CAT 2019 Question Paper | Verbal Slot 1

CAT Questions

Folk is the music of the people, is now hip again! Often dismissed as parochial, this music is celebrated at festivals, awards ceremonies, and on TV. But where does it come from? This passage tries to answer this question. In this question, we have to look for something which is not mentioned in the passage. A question like this one could be mildly tricky because the answer options have been twisted. But if you can read in between the lines, then these types of questions become a cakewalk. Start reading good quality articles from Bharath's Curated Reading List and get a rockstar score in VARC.

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"Free of the taint of manufacture" – that phrase, in particular, is heavily loaded with the ideology of what the Victorian socialist William Morris called the "anti-scrape", or an anti- capitalist conservationism (not conservatism) that solaced itself with the vision of a pre- industrial golden age. In Britain, folk may often appear a cosy, fossilised form, but when you look more closely, the idea of folk – who has the right to sing it, dance it, invoke it, collect it, belong to it or appropriate it for political or cultural ends – has always been contested territory. . . .

In our own time, though, the word "folk" . . . has achieved the rare distinction of occupying fashionable and unfashionable status simultaneously. Just as the effusive floral prints of the radical William Morris now cover genteel sofas, so the revolutionary intentions of many folk historians and revivalists have led to music that is commonly regarded as parochial and conservative. And yet – as newspaper columns periodically rejoice – folk is hip again, influencing artists, clothing and furniture designers, celebrated at music festivals, awards ceremonies and on TV, reissued on countless record labels. Folk is a sonic "shabby chic", containing elements of the uncanny and eerie, as well as an antique veneer, a whiff of Britain's heathen dark ages. The very obscurity and anonymity of folk music's origins open up space for rampant imaginative fancies. . . .

[Cecil Sharp, who wrote about this subject, believed that] folk songs existed in constant transformation, a living example of an art form in a perpetual state of renewal. "One man sings a song, and then others sing it after him, changing what they do not like" is the most concise summary of his conclusions on its origins. He compared each rendition of a ballad to an acorn falling from an oak tree; every subsequent iteration sows the song anew. But there is tension in newness. In the late 1960s, purists were suspicious of folk songs recast in rock idioms. Electrification, however, comes in many forms. For the early-20th-century composers such as Vaughan Williams and Holst, there were thunderbolts of inspiration from oriental mysticism, angular modernism and the body blow of the first world war, as well as input from the rediscovered folk tradition itself.

For the second wave of folk revivalists, such as Ewan MacColl and AL Lloyd, starting in the 40s, the vital spark was communism's dream of a post-revolutionary New Jerusalem. For their younger successors in the 60s, who thronged the folk clubs set up by the old guard, the lyrical freedom of Dylan and the unchained melodies of psychedelia created the conditions for folk- rock's own golden age, a brief Indian summer that lasted from about 1969 to 1971. . . . Four decades on, even that progressive period has become just one more era ripe for fashionable emulation and pastiche. The idea of a folk tradition being exclusively confined to oral transmission has become a much looser, less severely guarded concept. Recorded music and television, for today's metropolitan generation, are where the equivalent of folk memories are seeded. . . .

Question 16 : All of the following are causes for plurality and diversity within the British folk tradition EXCEPT:

1. the fluidity of folk forms owing to their history of oral mode of transmission.
2. paradoxically, folk forms are both popular and unpopular.
3. that British folk forms can be traced to the remote past of the country.
4. that British folk continues to have traces of pagan influence from the dark ages.

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Video Explanation

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Explanatory Answer

The question asks us to choose the option that is not a cause for plurality and diversity (rich variety) within the British folk tradition.

The author describes folk as ‘living example of an art form in a perpetual state of renewal’, because in folk music ‘one man sings a song, and then others sing it after him, changing what they do not like’. He observes that folk contains ‘elements of the uncanny and eerie, as well as an antique veneer, a whiff of Britain's heathen dark ages’ and that ‘the very obscurity and anonymity of folk music's origins open up space for rampant imaginative fancies.’ Note that the author mentions the oral mode of transmission, the fact that that British folk forms can be traced to the remote past of the country (antique veneer) and traces of pagan influence from the dark ages (heathen dark ages) as factors that influence the constant transformation seen in folk music.

The fact that folk is both popular and unpopular does not in any way affect the plurality and diversity within British folk. So, option 2 is the correct answer.

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The question is "All of the following are causes for plurality and diversity within the British folk tradition EXCEPT:"

Hence, the answer is paradoxically, folk forms are both popular and unpopular.

Choice B is the correct answer.