There is a great discussion on New Hampshire public radio (NPR) on “What is folk music?”. My comment is that I think there as many answers to “What is folk music?” as there are people to answer the question. I prefer to not debate which instrumentation is or is not appropriate as many others have already debated this to death. The thread that I found very captivating in the NPR discussion was the idea of public domain as mentioned by jimgiddings:
>>The core of folk music is anonymity and the public domain.<<
And further:
>>I would add that the music needs to be part of a community, although the community can now be a worldwide-web community as easily as a geographically-based community. True folk music will always be the mortal enemy of intellectual property rights: i.e. it can only thrive when people are free to build on the work of others. Pop music and country music (though maybe not jazz) all treat musicians and songwriters as islands whose creative “product” is inviolable. To make a living in folk music performers need to be constantly interacting with fans and other musicians in ways that labels and established pop musicians would find dangerous.<<
This is an awesome statement and it is exactly what the Creative Commons movement, founded by Lawrence Lessig, is all about. We need to lower barriers and increase creativity and interaction. The internet and especially Web 2.0 has provided a tremendous opportunity to independent artists and those in the folk music movement to interact with their fans and other musicians in a meaningful, fundamentally different way than has ever been possible. Big Brother is no longer in control. We have the means to restart the engines of creativity. Besides professor Lessig, another internet collaboration pioneer and favorite of mine is Jonathan Coulton. And of course, if you are reading my site, you already know that I have also thrown my hat into the ring and established my own web site with the desire to expand the circle of collaboration and creativity even more.
The What is Folk Music? Opening Up Creativity. by Chris Hartzog, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States License.
