One meaning often given is that of “old songs, with no known composers,” another is that of music that has been submitted to an evolutionary “process of oral transmission…. the fashioning and re-fashioning of the music by the community that give it its folk character.” Such definitions depend upon “(cultural) processes rather than abstract musical types…”, upon “continuity and oral transmission…seen as characterizing one side of a cultural dichotomy, the other side of which is found not only in the lower layers of feudal, capitalist and some oriental societies but also in ‘primitive’ societies and in parts of ‘popular cultures'”.