http://www.folk-network.com/
My local pub (the Old Heavygate Inn at Walkley) has a number of really endearing features. The beer is good, the staff are friendly, the jukebox is well stocked and loud enough to hear, and a vastly improbable number of my drinking partners are into folk music. Which can lead to some very protracted discussions. One question we’ve never been able to resolve is arguably the simplest: what exactly is folk music? Opinions are divided, although there are various points we are generally agreed upon. For one thing, folk isn’t the same thing as a solo guitarist singing to their own strumming, regardless of what American record companies may say. And conversely, just because an artist becomes established enough to have their own material released on record, it doesn’t mean that they’re suddenly writing commercial (and supposedly, therefore, non-folk) music.
One reasonably safe definition seems to centre on the relevance of oral tradition in the transmission of
material. If someone learns material from a Led Zeppelin record, they are doing no more than performing a
cover version, but if someone then learns the tune from their performance, and someone else learns from
their performance, and so on, then there seems to be every reason to regard the music as having
'become' traditional. A more political definition centres on the context from which the material emerges.
If a song draws on traditional idioms and deals with topics of social relevance (however allegorically), it
is hard to see why it should not be regarded as 'folk music' to exactly the same extent as, say, the Copper
songs of the same type.
In SRFN News 24, Rosie Huzzard argued cogently that just because a 12 year old prefers folk music to Boyzone, it doesn’t mean they’re from another planet. I agree, but from a different viewpoint: no real distinction exists between the two musical forms they are merely at different positions along a common spectrum. All folk music which now exists was necessarily ‘popular music’ to the musicians and audiences who transmitted it, and it is probably fair to say that some, at least, of the more radical music being created today will have entered the folk tradition by the year 2050. But which music will this be, and which of today’s genres will it represent? If we look to the definitions given above, some answers are rather surprising, because the vast bulk of material 'coming from the streets' and representing contemporary social experience is neither 'trad' nor 'pop', but techno, hip-hop and drum-and-bass. And as synthesizer and software prices continue to fall in real terms, we can expect to see even more material of this kind being produced. Technologically advanced instruments are becoming what guitars and mandolins were to the re-emergent folkies of the sixties, and just as the flexibility and low price of fiddles and banjos made them instruments of choice for so many folk artists of the last century, so the rapidly falling price of drum and instrumental synthesizers, and above all computers, is rapidly making these the instruments of choice for the next.
Synthetic Folk refers to this emerging future tradition, and in particular, an attempt to ensure that whatever forms this emerging tradition takes, it will include the idioms we all regard as so essential to folk music today. For example, on September 26th, the established underground radio station interFace hosted a live international internet broadcast of a strangely techno-cum-hip-hop performance of the folk classic Lisbon (by equally strange experimentalists, Duplicate Shadow), and a follow-up performance is currently planned early next year.
Ironically, the strength of 'underground' music is one of the greatest testaments to the enduring power of oral tradition, because this form of music is mainly distributed by individuals acting as individuals, passing tapes back and forth, using each other’s material as a starting point for creating new and ever more vibrant versions of the material they hear. Without record company interest, these musical forms have had no choice but to spread by word of mouth, and those compositions which have survived this gruelling selection process are now regarded as classics of their genre. More recently, of course, the internet has generated new social bonds and new shared experience, and songs which celebrate this new sense of community cannot truly exist outside the context that created them. It is likely, therefore, that a new form of 'distributed folk' will emerge, in which the themes promulgated are those which refer not to shared village or town experience, but rather to those factors which apply simultaneously to geographically diverse sections of the developed world’s populations.
So when is a piece of music an example of 'synthetic folk'? As with the definition of 'ordinary folk' we are still arguing this out over our pints, but one thing seems clear. Electronic instrumentation will be commonplace in 50 years’ time, and synthetic musical forms may well predominate. It is already very easy to write highly complex musical compositions using free software running on the cheapest computers, including pieces that are physically unplayable by any other means. And as Rosie pointed out last issue, most of the next decade’s emerging musicians don’t regard folk music as worth dealing with. Unless we embrace these emerging forms, therefore, and ensure that traditional idioms are kept in the mix, we run the risk that the music we love will be made obsolete by a newer more vibrant and more dynamically representative future tradition.