Jack - you're so right about slow airs - I've never heard one played yet with anything like the feeling it must have started with, they seem to degenerate into just a slow succession of notes.

Steve-
"I've heard some brilliant "inexperienced" players. You can find 'em all over YouTube for a start. Experience is not measured in years, as one part of your post seems to imply"
- Yes, some are lucky and gain a great deal of experience, or at least exposure, in a short time, or even grow up in an environment so cultured that "experience" in the usual sense is almost irrelevant. But in general experience increases with passing time if not at the same rate for everyone.

"If you learned it from a tune book, unless you're experienced, you will not be playing by ear. You will be playing it from the dots".
No you won't be, any more than an actor says his lines from the written word. You'll be playing it from memory. And hopefully using your experience to play it, lets say, sympathetically. How many shakespearean actors rely on an unbroken aural tradition dating back to the bard, and how many learn from books - words - letters - we don't play dots anymore than they repeat letters!

"sessions are only one part of traditional music. Not a very old one at that"
-So what is the main part of the tradition, and where is it kept alive?

To me "folk" music is only a small part of the tradition of communal music making that Don refers to (11 Oct 12 - 05:56) and that I love to take part in.

Don't want to repeat anything else thats been said before so I'll stop now