The folk thing...................

[teamsaint]

Mr GG

well personally, I couldn't care less what the performers or anybody else call their music.

Good question(of course) Gongster, and I would love to have a couple of hours to answer, or a month to study it !!Sadly, I have a 2 day sales meeting to prepare for,( no music,) and a rather unexpected "Rush " album to listen to. (plus 5 Reich Cd's)
its frequently the case that pieces of music would sit happily in other genres(for want of a better description of this state of affairs), but we seem to need labels. or at least somebody seems to think we do. What exactly is "indie" about modern Indie music?
Listening to folk music, Bach often pops into my mind(not out of boredom!)

[teamsaint]

Back in the 60s I seem to remember folkies like Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen - whatever beacame of them. Over here I remember Pentangle, Roy Harper, Michael Chapman, Eclection, Fairport Convention and their derivatives Steeleye Span and Albion Band - they rocked a bit - very good guitarists like Davy Graham - Al Stewart was a bit of a folkie too.

If you want folk that rocks, go to an oyster band gig !!

[Quarky]

If a heterosexual composer was known for his (or her) sexual promiscuity would that put you off their work? & what social upbringing would a composer have to have for you to be able to enjoy their music?

Freely admit that these are my personal prejudices - but unfortunately shared by many others. As regards sexual promiscuity, nothing against that - enjoy "Rape of Lucretia". But "Turn of the Screw" is too much in a middle class household for me to be comfortable there.

Perhaps a more substantial criticism of BB is his apparent lack of interest in the female voice (although Turn of the Screw is perhaps an exception).

Anyhow getting back to the main topic, there is perhaps a further difference between Folk and Jazz. In Jazz there is a high energy explosive component, which even in slow ballad numbers lies brooding there beneath the surface - but one is always aware of it. In Folk however, usually minimal energy expenditure, and an explosive "shout" is the exception - the most you might get is a good-natured canter through an irish jig.

[teamsaint]

Oddball...we could run a very interesting, and possibly very illuminating thread about voices, instruments and groupings, musical forms etc which various musicians chose to not use.



As for minimal energy expenditure in folk, have you seen Bellowhead, Oyster Band, Seth Lakeman for instance?

[Quarky]

well some might suppose so , ... but like Moses - erroneously!


and no, not that either ...

On that evidence, I would say that Donald O'Connor (who?) was a substantially better dancer than Gene Kelly.

[Lateralthinking1]

Arguably, folk is best appreciated by people with folk roots. If English, it can help to have been born in the North or the South West. I wasn't so what is my excuse? Coming to music in 1969-1970 at the age of 6/7 and delving into it like someone a lot older, I took to the many singer-songwriters in the Top 30. Mainly American - Baez, Collins, Dylan etc - but anyone whose 14th birthday then coincided with punk will have at least one natural ear for many things British. Interests in the countryside, politics, tradition and the geography of Britain probably all help in the appreciation of folk music. As it happened, all of these applied in my case.

While one of my main bands was the Clash, I was at the Croydon air show in 1980. I discovered a Lindisfarne album there that I bought not without embarrassment, having good memories of their singles back in 1972. Coincidentally, they came to my university in 1982. On 27 December of that year, I travelled from Croydon to Newcastle by train especially to see them at Newcastle City Hall, completing the return journey in 24 hours. While they were folk rock rather than folk per se, there was enough there of roots and politics to be an entry into other things. Alan Hull has been a key figure in my musical life. Like many, he died far too early.

In the mid 1980s, something rather wonderful happened. The pre-punk tastes, that I should by rights have never acquired had I not been only 7 when let loose on a radio, and the post-punk spirit had never been intended to meet, other than perhaps on a battlefield. Meet though they did with the Pogues, the Men They Couldn't Hang, Martin Stephenson etc. All the previous stuff came together at that point. In many respects, those live gigs - over a dozen in the case of the Pogues - defined my musical mid 20s although there were a lot of strands running in parallel. I have always been a generalist by nature if willing to get into detail.

People tend to think of the celtic period of the late 1980s and early 1990s in other terms - Clannad etc - but I was at Fleadh then annually in Finsbury Park listening to a lot of Irish roots musicians like Christy Moore. While I took in the overly commercial things briefly, I got out quickly when it became so MOR. Enya's "Orinoco Flow" was definitely a turning point, after which I turned away.

During the 1990s, I was all over the place, including musically, but from 1987 world music was becoming an interest and that developed. At times, the mainstream was so dire that I often concentrated on music from the 1960s-1980s period that hadn't been accessible at the time. Most genres. Certainly it was the era when I properly found people like Carthy courtesy of the local record library. Nick Drake's CDs were reissued in the late 1990s. Since Spotify, that instinct to know more about nearly all music in its development has gone much further. The folk resurgence since 2000 has also been welcome and often elides with world music.

Funnily enough, and this is embarrassing, I went to a junior school in the 1960s at which a batty deputy headmistress placed morris dancing on a par with Maths and French. It would be fair to say that many of us didn't take it seriously but I am grateful for it now as I think that it might have had an impact. On folk strains in classical music, I was a part of a major schools concert in Croydon in 1974 where we performed Copland. I was at university when I got a second hand cassette of RVW's 2nd symphony alongside, would you believe, Byrne and Eno's "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" and was immediately captivated. I think Zoe Rahman is doing some very good things with jazz and folk now. Alyn Shipton has played her on R3 but she wouldn't appeal to everybody.

[teamsaint]

Thanks for an interesting glimpse (?) into your musical life , Lat. Croydon toNewcastle and back to see a band....things you do, eh?!
Great to find , at last somebody round here who appreciates The Men They Couldn't Hang, one of my favourite bands, who have produced a magnificent body of work.
Paul Simmonds is a songwriter of the highest order.

Edit: Your last paragraph contains great suggestions of how education could be improved at the drop of a hat, at zero cost.

[MrGongGong]

Edit: Your last paragraph contains great suggestions of how education could be improved at the drop of a hat, at zero cost.

What , with Moorish dancing ?
My Kurdish friends are real experts at that ...........

[Lateralthinking1]

Thanks for an interesting glimpse (?) into your musical life , Lat. Croydon toNewcastle and back to see a band....things you do, eh?!
Great to find , at last somebody round here who appreciates The Men They Couldn't Hang, one of my favourite bands, who have produced a magnificent body of work.
Paul Simmonds is a songwriter of the highest order.

Edit: Your last paragraph contains great suggestions of how education could be improved at the drop of a hat, at zero cost.

Yes, very good. I like "Night of a Thousand Candles" best - Ironmasters, Scarlet Ribbons - and I saw them mainly in that era. The last time was at Glastonbury about five years ago and I was a bit disappointed. They seemed to be simply going through a routine and then at the end there was a big family gathering on stage. I do feel that sort of thing should be left to the Osmonds.

Anyhow.......I am stepping back now from this topic as it is a bit off-topic in many respects.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

What , with Moorish dancing ?

No: batty deputy headmistresses - the only proven preventative against Gove fever!

[Pabmusic]

...1913 marks the centenary of the musical embarrassment that was Benjamin Britten. Given his unsavory predeliction for young boys, it's amazing his reputation as remained intact but his setting of English folk music is especially unforgivable. Britten achieved the unimaginable feat of producing music that is more embarrassing for most Brits than Gilbert & Sullivan. It's strange how other people's folk music always seems better. I love the stuff Bartok produced and the folky-themes of Janacek are cool. Even the likes of Gottschalk throwing in folk themes in some of his compositions is appealing. However, whenever most British composers utilise folk themes you are put in mind of being sick from school as a child and witnessing "The Spinners " on Pebble Mill....By and large, anything from the British Isles tend to sound embarrassing and it is only in the hands of a genius like Frederick Delius that you can forgive anyone to mining this seam although the likes of Vaughan Williams had a good go. Britten , however, makes you ashamed to be English in his dabbling with folk music. I suppose that BBC Radio 3 will be choc-a-bloc with Britten tributes in 2013 and we can expect JRR to be sacrificed at some later stage in exchange for "Peter Grimes."...

What strange stuff. I can't make up my mind whether you are being serious or not - perhaps it's all a gigantic leg-pull, but I'll treat it as serious. Where do I begin?

First. Benjamin Britten's musical reputation is (or at least should be) independent of his personal life, except insofar as his personal life gives any insight into his music.

Second. What is your authority for saying that "Britten achieved the unimaginable feat of producing music that is more embarrassing for most Brits than Gilbert & Sullivan"? Do you have any data to show this is how "most Brits" feel? A representative survey, perhaps? In any case, what are your criteria for judging the embarrassment factor of a piece of music, and which music did you compare?

Third. What is your authority for saying that "whenever most British composers utilise folk themes you are put in mind of being sick from school as a child and witnessing "The Spinners " on Pebble Mill....By and large, anything from the British Isles tend to sound embarrassing..."? Another representative survey? Or is it just a personal opinion?

Fourth. What pieces do you have in mind when you say "it is only in the hands of a genius like Frederick Delius that you can forgive anyone to [sic] mining this seam..."? Apart from Brigg Fair, I cannot think of anything that introduces a tune from the British Isles, though On Hearing the First Cuckoo contains one from Norway, and Appalachia has a slave song.

Fifth. You miss the point about Vaughan Williams, who "had a go". He developed a musical language that was at least partly influenced by folk music - so when you listen to - say - the opening of Flos Campi or the Fourth Symphony, you are hearing something of folk music, even though it's all RVW. (Bartok did something similar in Hungary.) But that's not the real point about the folk-music revival of the early 20th Century. Those who collected, recorded, and sometimes incorporated tunes in their own music were responsible for preserving thousands of folk tunes and dances, and also for finding a different musical pathway. Some, like RVW, Holst or Butterworth, made simple settings that allowed the tunes to have the lead, while others, like Percy Grainger or Benjamin Britten (who was not a collector, of course) tried to make them into art songs. Whether they succeeded or not doesn't really matter.

Sixth. When you say "Britten , however, makes you ashamed to be English in his dabbling with folk music" is that a criticism of Britten (he doesn't do it very well) or of folk music (it's not worth it)? And what is your authority for saying it makes "you" (me?) ashamed to be anything?

I take it you don't like folk music from the British Isles. Pity, since some of it is very lovely.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

What strange stuff. I can't make up my mind whether you are being serious or not - perhaps it's all a gigantic leg-pull, but I'll treat it as serious. Where do I begin?

Every so often, IanT goes into "Mandryka mode" and posts a comment in which he vents his spleen and makes extravagant claims which are the equivalent of Rumpelstiltskin pounding his foot through the floor. The kindest thing to do with these is to ignore them, let the vapours pass and wait for his next topic which will be back to his usual standard of discourse and insight.

[Pabmusic]

Every so often, IanT goes into "Mandryka mode" and posts a comment in which he vents his spleen and makes extravagant claims which are the equivalent of Rumpelstiltskin pounding his foot through the floor. The kindest thing to do with these is to ignore them, let the vapours pass and wait for his next topic which will be back to his usual standard of discourse and insight.

Ah! I shall remember that...

[burning dog]

Surely the Spinners were great?!

EDIT Watch out for the young chap at 2:04 confounding racial stereotypes.

[Quarky]

As for minimal energy expenditure in folk, have you seen Bellowhead, Oyster Band, Seth Lakeman for instance?

Yes see what you mean - Fiona Talkington Wednesday evening - Bellowhead - Lily Bolero (I think -she's given up with play lists).
And a delicious piece by Monk - Pannonica.

But may be Engish folk is too far, poles apart in fact, from Jazz for there to be meaningful interplay (even though it may be argued Jazz is an amalgam of African plus German and French music). More promising it seems to me, listening to Late Junction Programmes, is interplay between mid-east, african and latin american folk music.