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User:Alex Wilding

Find traditional instrumental music

I’m as English as you can get, with all known ancestry based on around the West Midlands, but my life has been fairly international, with years spent not just in Scotland and Wales, but in Germany, Ireland, Australia and Italy. Amateur music – “folk music”, if you will – has been one of my main interests since the 1960s. I got going on “white-college-boy” acoustic blues, but with a strong addition of traditional music, at the folk club of my university. I dabbled in the flute back then, but didn’t take it up seriously until the late 1990s. For other reasons I moved to Ireland at about that time, so I learnt most of my flute-playing in the context of Irish music. The flute is of course nowadays only weakly represented in the English tradition (if at all), but it is the English musical tradition that somehow “sits well” with me, so I am now trying to play the flute in a traditional English style. Whatever that is.