Mediation and its definition in folk music

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 01:24 PM

I don’t think many people would demand author anonymity as a qualification
Not even the '54 definition demands that
Don't think 'passing on from one generation to another' qualifies it as traditional otherwise remembered pop and art songs would fit the bill
A bit more complicated as that
Jim

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Brian Peters
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 12:44 PM

”My understanding if there is a known author then the song cannot be traditional, but that defies logic on a few counts. So I admit to being confused as to what exactly is meant by traditional songs or lyrics, mediated or not.”

I don’t think many people would demand author anonymity as a qualification. As far as I’m concerned, traditional songs are those that have been passed on from one generation to another, though how many generations are required is still something that might be argued about. Steve Roud in ‘Folk Song in England’ suggests two. But this really is a minefield we should think twice about venturing across...

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 12:36 PM

"The comments you make about Lloyd's more expansive "waffle" "
More arrogance - Bert was at this far longer than your ficvve minute forays into the net for handy soundbites
If he taled waffle, why proffer his opimion as argument

"whether he believed that there was a pure oral tradition once literacy had been established."
You never mentioned "once literacy had been established." when you quoted him
Beside the point anyway
It has been long established that our song tradition has relied heavily on non literate pariah communities like Travellers who are the nearest to a pure oral tradition as has ever s=existed in these islands
It has never been established how influential literacy was in preserving the song traditions
The general belief has always been that literacy did far more damage to the preservation of our folk singing than it did good
The fact that the rise in literacy and the development of technology coincided with the decline of folk traditions certainly suggest that this was the case

When will you come to terms with the fact that you know less than else anybody posting here about folk song ?
Most of us have been at this for decades - a bit longer that your few months
Just pack this talking down to those people - it makes you look silly
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Brian Peters
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 12:35 PM

"Cecil Sharp in Somerset: Some Conclusions" (Folk Music Journal 1972, No. 3).. goes through much the same complaints about Sharp's unreliability, but doesn't use the word "mediation" anywhere that I've noticed.”

I’m familiar wih this paper, Jack, and it does use a derivative of the term just once, on p 239: “...he [Sharp] was advocating the grafting onto his own class's music of suitably mediated musical (and not literary) values...”, which refers to his preference for a new English art music based on musical structures from folk song. So Harker was using the term back in 1972, but had not yet weaponised it. The rest of the article contains as you say almost exactly the same content as the corresponding chapter in Fakesong.

Staying with Sharp, he does indeed claim that folk music is the product of a race, but his use of the term makes it clear he’s talking about the English as a race ('nation' might describe his usage better), and not any over-arching North European grouping – in fact, the English race is seen as opposed to the German as far as folk music is concerned. Sharp’s only reference to ‘the Arian race’ is specifically concerned with the possible Eastern origin of ballad themes (probably based on Child’s introductions) and from the context is clearly being used in its old sense of ‘Indo-European’, rather than is later usage to mean ‘Nordic’.

It’s also pretty clear who Sharp means by the ‘common people’ or ‘lower classes’: those people involved in “ploughing, sowing, reaping and other farming operations”, according to him. Of course this is an over-simplification since, as Bearman has shown, the singers’ list includes a number of other occupations (blacksmith, gardener, quarryman, etc) as well as the majority who were involved in agricultural work – farmers as well as labourers. You could quibble about the description of some of those people as ‘peasants’ – even according to Sharp’s understanding of the word - but “anybody below the nobility” pushes the envelope too far.

As for Sharp “push[ing] origins back into some unknown and undated (undatable?) past”, this doesn’t really describe his view. Although he looked back with approval to a pre-Reformation ‘Merrie England’ as a time when the populace was “renowned throughout Europe as a nation of dancers and ballad-singers”, at no point did he claim that the songs he collected had such distant origins. Dating folk song presented “an insoluble problem”, because the continuing evolution of the form rendered it timeless - “it belongs not to one period but to many” - and he directly rejected claims that modal tunes must be more than 300 years old. Of the songs, he wrote: “...some have a long history behind them, while others are comparatively of recent birth... Our inability to ascribe a great age to the folk-song will come as a disappointment to those who attach value to a song in proportion to its antiquity... we can but reiterate that the value of the folk-song lies in its own intrinsic qualities. If it is beautiful, it needs nothing to recommend it.” He had songs in his collection about Nelson, Napoleon and Dick Turpin, which could obviously be dated as 'no earlier than...' The question of ‘origins’ was one he preferred to skate around, believing that the evolutionary process he described was what really mattered.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,jag
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 12:13 PM

"Do we have to consider his use of the word 'educated' in the context of his discussion of the illiterate and the unlettered?".

In the context of that whole discussion. He is talking about mode changes to tunes used in John Gay's The Beggars Opera. "Gay, who was a townsman and, therefore, steeped in the music of his day, would unconsciously modernize the tunes, which he sang to his collaborator." (Gay was not a musician)

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,Pseudonymous
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 12:13 PM

From the paper linked by Jack Campin. When I've got a year or two to spare I'll have a look through this. :) In the meantime, a definition from that paper. I see what Jack means about Harker being more straightforward!


"We take the concept of mediation to refer to the bidirectional transmission, translation and/or transformation of one relatum (eg musical sound) by another relatum (eg technologies, discourses, social relations, sites and spaces). Musical sound is both constituted by and enmeshed in specific constellations of mediations (Born 2019). The concept may initially be clarified by Latour’s distinction between intermediaries, ‘what transports meaning or force without transformation’, and mediators, which ‘transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry’ (Latour 2005, 39). Citing Hennion (Hennion 1991), Latour suggests that ‘a mediator?…??creates what it translates as well as the entities between which it plays the mediating role?…??The layering of intermediaries is replaced by chains of mediators’ (Latour 1993, 78)."

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,Pseudonymous
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 11:58 AM

@ Jag: Interesting quotation from Sharp. Do we have to consider his use of the word 'educated' in the context of his discussion of the illiterate and the unlettered?

On G Born: was that the paper that mentioned ANT theory? I'll go back and see. Never felt much inclined to get involved with ANT theory, always had sneaking suspicion it was some kind of post-modernist playful academic joke. Probably just me.

@ Jim.

The comments you make about Lloyd's more expansive "waffle" are not pertinent to the question of whether he believed that there was a pure oral tradition once literacy had been established. I cannot be bothered just now to plough through his book to find the quotation I want, but I know it is there. At one point he says he thinks literate people write better songs than non-literate people. I suspect he might have been thinking of his own 'improved' versions.

"your theory that English people didn't (or couldn't) make their own songs". Yet another example of the misrepresentation of what posters say.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 09:49 AM

""However, I would tend to agree with Bert Lloyd that the idea of a purely oral tradition stretching back over centuries is a non-starter.""
Utter nonsense
The first chapter of 'Folk Song in England' compares the oral tradition with the primitive practice of tribesmen telling their thoughts to inanimate objects such as trees (Bowra's suggestion also)
Bert makes a comparison between the ballad, 'Lady Isobel and the Elf Knight' and the medieval sword hanging in the Leningrad Museum which is illustrated with a knight displaying the heads of two women victims
He was always expressing his belief that these songs were many centuries od - and international
You really are main this up

I assume you hastily dipped into Wiki for your info on yet another new colection(to you) Carmina Gadelica
I suggest you look further -
Some academis to question what Carmichael did with it - others do not, but that was not why I put it up
Nobody has ever suggested that the contents came from 'the Scottish People' - as opposed to your theory that English people didn't (or couldn't) make their own songs
You are ducking and diving like a politician
Try working things out for yourself
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,jag
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 09:19 AM

... So Sharp's usage predated Adorno.

Pseud. - G Born is one of the authors of that paper that Jack Campin linked near the top.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,Starship
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 09:15 AM

Pseudonymous wrote, "However, I would tend to agree with Bert Lloyd that the idea of a purely oral tradition stretching back over centuries is a non-starter."

A childhood game often used in schools and at parties wherein one person whispers a phrase to another person who in turn does the same to another, etc., would attest to the veracity of that statement. Somebody somewhere created the initial lyrics. If they were written to make money (broadsheets/chaps) or to protest a grievance, someone wrote/created the words. That they exist today attests that they--meaning the song lyrics--have entered the 'tradition', but what that means in the final analysis is anyone's guess. Everything has a starting point. My understanding from reading the educated opinions of the many excellent researchers and thinkers who have posted to this thread (and others of its kind) indicate that if there is a known author then the song cannot be traditional, but that defies logic on a few counts. So I admit to being confused as to what exactly is meant by traditional songs or lyrics, mediated or not. I am happy to be educated. If that is too far off topic, then forget I asked, because it is not my intent to start a war of words as to what is meant by the terminology.

Some years back (about fifty) the Tasaday were 'discovered' in the Philippines. They were a then unknown "stone-age" people newly found by anthropologists(??). It turned out the whole thing was pretty much a hoax. It will take wiser heads than mine to determine if similar occurrences have happened in the tradition or entered the tradition due to intent, happenstance or circumstance.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Georgina Born: https://www.music.ox.ac.uk/about/people/academic-staff/university-lecturers-and-college-fellows/georgina-born/

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,jag
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 09:11 AM

Sharp, 1907, "Some Conclusions", one occurance. "No collector would accept as authentic a folk-air which came to him through the mediation of an educated singer."

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,Pseudonymous
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 09:03 AM

The 2nd chapter in Ord's thesis is about the Radio Ballads. He looks at them as an example of revivalist practice and discusses how tape editing was used to 'contruct working class culture' (by which I think he means present, or present an image of).

Then he discusses Topic Records. And he goes on to Pentangle. I liked Pentangle.

Ord uses the term 'mediation' several times, but does not refer to Adorno. He cites somebody called 'Georgina Born' on musical mediation.
He does refer to Dave Harker, but also, and more often, to Ben Harker, including his work on theatre and on communists on radio.

He discussed the revival with many of those involved, including Bill Leader. It is an academic piece but interesting.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,Pseudonymous
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 08:26 AM

Regarding the 'Carmina Gadelica', a quick google shows me that this text is suspected of being mediated. It almost goes without saying, I am coming to think. The wiki entry suggests that it is not generally thought of as presenting a 'literal' account of what was happening in the oral tradition. Regarding who wrote the various pieces contained therein, I do not know what information is available. So I don't feel that this text is particularly useful in arguing that 'folk' stuff was originally written by the lowest class, even if some very very poor people were singing it.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,Pseudonymous
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 07:36 AM

"I wonder how much of the background information associated with the older collections is essential packaging ("tell us something about this song") and marketing hype ("Ancient..., Relics of...") rather than deeply meaningful theorising."

This is an interesting point. I referred a while ago to a PhD by Matthew Ord which went into some of these issues in respect of revivalist materials. The practice of producing 'liner notes' is one that caught my attention, not least because a great many of these appear to have been flawed. Ord goes beyond written texts to look at 'multimodal' semiotic practices. By this he means that images, text and sound work together to create a picture. It was a University of Newcastle thesis and you will find it by googling.

@ Jag@ I respect your point of view and the civility with which you express your ideas, but I wonder whether finding a 'simple' view of Sharp's piece risks misrepresenting it.

@ Jim: I wrote 'it is the idea that folk song was written by the lowest class that I cannot agree with' in the context of the discussion of Sharp. To clarify my point: I do not deny that anybody can make up a song, and I never have. The point I was making but probably did not express well enough was that I think it is an oversimplification of Sharp to say that he believed that the old English songs he was collecting had been produced by the lowest social stratum, and that his discussion of their more broad racial origin would make this view illogical if he did hold it.

However, I would tend to agree with Bert Lloyd that the idea of a purely oral tradition stretching back over centuries is a non-starter.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,jag
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 06:47 AM

@Brian Peters. Thanks for your comments about mediating the songs - I take your point.

I guess with the older collectors changing a song with an 'antiquarian' or 'folklorist' hat on is different to making them into songs for contemporary singers.

Most of the mediating I have been the recipient of is album cover notes and performers introductions. I wonder how much of the background information associated with the older collections is essential packaging ("tell us something about this song") and marketing hype ("Ancient..., Relics of...") rather than deeply meaningful theorising.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 06:13 AM

"it is the idea that folk song was written by the lowest class that I cannot agree with. "
Then the English were far less creatively cultural than the Scots who were noted for their masses of bothy and improvised waulking songs, milking and churning chants, not to mention the beautiful folk prayers and hymns found in Carmichael's 'Carmina Gadelica'
The 'tic Paddies' across the Irish pond left them standing by creating many thousands of local songs covering every aspect of existence from shipwrecks, national independence songs - right though to to murder ballads and on the-spot pieces about farting in church
Bernard Manning sure goth things the wrong way round big time
Even the non-literate Travellers were streets ahead of the English as song-makers
Do you think it was an inferior education system or were the English naturally backward ?
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,jag
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 06:06 AM

@Pseudonymous re your 23 Feb 20 - 02:27 AM post. I think you are overcomplicating things in your discussion of Sharp. He sets out his way of thinking at the time very clearly in Chapter 1 of "Some Conclusions".

One line of thought I have had whilst reading about 'mediation' of Folk music is "have I, during the 'second revival', been conned or unintentionally misled?". I read "Some Conclusions" in the mid 1970's but, despite the convincing criticisms of it in recent discussions, I don't think it sent me down the wrong track. I found one reason why.

Like some others I have been looking at the first edition of "Some Conclusions" found online. Having finished another book (which you will want to discuss) and looking for a place on the shelf for it I discovered that the "Some Conclusions" I had read was the 1965 edition edited by Maud Karples. It has a 1964 Preface giving 9 pages of Sharp mediated by Karples. I think that takes the edge off many of the criticisms (and probably gives scope for some new ones) so whilst the first edition is what we need for discussing the 'first revival' if we are considering what other people say about Sharp we shouldn't miss out Karples later thoughts.

Off-topic, harking back to Harker. The chapter title "The Strong Men and Women before Agamemnon is an unacknowledged 'quote' from Vaughan Williams' 1954 Appreciation of Sharp in the later editions of "Some Conclusions". Except that Vaugham Williams has "there were strong men before Agamemnon". He also has "... tunes which the average amateur could easily sing... ... with accompaniments which their sisters or girlfriends could easily play"

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Jack Campin
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 05:10 AM

Sharp seems to have a conception of English society rather like Gerard Winstanley's, the "Norman yoke" - the division is not so much ethnic (though the descendants of the Norman aristocracy did tend to retain their wealth) as that the Norman *system* survived for centuries. Perhaps William Morris knew about Winstanley and the other 17th century radicals? - they weren't common knowledge until people like Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson wrote about them in the 1960s.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,Pseudonymous
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 02:27 AM

Looking back at my posts earlier, it is the idea that folk song was written by the lowest class that I cannot agree with. Brian is right that Sharp did use 'labouring classes'. Yes, But he also in the same paper argued that folk (music) came from the 'race', and was therefore a fit basis for musical education in schools and for a future national art music. When first reading him, I felt his ideas didn't always fit together and Brian's useful discussion brings this aspect of the slightly contradictory ideas he has home to me. Because I don't think Sharp wanted to argue that the music of the labouring classes was a fit basis for a national art music: his focus is on the 'race', which he seems to conceive of as Saxon/Aryan and to be made up of 'the common people'. I also come back to the point made before about time frames: Sharp pushes origins back into some unknown and undated (undatable?) past so who knows what his views might have been about social stratification at that time and when this uneducated, non-literate common people is supposed to have existed. And Sharp was used to interacting with the very top middle classes: one of his books was dedicated to two princes who had been his pupils. I tend to think that the 'common people' he envisaged might have included anybody below the nobility, who, I think, have tended over history not to be English/old Saxon, though Victoria was partly German herself and was married to a German. Following 1066 they were and for generations spoke French.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,Pseudonymous
Date: 23 Feb 20 - 02:14 AM

@ Jack.

Hello

1. I think you are right about Adorno, though the little I know about his use of the term suggests that he uses it in a much more complicated way than Harker does in Fakesong.

2. One For the Money is indeed interesting. It shed some light on John Hammond (of Carnegie Hall Concerts fame), for example. Some later chapters particularly caught my attention.

3 You asked about other books in the series: I have one by Richard Middleton who wrote the introduction to Harker. It's about popular music and was an OU textbook. It is a very theory thick book with some detailed musicology in it. For me it is a 'dipper-in' when you have the mental energy for it. He too mentions Adorno and mediation, but sort of takes it as read that you are familiar with Adorno. But I think maybe Middleton wants to take from Adorno a view that jazz and popular music as part of the culture industry make capitalism more acceptable because pleasurable. And that capitalism is unavoidable and all consuming. Middleton seems to take much of what is labelled 'folk' as part of the culture industry. But in my experience pointing out how revivalist folk people do (and probably have to) in fact engage with aspects of the culture industry (as, for example, in making and selling CDs) makes one few friends on Mudcat.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Jack Campin
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 04:10 PM

I've just been looking through the earliest version of the ideas in "Fakesong", Harker"'s "Cecil Sharp in Somerset: Some Conclusions" (Folk Music Journal 1972, No. 3). It goes through much the same complaints about Sharp's unreliability, but doesn't use the word "mediation" anywhere that I've noticed. It's a dense slog to get through. As well as the more explicit semiotic language, the more expansive scope of "Fakesong" makes for a much easier read. As do the occasional flashes of sarcasm. Grumbles about technical vocabulary get it dead backwards here.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Brian Peters
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 03:08 PM

There seems to be some uncertainty here as to what Cecil Sharp was talking about when he referred to “the song-books of the past”. These would have been collections of early 19th century art music compositions, certainly including the works of Charles Dibdin - whose songs Sharp made a point of saying had almost completely died out amongst the peasantry in spite of their previous popularity - and Henry Bishop, whose ‘Home Sweet Home’ he likewise never heard in the field. He might also have been thinking of the British Songster of 1786, which contained the hits of the day from the pleasure gardens, though I haven’t found any reference to it in his writings. His point was that composed ‘art-songs’ of this kind were not only qualitatively different from the songs he described as ‘folk’, but had no been adopted by ‘the folk’. He gave due consideration to the idea that folk songs might be ‘garden escapes’ from the popular or art music of the past, but finally came down on the side of the theory that they were “the musical creations of the common people”, albeit through the cumulative effects of variation and selection rather than necessarily in their original composition.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Brian Peters
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 03:04 PM

‘jag’ wrote: ”as I read him, Harker was not talking about collectors mediating individual songs but a category of song that they were seeking out.”

He claimed both, and the alteration of song texts (and, to a lesser extent, tunes) was one of the main planks of the argument that the category ‘folk song’ was fraudulent. Selectivity – i.e. leaving out stuff not deemed suitable – and the social backgrounds of the collectors were the other chief lines of attack, but misrepresentation of the actual repertoire was of paramount importance. Consider this passage on Baring-Gould (p 166):

“Baring-Gould wrote 'fresh verses' to replace a 'great part of the words' that was 'obscene or indelicate' .... his assumptions about being 'imbued with the feeling of the folk poet' are staggeringly arrogant... Tampering with the texts was totally in order... Sheppard would often change the rhythm of a piece, or invert a musical phrase... 'Frequently the whole character of the original song was changed to what was practically his own invention in the style of his period'... What he was doing, of course, was to 're-write' a culture.”

In other words, the various textual and musical emendations were precisely the means by which ‘workers’ culture’ was ‘mediated’. Elsewhere in Fakesong the most is made of every possible example of editorial intervention, often at the level of the individual song. We’re told that Bishop Percy:

“’puffed out the 39 lines of the Child of Ell; he pomatumed the Heir of Lin till it shone again; he stuffed bits of wool into Sir Cawline, Sir Aldingar: he powdered everything'. The texts were “maimed beyond recognition” and “would have been quite unrecognizable in the culture from which [they] came” It’s suggested that “such restoration might be tantamount
to forgery”.

There are lots more passages relating to songs having been tampered with:

“Hogg took at least one text down from 'a crazy old man, and a woman deranged in her
mind', in 'plain prose', which the Ettrick Shepherd promptly worked up into verse. Kinmont Willie and Jamie Telfer remain under suspicion” (p 60)

“He [Scott] admitted to having 'restored' part of a text, made 'conjectural emendations', 'supplied' verses, 'corrected' one version from another, and 'collated' two variants according to his notions of 'merit'... Child found 'not quite forty petty alterations' one piece, and 'numerous alterations' in another.” (p 69)

“They [Bruce & Stokoe] sifted through Hepple's songs, picked bits and pieces out of Bell's Rhymes, and often altered them to 'fit'” (p 165)

Some of these claims may well be accurate, though I quote them purely to demonstrate the focus of Harker’s attack. He’s on a stickier wicket when discussing Cecil Sharp, who comes in for a major kicking regarding his editing of songs for publication. However, as I described on the earlier Fakesong thread, Bearman has disproved the specific accusations regarding Geordie and Wraggle Taggle Gypsies, and I was able to debunk the claims regarding several other named songs, after an afternoon’s investigation. Harker’s interpretation of Sharp’s disinclination to use the phonograph (for which there were several good reasons) is that “Sharp's... power to edit repertoires, separate tunes from words and generally intervene in workers' culture before it became public would have been severely undermined.” In other words, his ‘doctoring’ of the songs would have been discovered. In Fakesong, ‘mediation’ of the actual material is essential to the notion of the ‘mediation’ of culture, but – as I also pointed out before – this makes the term highly ambiguous in its usage. Already in his thread I’ve had a post of a verbatim and entirely representative quote from Cecil Sharp described as a ‘mediating’, which only goes to prove my point that the term has been so devalued by sloppy usage as to be useless. And that Mudcat can sometimes be a looking-glass world.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 02:51 PM

"did anyone record Walter Pardon singing "Grandfather's Clock"?"
It's on his list on the other thread but it was one of those songs he wasn't particularly interested in singing so we didn't push it
I think Mike Yates must have - I'll check later
He did sing the amazing ' The Old Man's Advice' - a parody of 'Clock' which advocated all agricultural workers should Join the newly resurrected Agricultural Workers Union
Walter's uncles were founder members when it was re-established by George Edwards
HERE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnTAkQAGzac
Jim

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,jag
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 12:54 PM

Jim, did anyone record Walter Pardon singing "Grandfather's Clock"?

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 12:25 PM

Sorry - don't understand
We are discussing the term what people choose to do with it
I can think of no greater mediation that to claim long-rejected pop songs yesteryear, music hall compositions, Pleasure Garden pieces.... and everything that has been crammed under the same umbrella have anything whatever to do with the original term
Once a term has been accepted and established by general agreement for any significant length of time, then that's how it reains until a significant number of people decide to make it something else
Deliberate, agenda-driven misuse doesn't hack it, nor do claims of small numbers of self-appointed and self-promoted 'experts'
Language doesn't work like that, otherwise George Orwell would have been writing fact, not fiction when he wrote 1984
Jim

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,jag
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 11:49 AM

Quote from a response to Thoms' suggestion on the term Folklore "we must announce to our future contributors under the above head, that their communications will be subjected to a careful sifting—both as regards value, authenticity, and novelty" (full context at https://blog.oup.com/2008/07/folklore/)

The Folk being mediated as soon as they were given a name?

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 10:58 AM

Did Thoms collect folk songs ?
I understood that lore was his thing (hope that wasn't a trick question (maybe you're mixing him up with William Henry Thomas)
Are you that inse cure that you need to use terms like "allowed to accept"
Nobody makes any rules here - this is something that has been generally accepted worldwide for over a century
It seed my life pretty will up to now, but then again, I always was a "starry-eyed naivete" as you well know!!
How long has that train I missed been gone ?
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 10:01 AM

Just a simple question...were any of the songs in Thoms's work folk songs by ANY definition? If you accept what was in Thoms's book as folk songs what else are we allowed to accept?

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 08:21 AM

"Joseph Jacobs thought that they didn't exist ""
Thom's definition caught on and became the international identification of lore tales, dance music, songs.... and pretty well everything else associated with the people ever since
In the end it doesn't matter once you accet the uniqueness of what we call folk song, which has so much else going for it
Folklore works as an identification tag
Jim

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,jag
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 07:30 AM

Culturally "the folk" were identified specifically in 1846 by William Thoms - it is their songs, dances and music Sharp was collecting

Joseph Jacobs thought that they didn't exist "The Folk is simply a name for our ignorance... ... Yes, I repeat it, the Folk is a fraud, a delusion, a myth."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Folk-Lore/Volume_4 /The_Folk

"Fraudsong" doesn't work quite so well.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: An Buachaill Caol Dubh
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 07:08 AM

If anyone had mentioned a "Pacer" to me until a minute or two past, I'd have been thinking of horses, and preparing to tug the oul' forelock as the Gentry rode by...

I'll get my plaid now (a bit of "mediation" going on there).

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,jag
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 07:03 AM

"If you're a transpotter, you are not mediating if you don't look for buses"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35725299

What if you are a tunespotter and you find one attached to some ill-fitting words?

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 06:38 AM

"I think it might help if Jim a) read Harker b) read the last thread."
It might help if you read what is put up rather than denigrating the sender
Harker did the latter big time and got his arse kicked for doing little else
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: An Buachaill Caol Dubh
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 06:35 AM

Just for the sake of providing some material which is of interest and some particular relevance to a broader discussion than the work of Sharp, here are two quotations from Allan Ramsay and Robert Burns:

"When those good old Bards wrote, we had not yet made Use of imported Trimmings upon our Cloaths, nor of foreign Embroidery in our Writings. Their Poetry is the Product of their own Country, not pilfered and spoiled in the Transportation from abroad: Their Images are native, and their Landskips domestick; copied from those Fields and Meadows we every Day behold.
    The Morning rises (in the Poets Description) as she does in the Scottish Horizon. We are not carried to Greece or Italy for a Shade, a Stream or a Breeze. The Groves rise in our own Valleys; the Rivers flow from our own Fountains, and the Winds blow upon our own Hills. I find not Fault with those Things, as they are in Greece or Italy: But with a Northern Poet for fetching his Materials from these Places, in a Poem, of which his own Country is the Scene; as our Hymners to the Spring and Makers of Pastorals frequently do . . . However, I do not expect that these Poems should please every Body, nay the critical Reader must needs find several Faults; for I own that there will be found in these Volumes two or three Pieces, whose Antiquity is their greatest Value; yet still I am perswaded there are many more that shall merit Approbation and Applause than Censure and Blame. The best Works are but a Kind of Miscellany, and the cleanest Corn is not without some Chaff, no not after often Winnowing: Besides, Dispraise is the easiest Part of Learning, and but at best the Offspring of uncharitable Wit. Every Clown can see that the Furrow is crooked, but where is the Man that will plow me one straight?"
                         Allan Ramsay, Preface to "The Ever Green".

"Wherever the old words could be recovered, they have been preferred; both as generally suiting better the genius of the tunes, and to preserve the productions of those earlier Sons of the Scottish Muses, some of whose names deserved a better fate than has befallen them. - "Buried 'midst the wreck of things which were". Of our more modern Songs, the Editor has inserted the Authors' names as far as he could ascertain them; and as that was neglected in the first Volume, it is annexed here. - If he have made any mistakes in this affair, which he possibly may, he shall be very grateful at being set right. Ignorance and Prejudice may perhaps affect to sneer at the simplicity of the poetry or music of some of these pieces; but their having been for ages the favourites of Nature's Judges - the Common People, was to the Editor a sufficient test of their merit."
                      Robert Burns, Preface to The Scots Musical Museum, Vol. II.

The date of Burns's Preface is 1788; of Ramsay's, 1724.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,Jack Campin
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 06:34 AM

Sharp is not talking about the words. Granted, he noted them down, but the focus of the piece is what sort of music should be taught in state schools

It is quite conceivable that the songs Sharp was looking for might have used words that largely derived from knowable print sources, set to tunes which had evolved in oral tradition into an idiom largely independent of the one they started out in. And Sharp would have been more interested in the kinds of melody his "peasants" had created or preserved. Did he make that distinction himself?

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 06:33 AM

"but a category of song that they were seeking out."
You mean - folk songs ?
That's not mediation - it's doing what you say you're doing
Culturally "the folk" were identified specifically in 1846 by William Thoms - it is their songs, dances and music Sharp was collecting
If you're a transpotter, you are not mediating if you don't look for buses
Jim

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,jag
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 05:46 AM

On the subject of the thread, as I read him, Harker was not talking about collectors mediating individual songs but a category of song that they were seeking out. He also regards them as mediating the world of a conceptual group of people - 'the Folk' - who they regarded as having created and/or developed that body of song.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 05:23 AM

If you care to look up Sharp's changing attitudes towards the working people he collected from yuo need to go no further than Harker himself (contradictory as it it)
Sharp left the Fabians because of their connection with the emerging Labour Party, but as his work progressed he changed his mind and rejoined, largely influenced by Mary Webb, who persuaded him to taka a 'class stance'
His close collegue, Mary Neal was an active campaigner for the betterment of working conditions and a suffragette
Hardly the "distainful ivory towerists" you people pant them
Please read the books you quote from
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,Pseudonymous
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 05:15 AM

Bearman, sorry mistyped it.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,Pseudonymous
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 05:14 AM

For an analysis of the people from whom Sharp took songs, the previous thread referred people to the historical research of Beaman, who went to some lengths to demonstrate that not all of them were people selling their labour for pay, his definition of working class. One was a farmer employing lots of people (but still a peasant according to Victorian definitions).

I think it might help if Jim a) read Harker b) read the last thread.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,Pseudonymous
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 05:09 AM

"As well search for a wild rose in a well kept garden, as for a folk-song in the song-books of the past".

The question was asked which past. Sharp would have been speaking of the recent past, because he was arguing in favour of a new folk song book, his. And we all know what those turned out to be like.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 04:49 AM

"If the aim is to give readers of this thread a full picture of Sharp's concept, then, for, me, picking out small extracts and mediating them in ways that suit a particular view may not be the way to go about it. I feel that this is what you may be doing."
Which is what you have constantly done, as Harker did before you

"Sharp state that folk songs were written by the lowest class"#Jus as well, as nobody knows who wrote them
What he said is that they belonged to the lower classes - he intimated that they made them and quoted Motherwell in saying they should not be interfered with so as not to destroy the language i which they had been made (Some Conclusions) and Motherwell's Minstrelsy)

He ws forecd to modify the songs he published for schools otherwise they would not have been accepted - what were published in the collections and the Journal were as collected - a red herring

"And Jim's assertion that Sharp was focussed on the agricultural poor certainly has no foundation in what Sharp wrote."
Don't think he took many songs from charted accountants or bus drivers
Don't be silly
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,Pseudonymous
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 04:47 AM

Regarding Dark Arches: What I pointed out was that Jim had stated plainly om the past week or so that this was the only song Pardon ever used printed materials to fill out the words of. I pointed out that over a period of several decades either Pat and Jim or Jim alone, posting on Mudcat had made a contradictory assertion, stating that 'some' or 'several' of his pieces had been made in this way.

I am happy to discuss whether this contradictory set of messages illustrated 'mediation' as this term is used in folk music, but I am sure we could find lots of other ways to describe it.

Nobody on these threads has said that the working class had no culture. It would be a ridiculous statement to make. Harker himself said no such thing. I don't know where Jim got the idea that he did.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: GUEST,Pseudonymous
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 04:29 AM

Hello Brian

If the aim is to give readers of this thread a full picture of Sharp's concept, then, for, me, picking out small extracts and mediating them in ways that suit a particular view may not be the way to go about it. I feel that this is what you may be doing.

The point I was making is that at no point did Sharp state that folk songs were written by the lowest class. So for me a post which says he was referring to the 'labouring classes' plural doesn't focus on the point I was making.

But what we need to note, I suggest, is that in this piece as a whole, Sharp is not talking about the words. Granted, he noted them down, but the focus of the piece is what sort of music should be taught in state schools, where the teaching of music had been made compulsory. It was written as part of an ongoing dispute between Sharp and other interested parties about what sort of songs children should be taught to sing.

Sharp himself had already published one set of songs for use in schools and homes, which included what they called 'national songs', ones with known composers and lyricists. But at this point he had changed tack. He was arguing that national songs should not be taught in schools; what should be taught was songs using tunes that he had collected, which he thought would improve the minds of the lower classes and provide national unity and lead eventually to the production of national 'art' music based on the traditional melodies he was collecting. These songs, as Sharp eventually published them for public consumption, would have words modified in various ways, including the removal of dialect or ungrammatical language and a general cleaning up to suit the mores of the time.

As it happens, your use of the term 'labouring classes' tends to confirm my point. And Jim's assertion that Sharp was focussed on the agricultural poor certainly has no foundation in what Sharp wrote. Nor does it describe the sample from whom Sharp took the material he collected, as has been discussed in some detail.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 22 Feb 20 - 03:53 AM

" I know that last word might be discountenanced by any who think a song should be passed on exactly as received. That's another issue."
If that had ever been a 'rule' for singers, we would only have ever have had one version of Barbara Allen rather than the two hundred plus that we know to have been made down the years and all over the English-speaking world
The situation is different for collectors (outsiders) in that you need to pass on the songs as you get them
For instance, the song 'Dark Arches' that our point-scorer made such an issue of (because she could find nothing else:
When Walter Pardon sought out a full version of this song, which his uncles would only sing a few verses of to him because of its 'indecent' nature, he was doind what every traditional singer in history had done - seeking out a fuller or 'better' version to sing.
That is not 'mediation' - or if it is, our entire tradition has been 'mediated' - if Dave Harker is right, that makes our entire folk repertoire 'Fakesong' - nonsense of course.
As collectors, Pat and I recorded the fragment and archived it as such - it went into the British Library listed as a (frag)
Had we re-recorded the full version (which I was surprised to find later, we hadn't), we would have annotated it with the information of where Walter had obtained it, but Walter did that every time he sang it publicly

It makes me angry when I read the 'Little People' snapping at the heels pf 'giants' like Bert Lloyd, accusing them of faking songs - he did no such think, as far as anybody knows
Bert was a singer who set out to instigate an interest in the music he felt important by singing good versions of songs rather than pert - remembered fragments
Some of tne neo-academics who still say that Bert and others 'faked' songs are still denigrating them for not being what they feel he should have been
They are like the the householder who was interviewed about Traveller's life-style said to the 'Travelling People' interviewer - "why can't they be just like us"

'Musical Museum' is one of my favourite collections - despite being one of the worst indexed
We have an early edition (cost all of £4) which is beginning to crumble - a pain in the bum
Burns was one of the most important of the Scots collectors - someone from farming stock taking down songs from the people he grew up with
That he became Scotland's most revered poet by using his native vernacular is something to be admired - yet there he is, high on Harker's hit-list accused of adapting what he collected "to suit bourgeois taste"
Bloody insane

"I think I am going to stick by my point about Sharp."
Of course you are - why change a lifelong habit and accept the facts ?
The large lump I put up was a direct quote from 'Some Conclusion' - it was a continuation of earlier points which were then continued at length later in the chapter
But why watch your argument fall to pieces by accepting what Sharp actually wrote !!!!
Sharp was of his time and class, yet he did more to put working people's culture on the map than most others have ever done - before or since
Nowadays it seems, many 'academics' are busily ferreting way desperately trying to prove that the agricultural poor had no culture, but had to pay bad poets to speak for them
Who to follow eh ?
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: An Buachaill Caol Dubh
Date: 21 Feb 20 - 07:59 PM

Yes, Steve Gardham, I agree entirely re. Stenhouse, and had added the name so that his work would go along with Laing's rather than seeming to be forgotten or dismissed (and J C Dick for similar reason); David Herd has been mentioned already. Stenhouse's labours have often made my personal researches both shorter and longer, since the reader often finds himself following a web of cross-references. And, since Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe made pictures for the Bannatyne Club, there's another Scottish name that might be included in this long survey of collecting and mediating.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Brian Peters
Date: 21 Feb 20 - 06:05 PM

The discussion of what class of person Sharp was talking about is tangential to the thread topic, but the following may help to understand his point of view:

Some Conclusions, p97
"On the other hand, the actual occupations of his life less often form the subject of the peasant's song, although there are a certain number in which the pleasures of ploughing, sowing, reaping and other farming operations are extolled... After all, it is not unnatural, seeing that his hours of work are long and arduous, that the labourer should find more recreation in songs of romance and adventure than in
those which remind him of his toil."

Looks like the labouring classes, then.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 21 Feb 20 - 05:29 PM

Got carried away there. Need to be more specific in view of the thread title. I don't believe Laing was mediating the ballads themselves but as he travelled about the country with his day job he was definitely mediating between the editors.

Subject: RE: Mediation and its definition in folk music
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 21 Feb 20 - 05:10 PM

HI ABCD
Some interesting points. I have long held the theory that David Laing was the main ballad broker in the early 19th century, not mediating perhaps himself, but encouraging the others and passing material and ideas between them. He also worked closely with Sharpe.

I don't see Stenhouse in that role. He wrote a useful commentary on the material in Johnson/Burns giving background info on the songs.