humusic1-1, Exercise 2: Testing a myth

Model answer (one possible choice: "Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies are Hungarian folk music"; check):

1. Define the claim: folk music in what sense? Tunes sung by peasants, tunes played by Roma bands, or melodies written in a "Hungarian style" by town composers?
2. Find the sources of the tunes: scholars who have traced Liszt's themes to popular songs, to verbunkos dance music and to the playing of Roma musicians, rather than to field recordings of village singers (check).
3. Compare with Bartók and Kodály's field collections, which came decades later and showed older layers of peasant song that differ from the music Liszt used.
4. Find what Liszt himself said about his sources and about Roma music, and how critics have judged it.
5. Sources: musicologists' studies of Liszt, ethnomusicology of Hungarian folk music, and the scores and recordings.

Likely result: the Rhapsodies draw on a popular urban style that was widely taken to be "Hungarian", not on the peasant folk song that Bartók later documented.