By David Francis,
We are social animals, and of course we need to get along better, be mindful of our rights and those of others (‘once you have rights what are the life possibilities?’ asks the Scottish poet, Kenneth White), keep working on the crisis of our political arrangements, and improving our living conditions through social policy. But if our vision is of a renewed human culture that allows for an expanded sense of being, and a new sense of our relationship with our earth, and if we think it important to re-think, re-ground and re-express the relationship between the human mind and the non-human world, then we have to look for resources.

By David Francis,

We are social animals, and of course we need to get along better, be mindful of our rights and those of others (‘once you have rights what are the life possibilities?’ asks the Scottish poet, Kenneth White), keep working on the crisis of our political arrangements, and improving our living conditions through social policy.   But if our vision is of a renewed human culture that allows for an expanded sense of being, and a new sense of our relationship with our earth, and if we think it important to re-think, re-ground and re-express the relationship between the human mind and the non-human world, then we have to look for resources. What is there in human culture up to the present – now laid out before us in a way that was never before possible – that can help us to re-connect, which can offer something of that expanded sense, can point towards relationship with landscape and the earth that is more than sentimental, and relationship with each other that is more than perfunctory?

To find and connect with something beyond dissatisfaction and alienation from the difficult context in which we find ourselves, then we have to move off what Alan Lomax called ‘the cultural super-highways’, and find a response that is as creative as it is critical.

The 18th and 19th century artists and thinkers known as the Romantics were among the first to define the search for an appropriate response, and, following them, people have turned to what has come to be known as the folk arts for resources.  The folk arts are seen as being off the cultural super-highway, but within reach and by and large outside of the usual western discourse.  We value the folk arts for their oppositional qualities (and also for the reason that they have been felt to be under threat of imminent loss).  Some have used folk culture to find ways out of our predicament and found themselves in dead ends like the kind of search for identity, in itself a sign of the fragmentation which is part of our malaise, which can lead to a too narrow perspective – certain kinds of defensive nationalism, for example.  On the other hand participation in folk music and dance might offer a kind of human interaction that appeals as a folk utopia, an idealised form of community, lost in the emergence of the mass society.  At the very least, in a gathering where music, dance, story and song are shared there is a chance for conviviality, which is not to be scorned, and is preferable to its caricature in the kind of boozed up bonhomie, too often ending up as oblivious aggression, that evaporates in the morning; or to nuclear isolation in front of the TV or the computer screen.

If we look to folk culture as a resource for connectivity, and for renewing human culture, we will find, to be sure, much that is sentimental, worn-out, moralistic, couthy, fantastical.  We also need to be clear that we don’t see folk culture as a resource for the imaginative re-creation of the folk utopia, a retreat into comfortable reassurance.  The job rather will be to work through the undergrowth of sentiment and couthiness to the ancient ground where a deeper engagement might begin (‘the only way to renew vision is to go right back to the ground’ – Kenneth White again).  And if there are elements in those folk arts which we can use to develop a language with which we can express our renewed relationship to the earth, which must be at the centre of a future human culture, then so much the better.

I’ll concede that a lot of folk material is a long way from the kind of language we need, although it is in there if we look, and the voices are there, both human and instrumental, waiting only for the minds that will allow them their fullest and deepest expression.

David Francis is the Traditional Music Forum’s Executive Officer.  The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forum or its Board.