The story begins with the West’s enthusiasm for identifying and analyzing the music of the countryside, and continues worldwide as modernity engulfs long-standing musicways. In the United States, “folk music” combines a sense of old songs and tunes with an imaginary “simpler” lifestyle, featuring the mountaineers of Appalachia and the African American blues singers, all playing acoustic instruments—guitar, fi ddle, banjo—with a hint of social significance. Generations reshape and “revive” this model at any time, including today. In the United Kingdom, “folk” along these lines blurs into Celtic and regional identities. In Europe, even though the word comes from the German volk (folk), the genre has different overtones based on local social resonance. For example, French musique populaire and Italian musica popolare, each with distinctive meanings, import the English “folk,” or “folk revival” to describe some styles. The various Slavic words based on the root term narod live in a regional world of their own, with many internal shadings and changing connotations. It is so hard even for Westerners to agree on the term that the International Folk Music Council, which debated long and hard in the 1950s to defi ne its subject, simply gave up and changed its name to the International Council for Traditional Music (Source: Folklore Music).
Modernization of Musical Literature in Persia
