Romanian intellectuals – primarily from the Danubian Principalities and the Habsburg Empire – gradually came to recognize, assess, and instrumentalize folklore in formulating a Romanian national identity. In 1830, Eftimie Murgu quoted several Romanian and Serbian popular songs in mutual comparison in order to argue for the Roman roots of the Romanian nation, a prolonged scholarly debate instigated in the late 18th century. In the 1830s and ’40s, Romanian periodicals (such as the Transylvania-based Foaie pentru minte, inimă și literatură, “Leaflet for the mind, heart, and literature”) occasionally published Romanian folk poetry and songs. The most prolific collector from the first half of the century was Anton Pann, who published several hundred popular songs (and who was in 1848 to compose the music to the anthem Deșteaptă-te, române). Yet throughout this period, neither Pann, nor the other notable collectors of popular-cultural material (Johann Andreas Wachmann, Carol Miculi, Henri Ehrlich, Alexandru Berdescu), worked with a clearly-defined concept of “folklore”; nor did they have a distinct agenda in making use of folklore for the development of a nationally Romanian school of music.They collected songs mostly from musicians (lăutari) in urban environments, and published either airs or lyrics (Pann being an exception for publishing both). However, in 1850 the Moldavian-born historian and politician Mihail Kogălniceanu identified folklore as an asset for Romanian nation-building and pleaded for a thorough exploration of the nation’s historical roots through the study of folklore. In subsequent years, Costache Negruzzi, Alecu Russo, and Vasile Alecsandri, poet-scholars from the same generation as Kogălniceanu, followed suit, excavating the folk heritage, drawing inspiration from it, and attempting classificatory models (especially for folk poetry).

By the mid-century, Romanian popular songs had come to be understood not only as historical sources for documenting the Romanian nation, as Kogălniceanu had suggested, but also as malleable creative pieces in the hands of composers. In 1850, in the Transylvanian town of Brașov, a handful of local intellectuals led by Iacob Mureșianu invented the first Romanian ballroom dance – a remarkable example of nationalizing folklore. Mureșianu, together with Ștefan Emilian and Francisc Kammauf, drew upon a range of popular regional folk dances and songs in order to create from their musical and choreographic elements a Romanian counterpart to the French quadrille. Suggestively titled Romana, it was first danced in January 1851, on the occasion of a ball of Braşov’s Romanian Women’s Association. By the end of the century, Romanian nationalists claimed that the Romana had gained popularity and widespread usage among Romanians in Austria-Hungary and the Romanian Kingdom, weaving an ethnically Romanian sense of social coherence.

A turning point in Romanian popular song-collecting took place in 1864 when Nicolae Filimon acknowledged the existence of hybrid influences in the corpus of Romanian popular songs and suggested that such influences could be filtered out by means of extensive comparative research. Therefore, he urged fieldworkers to collect Romanian folklore primarily from rural areas, claiming that the peasants’ music provided access to national specificity.

In 1880, Teodor T. Burada published O călătorie în Dobrogea (“A journey in Dobrogea”), the first regional monograph based on rural fieldwork. A path-breaker in Romanian folklore research, Burada paid attention not only to the musical instruments peasants used, but also to the local traditional context in which popular songs were played (Christmas celebrations, baptismal feasts, etc.). This regional focus was strengthened when later in that decade, Caliopi Zographos and Elena Sevastos, two women collectors, published the results of their fieldwork from Oltenia and Moldavia. Composers like Gavriil Musicescu likewise endorsed a regional turn.

Towards the end of the century, state institutions increasingly encouraged popular song collecting and voiced concern at the preservation of collected folklore. However, a Romanian state archive for folklore was established only in the interwar period.

In the mid-1880s, the Academy of the Romanian Kingdom created a fund and a prize for collecting national music. Dimitrie Vulpian, the first laureate, had published a 4-volume collection of almost 2000 popular songs; however, despite this impressive bulk, contemporaries were critical of Vulpian’s standards of musical notation and uncritical inclusiveness. Increased accuracy in popular song recording would profit from the phonograph, which was first used in 1901 by Vasile Pârvescu; his Hora din Cartal (“The circle dance in Cartal”) was published in 1908.

A comprehensive folklore collection, Materialuri folkloristice (“Folk literature”), commissioned by the Academy, was published in 1900 under the name of Grigore G. Tocilescu (with Christea N. Țapu as a controversially uncredited co-author).

Austria-Hungary began to give state support for folklore research around this time, too. In 1904, the Ministry of Culture and Instruction in Vienna requested that all ethnic groups in the Empire send their folklore collections to the State Archive. Two years later, Matthias Friedwagner was commissioned to gather Romanian popular songs from Bukovina, a region previously mapped by collectors such as Simion Florea Marian. (Friedwagner’s Rumänische Volkslieder aus der Bukowine was not published until 1940.) Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, the renowned composer Béla Bartók, commissioned by the Ministry of Education in Hungary to gather Hungarian popular songs from Transylvania, conducted fieldwork in that area well beyond the remit of his commission. With the financial support of the Romanian Academy, Bartók gathered over 370 Romanian popular songs from Bihor County, which he published in 1913 (Cântece poporale românești din Comitatul Bihor, “Romanian popular songs from Bihor County”). Bartók continued developing his ethnomusicological interest in the south-eastern region in the interwar decades.