It's an old argument. There are those who believe that footering with music is essential. There are others who prefer to leave things precisely as they are in some sort of pure state. The difficulty however is that, by now, we've all been addled both by the debate itself, and by the sheer quantity of the music twinkling within that twilight concept of "celtic" - a word which has became quite meaningless in anything other than marketing terms.
The musical crisis, however, is that so many traditional musicians are opting to go for all manner of fusions - many of which simply don't work. The quality of the playing and the best of intentions are quite beside the point when the end result amounts to little more than mush - what the musician Fintan Vallely referred to as "musical esperanto".
That's not to say that there isn't great music being made by those interested in fusion (Michael McGoldick's new album being one of the more successful ones), but there appears to be a general tendency to go immediately for the kitchen sink effect. In the rush to meet market expectations, cliche and shorthand take precedence over feeling and depth. The actual musical impulse sometimes seems, at best, secondary.
The constant problem, however, is that a musician needs a Janus capacity to look in two directions at once. To close his/her eyes to either the musical future or the musical past is to deprive him/herself of a great many things. Certainly nobody much wants the music to boil dry, but nobody wants it stewed to death either. And here I'm back to the word "mush".
One outfit which has been rather unfairly hammered in this regard is The Afro-Celt Sound System. They began as a project to fuse West African and Irish music with modern dance beats and, not surprisingly, the first album was received with the usual fusion of feelings - among them excitement, horror, curiosity, despair, enthusiasm and wicked pleasure. Your particular view of what they were up to depended on where you stood on experimentation - a dirty word in some circles. But their critics were forgetting that what the Afro- Celts were doing wasn't about traditional music anyway - it was about making people dance. And this must surely be a noble enough objective ?
But whether you dance to their particular groove or simply roll your eyes, the impact of the Afro-Celts is now beginning to be felt. Having just been nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best World Music Category, their often ignored contribution to this long running debate may finally have to be considered. They have long ago considered it themselves. But having thought about it, they have moved on to things global.
"I spent three years worrying about all that," says the Afro-Celts' founder Simon Emerson. "But as soon as we got the musicians together I just knew it was going to work and the spirit on our first record is a genuine one. By the time of our second record, we were already in demand as a live band, so we weren't sitting around scratching our heads thinking about whether or not we should be messing with tradition - we were wondering how to reproduce this music on record. But I wasn't interested in playing traditional music - I was interested in making new music. We're not claiming to represent traditional music, we're claiming to be doing something new - and you can't really say any fairer than that. There is going to be a global music where all the people involved are still deeply interested in their own roots. "
An early influence on Emerson was Donal Lunny, someone who has been a vital presence behind many of the most exciting episodes in Irish music. From Planxty, through The Bothy Band and Moving Hearts, to various bands of his own and now his latest venture Coolfin, Lunny has worked diligently at perfecting his own vision of the potential within Irish music. And while he admitted to me in an interview last year that he was still at a "marked remove" from where he'd like to be, his angle and principle remains that any experimentation must come from inside the music itself.
"If for example," says Lunny, "you're going to stick on a snare and a bass drum, you've got to think hard about what you're going to do with it, rather than just apply the formula. Formulas turn me off. I had heard attempts at that kind of treatment of traditional music and it had never worked. Not even partially. One thing that hit me very forcibly way back was that if you take rock drumming and impose it on Irish music, you are taking music from another place and another time and putting it as a layer on top of it. But if you take the Irish music and then draw the components and the character from within the music itself, then the music is actually generating the rhythm and the syncopation and the punctuation. That's what I've always been trying to do."
Donal Lunny has had his critics too. The mighty Moving Hearts were, for many, simply a groove too far. But those who constantly complained about the likes of Moving Hearts, and defended the purer drop, were always missing one very important point. Not everyone is born at the bottom of that deep well of tradition. Not everyone grew up in the middle of a seisiun. And not everybody was lucky enough to be related to Junior Crehan or Seamus Ennis. The rest of us needed to have the music revealed to us in some other way. We needed radio, television and record shops.
For me it was those early Chieftains records and, far more alarmingly, Horslips. For the serious trad-heads, what Horslips were at was the least justifiable venture into fusion of all - made all the worse by their extraordinary popularity. But the fact remains that Horslips introduced a lot of people to the music. I know for a fact that if I'd never heard Horslips, I'd certainly never have heard Mrs Crotty. In fact Horslips cracked open a whole cultural universe which before then was either unavailable or deeply unattractive.
"We went through two phases," as former Horslip Barry Devlin puts it, "firstly as people who were going to change the face of traditional music forever, then very quickly as a bunch of tossers who were messing about with stuff they didn't know anything about - and who weren't doing it very well. But we really did want to do a fusion, without a doubt. We were fusion-minded and The Tain was the album we always wanted to make. Now I know we get lambasted regularly for loads of stuff, and rightly so for much of it, but the one thing that I think is undeniable is that Horslips really did change forever how people felt about their own culture."
Of course today's music is still changing the way we feel about our culture. Whether it be our successes in pop music or in traditional-based music we are again being forced to reassess our notion of ourselves. For the most part, it's no longer a pretty picture. It seems that we're very good at mush.