Dear TheSnail,

I'm not going to be crass enough to name this event because (a) I see no point in upsetting the organisers unecessarily and (b) because I was invited to the event by people for whom I have great respect and liking - and I don't want to upset them in particular.

The only thing that I can say is that there were quite a few musicians and dancers involved and I have noticed before that certain factions among these often exhibit antipathy/hostility to songs and singers (and, no, I am not tarring ALL musicians and dancers with this brush). In this particular case antipathy to singing was expressed in writing (the writer opined that the miserly amount of time devoted to singing was wasted and should have been devoted to dancing). I was also struck by how few of the songs that were sung were actually folk songs - recently composed non-folk songs and children's ditties seemed to predominate.