>In rural Ireland, even down to the first decades of the twentieth century, the favorite activities during a damp afternoon were a) masturbating, b) composing a song. At Irish gatherings, a common form of socializing was to go round robin, with each person in turn singing a solo. In Wales it was choral singing. I'm sure similar traditions existed in the Mississippi Delta and the Ozarks. Sometimes music was taken from song sheets, and later, from records. But authorship was often anonymous, and lyrics were altered from person to person. This isn't a romanticization of the past. This is simply how people entertained themselves in pre-media times. This is a little different from going to a club, paying a cover charge, and listening to a band with all kinds of equipment, in a situation in which there is a strict dividing line between performer and audience, and the performers are hoping to be noticed and recorded on a commercial label. The closest thing we now have to a folk trad!
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When I was growing up in Romania, my grandfather had a fiddle which hung
on a hook on the wall. After supper, he would take it down and play. I
don't know how good he was; good enough for me. He played gypsy tunes
and popular folk songs and whatever took his fancy. I listened and
danced. His playing the music gathered us together in a way that sitting
around the stereo and listening just wouldn't have done. I don't play a
musical instrument -- and so I've spent zillions of hours listening to
recorded music with my friends -- it's fine, but it's more like sharing
a common longing than anything else. I've also spent a lot of time
listening to the lyrics of folk songs that were created in the way
Turbulo describes above and they are fucking amazingly great -- with a
purity, depth, universality for which you need either a Sappho or untold
generations of artistically competent humans.
I hang out with belly dancers and middle eastern drummers. When they party, half the people are drumming, and the other half are dancing. The parties seem to have a very different trajectory from normal drink-till-you-drop parties. For one thing, no one is in a mad rush to get intoxicated. There's always a bit of beer and wine, but not much (if anything) of other stuff. It's not that anyone is prudish, it's just that there's no pressing need for it.
I don't think this discussion should be about whether the revolution should ban recorded music. Obviously, it's wonderful to be able to have access to music that would otherwise be barred by chronology or geography. But there's also a point to helping people make music or dance or art, and there is a difference between the art produced in an age of connaisseurs and that produced in an age of universal competence in art/music/dance/theater....
Joanna
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