People really could take a lesson from what has happened in Ireland over the last decade.
Thirty odd years ago I would have said without hesitation that music here had little chance of a future.
Thanks to the dedication of a handful of people who went about building a foundation on which the music could survive and develop, Irish instrumental music has been guaranteed a future for generations to come.
The music has now been taken up (not over), by young players coming to it for the first time and quickly learning to play to a high a standard as I have ever heard, and they appear to be playing for the love of it rather than for the cudos.
THIS YOUNG PIPER is an example of what is happening today - the granndson of piper, Tom McCarthy, now nearly twenty years dead, who passed his love of music on to his children, who in turn passed it on to their children.
As friends of Tom Senior, we wondered what would happen to the Mccarthy's music - we no longer do - it is in safe hands.
It was achieved basically by realising what the music was, how important it is and building a foundation on that realisation rather than artificially forcing it into other forms and genres
The youngsters can do whatever they want with it now, and are - but they have a touchstone in the forms of The Irish Traditional Music Archive and a base to point to and return to, should they wish - The Willie Clancy Summer School (which will be holding its 43 annual school next July) and the other gatherings, get togethers and schools which have mushroomed over the years.
Deciding what the music is without faffing around crying "I don't know what "folk" means, seems to have done the trick.
Song still has some way to go here, but there are signs that this is BEGINNING TO HAPPEN TOO .
The overall driving force is not the celbrité or the chance to earn a living, but the music itself
I have little doubt that I'll shuffle off this mortal coil listening to good traditional music and song - I doubt if I would be able to say that if I still lived back home in Britain
MacColl once said that traditional music can survive anything but falling into the hands of people who don't like or understand it - sometimes I think that's exactly what has happened to it in Britain.
Jim Carroll