As the study of folk music has always been an academic pursuit, one would think the degree course would follow on in that tradition - something more along the lines of Ethnomusicology, which is to say as an academic discipline, rather than a vocational one, given that actual folk music has never been that easy to quantify or qualify given its social / human context. I remember an old friend who was doing the post-grad Ethomusicology course at Durham telling me of the fun she was having trying to transcribe a field-recording she'd made of an amateur Barber Shop Quartet from Hartlepool.

More of this, one would have thought, would be useful, by way of collecting, cataloging, analysing and generally documenting a music which endures very often in the cultural hinterlands - certainly beyond the remit of the likes of Folkworks, whom, I believe, we have to thank for the degree course, determindly churning out its 'Stars of the Future.'