“Song! It Will Again Be What It Once Was!”: The Moments of Music as Art, Artifact, and Fact

Abstract

The art, artifact, and fact of music interact in complex processes of triangulation to yield the “moments of music” that bear on the theme of the 2016 IMS conference in Stavanger, Norway. Such moments have historical and geographic dimensions, marking ontological shifts, such as the late-Enlightenment emergence of Volkslied (folk song) as a musical artifact of global encounter in the musical writings of Johann Gottfried Herder that frame the article. The moment of music also coalesces around religious and ideological change, aesthetic and cultural transformation, rising nationalism and colonial encounter, and the intimacy and materiality of the audio and the transcendent. Eight moments of music are examined in the course of the article—moving from Herder’s ontological moment to a sounded world in the third-century Sanskrit Nāṭyaśāstra to the movement of European ballads across linguistic boundaries to the reanimation of medieval ballads and eighteenth-century Singspiel in modern performances as narratives for the refugee crisis of our own day. A theoretical model of triangulating music as art, artifact, and fact connects the moments of music globally and across the historical longue durée.