I didn't bring ducks into this debate but strangely enough they are a very good analogy to use, because the arrival of the duck as we know it is a relatively recent development, in evolutionary terms. All species (a label or category that we invented and that ducks do not always recognise) of duck, being closely related tend to hybridise quite easily and readily. The result is that we can see in the duck, the continuing process of natural selection as it happens and some very confused bird-watchers, trying to identify some of the results in the field.

If it quacks like a duck and other ducks quack back, to the extent that they get together to produce little ducks, then what they produce is most certainly a duck, whatever you may want to call it. It may not look (or sound) like the duck that you are used to, know and love but that is your problem not the ducks (or the music's).

1998 MEACHER MOVES TO SAVE THE WHITE-HEADED DUCK A new Task Force will co-ordinate action in the UK to conserve the globally threatened white-headed duck, Environment Minister Michael Meacher said today. The birds are threatened by hybridisation and competition with the North American ruddy duck.

You could argue that there would not have been a problem in the above case had the 'Ruddy Duck' not been imported into the UK, but it was and you have to accept the situation as it is. The process of evolution in nature and in music will continue and leave behind those who cannot adapt. The dinosaurs moved on to become DUCKS?.

I am sorry if I appear to be labouring the point, but music (and the other arts) to me offer some hope for our troubled world. It is a universal language and I do not like to see the same narrow aguments used in the world, used in music as well.

Too much suffering has been caused and is still being caused by people not neatly fitting in to the categories that others have defined for them. All I ask for is tolerance in all things.

I would suggest that categories in music are more for critics and writers than for those that listen to it and create the music. They prevent people from being exposed to music that they might otherwise like.

If we must have some in music can we have as few as possible and can they be wide and flexible rather than narrow and fixed?