Do you listen to and enjoy traditional, or folk, music? I listen to it but do not, on the whole, enjoy it.
On the radio today, a Chinese musician who has made it big in the Western Classical Music scene talked of going back to his roots and exploring Chinese traditional music. The interviewer asked if he thought that Chinese music ought to be brought to the attention of the western public. The musician said that he was attempting to do just that and then gave an example of the kind of thing he was doing: he played a piece of traditional Chinese music on a piano.
This sort of thing is going on around the world, where Western musicians are exploring traditional music from all sorts of cultures and bringing it to the attention of the western public. This is all done with an air of virtue. The word ‘deserve’ is often used: does the music of such and such a culture ‘deserve’ to be brought to the attention of the wider world? It sounds good. It sounds as though these traditional musics are being ‘rescued from obscurity’, even perhaps saved from extinction.
Actually, what is happening is that they are being taken over and essentially destroyed.
That traditional Chinese music played on a piano sounds more Western than Chinese, western but just a funny, or unusual, sort of tune.
I have long had trouble with British traditional music. The Scots, English and Welsh all have strong folk music traditions, probably stronger today than for a very long time. But I have always had difficulty liking this music, always felt there was something out-of-kilter, something not quite right. It always had, to me, a sort of false ring to it.
It does, and it is this: traditional music was created by, and for, a people who sang as freely as birds. It was not about being an expert or having talent. It was just something totally natural that everybody did.
And that is what is wrong. That free-as-a-bird music has been turned into an ‘expertise’ and a ‘saleable product’ and that clashes with its true, essential nature.
So, rather than rescuing traditional music, we have lost it and have gained instead another brand of expertise, another saleable product. We have lost diversity in music.
This is competition at work. This is how competition impoverishes the world and works towards the creation of a monoculture. It has happened to British folk music, and now we are in the process of losing Chinese folk music.