Bone picking.
Certain past threads (and difficulty believing lunch is *really* over) have got me thinking:
It seems to me that in any culture’s aural tradition each story / song / melody is passed on with as much of it’s own history as can be remembered. For example, the teller of a First Nations tale must learn it’s where (and when) it came from before he / she earns the right and is given permission to share it. The musical parallel is that the older and more dedicated traditional musicians I’ve met pass on a whole pile of contextual information as they pass on a tune, including the name of the composer if they know it, even in the composer has been dead a century.
It also seems to me many musicians make a concerted effort to block out the awareness that the music they are playing came from somewhere and was written by someone and call this wilful ignorance an appreciation of “genuine” traditional music. Having blocked out as much contextual information as they can, they then make snarky comments about the uselessness of new tunes or composers who think the tunes they’ve written in some way belong to them. Possibly they do this because the continuing practice of ordinary people with kids and jobs and gardens and no Grammy awards composing little ditties in their spare time rubs their noses in the fact that it has always been done this way, and that their stubborn refusal to consider the people who wrote the tunes they play is nothing but laziness.
Discuss.