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In today's industrialized West, many repertoires of older music in oral tradition are sustained primarily through more-or-less self-conscious revivals structured around calendars of festivals. Each revival responds to particular social and economic changes, and each "revives" selected cultural goods in ways representing the modern needs of those sponsoring the revival, needs that may change as one set of sponsors succeeds another. This essay, which focuses on a turning point in the revival of Norwegian folk music and dance, presents a multilayered case study in the politics of culture.' Who ought to control the Norwegian folk revival, the most direct heirs of its founders, or a broader group reflecting the revival's modern constituency? On what ideological principles should power in the revival depend? How ought ideology to interact with the cultural raw material of the revival-music and dance-and with natural processes of change?
Gammeldans translates literally as "old dance," and gammeldans music focuses on Norway's adaptations of the music of nineteenth-century panEuropean social dances (principally waltzes, mazurkas, reinlenders, and polka types).2 Some of these tunes are heard in the ballroom, while more are exuberant songs that comprise much of that modest fraction of Norway's popular music that is domestically produced. Yet another repertory of gammeldans flourishes in oral tradition among many of the amateur fiddlers and other instrumentalists who are also the main custodians of yet older orally-transmitted music in Norway (Hoksnes 1988:138-39). At first examination, this particular repertoire of gammeldans might seem to belong to Norwegian folk music, indeed to have been its most vigorous branch for some time. Of course, the word "folk" has made many academics skittish during recent decades. But our reticence has no parallel in the insiders' rhetoric of the folk revivals that have taken place throughout European and Europe-derived cultures in this century. Among Norwegian fiddlers and dancers, folkemusikk centers on relatively old and valued dance music genres for fiddle-genres which have come to be cultivated as a sort of art music in Norway's folk revival-while dance genres a mere sixty to two hundred years old are relegated to the less prestigious category of gammeldans. (Readers new to Norwegian fiddling may wish to glance at Examples 1 and 2 below for samples of a folkemusikk tune and a gammeldans melody.)