cultural diversity, in "Swedish folk Music - from village greens to concert platforms" on the Svenskt visarkiv website at http://www.visarkiv.se/online/swedish_folkmusic.htm:

Festivalisation, concerts and medialisation are all parts of a process where the boundaries between musical genres and categories of musicians become harder and harder to distinguish. Maybe in the not too distant future we will be forced to discard the labels “folk music” and “popular music”, which are already problematical. When what we today call folk music focuses less and less on reproduction and more and more on innovation, then it would seem that we have returned to the order which existed before the term folk music was first introduced at the end of the eighteenth century. Perhaps it is time to dispense with Johann Gottfried von Herder’s prefix folk and simply talk about music.