I've tried to go back to Jon's original question here, as to whether breaking with tradition is traditional. 'Traditional' seems to cover a huge time range, up to about 70 years ago. Ie everything up to about one average lifetime ago. So in about 70 years time our present should have receded back into the traditional era by my reckoning. As various people point out, things will have shaken out by then & the good innovations will be part of the tradition & the sacrileges will have been abandoned. By definition. Recieved wisdom is that the world has changed more over the last century than over a vast period of time before that. So maybe our perception of a very stable tradition is partly due to the fact that everything was more stable anyway. By that theory it would seem that breaking with tradition would be more in keeping with the way life is now, and would have been a rarer occurence during the period which we currently think of as traditional. So I'd reckon that 'breaking with tradition' must always have been part of the tradition, people being what they are. However it is likely that due to factors such as commercial competitiveness, broadcasting & accessibility, and rapid social and technological changes such 'breaks' are more frequent and more apparant. That's a first stab theory anyway

Kris