This is something I find it hard to explain or quantify, but I don't agree with the allegation (Shaw Farmer, above) that folk music is "sentimental", and I think it's a key point in this discussion. It may be deceptively simple at times, but for me, it's the utter lack of sentimentality that draws me to folk music. I now find that much "classical" orchestral music and a great deal of piano music sounds sentimental to me and turns me right off.

Sentimentality isn't really a way of expressing feeling and emotion - it bypasses genuine sentiment and true feeling, substituting forms of expression that allow the listener and the performer to allude to emotions without actually experiencing them. I don't think you get that very often in folk music, and for me this makes folk music more powerful and direct, more capable of stirring up real emotion.

If you want an extreme example of the opposite of folk song, listen to some barbershop - I know there will be Mudcatters who do both, but they must know that barbershop is crammed with every sentimental device known to music, while folk song is not. Instrumental folk music, at its best, has similar qualities of spareness and simplicity.

As I said, I find it hard to analyse this, and can't really do any more than say that it's my gut reaction. But it's one reason that many folk musicians do not welcome over-complicated chords and harmonies, or fussy passing-notes, accidentals, and changes in tempo. It also explains why many traditional musicians and singers dislike some "classical" or "parlour" settings of folk tunes and songs - these arrangements are often spoiled by sentimentality.


Marje