Towards the end of last year the uk.music.folk newsgroup was dominated by a thread of articles discussing the meaning of "tradition". Started by Rod Stradling, who I am sure did not for one minute think he was about to become involved in a run of nearly 200 articles, the thought-provoking thread very largely avoided the usual pitfalls into chaos where a couple of people will go off at a tangent and start discussing Spangles or abusing each other over a minor grammatical error -- perhaps even a spelling mistake that was little more than a slip of the fingre. The centre piece of the discussion was a piece byDick Gaughan, who gives as good value on the Internet as he does on stage or CD, and I will risk incurring his wrath by bringing you lock, stock and barrel his article. Incurring his wrath because I have read his equally cogently-argued thoughts in a different thread on the unauthorised taping of his live performances. So please bear in mind the informal framework in which the article was intended to appear, though you would be hard pressed to find any lack of effort in its form or content.
I have left in the Internet conventions, so look out for the smileys and the use of asterisks for emphasis. Note that the early quoted lines relate to previous posts by Pete McClelland (>>) and Rod Stradling (>). Here is the article:
In article <19961127192800.OAA02568@ladder01.news.aol.com>, rodstrad@aol.com writes
>In article <44HaoFA51rmyEwU6@mcmail.demon.co.uk>, Pete McClelland
><Pete@mcmail.demon.co.uk> writes:
>
>>I wanted to provoke discussion on the view that we are all part
>>of a tradition due to a wider and more rapid access to other performer's
>>music.
>
>I've tried to raise this as a subject for further discussion about five
>times in this thread. As far as I'm aware, you're the first person to
>pick up on it. Maybe they're all shy?
Shy??
All right, all right, enough already - I'll bite :)
I agree, with a couple of reservations, with the proposal as stated -- that in this age, we are *all* part of a tradition.
Credentials first -- as far back as we can trace, my father and his father and his father etc were "traditional" fiddle players from the west of Ireland; my paternal grandmother was a melodeon player; my mother was a "traditional" singer and a silver-medallist at the Gaelic Mod in the early 1930s; and everybody in our family had repertoires of "traditional" songs which I learned. I hardly heard any music outside our family until I was seven years old and was already starting to play and sing the songs and music I had listened to for those first seven years. That places me, by anybody's criteria, firmly in "the tradition" of Scotland and Ireland.
At the age of 15 I discovered that there were many people in Scotland and Ireland who knew and sang the songs that I had hitherto regarded as known only by my family and was drawn inexorably towards the "folksong revival".
To me, any attempt to describe a tradition by reference to its appearance is doomed. The claims that, in order to be "traditional", the songs and tunes must be played or sung in a particular location, at a particular time, by particular people, on particular instruments or in a particular fashion are all akin to my previous metaphor about taking a bucketful of water from a river and claiming it as representative. These are transient phenomena adopted because, at the time they are utilised, they are quite natural and comfortable to those who use them.
When they have ceased to be so, they are discarded. Those who then attempt to adhere mechanistically to these conditions become anachronistic and are really in the role of antiquarians, preserving a relic of what the modes of expression of "the tradition" were at a particular time. This is a useful function -- until they start to demand that this particular snapshot is the "real" tradition and all other modes of expression are false. They are then guilty of attempting to fossilise a living entity. So they then dispute that it is still living -- by reference to the very criteria which are leading them to false conclusions in the first place.
Now for the heresy -- include in the above list of transient phenomena the methods of propagation and transmission. Folklorists have attempted to use these as a method of defining "tradition" because to actually define a "tradition" in a manner which is truly scientific, ie, will hold true at all times under all conditions, is impossible. Therefore it was desirable to claim, in the ages before mass methods of dissemination existed, that the essential factor was the *manner* in which the songs and music were learned. However, the only substantial difference between my learning "Erin go Bragh" from Davy Stewart and someone else learning it from a recording of Davy Stewart is that I was privileged to observe and learn from Davy's consummate skills as a performer and storyteller.
Whilst it is impossible to construct a truly accurate definition of "tradition", I would suggest that the most useful description we can use is by relating the tradition of a people to the history and general culture of that people. Thus, Vietnamese traditional music becomes fully intelligible only in the context of the Vietnamese peoples' history.
Otherwise it is a source of stylistic influence to people seeking musical inspiration. This is not a value judgement, just an observation.
The essential difference between me singing MacCrimmon's Lament and a non-Scot singing it is that I am more likely to be able to view it within the whole history of my people, as held in the collective memory of that people, ie "tradition", and therefore to better understand the multitude of nuances behind the imagery. It is not impossible that someone from outside could learn these but it is not quite so intuitive to them and therefore they would have to work a bit harder at learning all the things I learned naturally as a child.
I believe that the "folksong revival" was simply this broadening taking place and people learning in ways other than the previously assumed "correct" methods of transmission.
It is also my belief that the "folksong revival" was therefore simply the tradition reasserting itself in a new form under new conditions. I have no use for the terms "traditional", "revivalist", "contemporary" or even "folk" as applied to the kind of music I grew up with. To me, they are merely attempts to provide justification for performing material with which the performer had no formative relationship. No such justification is necessary -- if a song or tune appeals, play or sing the damn thing. If you do your homework and discover the contextual information then you will sing it with authority and may even help to enrich the "tradition". If you don't, you might still be able to reinterpret the song in a new and interesting way.
Either way, if what you do with it is adding something useful and constructive it will be absorbed and become part of that tradition -- if not, it will be ignored and forgotten. The tradition is far too robust to be damaged by any of our best efforts to protect it :)
--
Dick Gaughan, Dun Eideann (Edinburgh), Alba (Scotland)
website : http://www.dickalba.demon.co.uk/
Not all the articles were as thought-provoking as Mr Gaughan's. The other side of the usefulness coin is represented by the following message which I will leave anonymous as such things are often written in the heat of the moment. It goes like this:
Please stop this thread!! You're all mad, sad introvert navel gazers and if my head didn't have better things to do, you would be doing it in.
The Internet -- don't you just love it?