Should traditional music get more attention in the formal education system, or would this stifle interest, an upcoming conference asks. Siobhán Long reports

Anyone inclined to take the pulse of traditional and folk music these days would surely get a healthy reading. But cast the clock back 40 years and it would have been a brave seer who would have predicted the rude health of traditional music today.

Seán Ó Riada pedalled his way across the country on his pushbike, tape-recorder tethered to the carrier, in search of the music; Ciarán MacMathúna went in pursuit of rocks and stones to secure the accelerator pedal of the Radio Éireann van so he could keep the batteries of his recording equipment charged long enough to record a decent session; even the renowned American archivist, Alan Lomax crossed hill and vale to capture the inimitable talents of Margaret Barry.

These days, however, archives are in the making 24/seven. Traditional musicians, whether wizened or wanton, are recording in studios, in sessions and at home. And inevitably, as the music has shimmied and step-danced its way into the national consciousness, its advocates have argued for its absorption into the mainstream educational arena too.

Musicians have never been shy of sharing a tune or alerting a fellow session player to the delights of a quirky interpretation of a song or a hornpipe. The summer school tradition has yielded many a fine player too, whether by way of the Willie Clancy Summer School in Miltown Malbay or the newly-minted (and penknife-free) bodhrán summer school on Achill Island.

But still there are gaps. Despite the plethora of informal teaching and educational opportunities, some of the traditional music fraternity fear for its long-term survival unless there is a concerted effort to immerse the tradition within the formal music teaching firmament of second and third level education.

Fintan Vallely, ethnomusicologist, flute player and a man not given to ambivalence on the question of education in traditional music puts this question centre stage, by way of the forthcoming Crosbhealach An Cheoil: Crossroads Conference 2003, which takes place in the University of Ulster from April 25th to 27th.

"Some people would believe that if the State takes on the role of education in traditional music, the music will die," says Vallely, explaining the background to this year's conference. "Some people would say that the same thing has happened to the Irish language.

"But there are also arguments against that. One is that [the English\] language is an economic medium, and people use it in their everyday lives, but music and language are used in different ways. They can mean the same thing as regards identity, but music has an additional private aesthetic quality to it which makes it a different thing altogether."

Vallely doesn't bemoan the so-called academicisation of traditional music. "The most important thing about any music is that it's played," he says. "And the biggest level of teaching that happens is older players teaching kids. That usually happens these days in classes. It rarely happens that someone just absorbs the music. Summer schools are like a broadband master class, if you like, where you can have up to 140 teachers giving classes, as you'd see at the Willie Clancy Summer School.

Philip Bohlman, Professor of Music and Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago, is one of the keynote speakers at the Crossroads Conference.

An ethnomusicologist who has written extensively on the subject of American folk music, as well as the folk music of German-speaking Europe and Jewish folk music, Bohlman is sanguine about the future of traditional music whether cradled in the hands of the freewheeling musician or in the potentially "safe" environs of academia.

"The health of folk and traditional music is itself varied, for it thrives in some places and is surely endangered in others. One task of an educator, therefore, is to be vigilant about these different places: we must learn from the traditions that thrive and apply those lessons to the places where music is endangered.

"In this sense, the teaching of traditional music is no longer isolated - to a repertory, instrument, style, or nation - but rather it has been globalised. This, seems to me, to be one of the tasks and challenges of the Crossroads conference: learning the lessons from a world where the traditional also spreads across an international plane."

One of Fintan Vallely's key concerns is to explore the way in which traditional music takes its place alongside other genres, from classical to pop and jazz.

"I recall Barry Burgess from the University of Ulster saying that everything that needs to be taught about music can be taught through any form of music, whether classical, jazz, popular or traditional. And what he was arguing was that people should be taught the music that they're most familiar with and most at ease with. If it's traditional, they can still learn all about intervals, time signatures, keys, scales and so on. And this is certainly a thread or stream offered by the music department in UCC, going way back to Aloys Fleishmann and even before him, where students could study performance at third level through the medium of traditional music."

Philip Bohlman has trawled the spectrum of music education. As far as he's concerned, the teaching and sharing of music is a two-way process, with both formal and folk methods playing an active role in maintaining the health of the music.

"In principle, I think there is no single 'right place' to teach folk and traditional music," he suggests. "The best university and third-level courses of instruction, for example, are not isolated to ivory-tower pedagogy, but they reach out - actively so - to the communities. I should really say that I do not have personal gripes about folk and traditional music. In some ways, the arts are what the arts are, in other words, we either accept them, adapt to them, or change them.

"Musicians and teachers, ultimately, are the real agents. What is most difficult these days is that many of us live in worlds far removed from our own traditions. When this is the case, we can bring the tradition to us, which is what the Irish diaspora has successfully accomplished, at least in my home city of Chicago."

As well as viewing Crosbhealach An Cheoil/The Crossroads Conference as a heady opportunity to cast traditional music under the microscope, Philip Bohlman sees it as a forum for lovers and practitioners of the music to allow their views to coalesce in ways which might benefit the music in the long-term.

After all, isn't that what matters most, whatever one's personal biases?

"I have moments of optimism and pessimism about music education in the \ States, Ireland and elsewhere," Bohlman admits.

"The passion of traditional music remains strong, and the need for traditional music in a decentralised, turbulent world is perhaps greater than ever. The problem that arises is the limited and flagging support from organisations, governmental and private, that can and must support the teaching. We can't learn traditional music at the university if we don't have politicians willing to support it.

"One saw the difference in the States, for example, when the Clinton administration of the 1990s appointed two individuals with traditional-music backgrounds [William Ferris at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bill Ivey at the National Endowment for the Arts\] to head the major government arts and humanities agencies. Ivey and Ferris were the types of advocates that are necessary if the traditional arts are to thrive."

Crosbhealach an Cheoil - The Crossroads Conference runs April 25th-27th, Magee College, University of Ulster, Derry. Tel. 048-7137 5679, www.cros2003.com