Folk Music - an Ancient Mandala

Woodstock Festival

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair was a historic event held at Max Yasgur's 600 acre (2.4 km²) dairy farm in the rural town of Bethel, New York from August 15 to August 18, 1969. Bethel (Sullivan County) is 43 miles southwest of the town of Woodstock, New York, which is in adjoining Ulster County.

To many, the festival exemplified the counterculture of the 1960s and the "hippie era." Thirty-two of the best-known musicians of this time period appeared during the sometimes rainy weekend. Though attempts have been made over the years to recreate the festival, the original event has proven to be unique and legendary. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest concerts in music history and was listed on Rolling Stone's 50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll.
The event was captured in a successful 1970 movie, Woodstock, and Joni Mitchell's song "Woodstock", which memorialized the event, became a major hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The concert signaled the end of the so-called "Flower Generation."

Genres:
Rock and Folk, including Blues-Rock, Folk-Rock, Jazz-Rock, Latin rock and Psychedelic rock styles. Alternative Rock and Rap were played at post-1969 Woodstock festivals.

Date:
The original festival was scheduled for three days (Friday, August 15, 1969 through Sunday, August 17, 1969), but owing to technical and weather delays, the festival ended at approximately 10:00 a.m. on Monday, August 18, 1969, following Jimi Hendrix's performance.

Contents:



Folk revivals
Main article: Roots revival
See also: American folk music revival

Folk Music - an Ancient Mandala - RosiRed

As folk traditions decline, there is often a conscious effort to resuscitate them. Such efforts are often exerted by bridge figures such as Jean Ritchie, described above. Folk revivals also involve collaboration between traditional folk musicians and other participants (often of urban background) who come to the tradition as adults.

The folk revival of the 1950s in Britain and America had something of this character. In 1950 Alan Lomax came to Britain, where at a Working Men's Club in the remote County Durham mining village of Tow Law he met two other seminal figures: A.L.'Bert' Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, who were performing folk music to the locals there.

Lloyd was a colourful figure who had travelled the world and worked at such varied occupations as sheep-shearer in Australia and shanty-man on a whaling ship. MacColl, born in Salford of Scottish parents, was a brilliant playwright and songwriter who had been strongly politicised by his earlier life. MacColl had also learned a large body of Scottish traditional songs from his mother. The meeting of MacColl and Lloyd with Lomax is credited with being the point at which the British roots revival began. The two colleagues went back to London where they formed the Ballads and Blues Club which eventually became renamed the Singers' Club and was possibly the first of what became known as folk clubs. It closed in 1991. As the 1950s progressed into the 1960s, the folk revival movement built up in both Britain and America. It is sometimes claimed that the earliest folk festival was the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, 1928, in Asheville, Carolina, founded by Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Sidmouth Festival began in 1954, and Cambridge Folk Festival began in 1965.

We must mention too Brittany's Folk revival beginning in the 1950s with the "bagadoù" and the "kan-ha-diskan" before growing to world fame through Alan Stivell 's work since the mid-1960s.


Eastern Europe and the Balkans
During the Communist era national folk dancing was actively promoted by the state. Dance troupes from Russia and Poland toured Western Europe many times from about 1937 to 1990, and less frequently thereafter. The best known were the Red Army Choir and dancers. They recorded many albums. From Bulgaria, an all-female choir from Bulgarian State Radio sold albums around Europe. The first and most famous was "Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares" which even gained a certain chic after being promoted by British DJ John Peel. More recently Romani brass band music from the Balkans has gained a following. The most famous is the Kočani Orkestar. In Hungary, the group Muzsikás and the singer Márta Sebestyén became known throughout the world due to their numerous American tours and their participation in the Hollywood movie The English Patient and Sebestyén's work with the Deep Forest band.

Another example is the Hungarian model, the táncház movement. This model involves strong cooperation between musicology experts and enthusiastic amateurs, resulting in a strong vocational foundation and a very high professional level. They also had the advantage that rich, living traditions of Hungarian folk music and folk culture still survived in rural areas, especially in Transylvania. The involvement of experts meant an effort to understand and revive folk traditions in their full complexity. Music, dance, and costumes remained together as they once had been in the rural communities: rather than merely reviving folk music, the movement revived broader folk traditions. Started in the 1970s, tanchaz soon became a massive movement creating an alternative leisure activity for youths apart from discos and music clubs—or one could say that it created a new kind of music club. The tanchaz movement spread to ethnic Hungarian communities around the world. Today, almost every major city in the U.S. and Australia has its own Hungarian folk music and folk dance group; there are also groups in Japan, Hong Kong, Argentina and Western Europe.


rosired
rosired 		Latest page update: made by rosired , Oct 26 2007, 12:41 PM EDT (about this update About This Update rosired Edited by rosired


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