"Sharp's complaints that English culture is too 'cosmopolitan' and that we need something more purely national do have a ring of the hard right"(Pseudonymous) That's what I asked about a couple of days ago. I am still not convinced that it's not just a case of appreciating what is on your doorstep and promoting it as an alternative to other things that were fashionable in middle-class art music circles of the time. Proselytizing maybe, but being jingoistic? Not much different, say, than a bunch of musicians in the 1970's revitalising English traditional dance music at a time when Irish and Amercan forms made up most of what we were hearing in the revival.
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