Inspired by Jack Campin's references to the musicological history of 'mediation', I took a look at Georgina Born (an almost impenetrable thicket of jargon and bad English) and also a review of Antoine Hennion’s A Passion for Music. I’ll share a sample for the good of your souls:

Born writes: “Mediation, then: from one perspective, as the clue to transcending idealist ontologies of music; from a second, mediation as diplomacy, as the negotiation between apparently incommensurable worlds.” In case that’s already got you losing the will to live, she goes on to describe Adorno’s “philosophically-overdetermined and sociologically partial account of the dialectic between autonomous music and the commodified music of the culture industry.” I can at least attempt to unpick that – we’re talking about what happens when music is developed commercially for public consumption which, to be fair, would describe the work of quite a few of Harker’s ‘mediators.’

Hennion considers the contrast between a painting - which can be considered from any number of perspectives but is finally a fixed object – and music, which is amorphous, “always on the verge of permutation”. It always needs to be remade, which leads to a proliferation of infinite intermediaries, interpreters, and re-producers. “Music is event and advent, which means that it is perpetually transformed by any contact with its public, on whose listening it inevitably depends. Hennion attempts to unravel the influence of mediators, which can be institutional, technical, economic, social, political, or individual, including, to be specific, universities, musicians, instruments, politicians, promoters, patrons, and on and on. Mediation focuses more on the construction and presentation of music than on its artistic quality or on an analytical study of the art object itself. Hennion also cites the example (very apposite to us in the folk music world) of the alternative ‘Baroque’ and ‘modern’ interpretations of Bach’s music, leading to two substantially different musical objects.

This is a much more sophisticated, and also far less judgemental, concept of ‘mediation’ than Fakesong’s sometimes reductive, sometimes generalised usage. When Harker writes that “[James Henry] Dixon knew the 'pace-egg' drama through the mediation of a young besom-maker,” he means that one of the actors involved in the drama ’recited’ (probably, sang) it directly to Dixon. So why on earth not just say so and make it clear to the reader?

Further usages where ‘editing’ would have done perfectly well: “songs were further mediated in the processes of editing and publishing”; [of Lloyd and Vaughan Williams’s book] “Even the tunes were subject to further mediation”; [of Kidson’s attempts to regularize tunes for publication] “’what the singer obviously means' , as mediated by the 'expert' collector”; Chambers was “a mediator of others' mediations”.

But it’s not just used narrowly for textual or musical emendations – at the other end of the scale, we’re told that the “Scots people and culture” were “mediated by Thomson.” Harker is adopting a Humpty-Dumpty definition of ‘mediation’ – and if you accept it, then of course none of his individual usages is ‘wrong’.

This practice makes meaning unclear, possibly leading to ambiguity or suspicion. Could the besom-maker perhaps have written down the pace-egg song for Dixon after a gap of several years, could he have learned it second-hand from a relative and relied on his imperfect memory, or could he even have found it in a book of local customs? No: he was an actual participant in the drama, and he conveyed it first-hand to Dixon – but we’re not told this by Harker’s prose. As a reader, I like to know exactly what is meant, without having to do a google search to find the original document that Harker ‘mediated’. As a reader I also get very weary of being beaten over the head by constant repetition of the author’s pet words, whether ‘mediator’ or ‘bourgeois’. It just gets very tiresome.