You say that Irish music has "moved on" from "just" dance music, but that's exactly what I'm talking about and I'm not sure that it's ultimately a good thing. It's popular with the musicians, for sure, and those musicians are probably amongst the worst for being elitist, which was my point. It's also popular because the rest of the public has been spoilt with access to recordings and TV shows of the absolutely best of everything and takes technical wizardry and perfection for granted. But it's turning into a commodity for purchase, not folk music.

Also the high speed Irish session would be a lot less popular if the audience were expecting to be able to dance to it - as you say, they couldn't now, but as it happens that doesn't matter because they don't want to.

By the way, I don't agree that playing for dancing is tedious. Playing well for dancing is a whole different craft from playing music for listening to, and I've done a lot of both, including orchestral and chamber music as well as folk dance (morris and social) and song accompaniment.

I read recently that Northumbrian fiddler Willy Taylor used to spend hours thinking and discussing what went in to the perfect tune or playing style to give the best lift and impetus to the dancers, experimenting with cutting notes short and playing others longer, accents, rhythmic patterns and the like.

I'm not saying we should only play tunes when there are dancers, and there are valuable things you can do musically with the material that you wouldn't do if you were playing for dancing, but I still think that if it develops too far it just becomes a different art form.

Maybe I'll just have to face up to being labelled an old-timer.

Anahata