Suibhne O'Piobaireachd (How DO you pronounce it?)

Sweeney O'Pibrock (i.e. Suibhne as in the mad bird king of ancient Irish poetic literature and Piobaireachd as in the classical music of the highland bagpipes; both have obsessed me since childhood and continue to do do today...)

I struggled a bit but persisted and I think I have got the gist of some of it at least.

Essentially, I strive to be fair, inclusive and open minded in the belief that we all have the right to feel these things the way we do, and we're each going to be feeling them differently anyway. It's damn near impossible to be truly objective, but if we can be subjectively inclusive, and appreciative of other's passions, then things is cool.

The Revival has given us some truly creative wonders, and continues to do so today, be it in session, singaround, concert hall or wherever, much as (say) Medieval Music has given us some truly modern classics. This might seem contradictory, but all music is of its time & era and thus is the cultural Zeitgeist determined, however we come into it. For me it was around 1967 when as a curious 6-year-old I flipped over my mother's copy of All You Need Is Love and listened to John Lennon's weird modal clavioline playing on Baby You're A Rich Man and heard in there something significant to all sorts of things. Essentially what I heard was Folk's idiomatic passage into Pop, however so exotically couched, but then Popular Music is synonymous with folk anyway; an unbroken tradition these past 50,000 years & quite possibly more.

Folk, of course, is a more conscious selection, which is ironic given the precepts: one is reminded of Maud Karpele's comment that Jean Ritchie wasn't a real Folk Singer on account of her education. It was Maud, of course, who gave us the 1954 Definition in the first place (thanks, Maud!) as part of the Orwellian-sounding International Folk Music Council, which is now, as johncharles reminds us below, the more ethnomusicologically sensitive International Council for Traditional Music, whose remit is very wide indeed. I've known ethnomusicologists study everything from Elvis Impersonators in Blackpool to Barbershop Quartets on Teeside; and I've seen ethnomusicological methodology applied to The Folk Scene in an early Channel 4 documentary by David Toop which really wasn't what Folkies wanted to see or hear at all.

The Revival will change; it's changing all the time & there's no second guessing how it'll turn out. The Tradition, on the other hand, is fixed, unchanging, and sacrosanct on various levels. We may draw from it, use it, bask in it, interpret it, squabble over it, study it, but even though I doubt we'll ever truly get the measure of it, it'll never change. The Tradition of English Speaking Folk Song & Ballad is finite, and it is cherished, but it is dead as a process, and that we have any sort of understanding of it all is a bit of a fluke really, but there it is, like fossils. In that sense The Folk Revival is a bit like Jurrassic Park, or those CGI interpretations of extinct life you see on TV - some masquerade as scholarly studies, others turn it into a more blatent form of entertainment. Like The Tradition, the fossil record remains finite, but subject to a myriad possible levels of reconstruction and interpretation; but no CGI recreation will ever make it into the fossil record no matter how instructive it might prove in our understanding of dinosaurs. This in no diminishes paleontolgy, because without it, we'd have no understanding of dinosaurs at all...