Second Response to Jerzy

Jerzy's Response

Your point about Quebecois and Hawaiian geographical isolation is interesting to consider - I wish I had other examples to compare them with - but in any case, I didn't mean to exaggerate the parallels between entire cultures and a relatively small group of musicians.

With regard to early music being exclusively Western, I'm not sure I follow you. Clearly other cultures have long-standing musical traditions, but I don't remember Shelemay referring to them in any depth, at least not in this article. If they are mentioned, it's not as part of the early music movement, which I take to include mostly Renaissance/Baroque music. Thus when you write that early music players "feel no need to define their identity" through their music, I sort of agree with you - but not because "it may not even be their own." I think the important point is not that they might not feel that the music is "theirs," but instead that they choose to play the music on other grounds entirely.

More importantly, I think that referring to Hawaiian/Quebecois traditions as "their own" is problematic if you accept Handler and Linnekin's conception of tradition. In both of those cases, groups of people performed acts they deemed traditional though at times the practices weren't faithful to past practices (and in all cases were different simply because they were conscious of the idea of tradition behind the acts). The idea that that the traditions are "their own" simply because they have been passed down by ancestors obscures the fact that there are other kinds of connections between people that might be defined as traditional.