The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #146595 Message #3396894
Posted By: GUEST,Blandiver
29-Aug-12 - 05:35 AM
Thread Name: Can a pop song become traditional?
Subject: RE: Can a pop song become traditional?
The end result is that Irish traditional music will survive and thrive for at least two more generations.
Well a grim nationalistic MOR pastiche of it anyway. I'm reminded of an old Irish travelling musician I once sat in a session with in Tyneside back in the mid 1980s who left when the company started up with Simon Jeffe's Music for a Found Harmonium.
'You okay?' said I.
'It's not music anymore - it's just notes.' said he.
I remember another Irish session, in Durham at The Colpitts, very studied, earnest and famed for the sort of dazzling po-faced ultra-slick muso virtuosity that now typifies the genre. I was rapidly losing the will to live through in the other bar when one of the old Irish regulars came in, took one listen and proclaimed: 'Holy Mary Mother of God! It's Riverdance night!' and turned on her heel and left.
That said, I could listen to Seamus Ennis, Felix Doran & Willie Clancy all day - and very often do.
Me, I'm just happy that formula-free feral Human Traditional Music will survive and thrive as long as there are people on planet earth to play it, and will do so regardless of the prescriptions of Folk on what constitutes Traditional or Folk or whatever. All the Ethnomusicologist has to do is just sit back and rejoice at the reality of it all; just as the linguist rejoices in the living reality of language and the ethnologist in the living reality of cultural diversity. Folk will always be seen as risable & reactive by the majority of the population who are way too busy getting on with the realities of life, and music, to care about anything other than pure creative joy of doing it.