Celtpastor wrote:
Stuff like that has been done before, back in the 90ies! Check some of the later albums of the very unfortunately late Scottish Piper&Fiddler Martyn Bennet! There's nothing new under the sun...
The
90s? You make a decade sound hoary with age. I thought it was the Yanks that had short attention spans. Gimme me something from the 70s, and we'll talk.
Ah,
Martyn Bennett. At the end of his career (and too-young life) he went off in directions others in Trad circles found hard to accept; his treatment of
Oran nam Mogaisean, while I get the concept, is hard for me to listen to (from about 1/3 of the way through the track). Still, the rhythm and extranea work
from the tune (well, for the most part, admittedly

). By the way, that's his mother, Margaret Bennett, singing. She is a prodigious collector of old Canadian Gaelic music in the Maritimes, and without her, this otherwise obscure material from a rich tradition might be lost to us.
Here's a track vid, though, of
Deoch an Dorus, part 2, that also fuses the modern with the traditional in a less challenging manner than
Oran nam Mogaisean, and while it appears to bring the traditional into the modern, by another token the modern refers directly to the traditional in supporting the tune-as-ground-of-all. In the end it's not to my taste, but nevertheless I think it's well done, and the roots aren't lost.
Here's another vid of Bennett playing
MacCrimmon's Lament followed by a couple of strathspeys and a rant (maybe?), strictly Pure Drop smallpipes, that I think demonstrates where he was coming from and why he was arguably in a position, at the end, to go where he did with it whether it was my or anyone else's cup of tea or not.
chris_coreline wrote:
thats said the 'everything has been done before' argument is very very damaging, nothing else is so capable of insuring that nothing new gets done, its defeatism and its bad philosophy.
I have to agree. Better you should acknowledge what's been done, take it, and go further.