Global folk meltdown

With the increasing fusion of folk musics around the world, there are fears that distinctive regional styles are being lost or corrupted. Is this true? And if it is, does it matter?

The international record industry has made it easy for anyone to hear folk music from a vast range of cultures and performers. So most folk singers and musicians are inevitably influenced by the singing and playing of others whose backgrounds are very different from their own.

In instrument playing particularly, styles and techniques have been subject to a great deal of cross-fertilisation. Whereas at one time a fiddle player from, say, Donegal in Ireland would play only in the very distinctive Donegal style, a young player from there today is likely to have a mix of many styles, not even confined to those of Ireland let alone the north west.

So the obvious worry is that all playing ends up as a stylistic mush without a recognisable root in any particular cultural heritage.

With some instruments the effect of style-mixing goes beyond musical flavouring such as the treatment of accents, phrasing, rhythms, etc. It even impacts on basic playing techniques. For example the cross-row fingering used by melodeon players in the traditional style of central France is a completely different technique from the pump-action single-row playing of English dance music. When cross-row playing is applied to its rooted tradition it has a distinctive motion and seems delightfully expressive. When it's used out of traditional context it can sound sloppy and lacking in essential drive.

Similarly the cuts, rolls and piping cranns of Irish flute-playing, so effective when applied to Irish music, have an adverse effect if applied to a Lancashire clog-dance. But English flute-players, exposed to the wealth of fine Irish fluting on record, often can't resist adopting the techniques and dropping them into their own traditional music whether it works or not.

And these examples are on a broad national scale. Even more style-erosion takes place at a regional level, where highly distinctive localised playing traditions are often overwhelmed by cosmopolitan general-purpose folk music - a sort of multi-style musical casserole.

It can be technically very impressive. Exciting even. And of course it can be argued that it is just as legitimate and 'traditional' as the older stuff because it is a product of the natural evolution of folk music.

The real tragedy would be if this evolution caused the actual loss of those earlier traditions - if the all-purpose cosmo stuff became all that was available and the regional playing distinctions were neglected and forgotten.

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