1
"I remember taking Font Watling [the Suffolk step dancer] to a folk club, we sat there in rows of chairs, and he turned round to me and said, 'This is like a Chapel'. And it is ... sitting there for three hours in total silence, accepting what's on. The 1970s template for a folk club ... the two hour spots and the floor singers and all the rest ... is maybe not the way forward." Ian A Anderson, Folk Roots 136 p.29.
This study has proposed that the main problem with the British folk revival has also been the source of its initial strength: namely the hypothetical homogenisation of a form of performance history one should associate with a wide variety of socially, politically and culturally heterogeneous processes. Therefore the ‘meaning’ of folk music which has emerged has been used as a distinctive [but illusory] form or quality of social experience [past and present]. This folk discourse has become caught up in a consolidation and a permanence which has relations only to, or with, the images created at its own inception. There are few possibilities of transcending a priori meaning, of unfolding a dialectic of its own history. The folk club, for example, is there because without it, it would not be there. The musical and visual images in a folk club remain just that [images] and attract few new, young outsiders. They are put-off by an inward looking self replication, as Andrew Weskett observes:
Traditional music is fine, but we need to be open-minded when considering the spectrum which is available to possible audiences, or else clubs will continue to be closed shops, full of introverted cliques, blinded by their own shallowness when considering folk music.In what was originally a space for absence of rules, a rejection of musical rules, the folk club has now become caught up in the revival's own rituals. The images portrayed by a folk club are now more real than real and are sustained like a life blood, rather than the recreated images that they are. The folk club has now become the tradition, only resembling itself.
This study has also implied that a curious perfection process has developed within the folk revival whereby performers have consummated their performance models. Guitarists play like other guitarists; singers sing like other singers, and rather than being beset by poor floor singers [as MacKinnon suggests], the folk club is beset by those who scrupulously wish to resemble somebody else 'of note'. Playing has become a striving towards a disturbing perfection, a perfect replication. All potential miasma has been removed and a perfect prescription of folk remains. All of the ingredients are present, but in precise doses and perfect quantities. There are too few mistakes rather than too many and an entire generation of adolescents has been frightened-off by this performance rectitude.
In Chapter two it was stated that, during the first revival, Vaughan Williams collected and arranged folksong as a contemplation of an 'alternative' pre-modern society, something that could meliorate the advancement of the contemporary nation. This unerring musical confidence has been sustained by the second folk revival, which has seldom doubted the universal grounding of folk's values and status. This study has attempted to argue that while the present folk movement continues to be supremely confident, involving a hierarchy of values so firm and supported by a consensus so overwhelming, it has marginalised history, music-use, performance and reception. The folk club, especially, is fascinated with itself as a lost object but some, such as John Moulden, are evidently frustrated by this 'universal wisdom':
If clubs become restrictive and exclusive they are of no possible use to the tradition and should be dispensed with. But it’s always hard to abandon old markets and look for new.The temporal elongation of the revival has now deemed that those who were 'young turks' in the 1950s and 1960s have continued to reconstitute a hierarchical structure in order to sustain the revival as a vehicle of elevation and improvement. It is this structure, I feel, that MacKinnon mistakenly identifies as socially "cohesive". To recognise 'cohesion' in the folk revival, we already have to be 'in the know'; to 'define' traditional music in the way that revivalists do, we must already be willing to accept the social mores created by that section of society. MacKinnon
4 argues that "the music created by the folk scene has become a genre whose boundaries are not locally specific", but he fails to take account of the specificity of the social elevation of the folk revival brought about by a 'middle-classness' of gross proportions. This social echelon still deems that, while a level of tradition flows through certain types of music, it fails to do so in others. Affiliation to the folk revival in the 1990s has become typically middle-class in that it permits one to be both autocratic and self-abnegatingly humble and, rather like the Church of England, appears a bane to a younger generation.
This study calls for the re-establishment of a living dialogue with musical traditions by giving the various concepts of tradition a relevant contemporaneity and calling a halt to the 'universal timelessness' that folk music orthodoxy claims for only a limited amount of musical possibilities. This would certainly begin to attract younger participants. What constitutes 'tradition' then becomes responsive to the diverse arguments taking place in society. A lack of certainty about one's historical past, a refusal of the foundations set out by the two folk revivals of the 20th century, does not "abolish the meaning of their acts; it only affirms their limits, their finitude, and their historicity" [Laclau 1989]. Some folkies within the revival are now considering this lack of historical assurance and, as a summary, I have selected three routes along which the folksong can travel towards the twenty-first century with some degree of impunity.
Whereas the folk club is a construct of the revival itself, festive occasions have always been part of social and community life in the British Isles, and people in every generation and of every immigrant background have sought to keep this form of entertainment alive. The beginnings of folk music festivals in this country certainly took their lead from those in the United States such as at Newport in the late-1950s, but there have always been celebrations concerning the turning of the seasons, sporting and popular pastimes, theatrical entertainments and the like. A festival, in principle at least, does appear to have a claim on an historical past.
There has been very little written about the growth of folk festivals in the British Isles since the advent of the second revival. In retrospect, one can perhaps partially understand the reluctance of folklorists to consider the growing folk festival phenomenon. Festivals such as Cambridge and Keele began in 1965 and immediately celebrated that murky no man's land between the 'authentic' and 'in context' culture of the 'real' folk and the 'nonfolkloric' popular culture of American folk music. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, Paul Simon and Hedy West all appeared on the first Cambridge bill alongside Cyril Tawney, Pete Sayers and Dorris Henderson: "the token black lady on the bill." 5 So, although folklorists were involved to varying degrees as informal advisors to some of the festivals, they were also quite aware that the festival did not primarily have the 'purity' of [say] an EFDSS enterprise. Most folklorists apparently perceived it as happening [and perhaps better left] outside the locus of their concern. The late Ken Woollard, organiser of the Cambridge folk festival between 1965 and 1993 confirmed this rather 'snooty' attitude from what he described as 'traditionalists':
It was the traditionalists who objected to the Clancy Brothers being booked for the first festival. One of the criticisms of Cambridge in the early days was that we didn't put on enough traditional music and that this was what the working class was all about. When traditionalists said that to me I would reply that I'd never known an electrician who sang a sea-shanty while he pulled a string through a hole. They'd be more likely to be singing a Beatles song!It is essential that folk festivals come under the academic microscope for they continue to present some of the most important musical events within the British music calender. They are not restricted by the social mores of folk clubs, but, rather, exist as an embodiment of resourceful musical programming. They continue to attract thousands of visitors and artists from all over the world and are, in one sense, the future of folk music. Festivals remind us that folk music is, after all, a shifting signifier, something that is continually subject to modification. Even though the constructions surrounding a festival might have been formed from within a folk social consensus, the festival cannot succeed unless it attracts 'passive' or even 'non'-folkies. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that MacKinnon struggles with this performance polyglot, for the musical performances and social identities that he claims to be so intrinsically linked within the folk scene are far more 'up for grabs' on the festival site.
For example, important performance and cultural dialectics are able to manifest themselves at differing folk festivals, one being between passive or 'value and agenda free' presentations versus musical/cultural advocacy. By variable programming some festivals allow people to listen to a great diversity of sounds; whereas others present something of a musical fait accompli, having the tendency to impose their own concept of what is traditional upon people. Also many festivals in Britain such as WOMAD openly celebrate the concepts of pluralistic and multilayered societies, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and despite black audience numbers remaining miniscule. These visual and aural challenges within the festival scenario derive at least partly from the uneasy co-existence within many festival producers of a conservative personal music aesthetic and left-wing politic, together with a growing appreciation of the indeterminacy of musical traditions. Festivals, therefore, are unquestionably and openly problematic.
There is evidence to suggest that folk festivals serve primarily as entertainments and annual meeting places for an audience of mellow, sub-urban, middle-class people who have literally grown up with festivals. During the summer of 1995 I attended over a dozen festivals in England and Wales and found myself asking whether they served to encourage or enhance public understanding of different soundtracks or whether these events simply provided the same, mobile audience with a rather sanitary and unchallenging folk artifact.
A number of important questions arose from my festival tour. For example, should a folk festival be an arena of cultural affirmation or the scene of cultural and political debate? It could be argued that festivals should only reflect the related functions of celebrating, socialising, sharing and participating, but one could also suggest that the festival is an appropriate vehicle to address tensions and disagreements. Additionally, are festivals only successful because the producers, participants and audiences are of a similar socio-economic class or do they have an important community-based role to play? I discovered enough evidence to suggest that the folk festival-goer acknowledges the potential of festivals to alter the social and cultural dynamics of adopted areas [at least while it was in progress] and that festivals were viewed as challenges to conventional concepts about performed music and the status of performers. Folk festivals were also seen as vehicles for cultural forms usually overlooked by general public. For example, it was suggested to me by Chris Wade, organiser of the Beverley Festival [‘Open Forum’1995: discussion group at Beverley Festival] that festivals served a useful purpose by allowing 'alternative' social, cultural and even political disagreements to be addressed alongside music. For Wade, the very presence of a folk festival in a conservative town such as Beverley was a visible reminder that communal activity could exist in a variety of forms, and that "alternative and yet traditional forms of music were alive and kicking".
However it was also suggested to me by an organiser from the Warwick Folk Festival that festivals also had a rather negative function. For this interviewee, there was some evidence that the organisational structures and pricing policies had contrived to place a mask over cultural differences and structural inequities in the social system. My informant was particularly concerned that the ticketing policies of the Warwick festival systematically excluded large sections of the population because they were prohibitive and that, once the festival was over, there was little cultural aftermath in Warwick itself.
As I travelled from festival to festival in 1995 I found no real consensus. Perspectives and analyses were very wide-ranging. The festival is, therefore, an ideal monitor for the future role of musical traditions in modern society and an in-depth study of British folk festivals is obviously long overdue. Future works might ask, for example: what conditions the perceptions of traditions chosen to be represented at a festival? Upon what ethical warrants [if any] does the festival enterprise rest? How is a major British folk music festival to be understood sociologically [in its class and race representations, for example]? What are its political implications? How should festivals be comprehended within the realm of public spending policy? Few of these questions have yet to be addressed in anything but the most cursory and fragmentary fashion. This is a pity, for they are all meaningful and urgent areas of discussion. The last of these points, for example, demands imperative attention and research.
1996 was a seminal year for festival organisers. Most festivals derive considerable segments of their income from local authority and Arts Council funding and, whereas some festival organisers were able to maintain previous levels of funding via well-determined portfolios, others discovered that their musically sectarian approaches led to serious and drastic cuts. This situation was also compounded in Scotland by the effects of local government reorganisation in 1995/6. Many 'new' local authorities were unable to support any funding applications because of shortfalls in their reorganised budgets and Scottish festival organisers were forced to cut back on artistes and/or seek funding elsewhere. The Girvan Folk Festival, which had been running for 21 years, failed to materialise in 1996 and organiser and editor of The Living Tradition, Peter Heywood admitted in March, 1996 that some organisers were their own worst enemies:
My editorials seem to be a constant battle with underlying concerns with the structure of the folk scene. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard the words 'don't quote me but ...' to then hear what is really going on and how people really feel. Organisers are under a lot of strain and I know that some will eventually take the closure option or quietly run down their work.Therefore, while continuing to represent an important performance dialectic, many folk festival organisers remain under considerable financial duress. Funding bodies will not back what they see as rather 'flaky' proposals when they are often elitist, ill-defined and liable to lose vast amounts of money. This leaves the folk festival in a fascinating position. It can, like the folk club, continue to mollify a dwindling generation of mature former hipsters or it can involve itself in a dialectic about the growing popularity of various forms of musical traditions. If the latter is embraced, festivals will surely assume the vanguard in promoting folk as a popular music form into the twenty-first century.
The instrument is more unusual for them to see and hear. The banjo is rarely seen in live performance in this country, especially by kids, but I find that once they have got over the unfamiliarity the sound is very appealing to them.Bob Buckle's personal outreach programme to schools is both extremely productive and personally lucrative. He has been a professional performer since his days as one half of the Leesiders in the 1960s, and feels that folk music, and the 'scene' that surrounds it, is far too 'hidden'. Bob's tastes have always been eclectic, repeating to me on more than one occasion that all forms of music should be treated 'on a par'. He also takes the interesting view that, for the average person in Britain, music is never self-evidently 'there'. Bob believes that any music has to be made available to potential listeners by incorporating as much contemporary social and cultural context as possible. This is quite the opposite to many folk music performers who, at times, appear to expect the non-ordained listener to discover the music as a form of 'enlightenment', a 'digging-up of a patrimonial sod'. In the interview cited above, Buckle stated that:
Music is defined in different ways by different groups of people. Each of these groups have their own way of looking at music. They have their own conventions, support these conventions by social behaviour, and so on. But kids don't embark on these conventions quite so easily and early as one imagines. They aren't such musical snobs as we are when we've grown up! So I try to get them to 'listen without prejudice'. I get them to look and listen to the sound of the banjo. I appeal to their innate democracy. So, when they do become musical snobs just like the rest of us, they might find a little time to think about that old bloke Bob Buckle and his banjo. It means, I suppose, that the sound is there, in their brain. It's no good being a folkie expecting young people to rap on your club door looking for this stuff. That doesn't happen any more. You've got to take it to them. I suppose it's the 1990s version of field work ... except in reverse!I spent some time with Bob Buckle during December of 1995, watching him perform in schools in and around Liverpool. I found his "listening without prejudice" techniques fascinating. At St George's Primary, Everton, he performed to hundreds of children who knew next to nothing about folk music traditions, despite Everton retaining a strong Irish-Catholic background. His methodology began as soon as he entered the school. For example, while I was in the headmaster's study waiting for Bob to begin his first nursery session, a child of about 11 years came into the room and spotted Bob's banjo. "I love those guitars" she pronounced. I was about to inform her that it was a banjo when Bob silenced me. When the girl left the room he told me that correcting her might lead to frustration; that precision of description was "only a matter of stages"; that she was showing a level of enthusiasm ... and that the afternoon should be interesting.
The afternoon was fascinating. St George's Primary is an under-funded school in the heart of Everton Valley, not exactly the leafy sub-urban and grant-aided Grammar schools normally visited by the likes of the Folkworks organisation in the north-east of England. 9 Yet, because Buckle's methodology concentrated upon the practice of making music that looked and sounded easy, but also great fun [and very different from what they had previously been used-to], he was immediately accepted by what some might regard as cynical and street-wise inner-city children. His 'listening without prejudice' worked because the children were being asked whether they would like to participate. They were not being informed that this music was 'authentic' or superior to other forms, that they were listening to their musical 'heritage', nor that the music could only be played by a 'knowing' expert and was liable to disappear in the midst of the so-called urban chaos in which they lived. It was simply being presented to them as a participatory practice. The concentration remained on music as a practice. There were no musical/social prejudices emanating from Buckle, so there were none aimed at him. By the end of the afternoon he had effectively played three gigs to hundreds of children, and introduced them to the verities of the banjo. Some of the kids probably were bored, but it was an occasion that few of them would forget. Bob Buckle further discussed the afternoon with me:
It's too easy to say that folk music is so great that people will find their way to it eventually, once they have sickened themselves of commercial pop. That's absolute rubbish. It's all popular music, actually, by degrees. What I did today was more to do with musical practice, rather than finished items. When I first came into the scene I liked the idea of that folk music was open-ended; that we could use traditional music because it was never a finished work. I still try to do that ... but I think that that principle has been lost by a lot of people. Folk clubs are all about excellence; concerts are about excellence; the folk media applaud excellence. It's all wrong ... where does that leave the kids? Of course it's great to be accomplished, but that shouldn't be the only criterion. They don't discriminate ... that's the way in.By considering musical practice rather than musical 'value', Buckle avoided the temptation of viewing tradition with a 'superior', yet facile, romanticism. He also avoided the trap of giving a faceless and reductive impression of folk music as an inherent and inescapable political statement. Folk music cannot always represent the 'realities' of people's lives according to the dogma of the revival. In fact, if presented to young people as a form of musical veracity it can appear exactly the opposite: irrelevant and archaic. Folk music presentation in schools has thus far served as a barrier against understanding how musical processes work by making a contrast with the popular. No such distinctions were thrown at the pupils of St George's for Buckle had the greatest respect for the children's own musical tastes. He made no comparisons, passed no condescending remarks, never once patronised his young audience by comparing once genre with another. They were prepared to listen to him, and that should be enough for any [folk] singer.
... we found that we worked well together and that the workshop style we fell into naturally suited young people very well. It is only now [Nov. '94] that we are considering bringing in other tutors. The young people who attended our local events have only now reached the stage where they want to experiment and expand their musical horizons.Jenny and Ben were determined to work on their contemporaries in groups rather than as individuals. This, they claimed, helped to build-up confidence in the student. They were bothered by the over-concentration upon individual skills and excellence within the folk revival, and felt that participation, rather than musical 'quality', was part of the overall plan of the revival :
Many of the young people we are dealing with have the potential to be 'folk stars' but promoting them alone would be utterly pointless. The folk scene relies on the active participation of amateur enthusiasts, it also needs an audience, organisers, residents and the like.Not surprisingly, their experiences have proved that, in the 1990s, teenagers still feel more comfortable with other teenagers [just as they did when the revival was established]. Jenny stated to me that she and Ben discovered that when teenagers were persuaded to attend a workshop, they learned far more because of a feeling of security. There were no older experts present "putting their fourpennorth in"; in fact older folkies were banned from workshops, altogether. I visited a free week-long Youthquake summer school at the Liverpool Community College in August, 1995 and discovered this to be an accurate reflection of Youthquake's learning process. I was amazed to discover that the practice rooms in the cellar of the college were packed with children as young as 13 years. All were learning instruments such as fiddle, guitar, melodeon, whistle, but also music as 'disparate' as rap, latin, and folk without a discriminating adult in sight. Jenny Shotliff:
Few of us would feel secure in a workshop or folk club surrounded by people twice our age who all seem to know what they're doing. We also feel that in using young musicians and singers as tutors the workshops are provided by those who had similar influences and experiences to those they are teaching and to some degree provide role models at a difficult age when many young people choose alternative pastimes to folk.So, the workshops are committed to being run by and for young people. They are targetted at 13-18 year olds and the aim is to support and encourage young people to develop and extend an interest in playing and singing different styles of music. There is no prejudice against differing styles, only a foregrounding of traditional instrumentation when necessary. Meetings have grown to a once-monthly basis in and around the north-west of England. Youthquake have also run concerts and have special sessions and workshops at festivals such as Maghull Folk Day and the Fylde, Chester and Wigan folk festivals. They even have socials which include such 1990s leisure pursuits as Laserquest and 10-pin bowling. Evidently, Youthquake are not rooted in the past, alone, and are intent on providing an important challenge to the 'givens' of the folk revival. They are currently building-up a stock of instruments, including electronic keyboards as well as the more 'traditional' instruments, and have started a lending library for music tutors and tapes. The combined backgrounds of the tutors are interesting, to say the least, taking in influences as diverse as jazz, rock, blues, Irish, American, classical, English, morris, Ceilidh and street performance!
Jenny Shotliff took over the post of Youth Activities Officer with the North West Folk Federation in 1993. This led to her also taking charge of a page in the Federation's magazine Folk North West entitled 'Youthful Perspective'. Youthquake was then taken far more seriously within the ranks of older folkies:
This has been a valuable means of finding out what the young people in the area want and which areas of Youthquake they find most useful though it can take considerable coaxing to find young people prepared to write these articles. It is also a valuable means of communicating these needs to the [older] folk community of the area. To raise general awareness of what we are trying to achieve we have also contributed to the Buzz magazine, liaised with 'In With A Chance' and the local EFDSS branch and taken part in Radio Merseyside's 'Folkscene' programme.Acoustic Youth was founded in 1994 in the south-west of England by Tim Van Eyken [16] and Kerensa Wragg [15]. It has taken Youthquake as its model and is working towards similar aims and methods. It has contacts with Folk South West, a funded body responsible for folk promotions and outreach programmes in the west country. These are co-ordinated by well-known and respected singer and caller Eddie Upton. Having met at a variety of festivals over the past few years Youthquake and Acoustic Youth have now formed an alliance, and have been holding festival workshops together since 1994. In 1995 arrangements were further formalised, resulting in a weekend of workshops followed by a concert at Wells Cathedral Music School. A joint newsletter was produced in December, 1995, with an advance-mailing list of 200.
There is considerable evidence to suggest that folk music is regarded by younger people as one genre amongst many. This, however, does not mean that it is disliked. If the experiences of those involved with Youthquake and Acoustic Youth are anything to go by, it is the 'traditional' opposition presented by the folk revival of a pre-eminent folk music versus the musical manipulations of the popular that is regarded as extraneous and out-moded. The younger musicians of the 1990s are interested in a whole variety of soundtracks [as they really were forty years ago!]. The over-worked internal mythology of the folk revival has defeated itself. It is time for all revivalists to appreciate that, as Ruth Finnegan asserts "there are in fact several musics, not just one, and that no one of them is self-evidently superior to the others." 15
The work of Youthquake/Acoustic Youth also testifies that young people are not simply a passive and beguiled population with no interest in acoustic music. The myth that Sonic the Hedgehog has our nation's youth in a state of quiescent restraint is clearly exploded by the activities of such groups. When there is no over-arching, judgemental system based upon musical 'quality', then any soundtrack tutored through the likes of Youthquake becomes attractive and, in principle, equally 'authentic':
I don't believe that these are the only ways or necessarily the best ways to encourage young people to develop an interest in traditional music BUT they work and they are popular. By and large these young people are developing their interest in traditional folklore by playing music. When their confidence here has grown they then develop interests in song and/or dance. This is a different approach to that of their parents generation.Youthquake are currently seeking financial support to take their workshop approach into schools. They are in an advantageous and potentially exciting position. Their approach is young, fun and accessible and so they are able to present folk music as something that is relevant, something that goes on around young people all of the time. This is evidently a better image for folk music than one of folkies four and five times the age of an average primary scholar. Funding, of course, remains a problem. Up until 1995 Youthquake did not really require any degree of funding other than that raised from within, but in order to expand their programme, a need for greater resourcing has become inevitable. One would hope that the various funding bodies [especially the Arts Council] appreciate that they may well be looking at one of the most exciting projects to have emerged from the folk revival for over forty years, and fund it accordingly.
I have attempted to show, via this contextual and intertextual study, that the second folk revival was vital: a valid identification of hidden soundtracks; but I have also endeavoured to question the assumption that an historical consensus existed between the folk apotheosis and those being historically represented. This consensus was only 'valid' as a politicised socio/economic history at the revival's instigation: it could never be a universal 'truth'. I have also attempted to dispute the assumption that consensus existed among its contemporary representatives and, via a popular music studies perpective, have suggested that if we continue to look to the 'handcrafted' history of the folk revival for firm answers about how musical traditions work, we will be disappointed. I have further suggested that we can no longer allow the folk revival to comfortably legislate between 'opposing' or 'competing' musical genres, between 'superior' and 'inferior' soundtracks [a la Lloyd], for popular music history cannot subscribe to such totalising binary forms. Instead, via addressing the historical instances, the events and the elongation of the revival in an attempt to clarify something perhaps less tangible but [in the long run] more valuable, I have submitted that the 'meaning' of folk music has been continually contextually subjugated to political 'reason'.
By providing variable historical readings of the revival and showing the relative equality of all popular musics [including the genre of folk], I have argued that nothing can be gained from providing a musical history constructed from apparently luminous absolutes. This reading of music history does entail frustration [for any work is frustrating if it avoids a hierarchy of meaning] but it also reveals that an eclectic musical language speaks to a wider, more divergent audience ... something of a necessity for any folk movement. External histories such as this also show that the reaction of folklorists to the homogeneity of mass-produced music was not simply a reaction to music, but to the cultural and industrial systems that appeared to bring that music about. Thus, as times [and music] changed, the political antithesis of 'tradition' could not continue being successfully validated in the music, but only in the [past] systems which brought that validation about; it became illogical not only to fence-off folk music from other genres, but also to confine folk's role in society as a narrative of political events. Despite a noticable unwillingness by some interviewed to discuss the political input to the second revival, nobody condemned me for suggesting that the second folk revival was highly-charged politically and became rather bourgeois as it lengthened; but many were still horrified when I questioned whether the icon of 'tradition' should remain utterly central. At that moment the folk canon was usually rolled out and ignited to blast away my offending 'popular' incursions. But it remains quite evident that the discrete nature of folk music is a myth. Shim of Fatamatiche:
The mood aboard this particular 'ship of the revival' is that we have an English, Irish and Scottish crew looking for, say, India. If it's lucky, it might accidentally discover America! We take our cultural baggage with us, thank you very much, we might even get homesick for rock, but we're all very excited by a sense of liberation and the promise of discovery.Just as 20th century mass-produced music presented complex conceptual problems for folklorists in the 1950s, so the predicaments posed by the 1990s of how to contemporise and yet illuminate sources also call-out. They cannot be circumvented by folklorists condemning the thrust of global imperialism while retreating back into their manuscripts. Further research into the uses and definitions of folk music will have to include perceptions of folk as one soundtrack amongst many. Folk music retains the capacity to arouse the impulses, but when it is applied as an historical veil over the surface of reality it merely replicates Benjamin's vision of the 'Angelus Novus': "The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress."
18 Such actions deny the co-creative potential of our musical universe and reek of cultural pessimism.
Mike Brocken
Article MT030
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