Folk song, the everyday music of the common people as passed from generation to generation, has been highly debated ever since the first attempts by early collectors to define it. It has been performed, collected, researched, and unpicked, and the defining qualities which make it unique continue to stimulate current debate and approaches to collecting.
Folk Song conferences present the latest research in folk song in all its possible contexts and forms in two days of papers, discussion, insight and exploration into traditional song, with topics likely to include:
- Social history through song
- Historic collectors
- Authenticity and folk
- Song and social culture
- Folk for contemporary purposes
- Print and the tradition
- Performance
- Traditional English singers and their songs
- Revival repertoire
- Post-war collectors
Collectomania!: Folk Song and Music Collectors and their Worlds
2024 - Conference of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, English Folk Dance and Song Society
The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library’s 2024 conference investigated collectors as individuals and networks, their achievements and failures, motives, methods, strengths and weaknesses, social and political context, the contemporary collector, and the underlying ethics of collecting itself.
‘Once more to the mouths of the people’: Ralph Vaughan Williams and Folk Song
2022: conference on Ralph Vaughan Williams in his 150th anniversary year, examining his relationship with folk song.
