The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #111493   Message #2351183
Posted By: irishenglish
28-May-08 - 01:43 PM
Thread Name: 'English Country Dances', Please
Subject: RE: 'English Country Dances', Please
First off, most of the time, when someone links to something they already wrote about via a link, the link goes directly to the paragraph in hand, not to the beginnings of your website, where one would have to sift through hours of material to find the point you are arguing.
Second, while in some way I understand a certain aspect of the point I think you are trying to make, I find it misguided. Your arguments remind me of the character of Roderick Spode from the tv adaptation of Jeeves and Wooster-English nationalism of such a vague sort that it comes across as just wacky.
Yesterday I asked you what you might think of someone like Michael McGoldrick. Well, looking at an earlier post, I think I got my answer-"if an English person is singing an American song in an American accent they are not performing an aspect of their own English culture/if a Swedish tune is being played at a session of English folkies, one of our many fine English tunes is not being heard." Take that to another level WAV. People move around, Irish came to England,Canada or the US. English went to America. Or people move around in their own country. As I heard Norma Waterson say recently, if you had a song that someone from Sussex had in their family for generations, but then someone moves to Newcastle, the song will change, hence the reason for different versions of songs. What's your stand on bluegrass then WAV? You do know of course that versions of English, Scots and Irish ballads have been maintained almost completely intact in places like Kentucky or Tennessee. People singing songs about English knights and such with a rural southern accent. I suppose if your logic is carried through, those folks are wrong to do so, because they should be singing American songs, whatever that is.
On your website too I saw something about World Music-"World-music stalls and stages should be places where folkies of different nationality present different unfused music to each other. You do realize that word, unfused is a real difficult one to use in context of music. West African music does not follow a colonialism rule. You can say someone is from Guinea-Bissau, or Mali, or Senegal, but the music itself comes from an ancient source that predates those names for countries we now know. Thus someone like Toumani Diabate's lineage of griots comes from the area we now know to be Mali, but was not Mali until 1960, before he was even born. The same can be said in Europe. Ever hear regional European music WAV? Do you realize that there has been so much polinization in European music that you can have someone from regions of France singing in Italian, or someone from Sardinia singing in Catalan? See? unfused doesn't work when you have music that by a map says it belongs in one country, while culturally, actually belongs in another. So your stated belief that different nationalities should present their own native, unfused music to each other, is in actuality, a deluded belief that music stops at border checkpoints, even the ones that didn't exist until the 20th century.
To paraphrase Dave Swarbrick, you can do anything you want to music, it doesn't mind.