Especificación del modelo de gravedad espacial

Despite the vision needed to establish an organization such as Folkworks, it did not spring into existence in a complete educational vacuum. Anderson asserts that the folk scene in the UK at large was beginning to notice that their audience was dwindling, and seemed to have no notion of what to do to counter this trend. There were, he states, concerns: an organization called Perform had been set up in Cheshire 1982 after an impassioned talk by Dick Gaughan decrying the state of the folk scene’s demographic, although in Anderson’s assessment, ‘They’d got some people together to try and talk about it, but nothing really had happened’.12 The modern publicity that had accompanied Jay Unger’s adult fiddle workshops, along with the professionalism and attendance of the events themselves, had left a lasting impression. Compared with this, the workshops at British folk festivals showed little of this flair, or even basic preparation. In recalling a concertina workshop given at Cleethorpes Folk Festival, Anderson was scathing of the British attempts at inclusion:

Most workshops were sort of “it’s a guitar workshop, so I’m going to sit and play, [they’re] going to watch and ask questions and then we’ll all try little bits” but there was very little structure to it. I remember people being amazed when I’d brought something [written out], and I had the basic tune drawn up big, so everybody could

11 _{Listed on Anderson’s composition list in the biography section of his website, which can be retrieved here:} http://www.alistairanderson.com/bio-comp.htm, (23/10/17).

see it, and then I had little blocks of paper with the decorations, and a bit of blu-tack, and [I could] stick it on. “Oh look, that makes it different, and this grace note there…” And the thought of that, to give that much thought to a workshop before you actually arrived, was looked upon as pretty radical.13

The professional attitude may have been lacking on the festival circuit, but there were, at either end of the British Isles, attempts to shore up the local folk culture by involving children and young people in locally focused, community driven folk arts projects. Of these, the two that Anderson recalled as being operational immediately before the formal founding of Folkworks were the Scottish Fèis and Devon’s Wren Trust. The fact that similar solutions were appearing nationwide implied that there was a broader need to solve a precisely the problem which Anderson was describing: bringing in people from outside of the existing folk scene and creating spaces in which they could actively participate, creating a strong

community basis for continuity.

The Fèis movement of the Scottish Highlands and Islands began as a community-run cultural tuition festival on the Island of Bharraigh (Barra) in 1981. With a focus on preserving the musical, linguistic and dialectic heritage of the approximately sixty thousand Gaelic language speakers in Scotland, the Fèisean aimed to bring children and young adults into positive and inspirational contact with the traditional arts expressions of Gaelic culture.14 Within five years a second affiliated festival, Fèis Rois, was established in Ullapool in Ross-shire, with a

broadly similar agenda, although organized and run by a different committee. Of particular importance was the community strengthening aspect, which was seen as a way to help each of the individual Fèisean perpetuate themselves through the emotional investment of the local population.15 _{By the time Folkworks began, further Fèisean were forming: Fèis an Earraich}

on the Isle of Skye, Feis Tir a’ Mhurain on South Uist and Benbecula.16 Each was a self- contained festival, inspired by the previous events in other areas to run something for their own community: the event on South Uist was set up by a group of mothers concerned by a lack of Gaelic school provision.17 The movement continues to this day: by the twenty-fifth anniversary in 2007, they could report an annual attendance of around thirteen thousand across more than forty Fèisean nationwide.

13 _{I can confirm that this was still common practice amongst players of the older guard when I first started}

attending folk festivals in the early 1990s: in one Bert Jansch led guitar workshop that lasted over an hour and a half, all that was actually taught was the first bar of Angie.

14 _{Kate Martin (ed.), Fèis: the first twenty-five years of the Fèis movement (Skye: Fèisean nan Gàidheal, 2006),}

8-9.

15 _{Ibid, 13-15.} 16 _{Ibid, 59-65.} 17 _{Martin, 2006, 62.}

Co-founders Paul Wilson and Marilyn Tucker established Devon’s Wren Music in 1983, although later re-branded as the Wren Trust following the acquisition of charitable status in 1987. Wilson recalled that Alistair Anderson had worked with them on a project around 1985, and had expressed an interest, during a car journey to a venue, in adapting their community focused folk arts projects for use in the North East.18 Although Anderson had no recollection of any such conversation—stating that Fèis movement were the real inspiration from within the UK— he confirmed that he had indeed worked for them in a workshop setting around that time, and was aware of the work they were doing in the South West.19 Currently operating as Wren Music once again, with all mention of the Trust and the organisation’s history removed from their current web presence, they employ half a dozen project musicians in addition to Wilson and Tucker, and continue to deliver community folk arts projects, such as folk orchestras and folk choirs, mostly within the Devon area.20

In the North of England, Anderson recalled that older folk arts organizations were making little impact: the EFDSS had no real effective presence in the area, and that the CCÉ in Newcastle were “a closed circle” at the time, with no interest in broadening their

demographic. The Northumbrian Piper’s Society offered classes for aspiring pipers, but their reach and influence were limited. There were isolated pockets of work around individual schools though: a geography teacher named John Ray had started a small Saturday Ceilidh band called Crab Apple in Cumbria, which Anderson and Martin Dunn had attended to help out on occasion. Another similar project involved a school in Northumberland, which had been left without formal music tuition:

There was one other very, very good precursor: Mary Crane (Mary Cannon then) was in a school in Ashington, which was a middle school, and it had no music teacher for a couple of years. So there was no music, and eventually she said “Well, I play the fiddle a bit”, and the Head says “well, ok, teach a few kids the whistle”. Her formal music education was [minimal]—her reading was worse than mine, which is saying something—but she taught the kids all by ear, and then with some dots [Musical notation]. Whistle and fiddle. It was Irish stuff, because that’s what she’d grown up in. Before you knew where she was, she was taking them up to Glasgow and stuff.

The common factors between all of these projects are that they were focused on community level action, and run from within those communities, be they a Scottish Island, a Devonshire

18 _{Unrecorded informal interview at AFO conference 2010.} 19 _{AA Interview.}

village or a Northumberland school. They were happening independently and without support from pre-existing folk-arts organizations, and they were also not tied in to the network of folk clubs and festivals that had sustained the scene through the 1960s an 1970s, and was now becoming increasingly insular. What they all lacked, at that time, was the ability to reach outside of their locality, to where there was no pre-existing community to draw on, to inspire the formation of a self-sustaining interest group. That leap was to be taken by Folkworks, in part by utilizing the new network of arts centres, in part by using nationally renowned performers as their tutor base. Anderson knew that his idea for such an ‘intervention’ was unique:

An intervention which really started to open the potential for a much wider number of kids without that background [of parents already involved in folk scene] to stumble across it, and some of them to keep going? I wasn’t aware of that happening, certainly in the North of England, and by and large generally across England…