I had an experience, researching a genre of recorded music for a Mudcat thread above the line, that turned into a trigger. An "opportunity for learning and growth" as they used to say. Edifying, certainly.

There I was listening to a compact disc from Gael Linn, and a song track recorded around 1960 for a vinyl album promoting the Gael Linn Cabaret which took musical performers to various venues in Ireland, some outside of Dublin. It was the fourth song on the album, and I was unprepared for the sound of it. After all, it was preceded by Máire Ní Scolaí, singing sean-nós in the recording studio as no doubt she sang it on RTE broadcasts. Within her own technical style, Ní Scolaí was an artist of restrained good taste, and never went for the cheap gesture.

Then a piano loudly played an introduction, and a Gaelic lyric -- it turns out to be an Irish Jacobite personification of Éire as Bonnie Prince Charlie's forsaken, faithful sweetheart -- was trumpeted forth by a soprano who, as I have posted elsewhere, sounded like a cross between Victor Herbert operetta and Wagnerian opera. Not a singer myself, I was however trained and schooled as a pianist who specialized in accompanying students of teachers of classical singing at the university/conservatory level, and this sound of voice and piano, so desperately European sounding, took me back to my student days.

I was forcibly reminded how I just merged with my studies, my repertoire, and everything that goes with that tradition, as a young student, and how unable I was to perceive that said tradition came from a century and an era that is over and done with. Two World Wars have made irreversible changes in the Europe from which this musical tradition came. While there are those who preserve what remains of the tradition, and people with deep pockets who sponsor said preservation, it is not really a healthy environment for a young artist to live and grow in. Of course I benefited from my efforts there, but I lament how mindless I was and how blinded to the impracticality of that whole way of life; I don't make that kind of music anymore, nor have done for many years. This public computer is about to kick me off, so good night, everybody.