Bill D

First off I will agree wholeheartedly with you, I only managed about 10% of the point I was trying to make as well. We two do seem to represent the extremes, there must be a lot of views in between ours?

I did enjoy your post it deserves more time and more thought before I can respond properly, but there are few things first off don't think that the creative process is hampered much by the bickering at all, they will just do it whatever. It is those that enjoy the music that lose out and in the long run the artists, because they do need someone to listen to their efforts. If you stick a narrow label on a performance, some will go because they like it but more will not go it because they think they do not like that type of music, even though if they went they may enjoy it. The label enables you filter things out but you may be 'throwing the baby out with the bath-water'.

You make the point that things in your narrow categories get "fuzzy around the edges". Is that not the place where all the firm categories, boundaries, ethnic groupings and educational grades fall down? In the borderline cases? The ones that don't fit neatly into one or could be fitted into two or more? It's these to me that make your categories unacceptable. Especially when the casualties are people.

The evolution in music I refer to is the change that comes about when musicians are exposed to the music and instruments of other cultures. We are living at a very exciting time and the pace of that change is getting faster. The more forced concoctions will not survive the evolutionary process but others will grow, it is a natural process that has always happened, it is just faster now. It is very similar to Natural Selection, if the mutation works it will become part of the body of music.

I can see the attraction to some people of having an ordered world, I just can't see it like that. I look up the night skies and I find no answers, just more and more questions and I glory in all the paths there are to take to find those answers.

P.S. I like 'mutts'.