Well said, Anthony! The fact that you can play should be obvious to anyone who doesn't have their ego where their ears should be. C
>-----Original Message----- >From: [email protected] >[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Anthony Robb >Sent: Friday, June 17, 2011 9:00 AM >To: [email protected]; Inky- Adrian >Subject: [NSP] Re: The Dartmouth Competitions > > > --- 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 >
