matt milton: Something that nobody's mentioned is how TERRIBLE at publicity most folk festivals are.

I'll say! And folk musicians too. I offer free on-line advertising for traditional music performers and in two years not one person has taken me up on it. Go figure.

Blandiver: Anyway, answer me this - is an instrument still acoustic when you put it through a PA? It's a puzzler for sure. And what about when you record it?

Of course it isn't. The sound of a cardboard speaker is quite different from a piece of Norwegian Pine, and cramming a 6 foot grand piano through an 8 inch hole is not reality based either. Music is about dreaming. :)

Paula t: Ole Juul,
I hope I can reassure you that here are lots of young performers out there.

You don't need to Paula. :) I am quite aware of the number of talented young musicians around, and I am not really the curmudgeon you saw in that post. What I was eluding to was the popular view that music is about getting famous and not about spending a couple of hours doing scales before you allow yourself the luxury of going out.

Some music is not appreciated as widely as as much as it was at another time, but there will always be someone interested in carrying earlier forms forward. I think too that it is easy to lose perspective in a world of near ubiquitous television which obfuscates reality. There are people doing all kinds of stuff and likely not less of them - it just looks that way.