This chapter explores the ways in which folk music and dance were linked to science and politics in the twentieth century. To understand these relationships, the chapter starts with nineteenth-century collections of folksongs, which determine the canon of Bohemian and Moravian folk music until the present day. The traditional forms of folk music recorded by nineteenth-century collectors nearly disappeared in the twentieth century. This decline coincided with the emergence of a prominent folk revival, marked by the proliferation of both amateur and professional folk ensembles in post-1948 communist Czechoslovakia. Throughout the communist era, which lasted until 1989, these endeavors were officially aligned with the Communist Party’s politics and often carried propagandistic undertones. In the late twentieth century, folk music ensembles and practitioners were both influenced by and influencing classical music, as well as, later, rock and jazz, with institutionalized radio broadcasts playing a significant role in this evolution.

My essay examines Bob Dylan’s relation to sound recording, still a neglected topic even with the recent explosion of scholarship on the legendary singer-songwriter. Drawing on historical accounts of Dylan and his career, as well as recent histories of studio recording, I trace the artist’s mercurial relation to record making as evidenced in his turbulent encounters with various record producers. My chief focus is on Dylan’s account of his late 1980s creative crisis in his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume 1, which I argue also provides a condensed account of the songwriter’s philosophy of sound recording.

Music plays a significant role in both the establishment of and immersion in virtual worlds. This chapter theorises various forms of musical virtual reality, arguing that the virtual worlds of music challenge existing understandings of virtual reality and immersion. Analysing recording technology, mobile music, video games and the phenomenology of listening, the chapter argues that musical virtual reality can be theorised as an omnipresent, perpetually moving and embodied circulation of musical energy. Musical virtual reality invites a ‘drastic’ musicology that engages with the immediate, immersive and affectively powerful aspects of the listening event.