Featured in Alltop

Featured in Alltop

Tuesday 14 May 2013

Traditional music? "from today, everything is different"

While deploring all stereotypes, as we should, let's entertain a couple of fairly harmless ones for a minute.



First: the lover of traditional music - celtic folk or Dixie jazz, Chicago blues, calypso etc; and Second: the devotee of new music - urban pop, electronica, indie rock, prog-metal and so on. Obviously to separate them rigidly is artificial; many of us listen to (or even play) music from both categories.

I suspect that, if asked, many people would put lovers of classical music into the first camp. This is understandable: most well-known composers are dead after all. Some have been for centuries. Their music is far from "new", and it smacks of The Establishment more than just about any other art form. Its (professional at least) practitioners come through conservatoires and ivied halls of academe - very foreign planets to most people. How "traditional" can it get?

Well, here's my point: it ain't traditional at all.