(Apologies as I've only skim-read the above so if my two-penneth has already been discussed or dismissed I'm very sorry for my hasty ignorance!)

I guess there are two principle things that tie an artform to place - the influence of the place in the content or texture of the piece (in musical terms these could be in terms of vocab, accent, dialect of the lyrics, mention of local people, places, customs, sensibilities etc, or just the way in which the music reflects a place's atmosphere or character) or the extent to which a piece is fully reflective of the dominant place-bound sub-culture.

In folk terms, the former still stands but there are few places now where traditionally percieved folk would be encountered as the domminant collective cultural expression of a place, and so the chord between place and piece is immediately loosened (as it was whenever Sharp, Karpeles, Lloyd, Lomax etc re-expressed (by playing the recordings of or by performing anew) the materials that they found amongst new people in new contexts.

I live in south London at the moment, so the dominant 'music of place' would be grime or dubstep - absolutely ubiquitous coming from shops, flat windows, car stereos, teenager's tinny mobile speakers on the top decks of buses, etc... reflecting ever-shifting accents and dialects to subregions of the south and east of the city very accurately, and, in the musical construction mirroring the anxiety and excitement of concrete hyperreality illuminated by flickering neon tubes...

However, the non-specific pastoral aesthetic can be transportive in terms of sense of place or temporality/heritage. I guess music is always connected to place as long as somebody tells you where it comes from, either geograpically or psycho-geographically!

(Sorry to lapse into fragmented hyperbole again, it's what I do I'm afraid)