If we love our world being multicultural, we appreciate other cultures and perform OUR OWN

Culture, like humanity, is fluid; like clouds, it knows no boundaries - it drifts, blurs, adapts, changing & necessitating change; culture is flux arising from the necessity of human creativity. This why we find dozens of Folk Tales leaping over linguistic barriers like so many migratory birds. The same can be said (and has been said) of musical instruments, musical forms, genres & idioms on all levels - folk, popular, classical, experimental... Nothing exists (or indeed can exist) in a state of national isolation; and the diversity of global music is a consequence of this constant state of renewal & cross polination.

If we truly love our world being multicultural (rather just mire ourselves in specious self-serving rhetoric) then we must embrace the facts of the dymanics of global cultural process and rejoice in them. This can be anything from revelling in the splendours of Krautrock's global influence to exploring British ballad variations in the Ozark Mountains. OUR OWN in this context is so much bigger than what you might credit; thus might I merrily collaborate with Japanese & Italian experimental musicians, and find I have more in common with American Folk Musicians than I do with those in my home town. This doesn't imply a lack of diversity - on the contrary, it places culture as the reserve and consequence of the INDIVIDUAL who you conveniently overlook in your somewhat retarded world view.

Ever wondered where these so-called American idioms came from? Or why, for that matter, they find such popular favour globally? Why some of the finest blues singers arose from sea-port towns like Liverpool & Newcastle which are as much linked to an international identity as thyey are to their own countries? Or why Harry Partch rejected American Classical Music in his search for something uniquely American - and why he went back to the core of Pythagorean Musical Theory to do that?

I've recently been reading of Frank Zappa's fondness for Folk Music; seems he dug A.L. Lloyd & Ewan MacColl and was great friends with Paddy Moloney. In a radio discussion Paddy was describing how he'd found Indian folk tunes that were almost identical to Irish ones. When pondering the mechanics of why this should be, Zappa ventured the solution: "Sailors!".