--- On Fri, 17/6/11, Inky- Adrian <[email protected]> wrote: Anthony, can you play the NSPs? Hello Adrian It all comes down to what is meant by 'play'. Given the wonderful diversity of humanity there are some people who will answer yes. When I first moved north in 1977 and got 'in amang' what Will Atkinson called 'the real music' (that's where the last strong traditional music scene in England was still alive and kicking) I became immersed in a living music that was still very popular and still being used in communities for mutual entertainment as it had been for centuries. It was a flourishing music scene with a very strong identity but very different from the scene in other parts of Northumberland. This is what happens with traditional music, a fairly tightly defined regional accent builds up and is passed on but is continually evolving thanks to the input of a community rather than a single individual or family. That there was a brilliant family Clough tradition is beyond question. That Billy Pigg studied that tradition with its recognised master is also beyond doubt. Whether that narrow tradition held enough emotional appeal to speak to Billy and a whole community without exception is a very good question to which my answer would be apparently not. Your rather inflected description of Billy Pigg's playing displays a very limited understanding of 'tradition' and the way it operates, evolves and is propagated.
Scholars who have studied this topic in depth say that traditional music can be defined as evolving aEUR~through oral transmission' with three major facts shaping transmission: aEUR~continuity linking present to past'; aEUR~variation, from creative impulse of the individual or group' and aEUR~selection by the community, determining form/s in which the music survives'. Writing in the Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council (Vol 7: pp 9-29) R P Elbourne clarified this further: '..traditionality being concensus through time'. It is this point which you choose to ignore and that is your personal choice, but you go further and insist that I ignore the very tradition that I lived among for 27 years and fall in with a much narrower one which does not entirely butter my parsnip. By all means share your thoughts but please don't insist we limit ourselves to your idiosyncratic definitions of 'tradition' or for that matter, Northumbrian. Anthony -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
