Oops! Should have read:

When it says The term can be applied to music that has been evolved from rudimentary beginnings by a community uninfluenced by popular and art music and it can likewise be applied to music which has originated with an individual composer and has subsequently been absorbed into the unwritten living tradition of a community you can be sure that no such community ever existed in the entire history of humanity.

I might add that it's thuis sort of bizarre fantasising that underwrites a lot of the more wonky notions of the early revival; the assumption that things can exist in isolated pockets of perfect purity unsullied by contamination by contact with the real world I find hard to understand. Likewise the insistence that only unwritten music can be a living tradition is patronising in the extreme. That means so much of the Northumbrian Bagpipe Tradition wasn't actually Folk Music, where individual composition was highly prized and little changed to this day.

Still if Richard insists it all makes perfect sense, then...