Song collecting took wing in eighteenth-century Europe under three impulses: political, colonial, and economic. ‘Through music our race was humanised; through music it will attain greater humanity,’ wrote the Prussian philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). When he coined the term Volkslied – ‘folk song’ – it was to exemplify the soul of a people; folk song would be the quintessential expression of Romantic nationalism, and its character would reflect the character of a nation. The concept didn’t operate in terms of rich or poor, educated versus peasantry; it embraced everyone. Herder argued that it was a patriotic duty to collect Volkslieder as devotedly as he himself did, before they disappeared.

The second impulse behind the new vogue was colonial curiosity: what did the music of the subjugated peoples – and the hoped-for Christian converts – actually sound like? The Swiss theologian Jean de Léry (1534–1611) wrote about the music of Brazil, using musical notation and describing antiphonal singing between men and women; Captain James Cook (1728–1779) described the music and dance of Pacific islanders. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique (1768) was the first book to deal with the ‘diverse musical accents’ of other lands, giving samples of Swiss, Iranian, Chinese, and Canadian Amerindian music. The most graphic colonial account came from the Scottish explorer Mungo Park (1771–1806) on his journey along the Niger River. Repeatedly attacked by tribesmen, and several times imprisoned by their suspicious rulers, he was at one point taken in, fed, and lodged with great generosity by the women of a Malian village, who allowed him to watch as they spun cotton and sang through the night. ‘They lightened their labour by songs,’ he wrote,