Jim Carroll recently posted a very eloquent and elegant exposition about the reasons for his passion for the folk tradition, which was received with appreciation by most of the people who responded to it.

I had a question or two about the place of tunes in the tradition - non-vocal music - for Jim, who was engaged on more pressing matters and couldn't respond at the time. Jim - if you can spare some time to respond to the questions, I'd be very interested in your response.

One of the key points in Jim's argument was the metaphor of turning a song over and, if you saw a (c) symbol stamped on it, then it wasn't part of the tradition. Whether you agree with that or not is a matter of personal belief. My question is about tunes and their place in the "canon".

To take an example from Irish music: Carolan's compositions have been with us for 300 years or so and, as far as I'm aware, were clearly composed by him. Is the passing of those 300 years enough to have "canonised" Carolan's music sufficiently for it, and the man, to be part of the Irish tradition?

Moving to England, another example to ponder would be Billy Pigg, "the border minstrel" and (to my mind) the king of the Northumbrian small pipes. Billy played many traditional tunes, but he was never one to overlook a good tune if it suited him, and was also not one to let an occasional wrong note "get in the way of a good tune". So, would the tune "Bill Charlton's Fancy" (composer: B. Pigg) be part of our English traditional canon? Billy also adapted tunes he'd heard on the radio, for the pipes, and played them to great applause at Alnwick and other gatherings.

So, the questions are: how far do modern compositions or compositions by a known creator fit into the canon? And where is the break point where composition ceases to be part of the canon - Kathryn Tickell playing a duet with a blues harmonica player? For example. Could I just add, I'm not trying to be contentious here - I'm merely exploring the boundaries and place of composed instrumental music within a folk tradition.