Your thinking isn't only Ivory Tower, it is belligerent head in the sand.

Not all of us come to traditional music to be comforted from the ravages of the modern and post-modern worlds.

Some of us actually believe it to be a beautiful living tradition of music which can be every bit as relevant to contemporary life as avant garde jazz.

Ensconcing the music in the Ivory Tower for the benefit of academics in search of easy day jobs is no different than putting it in museums and archives to "protect" it from the masses popularizing and updating it.

Both strategies are extremely manipulative and controlling. Traditional music doesn't need rescuing by self-appointed heroic folklorists and ethnomusicologists, anymore than it needs to be intellectually analyzed by academics whose first interest is securing a comfortable career for themselves in the Ivory Tower.

Give me more of that naturally post-modernized old time music anyday.