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Folklore is the only recognised field of musical creativity on a mass scale. Here, ‘every new variant is an archetype, for there is no authoritative original’, even the same folk musician will not repeat the same melodic line unchanged; what folk singers ‘carried in their memories was not a fixed, memorised series of words and notes, but the fluid idea of a song which so far as they were concerned had never had any other existence than in the fresh evocations it received from singers like themselves’ (Bronson 1969, pp. 102–6). |
