I think the point is that griot music is a celebration of aristocratic power. If there is no aristocracy to compose and perform it for, why would anyone preserve it?

Name one who was end or banned. Lost their jobs, yes, but not that many: this kind of music was in decline then anyway. Some ended up in Britain or continental Europe.

There's a *lot* of question about it, and no positive evidence of any such process.

You mean, for the first time some Irish music got written down. That does not amount to a creative explosion, it amounts to a (small) boom in music paper. When was that music created? We just don't know.

We have a fair bit of evidence of what people in the cities were up to; the gentry got their hands on an buttortment of pieces of mixed folk and art-music origins and started playing them on the violin, recorder and (after 1725) the flute. In the country? Very few instruments known from there at all until much later. The early Irish pieces that got written down are not the sort of thing that comes out of a rural folk tradition; they're long, rhapsodic, complicated and have no function except as listening pieces. buttembling a paying audience for something like that is not possible in a scattered rural community, and a harpist can't keep going without being paid (strings are expensive, instruments enormously more so). Anyone who took their harp on tour through the bogs of Mayo in the 1650s would have soon dumped it in a ditch out of despair.

Travelling dancing masters were an import of an English practice, not the descendants of anything in Irish tradition. The tunes they played were a mixture of indigenous Irish jigs (mostly of vocal origin in Gaelic song) and reels and country dances from Scotland and England. The older harp music was of no use whatever to them.

The poorer clbuttes have quite a lot of use for some of the buttets of a departed aristocracy (like their gold and weaponry). But when an aristocracy declines or abandons its *artistic* buttets, the chances are their subjects won't care. The Highland Scottish peasantry didn't exactly rush to preserve piobaireachd after their lairds lost interest in it: it just faded into near-oblivion. Uncoolness was a much more important factor in the decline of the Irish harp tradition than any kind of direct repression, and becoming uncool among the rich didn't make it in any way more appealing to the poor.

Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files and CD-ROMs of Scottish music.