glueman, I gave a few examples of music that was composed and is accepted by the community of people who play and listen to traditional music as being traditional tunes. Why are you still saying the same things over and over again? A few of us on this thread have said that we have experienced learning music from other musicians who learned it from other musicians, etc. We've also said that we have experienced music changing slightly as it changes hands. Why do you keep saying that traditional music is moribund? To people who are part of it not being dead you just sound silly. It's sort of like the guy at a party who goes on about how cats don't have any reasoning skills. All the cat owners in the room just look at each other and roll their eyes. Since you don't believe the first hand experiences of the people you are talking to, it makes me wonder why you are here.

Get this:
It's not about history.
It's not about trying to revive anything.
There is no torch being borne.
It's not about whether the culture that produced most of the music is still alive.

It's about whether the music is still alive.
The culture, now, is the community of people who listen to and play traditional folk music.
It's all just about the music.

You seem to be obsessed with trying to make a very simple general definition into something very complicated. You come across like an academic who is studying traditional folk music and needs to draw lines around things.

Most of my favorite songs and tunes came from other musicians. Sometimes I even get a couple of versions, like, "Here's how I learned it years ago, but now I play it like this". Or I find songs in old books and piece together how I want to play them. If you want to call that a revival, go for it. I call it finding cool tunes in an old book. I then teach the music to my friends, who teach it to theirs. All while I'm learning the cool music they learned and sometimes adapting it somewhat for my own purposes. I also sometimes learn music from recordings, but even that doesn't necessarily stop the process. A few years back I heard the album I learned a song from for the first time in about 20 years. Without ever meaning to do so, I had made some notable changes in 20 years of playing it without reference to the recording.

The band I'm playing in now does traditional Swedish music. As I learned the music, there was rarely a CD with the tune on it. I can sometimes find the notation on-line somewhere, but it's always an approximation of what actually gets played anyway. The only way for me to learn the music is to learn from my bandmates, both of whom lived in Sweden and learned the tunes from other musicians at dances and parties.

Sorry, but your thesis doesn't pass the real world experience test. It only makes sense if you chain yourself to the 1954 definition and try to wring every last legalistic drop of meaning from it.

It's just not that complicated.