The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #142512 Message #3289355
Posted By: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
12-Jan-12 - 12:16 PM
Thread Name: 'Purist - a pejorative?
Subject: RE: 'Purist - a pejorative?
And for the umpteenth time, the Folk Process is about evolution, not creation. It's Darwinism rather than Genesis.
Actually, along with the whole concept of Folk, the Folk Process remains very much a theorectical perspective on a plethora of Popular Traditional Musical idioms for which there are a plethora of theorectical mechanisms. All music is subject to process (evolution as a creative process / creation as an evolutionary process) but dare I say that it takes as much faith to believe in the Folk Process per se (i.e that random amalgramation of memory loss and mondegreens which seems the prevalent orthodoxy here on Mudcat along with other such quare notions) as it does in the literal truth of Genesis?
Fact #1: Folk is an anomalous quasi-academic and ultimately patronising theoretical gloss on any given music, or act of working-class art / ceremony or functional object. For example, I made reference earlier on to the early 20th century Gypsy Clothes Peg I bought at the weekend from an antique shop over near Keighley. Whilst I bought it to use as a fiddle mute, I did so primarily because it beguiled me as a piece of beautifully made early 20th-century Roma Folk Art Treen. To the person who made it, of course, it would have simply be a) a clothes peg and b) a means of making some sort of income from frantic housewives trying to keep their laundry from blowing away of a blustery washing day. I hope it had a long life being used for exactly that, because whilst it's crap as a fiddle mute, it continues to beguile as a piece of beautifully made early 20th-century Roma Folk Art Treen. Now that's what I mean by patronising, even though that's exactly how I feel about it, so I can well empathise with the Antiquarian urge of folklore believe you me.
Given the various conditions of the Natural Habitat of what we now think of as being Traditional Folk Song (primarily oral, no copyright, highly creative master singers and song makers well versed in their tradition, static communities interfacing with other static communities via marriages, migrations, mendicants, travellers, no radios, no records other than ear wax &c. &c.) then is any surprise that each performance of any given song was a creative act in & of itself and quite different from any that had gone before it? I think not. Thing is, there would have been no actual record of that - a germ perhaps, or a notion, some line or image remembered and later built upon - unless (as in certain cases) those telling instances where a Broadside version becomes almost the definitive text as far as we call tell. As with all other Music Idioms (be they Popular, Classical & Sacred) process and fluidity are integral to the nature of the beast & might be said to be one of music's defining factors.
Fact #2 : The songs existed without Folk Theory; just as the birds exist without Ornithological Theory. In both cases taxidermy is an imperfect way of understanding the subject. Of course in many cases it's all we've got to go on, but the important thing here is to keep an open mind without wading in with pompous absolutes based on outmoded shibboleths, because that's no way of understanding anything.
I've known Traditional Storytellers (rather that Tellers of Traditional Stories) who were master story-makers in the Tradition of the Indo-European Folk Tale - extemporisers indeed, which chimes in with what Georgina Boyes quotes Joseph Jacobs as saying in The Imagined Village about the abilities of the old storytellers to make such stuff up on the spot, and something Jim Carroll said a while back about singers being able to improvise idiomatic Folk Song and Ballad. Such traditions of Free Styling exist in other idioms the world o'er, so it wouldn't really surprise me. But this no is no Process as such, rather it's just music, common, like Jazz, or Hip-Hop, or Indian classical music, or blues, or Western classical musicians like Messiaen and Bach improvising at their respective organs: all are defined by the essential fluidity of their respective traditions. Again, it's the nature o' the beast.
S O'P (armchair theorist maybe, but it's not just any old armchair...)