"it comes back to your point about the "sound" of the thing, it needs to be accessible/ pleasant to the untrained ear. If it is, it will speak to the masses."

This I think is a crucial point.

The 'folk' who origonally sang these songs were indeed 'aurally untrained' in the sense that they did not undergo any formal training in order to *cultivate an appreciation* of their own art. They were born and bred in the middle of it.

I PM'd another poster (Ruth Archer) here today (who has been most helpful towards me regards educating my ear btw.), and I thought of Opera when writing a response to her query about 'how I was getting on' listening to some of the folk material she'd sent me.

I'm no Opera buff by one hell of a way. But one of my absolute favourite pieces of music in the world is Bartoks Bluebeards Castle (The story in this piece - monstrous, fragile, saturated with shadows... Just like the folktale.). Yet despite my love of this work, I know that Opera as a genre remains somewhat alien to me - but purely as a consequence of my own lack of effort to educate my own 'untrained ear'.

I suppose, if traditional song *now* requires an "educated ear", to appreciate it, it does indeed describe a separation from the (generally uneducated/non-formally educated, both now as then) 'folk' from whom at one time, it would have been most naturally understood and appreciated.

The bottom line though, I gotta agree with IB there, Love is the answer. But not merely of the singer (whatever thier style.)

There is a dance between the 'Bard' and their listener. And a fascinated, loving ear, for a good story well told, is intrinsic to human nature. Be it told by Yeats, Bartok, Oscar Wilde, The Brothers Grimm, Cocteau, The Beatles, Jim Moray, or indeed Sedaynes Henry here.

Is the medium more important than the message? I suspect that human intercourse over thousands of years, may say not. That is not to say that particular ways of expressing any art should be dismissed as soon as there's a new generation of artists who wish to revolutionise the way things have been. But perhaps a kind of dialectical process could be allowed for?

Song is so ephemeral, and it's mode of transmission even moreseo. There are no objects on which to forge any secure certainty... But maybe that ephemeral butterfly-like nature of a song, which has passed through thousands of voices, doesn't want to be captured or married to any given miode of representation.

And strumpet that our butterfly may be, it will flutter to wherever honey tongues and voices and ears may Love it best.