Listening to home

: place, practice, and participation in the learning of Swiss folk music

Abstract

In this thesis, I ask how the learning, performing, adapting, and reinterpreting of Swiss folk music offers an avenue for its practitioners to engage with multifaceted notions of place, homeland, and belonging. In recent years, Swiss folk music has experienced a resurgence, in which contemporary folk musicians are contesting and renegotiating dominant narratives of nationhood and heritage. Simultaneously, however, this musical practice remains deeply embedded within experiences of place and homeland, as the social and embodied processes of maintaining the sounds of a tradition encompass a wealth of experience and relationships. I first examine how one learns to listen to Swiss folk music, the processes of coming to understand and participate in it, and what this means for the situatedness of the listener. I then address three significant learning and participation contexts of Swiss folk music. The first of these examines ‘traditional’ contexts of folk music, exploring the non-formal qualities often associated with traditional music and how they contribute to the genre. This is contrasted with the environment of the university folk music program, in which characteristics of genre are actively being negotiated and selected. Lastly, I address the learning of folk music in regional music schools. These examples enable me to consider the larger picture, of folk music in relation to homeland, belonging, and the nation in contemporary Europe. Here I bring the discussions of genre and practice into conversation with ideas regarding the nature of Heimat, as a category that is widely understood among Swiss citizens but often hard to articulate or define. I argue that throughexploring learning contexts of Swiss folk music and identifying features considered important to its continuation, we are granted rare insight into the emergence of senses of place and home, and their ideological framing, through affective social, embodied, and musical experience.

Date of Award	29 Jun 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Richard Irvine (Supervisor) & Stephanie Bunn (Supervisor)