Re: Performance style (diversion)

Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 14:19:15 -0000
Newsgroups: uk.music.folk
Size: 1,360 bytes

"Ian Anderson" <email-address-deleted> wrote in message
news:email-address-deleted...
> For some reason this got me wondering - does anybody under a
> certain age use "contemporary" as a name for a musical genre any
> more? Especially since the music it generally describes is anything
> but - usually being time-trapped somewhere around the late 1960s.
Nah, "contemporary" furniture and home decor was late 50s, early 60s, the
sort of stuff that's now valued as "retro".
But oddly enough I noticed, just a few hours ago, the use of "contemporary"
in relation to folk music. If you open the BBC Radio Player and go to the
"Folk and Country" genre, there's Celtic Heartbeat offering "Traditional and
contemporary folk", and Celtic Connections with "contemporary Celtic music"
(wow, two weasel words in one phrase!). So there you are - it now seems to
mean "non-traditional" (I suppose).
To me it suggests that it's music of its time (the opposite of "timeless"),
which of course means the term is valid only at the time it's used. Once the
music is out of date it's neither contemporary nor traditional - I don't
know what we'd call that.
The term may be used differently in the US, but I rather think they consider
anything from as far back as the 1960s to be traditional, or at any rate
old.
--
Marjorie Clarke
--
Marjorie Clarke