:: If you were a villager living in 1723 where would you go to listen to/sing folk songs each
:: night - a 'concert' in town (no railways, remember) or your local alehouse? [...]
: Of course you would go to an alehouse and of course you wouldn't pay.

How many people in the British Isles in 1723 lived within a day's walk of an alehouse? A small minority, I'd guess. Most people lived in very small villages where the only public building of any kind was a church, if that.


|| The idea that there has ever been some sort of Guild of Master Folk Singers strikes me as absurd
| No-one has even remotely suggested such a thing

Then maybe they should have done. In some parts of the world that was exactly how folk music worked (like the "ashik" lineages of Turkey and Central Asia, which mirrored the structures of discipleship in Sufism). Some aspects of folk music in Scotland come near to that model - Highland piping schools or the family traditions of the Travellers.


% Human nature has not changed much throughout recorded history. Just because we have no
% evidence for something in the past does not suggest it didn't happen exactly the way it does now.

That is probably the most wrongheaded comment in this whole thread. We know of many societies where money in any form was totally unknown, and many where music developed in directions where it could not possibly have been paid for, even if the society had started to use money. Some of these are so different from what we know in the modern developed world that we might as well be talking about the Antarctic Ocean market in whale songs. "Human nature" predicts nothing.

Two examples: a culture in Bolivia where everybody was expected to compose exactly one song in their lifetime, adopt it as their own, and would never sing anything else; the song would die with them. In other South American cultures, every piece of music was considered to have been composed by a totem animal or plant, with the human who first performed it being a mere amanuensis. In the one case there was no way something like a solo concert performance could exist - there wouldn't be enough material - and in the other the performer couldn't claim credit, the music was the utterance of the totemic deity.

And relationships between amateur and professional can be very different from those prevailing in the present-day West, even in societies where music is solidly part of a money economy. Hiromi Lorraine Sakata's "Music in the Mind" (about the musical culture of three different regions of Afghanistan in the 1970s) is an eye-opener. About the only generalization is that amateur music in the areas she looked at was of higher status than the professional variety, but the situation varied depending on musical genre, ethnicity, where you played and who for, what your day job was... and there was next to no transmission of music from professional to amateur, though the other way did happen. (One particular oddity was the position of the flute, which was the only melody instrument considered acceptable by the Mevlevi dervish order in Anatolia and Iran; in Persian-speaking Afghanistan it wasn't regarded as being a musical instrument at all, though it was widely played - fluteplayers weren't seen as being musicians, whether or not they took money for playing it).