On Aug 27, 2007, at 5:35 PM, Jon Redpath wrote:
There is NO such thing as Celtic music. Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Brittany have only one thing in common, an unfounded dislike of the English. The musical identities are very different with a few overlaps. The Celtic label is just a con , made up to make money out of nothing. In Scotland our music is Scots/ Gaelic NOT Celtic.
At the risk of continuing something that is rather tangential to the list (although perhaps germane to the extent that everyone seems to assume that drones = "Celtic," ergo the HG is "Celtic"), I'm going to disagree with Jon's dismissal of the Celtic rubric to some extent. It isn't just a con to sell music. The people who call their music Celtic do, in general, consider themselves to be "Celtic," whatever that may mean. This means that a Galician looking for "authentic" elements to add to their repertoire will be much more likely to look to Ireland or Scotland than to Tierra del Fuego, Papua New Guinea, or Mozambique. Whether or not the idea of "Celtic music" has any historical validity (I'm with Jon on thinking that it does not), the point is that today these musics *are* Celtic because their performers and audience believe that they are and they have entered into a community of influence with each other. Galician performers thus feel justified in taking Irish tunes (and vice versa) and using them without the stigma of being "inauthentic" (a *very* problematic term, as I've mentioned before).
In other words, historical connection is not the only criterion for determining whether something is made "out of nothing." The connections people believe that they have can be a powerful force for change, and there are Scots who happily embrace the "Celtic" label for their music, even if they are making no money off of it.
Or to turn to something closer to Jon's home, "Celtic" music is just as authentic and real as clan tartans, which were made up to "make money out of nothing." The notion that tartans were associated with specific clans that were entitled to use them was a fabrication from whole cloth (pun intended), but that doesn't make them a con or an inauthentic part of Scottish culture in the present day.
Notions and questions of musical authenticity are endlessly vexing and never settled because there is no single criterion to which everyone can agree that will provide the answer.
Best, Arle
