History

The International Folk Music Council (now known as the International Council for Traditional Music) could well be regarded as the ancestor of the BFE. Founded in 1947 and based at first in the UK though with a world-wide membership it made provision for individual national committees or chapters to be set up by its members. Such a committee was formed in the UK in 1973, after the parent body had moved its secretariat overseas. Maud Karpeles, honorary president of the IFMC, contributed a foreword to the UK National Committee's first newsletter in December 1974 in which she remarked: "the need has been felt for a national body which could coordinate the interests of the various folk music organisations and interested individuals within the country and bring them closer into touch with the international organization".

A look at the first working committee of the UK National Committee gives an idea of the scope of interests of its members then. Peter Cooke - chairman - had returned from Africa a few years earlier to take up a position in the University of Edinburgh's School of Scottish Studies where he was busy researching Scotland's traditional music; Secretary S.A. 'Nibs' Matthews was then artistic director of the English Folk Dance and Song Society; Marie Slocombe, who was to edit the Newsletter for several years, had recently retired from her work in the BBC sound archives; John Blacking had not long returned from South Africa to head the Department of Social Anthropology at The Queen's University of Belfast; Roy Saer and Phyllis Kinney were based at the Welsh Folk Museum while Mrs E.V. de Bray attended as assessor for the Department of Education and Science; last, but not least, Gwen Montagu, Bert Lloyd and of course the indomitable Maud Karpeles (who celebrated her 90th birthday in 1975) represented the interests of members at large.

John Blacking (1928-90)

But a glance through early conference themes and papers shows that interests ranged far wider than British and Irish musical traditions. At conference ceilidhs John Baily (now Professor at Goldsmiths's College), then one of John Blacking's postgraduate students at Belfast, regaled us with Afghan dutar melodies, Bert Lloyd sang bawdy sheep-shearing songs of the Australian outback and Peter Cooke coaxed others into playing Ugandan xylophone tunes. Early on a pattern of conferences, one-day meetings and Newsletter was established and has largely been preserved to the present. The first Newsletter appearing in December 1974 (a mere 8 cyclostyled pages) announced the first annual conference to be held at Keele University the following April and provided pages of information on the teaching of ethnomusicology and folk music studies around the country. Over the next decade the Newsletter grew steadily to make room for summaries of papers given at successive conferences and one-day meetings as well as discographies and news of recent publications.

When in 1981 the IFMC changed its name to the International Council for Traditional Music the UK National Committee soon followed suit and abandoned its title for the slightly less cumbersome UK Chapter of the ICTM - still preserving a tenuous link with the parent body and continuing to report its activities in the ICTM bulletins. Its own Newsletter became a Bulletin in January 1983 and rapidly expanded so that it could publish selected conference papers. By 1991, however, the Bulletins had grown too large, and the scope and quality of research being done by ethnomusicologists and scholars of folk music around the UK clearly called for a journal. Accordingly the British Journal of Ethnomusicology appeared (in 1992) and the Bulletin reverted to a much smaller twice-yearly Newsletter. The journal rapidly acquired an enviable international reputation as a source of high quality research papers and has in 2004 been taken on board by professional publishers (Routledge) with a new name Ethnomusicology Forum. 1995 saw one further change when the UK membership opted for its present name - The British Forum for Ethnomusicology.