Why should we want to define traditional music?

There seems to be a strong feeling amongst some people that we want to use it to oppress people – You can't sing that here: it's not traditional: piss off. I've known that happen – Ewan McColl, NTMC, Ken Loveless all come to mind. I don't object to that, provided it's clearly advertised on the tin, but it's no part of my plan for world domination.

I recently received a substantial sum of public money to study traditional dance, and have spent it all in lap dance clubs, which I believe meet the wide definition of the ITMC. Well, actually I haven't, but I would like to think that if I had at least most of you, dear tax paying readers, would have the decency to feel outraged. For academic projects involving public funding I think some kind of definition that is tight as a duck's anus is more than just justifiable.

But most of all, as some people have already said, we want a definition because we want to communicate clearly, and in this situation we need to make the definition fairly tight, so that we all know what we are really talking about. Only if someone then tries to use that definition for function one above does that prove a problem. And to that end I like the old IFMC definition involving Continuity, Variation and Selection.