I'd be real curious to see how SO'P does in one of those song-lines that Joyce described.

You know, I think I'd rather be killed on the spot than live compliant to such an absolutist cultural regime. That has to be one of the most barbaric things I've ever read on this forum.

"Traditional folk music" doesn't mean the same thing as "there's a long tradition of using a Stratocaster for electric blues" or "we have a family tradition of going to Phoenix every January".

Agreed. The 2nd & 3rd examples are describing tradition in an actual living folkloric sense; the 1st example on the other hand invariably uses the word in its ersatz revival sense, where what is called traditional is actually a modern construct in terms of its contrivance and attendant assumptions.

The problem is that Suibhne O'Piobaireachd is apparently saying that all music is traditional music.

I'm just going on what the ITCM say about in their stated aims, which makes a lot of sense to me with respect of the breadth of this thing we call music which I have quite a passion for. I grew up listening to popular music of most idioms, medieval music, experimetal music, classical music, unpopular music of most idioms, free jazz, revival folk, ethnomusicological field recordings from the world over (with a particular fondness for Africa, Indonesia, Eastern Europe and the British Isles). I still listen to that now and consequently I think it's folly to assume some musics are more traditional than others, though as pointed out above I think a fair case can be made for certain musics being less traditional than they might think they are - revival folk being a case in point, which is presumably what JP means by Traditional Folk Music.

"But what kind of music?" they say . . . What comes next in your world of all-pervasive tradition?

What I generally say is that I play Indo-European No-Age Sounds, which is a sort of experimental popular creative music that opens its heart to hip-hop, diverse ethnic musics & song, free improv, ambient, drum and bass, free-jazz, and more besides. If they want to know more I just whip out my kemence and electronic shruti box and sing them a verse or two of Butter and Cheese and All with a few freely improvised interludes, or else I take them down the beach for my legendary rendering of John Cage's 4'33" in which I draw a Cretan Labyrinth in the sand & stand poised at its centre with a Hungarian doromb - but don't actually play it. Just as long as they're listening, that's all that matters.

As Frank Zappa once said:

Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is THE BEST.

As Duke Ellington once said:

There are only two types of music in the world - Good Music and Bad Music.

As Louis Armstrong once said:

All music folk music - I ain't never heard no horse sing a song

As Sun Ra once said:

Music is a universal language - and it goes straight to throne of the Creator of the Universe as your personal ambassador and personal nemesis. That's now he knows you - according to your music