Re: West Afrikan Akonting lute musik Old Time Herald web site

> I think the point is that griot music is a celebration of aristocratic
> power.  If there is no aristocracy to compose and perform it for, why
> would anyone preserve it?

Actually though griots celebrate aristocratic genealogies they also preserve
and perform the collective myths of the people, African chiefdoms were not
class stratified societies as in western Europe, and chiefly rule was very
dependent on mass popular consent, and musical  and oral poetry were  often
public performances and not confined to chiefly houses.  And in Ireland
there is no evidence that the aristocracy did not interact with peaseant
dance music, 

> Name one who was killed or banned.  Lost their jobs, yes, but not that
> many: this kind of music was in decline then anyway.  Some ended up in
> Britain or continental Europe.

> The poorer classes have quite a lot of use for some of the assets of
> a departed aristocracy (like their gold and weaponry).  But when an
> aristocracy declines or abandons its *artistic* assets, the chances
> are their subjects won't care....Assembling a paying audience for something
like that is not possible in a scattered rural community, and a harpist
can't keepgoing without being paid (strings are expensive, instruments
enormously
more so).  Anyone who took their harp on tour through the bogs of Mayo in
the 1650s would have soon dumped it in a ditch

Well name one harper who threw his harp into a ditch in Mayo i.e. the above
statement contains as many unsupported assertions about cultural process and
norms as you accusse me of purveying. I think it goes without saying that in
reference to the origins of any folk practice whether we are talking about
the banjo or Irish dance music we are always in the realm of speculation and
inference in which primary historical data will be fragmentary

  However Irish bardic poets and harpers were banished to the West Indies
where many died of fever and poor conditions of indentured servitude. Exile
to the West Indies was seen as a de facto death sentence in this period.

As for the rest we may disagree on the particulars but you are also making
arguments for some sort of hybridization process and thus confirm my point
that similar hybridity was at work in the development of the banjo from
African prototypes.

> You mean, for the first time some Irish music got written down.  That
> does not amount to a creative explosion, it amounts to a (small) boom
> in music paper.  When was that music created?  We just don't know.

See Brendan Beathnach on the dating of the big reels and jigs in his Ceol
Rince books and he was not referring to transcription dates.

Your  point here was that the 17TH and 18th century witnessed a
hybridization  from multiple sources such as the  European baroque, and I
would add the bardic tradition. Do you think it merely vanished in thin air
in an highly skilled oral culture/ as unemployed harpers and singers sought
new markets and audiences.

> Travelling dancing masters were an import of an English practice, not the
> descendants of anything in Irish tradition.  The tunes they played were
> a mixture of indigenous Irish jigs (mostly of vocal origin in Gaelic song)
> and reels and country dances from Scotland and England.  The older harp
> music was of no use whatever to them.

There was a travelling musician vocations within families and for disabled
persons as well as a dancing masters, and the fact  that the vocation of
dancing masters originated in England only confirms my point about
hybridization, nor would their musical practices would have been immune to
indigenous Irish music and nor would tradition keepers in Ireland abstain
from pursuing this type of profession .there is much written evidence of
indigenous Irish dancing masters, do you thing their repertoire only derived
from Playford and such English collections

I never claimed that the earlier harp music was preserved among the
peasentry, that music all but vanished except what was collected by Bunting
from the older itinerant players;, and mouth music was a primary form for
preserving all sorts of rural musical memory,

See Alan Jabbour on the dissemination of violins in the 17trh and 18th
century in British Isles and Americas
On Saturday, November 29, 2003, at 10:30 PM, bogus address wrote:








N


There is no question that the fragmented survivors of this repression
fled for sanctuary to the peasentry in the remote parts of the west
of Ireland and then disseminated their musical traditions among this
population, traditions that were once exclusively reserved for clan
nobility.

There's a *lot* of question about it, and no positive evidence of any
such process.


Thus historians are not surprised that the late 17th century and 18th
century witnessed an explosion in rural Irish music composition,
dancing, and instrument innovation.


W
.

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