What Distinguishes The Cygnet Folk Festival From Hobart's

Summer Rock Festivals and other Prominent Events?

The Cygnet Folk Festival became the de facto State Folk Festival
of Tasmania after the organisers of the Longford Festival decided
to end that Festival at the peak of its popularity. The Longford
Festival, in the early to mid 1980s, was one of Australia's largest
festivals attesting to the great vitality of acoustic and folk music in
Tasmania. At Longford one would find, folk-revival bush music,
the new world music hybrids of Eastern and Balkan sounds,
singer-songwriters and Celtic music with a sprinkling of blues and
bluegrass music thrown in. The most successful festivals in
Australia today such as Woodford, Port Fairy and Womad have
largely continued with this blend of styles with some obvious
changes in trends and influences over the years.
The Longford Festival, at the peak of its popularity, had grown too
quickly for its logistic, administrative and volunteer resources.
Those running it were finding the task too big. Consequently,
when it ended, the Cygnet Folk Festival gradually filled the gap
left.

Folk Festivals around Australia were growing as an underground

current separate from mainstream popular, classical and jazz
events. No one style of music distinguished them, at any festival
one might see, Egyptian Belly Dancing, Flamenco troupes,
Bulgarian singers, Hungarian folk dancing, Gypsy Fiddlers,
Scottish pipers, Irish Flautists, Drummers, singers of Chora
players from Africa, Indian Sitar players, Delta Blues Specialists,
Bush poets and community choirs etc etc...
This variety still holds for dozens if not hundreds of small and
large folk festival in Australia. The Cygnet Folk Festival has
continued to allow opportunities for people from different musical
cultures to interact and learn from each others traditions methods
and techniques. This leads some times to respectful maintenance
each tradition's uniqueness, other times it engenders bold new
stylistic cross-pollinations and hybrids.
However, it is not just the eclectic or ecumenical nature of the
musical and dance-based art forms involved that distinguish folk
festivals.

Consider a classical concert a jazz concert or a rock festival. In

each case a professional act is on a stage entertaining an audience
of ticket holders. The show may go for a few hours or in the case
of some rock festivals, a few days. People watch, and listen and
perhaps, dance. Then when it is over they go home.
The success of such concerts or festivals is measured by tickets
sold relative to costs and by post event reviews made by
professional critics. The audience may find themselves inspired or
else they may leave, simply with a few good memories.

A folk festival is a very different kind of event. One very clear

connotation of the term 'folk music' is that music making and
dance is part of living. It is not just something that we pay for but
something we do, share and inculcate in ourselves, communities
and families. When you learn a folk song or dance you are taking
into your own being threads that connect you to your forebears or
to those who came before you. The stories secreted in folk songs
are ancient and they call into the present elements of ways of life
that are both exotic and other, on one hand, and universal and
recurrent on another. Folk music and dance remind people that
they are connected by threads from the past to the future,
connected too to the cycles of the seasons, planting and
harvesting, and the cycles of life, loves, birth, loss and death.
Consequently folk music is supposed to make present our
continuity with others, with the past and with nature.

For folk music this special potency is achieved, by inviting

people to participate rather than merely observe. This occurs in
several ways. Folk festivals always feature a blend of local and
visiting acts and of amateur performers, community groups and
professional acts. Visiting and local professionals not only
perform concerts but offer tuition in workshops which open their
skills to others. Locals jam or session together at various venues.
Often they play with star performers from interstate or over-seas.
Locals and visitors who are not on the bill are presented venues
where they can perform unscheduled concerts merely by placing
their names on a list. A folk festival must be so defined, at least in
part, by the breakdown of the strict distinction between an elite of
performers and a community of observers.
Folk festivals go a step further though. Through the processes
mentioned above they act as forums in which new networks to be
formed. New collaborations are formed and from these new acts
coalesce. In workshops, unscheduled concerts and group jam
sessions it is not just vocal and instrumental skill that is acquired
nor just stage-craft. Rather it is the meeting of people who share a
common joy in playing music as a part of life. In no other type of
festival are so many of the audience members also themselves
musicians and or dancers, poets or street theatre artists.
A folk festival therefore is a natural forum for the serendipitous,
for the growing of community choirs, new bands and
collaborations, drumming groups, and for finding dance partners
or instrumental teachers etc, etc.
The Cygnet Folk Festival is much loved, through-out Australian
music circles, specifically because as a small to medium size
festival it offers perfect opportunities to mix with others practicing
and developing their skills and together to share ideas and
instrumental techniques etc. Many of Tasmania's bands grew out
of collaborations that grew from chance meetings at Cygnet.
These bands in turn generated spin-off bands and the process
continues.
Being the only inclusive festival of this sort and size in Tasmania
the Cygnet Folk Festival has a unique role in the psyche of
emergent Tasmanian musicians in world, roots, acoustic and folk
genres. For many musicians in the process of developing an act
getting that act performance ready for Cygnet becomes a motive
and a goal that sustains them for the year. Other gigs during the
year are seen as preparations for Cygnet where and when they
may get a chance to play on the same stage as visiting stars, or to
play with them, to impress them, learn from them and/or network
with them. Cygnet as a Festival welcomes this ethos and
continues to inspire the formation of bands and acts. Further it
offers very young musicians a chance to participate in a high
quality festival and to feel some ownership of the festival as well
as a pride in their part in it.

For a rock or classical festival, the model for success may be the
excitement displayed by the audience balanced against an analysis
of profit and loss measurements. For the Cygnet Folk Festival the
Festival's success is to be measured by how many lives it
enhances, how much grass-roots music it inspires, how close it
comes to generating a community of artists and to what extent it
reminds the whole community that their songs are worth singing,
their stories are worth telling, their home place and their ancestors
are worth celebrating. Cygnet is not a grant driven festival, it
ticks along on door takings and volunteer efforts. Grant monies,
when they come, are greatly welcomed and allow the festive to
add ingredients and depth to the Festival...To throw something
different into our local mix.
If Australia still retains a residual 'Cultural Cringe' this applies
even more so to many in Tasmania.
Some festivals seem to be based on the premise that Tasmanian
audiences need to be presented with culture which invariably
comes from elsewhere. Local musical culture, to the extent that it
is even a value, is measured by how well the local act is received
interstate or how well it approximates or covers the styles and
standards set elsewhere. These prejudices and this outlook must
always work against the organic development of, and sustenance
of, an original Tasmanian musical voice grounded in local
experiences.
I have excluded individual performers in favour of duos and
bands.
Those listed are bands formed after after connections and
networking growing out of the Cygnet Folk Festival or bands for
whom the annual Cygnet Festival is a principal sustaining goal;
I have not included many bands that regularly perform at Cygnet
but have distinct profiles outside of folk music circles. Nor have I
included the Cygnet school concert band, local choirs, bellydance
and Morris dance troupes and pipe groups that perform at the
festival. Rather I have tried to demonstrate the role of the festival
as an incubator of local musical culture and as a force for
sustaining and growing that culture. This list is a small sample as
it applies to bands working at or growing out of the Cygnet
Festival over the last 8-10 years out of a history of 28 years

The Cockies
The Crows
The Craggs
Carriad
The New Holland Honey Eaters
the Brenda Agenda
Rakish Paddy
The Celtic Cowboys
the Grubby Woolley-Rich band
The Tasmanian Heritage Fiddle Ensemble
The Hobart Old Time String Band
The Hobart Ukulele Group
The Grass Roots Trade Union Choir
In Like Flynn
Shake Sugaree
Slap Dash
The Ranters
Ukulele Junction
coyote Serenade
Turpentine Blues
Das Swing
Djingo Django
Swing Wizard
The Apple Shed Sugar Gliders
The Bug Swatters
Bandecoute
Czardas
Good Dog
Harlequin
Marsala
Tuelve
Tantallon
Celia Briar and Tom Walwyn
Slikweed
The String Chickens
The Fooks
Daido and The Blue Mosquitos
The Foley Gang
Kintail
Women in Black
Brian Owens and Tom Dunlop
Eclectic Jug
The Back Porch Boys
Triad
One Step back
Dolly Putin and the Kazhakztan Cowgirls.
Smoocher
The Melanie Gent Band
She Wolves and Cub
The Fence Pickets
Sheyana
Freya
Tumbao
Wheatbix with Syrup
Shimyrrh
Ajak Mabia and Band (African refugee now very big on the
Australian Festival circuit)
Acoustic Avenue
Babylon Bicycle
Anita George Band (Now working professionally interstate)
Alex myer and Friends
Deputy Nest
Bridget and The Wheels
Annie'N'Rose
Leeane Maclean Duo
Sitarama
Peter Hicks and Annie Parcell
Nik Meredith and The Shed band
Martinique
The Doublemen
Aye Pod
Isla Flamenco
The To'Rags
Strange Brew
Ten Bears
The Combovers
The Spondooli Brothers
Whistler's Mum
Dancers Delight
Generations Three
James Brook and Co
The Jessica Royce Group
The Middle Tones
The Reinberger family
Red Neck Stints