Getting back to a couple of things that caught my interest earlier:

Spleen Cringe: There is no "traditional folk music". There are, however, plenty of traditional folk musics. Lots of different countries and regions have them - and guess what? They don't all sound the same! They're not a single genre! I presume, JohnP, you play a couple of them, perhaps from the UK/US traditions, rather than from, say, the Mongolian or Uzbekistani or Malian traditions? Personally I'm a huge fan of traditional folk musics from India, Pakistan, North Africa and the Middle East. None of them sound much like Dock Boggs or Lizzie Higgins, f'rinstance, much as I love the music of those two individuals. I guess that's not what you mean when you describe traditional music as a "genre"?

Yes, obviously there lots of traditions from lots of places. And no, they don't all sound the same. They do, however, sound a lot more like each other than any of them sound like modern pop or classical music. Since almost everyone on Mudcat is primarily involved with European or American folk music, it seems like if we need to delve into other traditions for specific discussions or examples, it is easy to get more specific. Most of the time it's not needed.

I have a lot of familiarity with European, British Isles, and American traditional idioms, and I hear common themes and similarities all over the place. I listen to but don't know much about Andean, Turkish, Greek, and North African music. They have the stamp of tradition in my ear, even though the melodies and rhythms are different. They don't sound anything at all like what I hear on the radio most of the time. For my purposes -- and that's all that really matters when I'm playing or listening -- I can easily lump them into one genre with a bunch of interweaving idioms.

Which brings us to:

Amos: But for any meaningful discussion within that broad stream, the fact must be faced that there are many traditions, of different temporal lengths, with different degrees of literacy or other devices in their transmission, and different musical dimensions. But it is absolutely obvious to me there is no single "tradition". There is a sheaf of them, wending and dividing and rejoining through time.

I love the interweaving of traditions -- in fact that's part of how the music came to be. I've noticed that European music gets more odd the farther east it goes -- German and Austrian music is pretty straightforward, Hungarian starts moving away from the "standard" modes and harmonic patterns, Bulgarian can be like that or more Turkish in sound, etc. I sometimes get accused of playing Bulgarian music when I'm playing Swedish music. There is a type of polska in 3/4 time that is rhythmically very nearly the same as a daichovo in 9/8, and which uses a scale that includes a one and a half steps between two of the notes. A cursory listening can make them sound like they come from the same tradition.

But the idea that really caught my interest here is wondering if the type of musical collusions/collisions that made Appalachian music, Cajun music, and the blues are still going on. Or has the prevalence of rock music and the shrinking world made that a thing of the past? Does anyone know of any blending of different types of traditional music to make a new idiom in the last hundred years or so?

Perhaps one of the reasons that rock music has become the music of the people is because it lends itself very well to mixing with any other musical genre or idiom, without losing the basis of what makes it rock. I hear Mexican rock, a few different types from Africa, Euro folk-rock, jazz fusion, rock based on classical music, and, of course, the blues. All definitely rock, all definitely influenced by and fused with completely different genres.

From a process standpoint, rock is even doing the whole change-through-the-gnerations thing. Just listen to Crossroads by Robert Johnson and then by Cream.