Paper short abstract:

Contemporary Swiss folk music lets an emerging generation maintain dynamic relationships with place and heritage over time. I explore how key spaces of experience offer sites for cultivating relationships between the new and the traditional, through participation in a community of musical practice.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how contemporary Swiss folk music provides a means of allowing its performers and participants to maintain deeply-rooted associations with place over time, while engaging in dynamic negotiations of value, meaning, and heritage. Folk music in Switzerland has fluctuated between discourses of tradition and innovation over the last century and a half, having navigated periods of extensive openness as well as intense nationalism. Following decades of competing standards and ideologies, an emerging generation of Swiss folk musicians is learning and participating in this established community of musical practice while bringing their own interpretations and nuances to their musical tradition. My ethnographic research with members of this group provides the material for this paper; I will discuss the way in which a perception of collective heritage forms the basis of a musical genre that remains locally grounded and indisputably Swiss while navigating a constantly forward-moving trajectory. Numerous significant folk music festivals, as well as a recently-developed postsecondary program in Swiss folk music, provide spaces of experience in which relationships between new and established musical idioms, values, traditions, and participants can be discovered and developed. Through processes of learning, interaction, and engagement with local legacy, the meanings and values attached to the country's musical heritage are continuously negotiated and co-constituted in a vibrant social landscape. New creative activity and processes exist alongside, and rooted in, traditional practice and repertoire, as both vertical and horizontal experiences of place are mediated though multigenerational participation in Switzerland's folk music community.