On Jim's voulez vous...

I am at the age when Ou sont les toilettes? is a more useful phrase. I have it in three languages.


I rather like the horserace analogy, but this just brings us to the equally tricky questions of evidence and dating.


Changing the subject, in the musical chapters Julia Bishop discusses how various folklorists have applied the concept of 'modes' to folk songs. For example, one person decided that anything in a major key was ionian and modal, rather than, let's say, 'scale-based', possibly from a belief that modes were older and there was a desire to provide old origins for tunes. Then somebody suggested that the concept of separate modes did not really fit the data, which was in any case somewhat floored for various reasons, including practical ones.
I thought of discussing this on one of the mode threads, but these are various and I cannot see an apt one. Some get too technical for me.

It interests me because half a lifetime ago, before I had any understanding of modes (I now have some basic understanding of what they call 'church modes), somebody told me that folk music was modal as if this were a well established fact. Yet Roud's book seems to challenge this idea. Need to go back and re-read, but finding it a valuable and interesting part of the book as a whole. My guess is that somebody with little musical knowledge could get to grips with it if they persevered. It seems quite well explained.   

So if anybody wanted to discuss this should it be here or a new thread or one of the existing mode threads.

?????Wittgenstein in this heat?????