Is there a future for traditional music

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: GUEST,Frank Hamilton Guest
Date: 20 Feb 00 - 10:22 AM

McGrath, I take your point about the school system. Maybe they should ban all education. At least until they go back to the drawing board and fix it.

Regarding the smoothing out of folk music to make it more accessible, I believe that this is what traditional folk singers do when they sing their variants. It's all about communication. Barbara Allen gets updated to deal with a new set of circumstances.

Regarding the "folk music is everything" argument, I can only say if it don't feel like folk it probably ain't. If a folk song is sung in the forest and there's no folklorist around to interpret it, does it exist?

It's disconcerting to think that future folk music may written on today's bathroom walls. Or rap and roll.

Frank

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: The Shambles
Date: 20 Feb 00 - 06:43 AM

We do at least know what we mean by the word music. Music is only truly created in the PRESENT, at the moment the notes are formed. It will not be the same as you have done it before or the same as you may do it again in the future.

The traditional way of doing something (including music) does not mean, the way we did it in the past but to continue in the way that we do it NOW.

It is not a long-dead and dusty fossil that we need to record and classify but a living, breathing and healthy animal to live along side. It is the difference between preservation of the past and conservation for the future.

The DT is so very important, not as a record of what we did but as a cyber tool of today, to help and enable us to continue doing exactly what we are doing NOW. This forum and now The Mudcat Song (and tune) Book, clearly demonstrate the present and I do not see any problems with the future of this music. For as a result of all this technology, we all now know so much more about the whole global nature of our music, influences and its appeal. The Mudcat, on its own clearly demonstrates that we are not alone.

The only danger, I see is in those who, because they are comfortable with it, would nail the music to some fixed moment in time (and place) and as a result watch it wither and die.

It has been interesting following the thread, to see how the distinctions are made between the past (=traditional), the present and the future as if they were all different countries?

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Barry Finn
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 10:26 PM

William Doerflinger collected songs & near 50 years ago published "Shantymen & Shantyboys", he's still around collecting. A couple of years ago he was at Mystic Seaport Sea Music Festival with his tape recorder, he was attending & recording the workshops that were featuring recently written songs. Leads me to believe he's on to something. Barry

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Willie-O
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 10:20 PM

>Will the songs go into a widespread oral tradition and be subjected to the editing and innovation of tens of thousands of people over several generations? Can that happen in the technological world of today.

Huh? How could it not happen? Now more than ever.

Anyway, traditional music is unkillable by definition. Despite commercial ebbs and flows, people that like it continue to like it, play it, create and share it. They don't stop liking it, and making it, because it's gone onto the Wired magazine "Tired" list. Your commercially driven media promulgate this silly notion that because something seems anachronistic that it doesn't exist--that the future, whatever it is, will be totally different than the past. This is mostly because the dreaded free market economy is fueled by this "bring on the new, throw old the old" concept--but it doesn't mirror the way people actually live their lives.

And if you want to know where to collect songs in the future, drop by McDonalds Corners Ontario in fifty years and look up my kids! I bet you they'll still have some of mine...and they'll be like new, hardly ever used. <(grin)> for I am...
Willie-O

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Troll
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 10:16 PM

Sourdough.

I don't believe that there is any way that anyone could give more than a broad guess as to what the future will hold for traditional music. I was born in 1940 and the world has changed so much in that time that I doubt that my Grandfather or his brothers would recognize it now. I barely recognize it myself sometimes. It has changed in the last ten years in ways that I would not-could not- imagine in 1990. It will change in the next ten years in ways that we cannot even perceive today.The best that we can do is to continue to sing and spread the gospel. The songs that will stand the test of time will make themselves known by the fact that we, the singers and performers, will remember and sing them. The rest will fall by the wayside. It has always been this way.There are thousands of songs in archives around the world that no one sings because they lack that special quality that speaks to the soul. They are there. Someone wrote them. Someone collected them, but they no longer speak if indeed they ever did save for a brief moment.

The good stuff lasts, no matter what.

troll

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Sourdough
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 09:58 PM

A few people seem to have understood what I was (apparently clumsily) trying to say. I'm going to give it another whirl.

I am not wondering whether traditional music will be sung in the future. Those who wrote something to the effect that "quality will out" I think are saying that it will and I agree. I'm asking something different. Maybe an example will help.

There are wonderful traditions of music sung by sailors of the "Iron Men" days, sailors on naval vessels, on whalers, on schooners, herring boats, codfishers, pirate ships, etc. There are people today who have caught the excitement of that music and some of them have the skill to communicate that to others even if their audience doesn't have much of an understanding of the life being sung.

However, that's different than a living tradition. There are no crews of sailors who are polishing the old songs, writing new verses, trading them as they move from ship to ship and passing them on to the next generation of sailors. The old songs now either get preserved like flies in amber or they get reworked by people who have little understanding of the lives sailors lived (imagine almost anyone today being tansported back in time to a mid-ocean forecastle gathering and announcing that he, too, was a real sailor. I suspect there are few alive who could carry that off if they had the oportunity.

Those who care about old songs and try to get to original collected versions often find they need to smooth out the melodies, change vocabularies to make the meaning more accessible, etc.

When songs travelled from the British Isles to the US, the lyrics went through a pattern of changes that was determined by the new culture they were coming in to. But they filled a need and were taken up in the churches, farmhouses, fields and forests of the new land. It was not performance music, it was home made, a part of daily life. Can this kind of music survive as a living tradition rooted deeply and widely in the culture today?

Are there songs being written today that will be around in years to come. However, it is hard for me to imagine what it is a collector would be collecting fifty years from now. Will the songs go into a widespread oral tradition and be subjected to the editing and innovation of tens of thousands of people over several generations? Can that happen in the technological world of today.

That is what I was asking, not "What is Folk Music" or "Is there good music being written today that will be around several decades from now?"

Where will these groups be that rely on themselves for entertainment, on music for self-expression - in our prisons? On our Rugby teams?

Sourdough

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: T in Oklahoma (Okiemockbird)
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 08:23 PM

Ho, folks! This seems to be a "what is folk ?" thread under another name.

I have never been satisfied with the "criterion of ignorance" for defining "folk" music. (This is the notion that folk music must originate among people who are unaware of distinctions between folk music and any other music.) Hence for me the songs that were collected in low-population rural areas are part of a continuum, and certainly not a closed canon.

One way I like to identify "folk" music is as music that circulates freely (no friction from copyright cops) as short one-line diationic or only slightly chromatic airs of fairly consistent tonality throughout (no fancy modulations or schmaltzy chromaticism.) Folk music, in this sense, can be an ever-expanding genre, as long as the term of copyright is short enough to allow a reasonable rate of turnover from copyright to public domain status. If that condition is met, folk music, as here defined, has a future.

T.

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Crowhugger
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 07:59 PM

I wonder if O'Carolan asked himself these questions.

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Osmium
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 07:54 PM

I have no doubt taht quality will survive. I'm fairly new to the traditional scene and so have had to be selective about what I learn and so will it be for future generations. The advantage they will have is databases such as Mudcat provides that will allow them to listen to something close to the original intent. If it doesn't work for them it won't survive but everything we have today has already withstood the test of time in the most rigorous of environments requiring "hand to mouth" trasnsfer of information. It is not going to fade away overnight.

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: poet
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 07:35 PM

I do not beleive that that the singing of Traditional Folk Music will ever completely die. However I do worry that the roots of the music may be lost in this deluge of music spreading throughout the world via the net. When you consider that even before the computor the music travelled and within a few years became "ours" even here on the cat arguments have raged and court cases mentioned as to who wrote various songs and this not through malice it is through innocent belief. I myself believed that the springhill mining disaster referred to a pit in cumberland England for years and years until i was put straight by a very large Canadian in a bar. Mind you I thought he was an American and that did'nt impress him either.

I may not be expressing myself very well here but I hope you Know what I mean.

Poet (Guernsey)

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Bev and Jerry
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 06:18 PM

We have made a living playing folk music in schools for twenty years. Mostly we do it by teaching history through folk music. The history in folk music is the history of ordinary people. That is, your history and our history. The history taught from textbooks is the history of kings, presidents and generals and contains only facts deemed important by historians. Folk music teaches how regular folks felt about what was going on around them.

The only reason we can make a living doing this is that schools don't do it. The most common reaction we get from teachers is: "Gee, I haven't heard some of those songs since I was a kid and my students have never heard them". Our usual response is "Why not? Why aren't you teaching your kids about folk music?"

Well, at least we have exposed almost a million kids (no kidding) to folk music and if only one percent liked it enough to carry it on, that's ten thousand future Mudcatters!

Bev and Jerry

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 05:46 PM

Teaching things in school can be fatal for them. I think it would do a lot more for folk music if they tried to ban it.

If kids knew they were likely to be suspended from school if they showed any interest in folk music folk music would be breaking out everywhere. (And as a bonus they could stick gangsta rap on the curriculum, and that'd be the kiss of death for that.)

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: GUEST,Wesley S
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 05:41 PM

I've often thought that the folk boom of the 50's and 60's was a rejection of the atomic era and it's technology. And it wouldn't suprise me if in the coming information era that we see the same thing happen. While embracing the new technology people will also want to return to simpler values also. As Guy Clark sings : "Stuff that works, stuff that holds up - the kind of stuff you reach for when you fall". Let's hope so. The emotions that are expressed in folk and traditional music will always be with us. I think the music that expresses those emotions will also.

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Joan
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 04:35 PM

I worry about that, too. It seems as though there are fewer people interested in singing old songs, venues for traditional-oriented performers are slowly folding, and the public in general has a steadily diminishing chance for exposure to the sound of a traditional song via the media.

On the other hand, there will always be people studying the past: School kids, for starters. Since there's not a period in history that isn't documented in song, wouldn't it be nice if schools taught folk music a valuable primary source of information when studying early times? Wouldn't it be terrific if music teachers stopped to consider that "good" music doesn't always have to be from certain elite composers, and that those often took rhythms and melodies from common people. And how about the great ballad stories as a source of literature?

And if all else fails, someone will discover the sound of guitars, banjos and The Voice down the road, and get excited about discovering a "new sound."

Joan

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: GUEST,Frank Hamilton
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 12:50 PM

Well I like all kinds of music but I don't confuse be-bop with trad jazz or chamber music. Sure, trad folk has a future as long as people care about it. Same for any kind of music. The underlying question here is probably will it be popular? Will it be on the charts? Will there be a folk music revival like in the late fifties? My take, probably not. Who needs it? I do need folk music but I don't reflect the tastes of people nowadays who are buying pop recordings so I don't care if it has mass appeal.

Trad folk music is like history. It'll be around and probably interpreted differently by those who are interested in it.

There are no musicians around today who played in the Elizabethan courts of King Henry but there are plenty of Pro-Musica Antiqua (early music) groups extant. Trad jazz bands are all over Europe playing the tunes of the Hot Five and The Red Hot Peppers and in that style. Same for The Hot Club of France.

Someone out there is always going to be interested in traditional American folk music because it is valid as a musical expression with great songs and interesting music. We may not see the likes of many traditional singers who are gone but the respect for the music and the tradition will foster a range of those who care and reinterpret the music with taste, understanding. scholarship (an ugly word) and passion.

Might as well ask the question, will there be people around in 3001. That might be a relevant question.

Frank

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Dave (the ancient mariner)
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 12:38 PM

Art, you paint a bleak future for folk music. I am more optimistic about it since I came to this forum. Many of the people who love folk music are much younger than us. Beethoven, Bach, Vivaldi, is still being played and loved by young and old. Although I doubt if all the old songs will go on, at least they are recorded somewhere. The computer is spreading the music all over the world. People will always look into their past. We all have a need to remind ourselves of those that went before us, and relive the times that created the music. Today it more readily available than ever, especially here in Atlantic Canada. I love the old sea shanties but they were all written long before I was born. We did'nt use them much on steamships, but on some, they were sung for entertainment.Yours,Aye.Dave

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Hollowfox
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 12:31 PM

In his book , A.L.Lloyd said that if "Barbara Allen" is a folksong, then perhaps there should be another designation for Malvina Reynolds' "Little Boxes". Myself, I think of "this sort of music"(whatever you want to call it)as analogous to grape juice, wine, and brandy. A lot of grape juice gets made in any given year, and most of it is drunk soon after it is made. Some, but not most, gets made into wine. One of the major "ingredients" in wine making is Time. (Also, it should be noted that fewer people drink, much less enjoy wine, than grape juice. Also, a person is allowed to enjoy both beverages. Now some, but not most, of the wine is further distilled into brandy. A major ingredient in making brandy is even more time. And again, a person is allowed to like any and all of these drinks. So, too with music. Who would have thought a century ago that "The Night the Dun Cow Burned" would someday be considered a "traditional" song by some people? Songs (and stories) are the most portable things that humans have. "This sort of music" gets sung, learned, and passed on soley because people want to sing it, and htat is the salvation of traditional anything..as long as people want to sing it, it will stay alive. When people don't want to sing it anymore, then nothing will keep it going; not even injection into school curricula. A story: Once, an anthropologist went to Australia to do field work among the Aborigines. The Aborigines that he was studying asked him if he'd like to hear a song that they'd learned from their father's fathers? "Of course!", he replied. so they san him "Camptown Races". The song had traveled to Australia with the whaling industry.

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Art Thieme
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 12:17 PM

Sourdough,

You have cut to the core of the arguments here over what folk music is. I reside in your camp---but the fire is burning out and the tent is half blown away. Is there a future for the tradition? I'm reminded of that last great scene in the film of Ray Bradbury's book Farenheit 451. Books have been outlawed. It's a cold wintry day and those dedicated to preserving their favorite books are walking around as beautiful and gentle snowflakes descend on them. Individually, they are working on memorizing entire books of their choice. They will recite it later to all who want to hear it. And some of the hearers will choose to learn it too.

Is there a future for tradition? Time will tell. If not, something extremely valuable to me will be lost. And when it is lost, there can be no sounds like it in the forest.

Art Thieme

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Crowhugger
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 10:37 AM

LtS,

Well met, pretty Squeak, well met.

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 10:33 AM

If we didn't do new stuff, there would be nothing to be traditional in 50 - 100 years time would there? The best songs are about struggle, either with the land, sea, life and love, or else with democracy, diplomacy, defiance and survival, without those, what is life about? And even if the songs stop, the struggles still go on.... There are songs about four loom weavers, striving to keep their families alive, songs about women working in the mines - what are they but the forerunners of songs about Rosa Parkes and Emmeline Pankhurst?

As long as there is history, there is a future for traditional songs. There is no struggle now, that does not have its counterpart or contemporary in the past.

LTS

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: wysiwyg
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 10:32 AM

Well look at the demographics and some interesting possibilities emerge. Look at all the baby-boomer folkies who now have enough gray hair to be taken seriously in the world. This generation has been a big enough marketing target to give the world a lot of things that might never have been so widespread.

F'rinstance, just now we are about to see how the aging of this market group will finish tipping our environment in favor of accessibility for all. I don't think that the ADA and the widening of store aisles and bathrooms were just responses to the disabled community's outstanding ability to organize and agitate for much needed change. I think the financial powers-that-be saw the baby boomers coming in droves (on Rascals), purses and pockets bulging with the old do-re-mi, and they made sure we could all get in the door to buy our Depends! Really-- our boomer generation has real power, the sort we never dreamed of when we marched just to be heard! We don't use it intentionally as much as we did when the fire in our bellies was fresher.

So how does this demographic power affect the present and future of traditional music? We will find out. I don't know if we can apply intentionality, but I do know that much of what I love about the personalities and personages of Mudcat is the result of being around for awhile, and I would bet most of us are indeed boomers? So is the trad music subset of the boomer market big enough to use the old dollar vote to change things?

I don't know, but I know that many of us are the wise and wacky people our friends and others turn to for the occasional (frequent) de-goofing. So what would happen if we started using trad music even more intentionally to affect our immediate environments, and the people in them?

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 09:51 AM

It's really like saying "is there a past for modern music?" By that I mean, everything we call traditional was modern once.

I seriously think that the tendency for the future is going to be for the break up of monolithic mass popular culture. That's is likely to mean the continued developemnt of lots of little separate musical traditions. At the same time were going to get a sort of globalisation, with the musical elements coming from far away as likely as near.

Mudcat demonstrates both these processes in action, at a very early stage.

If I think about where the music I am involved in comes from, mostly it's from people I play with, and from people we've seen and heard at festivals, and from the records we've bought after listening to them and being impressed. (And increasigly stuff I've come across by people on the Mudcat). And for any bunch of musicians meeting up to play on a regular basis, that kind of thing makes up the basis of a tradition.

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From:
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 09:27 AM

Sourdough, as Crowhugger says, COME TO ATLANTIC CANADA.

I'm from Cape Breton, and now live in Halifax on the mainland of Nova Scotia. Between the two place, I've met literally dozens of songwriters who compose the type of song you are referring to.

Two of these are David Stone and Vince Morash. Among Vince's recent songs is one which talks about the loss of the salmon fishing industry in the Pacific NorthWest. Dave has written songs which are both quite serious as well as those containing liberal quantities of humour. In the serious vein, there are songs about the decline of the age of sail, and The Halifax Explosion. In the humour types, there is a Shantey song which is all about Cheese, and a new one called I Love My Back which talks about the pogie! Classic topic for a Cape Bretoner. Dave is also from Cape Breton, and Vince is from a small fishing village called Peggy's Cove.

Anyway, yes, there IS a future for traditional music. We still see, not just here in Atlantic Canada, but all around the world, new young writers who follow in the footsteps of Murray MacLauchlan, Gene MacLellan, Stompin' Tom Connors, or Alister MacGillivray, to name a few of our regional songwriters. Their songs are making their way into the conciousness of YOUR young because you play the music. It influences them in subtle ways.

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Pinetop Slim
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 07:56 AM

Gillian Welch could be the reincarnation of Corinna, last name forgotten, but remembered as Darlin' Corey. Decades after they dug a hole in the meadow and laid her down, she lives again and tells us to raze the old still house.
For me, there are two comfortable ways to deal with the issues Sourdough raises. One is to ignore the issue and just listen to what I like without concern for categorizing it -- it doesn't matter if I call it folk, trad., roots etc., as long as the song rings my bell. The other way is to accept that there are two tiers of folk music: traditional folk, which has been handed down through the oral tradition, and contemporary folk, which could be passed along through the oral tradition and we hope would be.
At 51 I'm old enough to have heard a few songs evolve from contemporary to traditional. My mother knew "We Shall Overcome," I know it, my kids know it. Ditto for "If I Had A Hammer." I sang "Blowing In the Wind" at summer camp; my daughter has sung it at summer camp.
At least a few contemporary songs and tunes are sure things to clear the hurdle into the traditional realm -- "Ashokan Farewell" comes to mind as the author has already has had to spend a lot of time proving it wasn't written 130 years ago. I'd bet a nickel my grandchildren will sing "The Great Storm is Over." Some of Welch's stuff is a pretty good bet. I won't be surprised if I hear "Tear My Stillhouse Down" introduced at a coffeehouse as a traditional song, author unknown.

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Banjer
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 07:24 AM

To hell with tradition, let's just keep doing it like we used to!! Given the fact that today we are listening to (and playing) the same stuff our forefathers did, would it not then follow that our future will also be playing our past? I think folk music will always be around, maybe even more so than in the recent past because it has become much easier with modern technology to access lyrics and songs from places one would have had to travel to in the past.

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Clinton Hammond2
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 03:58 AM

The thing that I like best about tradition is that every generations tailiors the traditions to themselves... things must change or they die... And music is a part of that...

Wouldn't it be great to come back in 500 years and hear the then-so-called 'traditional' music! That alone makes me kinda hope for reincarnation...

`~}

Subject: RE: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Crowhugger
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 03:50 AM

for the English/Scottish/Irish taditional music of North America...", lend your ear no further than Atlantic Canada. While every kind of music thrives there, UK-rooted stuff abounds, along with great gobs of new stuff in the old style.

Problem? What problem.

Subject: Is there a future for traditional music
From: Sourdough
Date: 19 Feb 00 - 03:45 AM

Thirty years ago, I was pretty sure that I knew what folk music was. It was traditional music, sung, unselfconsciously, by people who learned the songs in their families and from their friends. The songs, often from a long time past and many thousands of miles away (after all, I was interested in American folk music) had been shaped by geography, culture, and needs into American variations but still there were songs of the sea sung in the Blue Ridge Mountains, songs of knights and ladies sung in the farmhouses of Vermont. People, like several people here on Mudcat, went out and hunted down those songs , many of which would have been forgotten otherwise. Young singers from very different backgrounds picked up the songs brought home by field collectors because they felt somehow there was a connection in that music to their lives as they were and as they wanted them to be. But I wonder what this means for the English/Scottish/Irish taditional music of North America.

This new generation of singers came from a very different culture than did the music. They were often far more literate and more sophisticated. Their musical ears were tuned differentlty, they had different ethics, morals and experience. The unselfconscious native singer is an almost extinct species, I think.

What I am getting at is I am wondering if there can be, today, a folk music in the sense that there has been folk music for the past centuries. Can it exist side by side with the technical entertainment culture we are inside of today? Can traditional music remain vital if it is of interest to antiquarians and people who write social activist songs to convince the already convinced?

I don't mean to be saying that there are not beautiful songs being written today, songs that seem to come directly out of the folk tradition - Gillian Welch and David Rawlings come to mind as sources of some of the best new music I have heard but such compositions won't be traditional music for quite a while yet. It needs to be picked up and shaped by thousands, tens of thousands, of people who polish the tune and the lyics until it reflects their lives more clearly. Can it ever become traditional music or is our society's traditional music really now the popular songs of the Fifties, show tunes and "evergreens", songs that we can all count on each other knowing, at least well enough to sing along.

I have no doubt that traditional music will continue to be played by people who are aware of and sensitive to the beauty in the old songs but those songs are no longer a part of a living traditions where whole communities appreciated them and loved to hear them played at their festivals and ceremonies. Can they really continue to live or after a few generations separation from the source singers, will they just become beautifully embalmed?

I am really interested in hearing what people who have spent far more time thinking about this subject than I have, think about this.

Sourdough