I'm a self-taught musician, so I was never classically trained, but I spent a few years in a terribly stuffy early music consort. There was a lot of snobbishness there, enough that I finally quit to get away from it. Maybe the rules that we couldn't play outside of were worse than the snobbiness. At least there was also a lot of improvisation in that group.

I have encountered an equal level of snobbishness from folk musicians. Why are some people so proud of being musically illiterate? What's wrong with the ability to read music being one of the tools in your arsenal? And, for a lot of traditional folk musicians, the rules that you can't play outside of are just as strong. And improvisation, in some styles of folk music, is frowned on as stongly as it is among a lot classical musicians.

I have much more fun finding and celebrating the similarities between different styles of music than in building walls between them.

John Peekstok