Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
by
Sheldon Kessel
Hamline University
August, 2010
Committee:
Justin Maxwell
Patricia Weaver-Francisco
“If a composer could say what he had to say in words, he would not bother trying to say it in
music.”
- Gustav Mahler
“Is there a meaning to music? My answer would be ‘yes.’ And can you state in so many words
what the meaning is? My answer would be ‘no.’”
- Aaron Copland
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
An Ontology of Music 6
Standardized Taxonomy 51
Meaning Systems 65
Bibliography 106
Appendix III: The MALS Conference and the Accompanying Compact Disc 134
Kessel 1
Introduction
The universal question of musical scholarship, reaching from antiquity to the present,
has been a variation on a theme of, “what is the significance of this thing we call music?” Music
is, superficially, nothing more than sound – in essence no different from the natural sounds of
water rushing down a river, the crack of thunder, or the modern equivalents of speeding trains
and car horn blasts. Yet somehow, in ascribing the title of “music” to sound, we signify it as
something, in some way, more important than incidental environmental noises. In using the
descriptor “music” we ascribe meaning to sound – meaning beyond perceptual data used for
navigating our way through the world. The sound of a crack of thunder typically means
something about weather, but that same sound presented as, or within, something regarded as
a piece of music, signifies something entirely different. And that “entirely different” idea is the
Musicological inquiry concerns itself with all possible aspects of the ideas and activities
popular music studies, music theory, psycho-acoustics, etc. Within the umbrella term of
“Musicology”, or Musicological Studies, there are a number of other disciplines such as Music
Therapy, Neurology, and Musical Linguistics that also seek, in various ways, to understand
sound and music from perspectives beyond that of the professional musician. Yet, in examining
recurrent themes throughout the sub-disciplines of musicology, it becomes apparent they are
all attempting, in some way, to answer that broad question concerning the significance humans
place on sound.
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those activities congruent with the Western art music tradition. That is, the “classical” world of
notation written by composers, disseminated by conductors to performers who play for passive
listeners gathered in a place created to hold large numbers of people specifically for these
activities. However, over approximately the last hundred years, every facet of music has come
under intense scrutiny and change. There is no longer any one, simple, definition or
explanation for what can be defined as “music” or “musical creation”. If a tree falls in a forest it
does, indeed, make a sound – and I may, very well, choose to call it music, and you may, very
well, decide to argue that categorical distinction. So, to establish an idea of “music” we must,
logically, begin with the categorical term – we must build an ontology of music.
frustrated with, and fascinated by, views of musical ontology and semiotics taken by my
professors and peers. It became apparent that the music treasured by friends and colleagues in
the rock and rave “scenes” which I participated in, was not considered “music” by many of my
music professors. Likewise, to many of my peers, the thought of studying music in an academic
setting was tantamount to torture. To them, the music of academia – “classical music” – was
long dead and had no relevance to their musical conceptions. During this time, I began
exploring musicology texts in an effort to understand when, how, and why “music” split into
what I saw as conflicting “music worlds.” The more I explored, the more pronounced these
separate “music worlds” became. Most notable, among many fascinating discoveries, was that
of “music worlds” by actively denouncing or simply ignoring anything that wasn’t part of the
Western “classical music” tradition. Musicology, itself, split into sub-disciplines with sub-
disciplined scholars typically ignoring work done in other sub-disciplines. Most notably, within
Musicology, the most popular forms of music to general lay audiences – popular song and
western jazz – tended to be ignored. Popular music styles were studied more for their cultural
and literary contributions than for their music, and tended to be studied by sociologists,
worlds” a dominant theme emerged. Within each “music world” there is an accepted musical
language of timbres, tempos, rhythms, harmonies, and melodic contours. Music worlds have
hierarchies of power and influence, accepted speaking patterns, educational levels, economics,
and nearly every other social group indicator. Within music worlds, as part of their culture,
music serves certain social roles which dictate the importance of the “music itself” to the
culture. To the degree in which the music is important to its corresponding culture, it offers
communication for emphasizing cultural attributes of the music world it is part of. Through my
research it became apparent that music worlds correspond to large groupings of musical genre.
I began formulating ways to organize music into a taxonomy of music worlds and, therefore,
musical genre. The connections between music worlds, musical genre, and musical-sociology
seemed so apparent that I felt there had to be scholars with similar thoughts and interests.
Further, a systematic means of organizing musical creation in terms of both sound and
acknowledging social influences on musical creation. So, I set out to systematize a method for
determining the most significant musical and extra-musical characteristics of a music allows for
analysis and interpretation appropriate for the music being analyzed, thus preventing mis-
performance-based ritual.
groupings can be made based on works with similar musical and extra-
participation, has developed into a personal mission. My taxonomy of musical genre has
developed into a way of not only organizing “the music itself” into logical groupings but,
through that organization, it provides a framework for determining the significant aspects of
each music world. Musical, along with extra-musical, aspects of “music worlds” provide various
types of significance for participants in those “music worlds”. The following study details the
research, thought process, and method I’ve developed for what I call the Supergenre System of
Musical Taxonomy for Hermaneutic Analysis. Through this framework of meaning construction,
I provide a systematic way to interpret “the significance of this thing we call music.”
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An Ontology of Music
The compulsory prerequisite for any inquiry is, of course, a definition of terminology.
So, in examining the musicological question of, “the significance of this thing we call music,” we
inherently has meaning for those sending and receiving the communication. Musicologist Philip
Tagg has said it has some sort of meaning expressed as “individually experience-able affective
states and processes” (Tagg 3). Then, to be perceived as a form of communication, it must be
something desirable in some way (97). However, a musical work does not exist in a thing, but is
creator intends a work to be music rather than noise, then it becomes a work of music. In Frank
music, but it doesn’t become music until someone wills it to be music and the audience
listening to it decides to perceive it as music” (Zappa 141). For sound to be understood as music
there must be a commonly held idea of the communicative possibilities of musical activity.
Those involved in the activity must share appropriate expectations of language, environment,
and standard musical and social practice in the shared culture of the participants. “In order to
communicate, we must first make the assumption that our acts and utterances mean the same
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to others as they do to us; to the extent that we share the same culture, and so have a
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Western musical thought began a gradual shift
in perspective. Nineteenth century musicologist Jules Combarieu said, simply, that music is the
art of thinking in sounds (Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music 255). This
suggests that music can exist solely in the mind – a definition which may be seen as
empowering or, alternately, bourgeois. It may suggest that only those trained to create mental
models of music are authorized to do so, as suggested by feminist musicologist Lucy Green (P.
Martin 33), or could infer a democratic ideal that any and all sounds conceived mentally are
musical ones. This idea of “thinking in sound” complements John Cage’s idea of all sound being
music in some sense, and augments a significant amount of recent musicological work that
Composer and philosopher Benjamin Boretz wrote a series of articles in the academic journal
Perspectives of New Music spanning the years 1969 to 1979 arguing that thinking about music
and engaging in discourse about music was, essentially, equivalent to composing or performing.
Since music is a highly abstract art form, he argued, language is as suited to disseminate musical
ideas as traditional melody, harmony, and rhythm exhibited in performance. “The very being of
imaginers, in individual acts of perceiving or conceiving – that, in fact, the only real music
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‘theory’ IS the creative-intellectual transaction which ontologizes music itself” (Boretz, Meta-
Variations (I)).
Musicologist Christopher Small expands the notion of creating music through discourse
by including all activity, in any way, musically related through social ritual. He argues that the
act of participating in a musically related ritual is, essentially, the act of musical creation. In his
book Musicking, he offers a new term which encompasses all musical activity – “musicking.”
His theory is that to music is to take part in any sort of musical activity, in any way, “whether by
(what is called composing), or by dancing” (Small 9) and the term “covers all participation in a
musical performance, whether it takes place actively or passively” (ibid). All music, and all art,
is participation in ritual. Art objects, whether plastic or conceptual, exist as a result and
Small’s theory and terminology could easily apply to all arts with a new term – Art-ing.
As his theory stands, “musicking” is any participation in any musical activity, implying social
connections created through the activity and associated rituals of discourse and socio-cultural
interaction. This all-encompassing term “musicking” has become a dominant force in my own
musical thought.
Like Christopher Small, Philip Tagg is a contemporary musical thinker who prefers to
integrate social and cultural factors into his ontology of musical creation. The bulk of his work
combines traditional Western musicology and music theory with sociology and popular music
studies. His is a decidedly Marxist approach to breaking down prejudices in academic discourse
Kessel 9
and promoting cross-pollination of ideas. His website, tagg.org, offers a staggering body of his
work for free download including an early draft of work tentatively titled Music’s Meanings
which includes a somewhat scathing description of past and current musicological discourse.
Tagg’s approach is, like my own, formulated around a central idea of integrating the whole of
musical studies into a coherent unified theory of the importance of the thing called music.
In his article Towards a Definition of ‘Music,’ Tagg first discusses how a concept of
“music” as a distinct and discrete area of human activity, is a decidedly Western notion. This
echoes the integrative approach of Christopher Small who also takes much of his musicking
theory from non-western cultures. A significant percentage of the world’s population doesn’t
conceive of “music” as a discrete activity from those activities accompanying it. However, as
Westerners attempting to engage in discourse about this thing we call music, we must begin a
priori by formulating a concept of the thing itself. And so, Tagg establishes eight axioms for the
1. Music does not exist unless it is heard by someone, whether out loud or inside
someone’s head. Sounds which no-one hears, even a recording out of human
2. Although the original source of musical sound does not have to be human, music
or presentation.
communication.
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4. Like speech, music is mediated as sound but, unlike speech, music’s sounds do
not need to include words, even though one of the most common forms of
musical expression around the world entails the singing, chanting, or reciting, or
words.
dancing, marching, caressing, jumping – human gesture and movement can exist
without music even if music cannot be produced without some sort of human
gesture or movement.
8. Although music is a universal human phenomenon, and even though there may
significance for participants in the interaction, whether intellectual, emotional, or physical, and
conveyed effectively. Following Tagg’s reminder that “music” is a distinctly Western concept,
we can abbreviate the previous definition with the following: “music” is a construct of Western
culture in which perceptions of sonic phenomena are understood and offered as social and
aesthetic discourse.
Within musicking, the discursive possibilities are determined by the most significant
theorist Harold Lasswell. He states that the important considerations in any communication are
of “who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect?” (Cobley and Janz). The
code/message.
Tagg mentions emotional and physiological affectation from music communication, but
his emphasis is toward the communication rather than the meaning of that communication.
Yet, meaning is the central problem of the significance of the thing called music. Why and how
is music meaningful? Why and how is sound meaningful beyond being a perceptual tool for
navigation through the world? These questions have historically been central to musical
inquiry.
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In asking “what is the significance of this thing we call music?” we are really asking why
music provokes powerful physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual responses in the human
meaning, often obscurely or indirectly; the quality of conveying or implying; or the quality of
being important. So, we are asking why music has meaning, regardless of the connotative or
denotative intention of the word “meaning.” Musical thinkers throughout history have
pondered this question and have arrived at, seemingly, the entire gamut of possible answers –
commodity. The great task of musicology has been to interpret the implied, indirect, and
obscure meanings of music because, in some way, we humans deem “this thing called music”
Since ancient times, music has bridged the human senses of the mystic and the scientific
– the rational and intuitive, yin and yang, body-soul and mind. In pre-industrial times, the art of
music was inseparable from both its implied science and its perceived spiritual aspects. There
was no question as to the meaning of music. Music embodied fundamental truths of the
universe, and the meaning of music was the rational ordering of all human knowledge. It was
principles. Art was proof of fundamental constructs embodying scientific and mathematic
principles. Through knowledge of these principles, spiritual and intellectual enlightenment was
Boethius, music was one of the interconnected basic disciplines of education along with
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arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Any of the four areas of curriculum were able to
describe and offer insight toward understanding any of the others. Music as geometry,
arithmetic, and astronomy illustrated the interrelatedness of all human knowledge, and this
interrelatedness was the fundamental teaching of the father of western musical thought --
Pythagoras.
Though we have no direct writings of Pythagoras, his legacy and teachings were shown
through the work of his students – the Pythagoreans. However, owing to his supposed belief
that certain knowledge should be known to only a select few, and his alleged proscription of
writing about his teachings, many of his ideas remain clouded in secrecy (James 24-26). We do
have the basic mathematical and, therefore, musical principles which he discovered, but not
their details, nor their intimate relationship with mystical thought. In Aristotle’s discussion of
the Pythagoreans in the Metaphysics (698) he recounted how they related mathematics and
music to all other forms of knowledge. We know that Pythagoras discovered the principles
which form the mathematical ratio-based Western tuning and harmonic systems – part of his
principle of Musica Instrumentalis. He then described planetary orbits as related to the same
harmonic ratios – forming the Pythagorean principle of Musica Mundana. Above all, however,
he considered himself a healer. Pythagoras believed that music was a fundamental component
of the human body, and believed afflictions could be healed through a process of finding an
ailment’s resonant frequency of sound vibration and harmonizing with it. This was his concept
Less than one hundred years later, Plato expanded on the Pythagorean theories and
attempted to make them more concrete, logical, and rational – at least to the ancient classical
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mind. Musical ideas are found throughout Plato’s dialogues to illustrate concepts gleaned from
all three Pythagorean musics. Like Pythagoras, Plato considered music to hold a central
position in relation to logical thought. The importance Plato placed on musical ideas is
illustrated by the frequency in which music appears in his dialogues. Of the thirty-five
dialogues, there are musical ideas to be found in, at least, fifteen: the Crito, Charmides, Laches,
Epinomis, and Greater Hippias. However, his most significant musical ideas were set forth in the
Timaeus.
The Timaeus explains the origin and structure of the universe in a manner similar to the
Hebrew Bible’s Genesis. Where the Timaeus differs, however, is in its decidedly mathematical
descriptions – in its relating the structure of the universe and its planets to musical harmonic
ratios (Plato 1165, 1172). Plato also relates the musical structure of the universe to concepts of
Musica Humana as a way of correcting problems with the human soul. “Harmony, which has
motions akin to the revolutions of our souls, …[is] meant to correct any discord which may have
arisen in the courses of the soul, and to be our ally in bringing her into harmony and agreement
with herself” (Plato 1175). To offer an extremely concise summary of Plato’s Timaeus would be
understand the universe and our place in it. This interrelatedness of music to all reality, as
proposed by Pythagoras then Plato and others, persisted in various forms for over two
thousand years. Music meant logic and understanding – if it provoked emotion, the emotion
was to be understood as logically influenced. Likewise, any social function or ritual that might
Kessel 15
surround the creation of music was understood as important for the betterment of the
about the natural world hidden in its mathematical structures (P. Martin 28). As an early
its meaning. We do know there are fundamental mathematical truths and relationships to be
found in the science of acoustics as well as in musical rhythm and form. Decartes’s rationalist
approach to musical meaning rejected attempts at ascribing affective traits to music. Music,
along with the other arts, expressed the beauty of the ordering of the universe. Then,
The Enlightenment and subsequent Romantic artistic movement signaled a major shift
in thought and culture. Where art, science, and spirituality were once united, they forever split
into separate, incompatible, areas of activity. In art, there was a fundamental shift in attitude
from logic and rationality to “rebellious emotionalism” (Atkins 185). The natural world was no
skepticism and a desire for empirical evidence. Philosophers could no longer claim that the
universe held fundamental truths – those truths needed to be proven through empirical
evidence. Logical proof shown through rhetoric became less valid than empirical judgments
shown through some sort of evidence. Emotional responses to stimuli became valid, welcome,
and celebrated as empirical evidence. Art attempted to display and celebrate both the
irrationality of human emotion and the newfound chaos of the natural world which, at the
time, was seen to be lacking empirical, logical, order. In Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying, he
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says, “What art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her
condition” opened up ideas of art, its meaning, and its interpretation, to theories beyond
expression of a natural, logical order of the universe. A piece of art, whether visual, musical, or
physical, isn’t finished until it is perceived and interpreted as meaningful in some way. So, by
asking, “what is the significance of this thing we call music?” we are asking about musical
perceptions as they have existed in Western culture since the late eighteenth century when
music no longer meant, “the natural, logical, order of the universe,” but began to mean
Between ancient-classical and romantic artistic ideals, a bridge can be found in the work
ideas on education and politics, but his aesthetic philosophy was a major contributor to the
Romantic paradigm. He believed that nature, including human nature, was intrinsically good,
though unpredictable. His entire philosophy followed this fundamental belief. His politics, as
presented in The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right, set forth principles of rule-by-
agreement. His idea of the social contract essentially states that the members of a society will
obey laws they agree with, and socialization ensures agreement with laws, so long as the laws
attempted to revise the standard musical notation system to be easier for non-professional
musicians to read and understand. The goal of his revised notation was to allow laypeople to
gather together to share the social experience of performing music in groups, bonding them to
Kessel 17
form a more stable, natural democracy (Simon 435-436). For Rousseau, most everything was
Rousseau’s musical aesthetic offers some of the fundamental arguments about musical
meaning that persist to the present day. Contemporary musical thinkers continue to debate
For Rousseau, music was a representational, imitative language derived from natural,
pre-speech, passionate vocalizations. Melody imitated these vocalizations, and so, represented
their emotional content (Simon 437). So long as music was focused on melody, on imitation
and representation of the natural voice of the human, it was natural and good as stated in his
Essay on the Origin of Languages. To Rousseau, only vocal music, devoid of stacked harmony
and polyphony, could be moral since melody was natural and ancient, but multiple pitches
sounding together had been a contemporary invention. Music was direct communication of
emotion, and that emotion could only be expressed in pure melody (Scott 301-304). He had a
strong belief in the power of melody, stating that “Sounds in melody act on us not only as
sounds, but as signs of our affections, of our feelings. It is in this way that they excite in us the
movements that they express and of which we recognize the image in them” (Simon 438).
The time in which Rousseau lived is now considered the Classical era of western music.
That is, Classical with a capital “C” versus the whole of small “c” classical music – a strange
confusion of terminology for musical non-specialists, which I will return to later. This Classical
era, spanning approximately 70 years from 1730 to 1800, saw widespread standardization of
the western tuning system – a process first explored by Pythagoras two-thousand years earlier
Kessel 18
and shown to be useful and practical by J.S. Bach and others in the previous Baroque musical
period. This equal tempered tuning system made harmonic modulation, polyphony, and
counterpoint possible. These ideas were explored in the Baroque, but perfected and
standardized in the Classical period. Major formal developments also occurred, such as the
establishment of sonata form. Sonata form made many other large and small scale forms
possible such as symphonies, string quartets, and overtures. While philosophers such as
Rousseau were playing with ideas of musical meaning, composers like Mozart and Haydn were
taking advantage of the new standardizations and offering a massive body of work for the
Just seven years before the death of Rousseau, a composer was born who eventually
ushered in a new aesthetic and way-of-being together with a new musical era. Ludwig van
Beethoven, born in 1770, brought together the passionate ideals of the Enlightenment with the
compositional ideas of the Baroque and Classical musical eras while forging a new style of
individuality by breaking free of the rigid compositional structures of form and harmony
established in the previous two eras. This emotional passion combined with individuality and
assertion of personality became the traits associated with the Romantic era.
The Romantic era saw new musical interpretations beyond expression of universal truth,
belief in “elevation of the spirit”, or, especially in the Baroque and Classical periods, celebration
of those in power. Theorists such as Heinrich Schenker found significance in the analysis and
continued exploring musical aesthetics. The new musical aesthetics often centered on ideas of
empowerment of the individual, with the roles of composer and soloist performer elevated to
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new levels of admiration. This admiration is, perhaps, nowhere more apparent than in the
work of Nietzsche and his corresponding veneration of Beethoven. In Nietzsche’s work we see
the veneration of the self as a god-like being. Humans and their art were no longer subject to
In contrast to the majority of aesthetic philosophers who typically discussed music only
in passing, while favoring the plastic arts; music was central to Nietzche’s aesthetics. Nietzsche
Writings, he says music is his “most authentic world”, and he considers Beethoven one of the
“pillars of German music” (Liebert 13), while in Sämtiche Werke, he compares Thus Spake
Zarathustra to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (5). He believed music to be the highest form of
communication and often spoke of the inadequacy of spoken language: “in comparison to
music all communication through words is shameless” (3). He aspired to greatness: to become
a great writer and philosopher, as well as a great composer in the spirit of the Superman, or
Übermensch, described in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Later, in Ecce Homo, written toward the
end of his career, he describes, with audacious poetic flair, how he attained his goal of
greatness. “He who knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an air of the
heights, a robust air” (Nietzche, Ecce Homo , Forward S3). Ecce Homo goes on to elaborate on
the author’s magnanimity including anecdotes surrounding the writing of his major
significantly influential philosopher, his musical works are often seen as failures. However, his
ideals of celebrating self-expression and overcoming personal adversity form a basis for 19th
century aesthetics in all the arts. His philosophy of struggling toward greatness, which he called
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the “Will to Power,” is supremely exhibited in the life of Beethoven, one of Nietzsche’s heroes.
Beethoven, like Nietzsche suffered ill health throughout his life but strove to continue
his work as his health deteriorated. He wrote some of his most significant works while nearly
completely deaf. Beethoven’s life embodied Nietzsche’s ideas of the “Will to Power”:
essentially, the ego’s drive to overcome adversity, strive toward perfection, and achieve some
form of greatness and immortality. This greatness and immortality is achieved through creation
of values and achievement of goals. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche says, “Valuing is
creating…without valuation the nut of existence would be hollow” (Nietzche, Thus Spake
Zarathustra 37).
For musical thinkers of the nineteenth century, music was an assertion and celebration
of the ego. Perhaps more than any other philosopher, Nietzsche embodied this celebration of
the self and brought about a fundamental shift in musical thought. Through assertion of the
self, it became possible for musical creators to have intention toward embodied musical
meanings beyond the universal. Music provided artistically embodied values of beauty and
power for admiration and inspiration toward attainment of greatness. Through music,
composition and performance. Musical creators were now free to attempt to inject ideas into
their music beyond mere craftsmanship and skill in manipulating musical materials. Old rules
about composition and performance were discarded to make way for the ego. With
Up to, and including the nineteenth century, music represented a great many things –
from the logical ordering of the universe, to characters and stories in opera, to the individual’s
quest for greatness. Musical meaning was of representation. It did not exist as an artistic
rendering of musical thought but as a description-in-sound of something beyond music. This all
changed as an idea of “pure music” became the common and standard conception of musical
thought.
The idea of “pure music” began in the mid-nineteenth century with the theories of
Eduard Hanslick as described in his Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Musically Beautiful)
(Robinson 1-2). According to Hanslick and his followers, music is incapable of describing or
elaborating upon any idea or phenomenon beyond itself. The concept of “pure music” focuses
entirely on “music for its own sake” without any extra-musical influences. In his time, this
started a heated controversy between him and Richard Wagner who held that music was
inseparable from both emotional and literal, text-based meaning, whether in vocalized lyrical
content or extra-musical text accompanying the work in question. These contrasting ideals of
what music expresses became so pronounced as to set up two types of work in Western music-
making: absolute and program music. Absolute music was the “pure music” of Hanslick’s
thought, while program music was written specifically for representational purposes, whether
in operatic productions or performed with accompanying notes about the piece which
presented ideas the composer was attempting to convey through the music. This dichotomy of
musical meaning as being either inherent in the music or presented externally set up the
expanse of controversies surrounding musical meaning that persist to the present day. Does
music have significance on its own, or is it merely a representation in sound of emotion, action,
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people, places, or things? From the early twentieth century onward, this has been one of the
emotional states – music as the representation in sound of emotion. This is, perhaps, the
oldest and most widely accepted notion of musical meaning – especially for non-musicians.
Representation of emotion is the fundamental belief conveyed in clichés such as: “music is a
universal language”, or “music soothes the savage beast.” Beyond representing emotions, the
“representation” discussions often include the myriad ways music can represent the physical
world through the imitation of sounds such as thunderstorms, rustling leaves, or animal calls.
compendium and manifesto of how music works upon the emotions. The work is summarized
in the following: “the creative act in music …the transformation of the composer’s complex of
emotions (content) into musical form by the composer’s ‘ability’ functioning unconsciously
and consciously (technique) as a builder of small-scale forms into a large one (form); acting in
its latter capacity (technique) as a realizer of the potentialities (conception) envisaged in its
former capacity (creative imagination)” (219-220). Cooke analyzed various musical passages
for their emotional content and cataloged them accordingly. The work catalogs and analyzes
standard harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and temporal devices for their representational affects.
Though much criticized for its myopic focus on specific musical devices and interpretations, the
Indeed, studying the ways in which music acts on the body and mind has become fashionable in
psychology, the social sciences, and popular culture. Neuroscientist Aniruddh Patel, in 2008,
published his book Music, Language, and the Brain, examining the ways music, seemingly,
affects the entire person – body, mind, and spirit – if the person is familiar with the music’s
semantic meanings and pragmatic meanings. Semantic meanings, in musical terms, would be
those of representation, whether representing emotional states or sounds of the physical “real”
world. Pragmatic meanings are those of context; meanings outside of the “music itself” such as
Two recent bestsellers have brought psychological studies of music to the masses:
Music, The Brain, and Ecstasy by Robert Jourdain, and This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel
Levitin. Both written for general readers, the two works relate anecdotes to scientific and
Musicologist and cognitive scientist David Huron published his scholarly book Sweet
expectation. Most notably, he discusses how internal schemas of genre are linked to musical,
listener links the entire experience to the genre. Only after repeated and varied exposures to
the genre in question is the listener able to break apart the musical, environmental, and social
Kessel 24
cues into distinct identifiers (Huron 203-218). However, the majority of Huron’s text is devoted
Harmonic, melodic, and formal tension and relaxation as the creator of musical meaning
is a continual theme in traditional musicology and music theory. The building-up of tension and
subsequent resolution is the analytical foundation of the bulk of Western music theory and
musicology. It is also how harmonic content became the dominant focus in Western Art Music
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The analytical technique taught in the majority of
music schools today, Shenkerian analysis, focuses on large and small scale harmonic
large and small scale harmonic and formal structure has been used, simultaneously, to both
advocate and condemn notions of emotional meaning in music. Leonard Meyer, in his classic
Emotion and Meaning in Music promotes ideas of a fundamental emotionalism in music that,
while often residing in harmonic and formal qualities, inhabits all “purely musical” traits as well
as cultures surrounding the music. Meyer’s ideas of musical and cultural content were preludes
to much current thinking about musical meaning. However, many contemporary thinkers
disagree with the idea of music’s fundamental emotionalism. Musicologist Simon Frith has
said, “If music is meaningful in emotional terms it is largely as an effect of cultural rather than
Musicologists have been arguing about musical meaning since, it seems, the genesis of
the musicological discipline. Theodore Adorno said, “it is impossible to determine in any
comprehensive way the meaning of music, i.e., the thing by which it acquires its right to exist”
(Adorno, Essays on Music 137) and, “in music, what is at stake is not meaning, but gestures”
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(139). This may be a variation on an earlier statement by Adam Smith, made in his Essays on
Philosophical Subjects, where he suggested we don’t get emotional meaning from music but
are offered a suggestion of movement (Smith 245-248). Adorno, perhaps more than any other
musical thinker, also promoted notions that music represented social and political values. As
an early twentieth-century modernist and Marxist, he held strong convictions that music
promoted values far superior to simple emotional content – most notably of either
piece of music lies in the ways its internal structure both reflects and creatively articulates the
structure of the group or society in which it was conceived” (P. Martin 79).
Though he denied any specific meanings, Aaron Copland may have countered the
argument in his classic What to Listen for In Music when he stated, “my own belief is that all
music has an expressive power, some more and some less, but that all music has a certain
meaning behind the notes and that the meaning behind the notes constitutes, after all, what
the piece is saying, what the piece is about” (Copland 9). Elsewhere, Copland claimed that
when composing he, “put(s) down a reflection of emotional states: feelings, perceptions,
imaginings, intuitions” (Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music 269). Taking the
idea of musical expression to its extreme, Cooke’s magnum opus The Language of Music
attempted to catalog melodic and harmonic content of the Western tradition in terms of its
emotional content. So, Adorno and Smith claimed music means nothing but gestures of
musical movement, Copland and Cooke claimed music is highly expressive, and sociologists of
music tend to agree that music, “through its ‘abstract’ nature, is singularly suited to reveal the
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giants of musical thought have valid and useful ideas. The key is to apply their theories to the
appropriate music in the appropriate situations. This idea of maintaining the appropriate
perspective is, perhaps, the most important aspect of my Supergenre System of Musical
Traditionally, Western musical thought has focused its energies on music created as
art and entertainment for the upper and educated classes – the music typically referred to as
that of the Western Classical Tradition. As such, when aesthetics from that tradition are
applied to other musics, the result is that the “other” often fails to meet minimum aesthetic
standards. This can be seen within the Classical Tradition in the “representation versus pure
music” arguments. Characteristics which bring meaning and offer significant musical
characteristics in operatic works may simply not be found, or are insignificant, in chamber
musical and extra-musical characteristics as possible, then apply those characteristics from
perspectives both within and outside each music-creating culture. Only then will it be possible
The task is, of course, a daunting one. Comprehensive analysis of all music in
existence from the discrete perspective of each work and its accompanying creative culture
would be futile. There is simply too much material to analyze. However, when approached in
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terms of genre, examining works with similar characteristics, patterns begin to emerge and the
task of creating an integrated musicology becomes manageable and possible. The fundamental
task is to maintain a distanced analytical perspective. Further, the crucial factor in determining
the proper analytical perspective is the music’s social and cultural creative environments.
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Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are confronted with a musical
world larger and more diverse than at any previous time in history. We are constantly
immersed in conventionally musical sound whether we wish for this immersion or not. Then,
when we intentionally seek musical stimulation, we have nearly the entire musical history of
the world at our easy disposal. The only requirement for access to this vast amount of
meaningful sound is an internet connection and, perhaps, a credit card account. This easily
accessible musical diversity prompts new questions for musical thinkers seeking interpretive
possibilities for musical meaning. While offering a new palette of sounds, this new multiplicity
has also increased the distance between sub-disciplines of musical thought and complicated the
The expansiveness of easily-heard sound has the effect of creating new hybrids of
musical categories. For there to be any hope of understanding the new hybrids, their individual
ingredients need to be understood. It has occasionally been argued that any attempt to
organize or deconstruct notions of genre in the modern environment of diversity is futile. “It's
now a cliché that true genre distinctions have dissolved away,” according to New Music Box
blogger Molly Sheridan. However, I contend that the new multiplicity of musical material
ingredients for analysis. Those individual ingredients of genre and style can then be analyzed to
facilitate understanding their hybrids. This crucial task involves analyzing the myriad
possibilities of significance for a particular music according to its sound as well as its importance
to those who participate, in some way, with the music. Then, it becomes necessary to analyze
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how the sounds and cultures surrounding them interact with other musical cultures to produce
hybrids. Within and without musical cultures, a major meaning-creation channel involves how
participants relate to themselves, each other, and the music. Through this cross-fertilization of
musical and cultural materials, new hybrids are formed. However, to begin to answer any of
these questions of analysis, it first becomes necessary to organize the field of inquiry – to
formulate a language and create a method for organizing the artifacts of inquiry. This
organizational and ontological work has been the neglected, but crucial, investigation inhibiting
Music could quite easily be organized according to significant characteristics were it not
for a certain amount of reluctance toward organization on the part of musicking participants.
Genre categories, genre distinction, and genre sub-divisions are topics of major importance
with certain groups, yet completely dismissed by others. This anomaly in musical thought
seems governed by questions of musical authenticity – questions I shall return to later. For, in
order to realize questions of musical authenticity, a general theory of musical genre must be
addressed. Musical authenticity, meaning, and social interpretations of musical quality are
Genre theory has become a well-established subset of both literary and film theory. If
we understand music as a form of communication, similar to literature, film, or any other form
of creative transmission, a piece of music can be understood as a text. Genre theorists in the
fields of literature and film have invented a number of ways for organizing the creative
“objects” of their fields. Socio-linguistic theorist David Fishelov theorizes that literature can be
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other texts, then, the texts’ relationships to social institutions and, finally, according to the
texts’ semiotic speech act. Here the “speech act” is defined in semiotic terms as, “action
performed by an utterance as part of a social interaction” (Frow 153). Literary scholar Thomas
Beebee understands the development of genre in stages as rules which develop organically
until they become recognized as textual features, then become conventions of reading. Film
theorist Rick Altman understands genre as a blueprint, or formula for production; as structure,
or formal and technical concerns; label, or marketing category; and contract, concerning
audience expectations (Frow 52). For an organizational system to be complete, it would seem
As text, literary and film theory applies equally to music. To support this idea further,
consider that from ancient times, music and poetry were considered interchangeable. For a
specifically literary definition of genre, Martin and Ringham’s Dictionary of Semiotics states that
genre refers to “different Styles of literary discourse, …different genres are characterized by a
particular structure, by grammatical forms or special turns of phrases that reflect the
communicative purpose of the genre in question” (67). To adopt this literary scheme to music,
Musical Genre: Two Applications.” Fabbri claims a number of criteria regarding musical
taxonomy: rules for formal and technical requirements, semiotic considerations, participant
behavior, social and ideological constraints, and commercial goals with corresponding juridical
constraints (intellectual property law such as copyright) – these musical genre requirements
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correspond to the literary genre definition as found in the Dictionary of Semiotics if and when
Literary semiotic theory is often applied to cinematic analysis, with film critics and
theorists willingly theorizing genre categories and engaging in discourse about works and their
genres. In his short work, Genre, on the semiotics of film, Stephen Neale says that, within the
film community, the 1970s were a time of, “realization that any form of artistic production is a
rule-bound activity firmly embedded in social history, [so] the theory of cinema set about
discovering the structures which underpinned groups of films and gave them their social
grounding” (Neale 1). So, is this thing called “genre” that I claim to be of utmost importance
necessarily rule-bound? If so, what are the rules? And, what is this thing called “genre,” really?
House Dictionary says it is “a class or category of artistic endeavor having a particular form,
content, technique, or the like; genus; kind; sort; style” (Dictionary.com). So, musical genre
theory is the study of organizing musical creation into categories. In Beard and Gloag’s
compendium of musicological topics, Musicology: the Key Concepts, the authors summarize the
key issues surrounding musical genre discourse. Their discussion forms an abstract of the
4. Major differences in generic convention between popular and art (“classical”) musics
(72).
In my research of musical genre and meaning creation, Beard and Gloag’s brief, three page
dictionary-style entry has been the most comprehensive discussion of the issues surrounding
Musical genre and its corresponding taxonomy is, in fact, a rare topic in musicological
discourse. To qualify the statement – broad spectrum genre discourse, taking into
consideration the whole of musical creation, rarely occurs. Most notably, there is an inherent
prejudice, or “avoidance of the other,” between historical musicologists and popular music
scholars as if “the other’s” music doesn’t exist at all. Musicology, as a broad discipline, seldom
and popular music studies. Within sub-disciplines, genre discourse toward organizational and
meaning-creation schema does occur, but perhaps due to fundamental differences in musical
and social practice among the musics studied, broad-spectrum logically organized discourse,
something fundamentally missing from the whole of musical scholarship. A common language
for genre labeling and agreed-upon criteria of genre creation is needed across musicological
sub-disciplines in order to engage in cross-pollinating research and foster new, integrated, ways
of thinking about musical creation. A basic, common, language would further musical thought
and allow for unified musicological thinking. Labels, though often resisted, are tools for
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humans to make sense of the world. They allow us to categorize and make hierarchies of
existence and give us tools for organizing thought. Arbitrary labels bring arbitrary thought, with
disciplines somehow perceived as unrelated. What should be a unified field of inquiry has,
inadvertently, become disjointed. A systematic and logical taxonomy is needed not only for
generalized organization of musical thought, but to bring a common language to the sub-
disciplines of musicology.
Popular music theorists seem most willing to engage in genre discourse. However,
popular music study, as a field, tends to look with suspicion upon fields such as historical
musicology and music theory as being myopic and hegemonic. Likewise, historical
musicologists and music theorists tend to look upon popular music studies as unworthy of
serious academic merit. And only one generic label has ever crossed musicological sub-
discipline lines – that of a distinct category of Art Music. Art Music, as described by popular
music scholars, is the genre of posterity, bourgeois culture, and traditional notation, usually
accepted through the “classical” label in the recording industry. To historical musicologists, Art
Popular music scholars, in examining the most commercially visible forms of music, tend
to be at the forefront of musical genre theory. Many popular music scholars have formulated
theories of genre such as Franco Fabbri, Simon Frith, Richard Middleton, Jason Toynbee, and
others, but their theories are decidedly “rock-ist” in nature. That is, popular music scholars
have often, up to this point in history, taken a “rock-centered” view of popular music, often
attempting to separate “rock” from the whole of popular music with an emphasis on rock’s
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“authenticity” versus other “pop” music. Here we see the “authenticity” problem as a recurring
one, and one that must be confronted later, after the larger issues of genre creation and
Beyond the “rock-ist” problem in popular music studies, there has been a significant
amount of discourse surrounding distinctions between genre, Subgenre, meta-genre, and style
within popular music. Theories and studies of musical taxonomy beyond large genre groupings
are, I believe, the most valuable contribution to musical genre theory from popular music
studies. Emphasis on the ever-changing, continuously evolving nature of genre and style is of
paramount importance considering today’s universe of easily attained musical sound. In Roy
Shuker’s entry for “Genre” in his Popular Music: the Key Concepts, he discusses three criteria
for genre difference, presumably condensed from the theories of Breen and Weinstein. He
says, in popular music, there are three criteria for genre distinction: stylistic traits, or sound of
the music; non-musical stylistic attributes (assumed marketing tactics and image); and audience
(assumed market demographic). These ideas may be valid as a possible organizing scheme for
commercial music within a capitalist marketing structure, but these attributes for taxonomy
musical creation, and therefore no systematic way to decode musical meaning creation and
inquiry has been an avoidance of an entire level of musical knowledge and scholarship. It
would seem to be a natural subject of inquiry – before studying musical content is attempted,
genre organization is needed. This systematic approach would apply common rules of
organization to large groupings of musics. Common rules applied across genres would
The work involves defining and labeling large groupings of genres according to broad
A unified theory of musical genre might also benefit the musically inclined public in
areas of musical accessibility. Standardized genre labeling would offer terminology for
discourse, thereby enabling further musical discovery and appreciation while, perhaps,
lessening some negative effects of the marketing labels currently favored for genre labeling. To
discover music that may be of interest, a music needs to be grouped with similar musics, and
simultaneously given perspective toward the whole of musical creation. This perspective allows
the interested party to view both familiar and unfamiliar music within a logically organized
structure. Systems of organization currently in use fail to organize musical creation as a whole
and, consequently, often through omission, fail to provide inquisitive listeners with potentially
As a practical and decidedly commodity-driven exercise, there has recently been a surge
in musical genre studies. However these have been less academic then market-driven. They
tempo, or any number of criteria provided by end users and added to databases with the
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ultimate goal of driving “music industry” capital accumulation. Pandora, StumbleAudio, iLike,
Musicovery, iTunes Genius, and LastFM are just a few of the now hundreds of websites which
attempt to suggest music for listeners based on their preferences for certain styles or genres
based on industry-accepted labels. While these automated music suggestion systems might, on
the surface, seem to solve the genre-related problem of musical discovery, they only serve to
omission. By omitting musics that fail to fit into their categories, these services are, in essence,
no better than the bricks-and-mortar music store model of genre that includes rock, jazz, pop,
and classical. What music is categorized as rock, jazz, pop, or classical? What are the
The All Music Guide, a database established in 1991, includes nine genre-groups broken
down into genre then style with nearly 1000 labels (Macrovision Corporation). The All Music
Guide is the only commonly used musical taxonomy open to the public. Gracenote (formerly
known as CDDB), the Music Genome Project (implemented in Pandora Internet Radio), and
other corporate electronic music delivery systems (Pachet and Cazaly) are proprietary
consumer data-delivery services and, as such, do not disclose their organization schemes. The
open-source internet databases Musicbrainz and Discogs have potential as master taxonomies,
but, through their community-centered approach, allow such widely divergent user-generated
labels as to render their labeling schemes useless. Certain governments, most notably Canada
and the UK, require radio bandwidth and airtime to be devoted to particular genres, with the
record labels (Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music 79). All systems currently
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in use, however, are industry constructs rather than musicological ones. They tend to ignore
musical and sociological content in favor of marketing and corporate ideology (84).
In the early twenty-first century, labels used by the music industry have become
standard and accepted, even though the labeling schemes are somewhat arbitrary. Within the
recording industry, labels are marketing constructs. They are used to create a product, find a
market for that product, and sell the product efficiently and effectively. Genre labels used in
the music industry are used for no other reason than that they are the ones that are used. They
are standard practice. Labels used within the music industry are simply general practices of
marketing developed over time (Holt 26). Music industry scholar Keith Negus summarizes this
phenomenon in stating that, “industry produces culture and culture produces industry” (Negus
Within music-making communities and musical scholarship, genre labels used by the
music industry are accepted as vague starting points, never as absolutes. For “musical insiders”
– those involved in the creation and study of music, genre labels hold a great deal of
significance beyond their use as marketing tools. Labeling for these musicking “insiders”
artists they sound like rather than in terms of the sound of their music or any extra-musical or
cultural associations. Discussions often surround “best examples” of a genre in order to define
its pertinent and distinguishing features. This is referred to as the “prototype effect” (Fabbri,
Browsing 7). This solution of “prototyping” simultaneously solves the problem of genre labeling
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and complicates the matter. Serious problems arise if lineages need to be traced back multiple
generations to find a commonly known artist. A much simpler solution would be to offer a
standardized category that fit the artist’s output. Yet the decision must be made as to which
label to use. Then, how do we categorize output from creators who create hybrid work,
especially those who defy the broad industry-standard categories of Pop/Rock, Jazz, and
Classical? What if musical creators create music that might be simultaneously categorized as
Pop/Rock, Jazz, and Classical? If such hybrid cases seem absurd, consider Frank Zappa and John
Zorn.
Both Zappa and Zorn have extremely prolific catalogs of recorded work with much of it
crossing traditionally accepted genre lines. In addition they often have intentionally combined
traditionally labeled genres to create new hybrids. So, how can we make sense of their music?
During every act of listening we are, even if only subconsciously, always engaging in acts
of categorization and, therefore, genre labeling (Negus 25). We may decide a sound isn’t music
at all, or we may relate it to sounds heard in the past and begin to recognize familiar musical
elements. This is simply how musical enjoyment happens – we relate what is heard to sounds
heard in the past. In relating sound to memory, we experience intellectual, physical, and
emotional stimulus – the essence of musical enjoyment and the impetus to decoding musical
meaning. In fact, we must relate sounds and music to sounds and music heard in the past for it
to be heard as anything other than noise. Social and cultural influences determine what we
consider to be music, how we hear them, use them, categorize them, and, ultimately, find
meaning in the sounds we call music. Before we can consider the social influence on meaning
Kessel 39
creation within genres, we need to determine the social cultural influence on genre labeling.
The social influence on meaning will be discussed in a later chapter of this work.
Genre labels are often taken for granted by the public and begrudgingly accepted by
musical creators, though mental models are constantly being applied, new ones created, and
genre implied, based on previously experienced categories. Sociologist Simon Frith argues,
“people do not experience their aesthetic beliefs as merely arbitrary and conventional; they
feel that they are natural, proper, and moral” (73). Yet listening choices are usually made in an
effort to conform, “taking on music as an emblem of social solidarity with their peers” (Jourdain
263). In this effort to conform, listeners use industry standard genre labels as if the labels are
The “natural, proper, and moral” labels tend, however, to be simultaneously too broad
and vague while also, in some cases, being too specific. Critically analyzing genre labels used
for marketing purposes exposes some of these flaws. How can a thousand years of musical
output, with new works still being created, be given the marketing label of “classical”? (I refer
here to the marketing label, not the musicological label “Classical”) Conversely, what
distinguishes much of “Rock” from “Pop”? What is the difference between “Rap” and “Hip-
Hop”? In fact these are the very questions often debated by musical “insiders” who actively
create and participate in musical culture outside the corporate marketing apparatus.
are usually accepted as the proper way to describe a music by consumers. However, musical
creators often think of themselves as functioning at a level higher than that which can be
described in terms of genre – transcending generic restraints. While the mass of musical
Kessel 40
consumers blindly accepts corporate labels, many musical creators dismiss any and all labels.
For both those who dismiss genre and those who blindly accept the industry created labels,
there are often only two categories of music – good and bad – subjective evaluations of the
music, usually based on socially conditioned factors, are of primary value. There is nothing
inherently negative in this valuation. Philosopher Benedetto Croce has said, “aesthetic or
intuitive modes of thinking are antithetical to logical or scientific modes (such as) genre theory.
The aesthetic has no logic, logic kills aesthetic expression” (Frow 27). Croce’s argument is often
the dominant one to musical creators, as if to work within a genre is to be bound by a set of
“nothing other than the codification of discursive properties” according to cultural theorist
way.
(Frow 18). Genre is not a rule or law, but simply a descriptor – a way of relating a work to that
which came before. Philosopher H.R. Jauss states, “Just as there is no act of communication
also unimaginable that a literary work set itself into an informational vacuum, without
indicating a specific situation of understanding. To this extent, every work belongs to a genre”
(Frow 28). In this constant evolution of performance of discourse there exists a requirement of
significant similarity for inclusion or significant difference for exclusion from a genre. If a
creator wishes to create within a genre they must simply create work similar to that which is
already established as an example of the genre. Original work within a genre seems to be the
Kessel 41
true point of controversy in musical genre discourse. Within genres, creators must produce
difference in similarity to create original works – an almost confrontational concept for many
creative individuals to comprehend. All human creation works within “possibilities that are
given, rather than summoned up freely by the imagination” (Toynbee 66). Commonalities must
be part of the creation to enable understanding. Those common elements form the language
and the corresponding genre-culture of the social environment in which the communication
cultural creative interaction of significant similarity versus significant difference. However, due
to market-based genre labeling schemes currently in wide use, difference is emphasized over
similarity.
Problems arise when a musical creator makes something that is truly outside of
accepted industry labels, and a consumer attempts to connect with the creation. The
limitations of industry labels become clear when a consumer can’t find an artist’s work, and the
work can’t be categorized to enable being found (Frith 75). These limitations have been
steadily improving over the last several years due to the advent of internet music information
databases such as Discogs and the AllMusicGuide, but no stores (whether digital or bricks-and-
mortar) have fully implemented their genre and artist cross-referencing schemes.
The examples of John Zorn and Frank Zappa serve to illustrate the problems of cross-
referencing highly prolific and genre-jumping musical creators. Discogs shows Zorn’s genres to
be: Electronic, Rock, Latin, Jazz, Funk / Soul, Classical, Reggae, Non-Music, Folk, World, &
Country, Pop, Stage & Screen, Hip Hop, Blues, and Children's. The AllMusicGuide system of
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classification lists his genre as Avant-Garde but his styles as: Jazz, Free Jazz, Avant-Garde Jazz,
Pop/Rock, Experimental, Modern Creative, Modern Composition, Stage & Screen, Soundtracks,
Film Music, Classical, Structured Improvisation, Free Improvisation, International, Jewish Music,
Post-Bop, Jazz Instrument(al), and Saxophone Jazz. Problems here are obvious in the
incompatibility of the systems. Discogs uses something it calls “genre” while AllMusic uses both
“genre” and “style”. Similarities are largely absent between the systems beyond some basic
ideas of “Rock”, “Jazz”, and “Classical”. We can find similar problems in classifying Frank
Zappa’s musical output. Discogs lists Zappa’s genres as: Electronic, Rock, Latin, Jazz, Classical,
Blues, Hip Hop, Funk / Soul, Pop, Non-Music, Stage & Screen, Reggae, Folk, World, and Country.
His AllMusic entry lists his genre as Pop/Rock and his Styles as: Hard Rock, Prog-Rock, Jazz-Rock,
Comedy Rock, Experimental Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Art Rock, Jazz, Progressive Jazz,
Comedy/Spoken, Fusion, Proto-Punk. Again, the similarities between Discogs and AllMusic are
Both Zorn and Zappa have been quoted with statements about the necessity, in some
form, of genre labeling to make the music, in some way, accessible to audiences. In the May
2009 issue of JazzTimes magazine, Zorn said his music, “is not jazz music, it’s not classical music,
it’s not rock music…(but) the only outlets were jazz magazines. Even though it didn’t belong in
that tradition or in that format, it was the only format that there was” (Milkowski 48). In Frank
composer first, and performer of popular music only out of necessity. As a composer who has
been relegated to create rock with lyrics he says, “lyrics wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t for the
Kessel 43
fact that we live in a society where instrumental music is irrelevant – so if a guy expects to earn
a living by providing musical entertainment for folks in the U.S.A., he’d better figure out how to
do something with a human voice plopped on it” (Zappa 185). Both Zorn and Zappa have said
that their prolific output is their life’s work as expression of their core values as creators.
Through a process of organizing genre we are able to assess the values at stake within
each genre family. In the words of Simon Frith, “Musical disputes are not about music, ‘in itself’
but about how to place it, what it is about the music that is to be assessed. After all, we can
only hear music as valuable when we know what to listen for and how to listen for it” (Frith 26).
To organize the whole of musical creation in order to understand what to listen for and
how to listen for it, I propose a hierarchical taxonomy of musical creation with its highest level
simply stated as “Music” from which all further divisions grow. This taxonomy takes into
consideration the music itself from a traditional, notational (music theory analytical),
perspective as well as cultural, social, and personal characteristics of each taxonomic levels’
musicking participants. In addition, I contend that each taxonomic level offers particular levels
of meaning for participants. As a result, by organizing the artifacts of musical activity, we are
simultaneously organizing interpretive possibilities for those artifacts. This taxonomy could, in
theory, be extended to include all of artistic creation with the largest division being “Artform.”
culture” (Shepherd and Wicke, Music and Cultural Theory 34). The significance of these nice
things to listen to that we call music, on a macro scale, is the significance of knowledge and the
culture we may begin the taxonomic division here with Artform, which may divide into Music,
Dance, Architecture, Painting, Sculpture, Literature, etc. To begin this particular taxonomy –
that of music, we will begin with the “Artform” division of “Music” without further distinction
of “Artform.” Elaborating on the ontology of music described earlier, the largest all-inclusive
category of creation of “Music” also poses no restriction on that which may be called by the
name “Music.”
ways in which to divide “music” into generic categories based on a variety of characteristics.
Composer and philosopher Leonard Meyer has proposed a multitude of criteria for category
creation. Some of these include time period, utilitarian musical purpose (dance music, worship
music, relaxation music, etc.), music of different cultural and/or geographic areas, musical form
(song, sonata, opera, etc.), and music of socially defined groups (affluent, folk, counter-cultural,
etc.) (Meyer, Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology 38). These distinctions, though
fairly comprehensive if taken together, are far too disparate to use as top-level genre
categories. Meyer’s studies focus on creating categories within the western European
symphonic and vocal traditions, and ignore creation outside those traditions. Like most
scholars who have examined the question of genre, he concentrated his efforts on inventing
subgenres within already accepted categories. He ignored the larger question of broad
categorical distinctions.
Likewise, there are numerous scholars who have proposed theories of why and how to
create distinctions within larger genres, but few, if any, who question the large genre labels. In
a study of various methods for categorization, Allen Moore provides an account of a number of
Kessel 45
methods suggesting that there should be broad genre categories but fails to offer any. He
chooses instead to focus his energies, like most other genre scholars, on how subgenres are
created (Moore).
broad musical categories. There are broad distinctions currently in use, such as “classical”, and
“popular,” but I have found no studies defending such labels. “Classical” and “popular” are
commonly used labels simply due to their common usage. Here we uncover a very
problematic, and usually ignored, issue – what to do with music that is neither “classic” nor
creating difference. There must be some feature that all members of a group have in common
that creates distinction. This categorical distinction could be compared to Phylum within
biological taxonomy. Kingdoms are very broad categories for life such as animals, plants, and
fungi. Within each kingdom, the members of that kingdom have something very basic in
common. Creatures within the animal kingdom are relatively large, mobile, multi-celled
organisms composed of systems of multi-celled components called organs, for example. Music
is in the kingdom of artistic creation, along with literature, plastic arts, film, theatre, etc. The
animal kingdom is then broken down into phylum based on body type such as vertebrates and
invertebrates. All animals have multi-celled, multi-system bodies in common – phylum divides
these into type. To further break down the kingdom of music, we need a similarly broad
criterion based on “difference in similarity.” One such criterion is the primary text of a music.
Kessel 46
The primary document of a music is the thing that allows the music to be understood,
studied, and possibly re-created. The primary text’s intention is to disseminate the music free
text transfers musical ideas in much the same way that a book transfers thought from the mind
There are three primary texts for musical dissemination which form the basis of musical
genre. They are the score (significantly documented written text), oral tradition and recordings
(sound as text), and the musical sketch (lead sheet, outline, or oral description). These three
primary documents allow the artistic category of “music” to be broken down into the three
broad categories of “Art Music,” “Popular Music,” and “Improvised Music.” The main tree
Within each of these broad categories, a number of different criteria must be used to
further sub-divide the musical categories. This is similar to the way in which biological
taxonomies are further sub-divided from the phylum. Vertebrates and invertebrates are so
dissimilar that completely different systems must be used to further categorize them. Likewise,
the primary documents of my broad categories are so different that each broad category must
use differing criteria for further sub-division. Franco Fabbri suggests that broad categories be
called systems (Fabbri, A Theory 1). Likewise, the genre labeling system outlined here will have
as its largest division something called Supergenre Systems. In my taxonomy, beyond the root
of “Music,” each sub-division, or branch of taxonomy, has discrete criteria for distinction.
In music, just as in the plastic arts, there are distinct “art worlds” with entirely separate
cultures. Within these cultures, a number of roles must be filled such as composer, performer,
Kessel 47
and audience member (Becker 34-39). Also, within each “art world” there exists a certain
amount of “social capital.” Social capital, as proposed by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, is a value
system of interpersonal and institutional relationships which provide resources for various
types of activities – personal, public, and professional (Bourdieu). Applied to music, the
Supergenre systems are the “art worlds” of music which provide “social capital” on varying
levels from the professional and public to the interpersonal, depending on the level of
taxonomic division. They have, as their primary value of distinction, the musics’ primary
participants who might hope to re-create the music as active participants such as players or
scholars rather than passive listeners or cultural participants. Here, ethnic culture begins to
roles for participants that is conspicuously absent from many other cultures, most notably
those of the African continent. This absence of distinct musicking roles is often a marked
feature of non-Western musics compared to Western ones. Beyond roles of participants, non-
Western cultures often treat music, ontologically, as something completely different from its
the Hausa people of Nigeria who have many words describing musicians, musical practices, and
instruments, but no word for music, itself. Music, outside the European tradition, is often an
integral component of the social culture at large – indistinguishable from, and integral to, other
cultures, musicking participants are simultaneously listeners and creators, with little to no
separation of roles. We will see later how this opposing ontology can conform to my taxonomy.
Beyond distinction according to dissemination method, social factors come into play.
This is part of my comprehensive and integrated approach to musical taxonomy. Ever since
Theodore Adorno’s contention in the early-to-mid twentieth century that musical meaning had
as much to do with social factors as with features within the music itself, musicologists have
been arguing the significance of sociology to the study of music. There now seems to be a
consensus (with, naturally, some outspoken detractors) that social factors do, indeed, play a
powerful role in how we interpret sound and the stuff we call music. Through those social
factors, the study of sociology is enhanced, in turn, by interpreting how social groups use music
to enhance their cohesion. As the relatively new discipline of musical sociology, or socio-
musicology, develops, there becomes a need to logically integrate the whole of musical
creation into a single area of inquiry – a major ambition of socio-musicological investigation and
the goal of the Supergenre System of Musical Taxonomy for Hermaneutic Analysis. To relate
one social group to another it becomes necessary to find what they have in common in order to
determine their differences. By determining their differences, contrasting musical cultures can
be studied in greater detail. Then in examining social differences between musicking groups,
Accepting as fact that music can create meaning, attempts are made to determine how
meaning is created and what type of meaning is created. Sub-disciplines of musicology assert
meaning creation differently for their musical area of study, some considering only traditional
western musical characteristics (harmony, melody, rhythm, timbre), others considering extra-
musical characteristics such as included text, and still others examining sociological and
psychological influences. Considering the divergent theories of meaning and meaning creation
creation among the divisions of music. Meaning creation and meaning-type in a performance
of a Beethoven string quartet is probably not of the same type or method as the latest
American Idol’s radio hit. It follows that musical meaning is closely aligned to musical genre.
In the previous section of this work, I proposed a system for large-scale organization of
the whole of musical creation I call the Supergenre System. While there are practical “real-
world” applications for this system as a way of organizing musical creation, the system also
together. Perhaps it is worth repeating that my system provides a framework for interpretation
method, interpretive possibilities are realized for groupings within the organizational system. I
impossible to assert “piece of music A produces meaning B.” I believe this absolutist approach
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has been a major shortcoming of hermaneutic musicological work in the past. My Supergenre
System simply provides a framework for understanding the significant values inherent in
musical cultures, thereby offering, for those unfamiliar with a particular musical culture, the
means to understand the sounds and sociological factors significant to the genre at hand. My
misunderstandings arising from attempts to impose one set of musico-social values on a music
that, inherently, has an opposing value system. To understand a music, we need to understand
By examining the social and cultural zeitgeist surrounding various musics, it becomes
apparent that the groupings within the Supergenre System place greater or lesser importance
on each of three socio-musical characteristics: the musical text, the musical sound, and the
social and cultural environment of musicking participants. So, while the distinguishing
characteristic of each grouping is a difference in similarity (the primary text) the value system of
each determines how the taxonomic tree is further broken down into Genre, Subgenre, Style,
Standardized Taxonomy
taxonomic tree with the root being simply “Music” defined as any and all sound deemed
worthy of the title “Music” by someone, anyone, anywhere. From “Music” there are three
major divisions, with their distinction being the “primary text” of the music. The primary text is
the major way in which performance information is disseminated. In this section I offer more
The first Supergenre System is “Art Music.” It is the one category that enjoys little
argument about its label from musicologists, though it is occasionally referred to as “serious
music” in musicological discourse, and the music within the category is sometimes debated.
The challenge in using the “Art Music” label is in convincing the general public and the
commercial music industry that “Art Music” is a more descriptive and accurate label than
“classical.” The term “classical” refers specifically to Western scored music from the eighteenth
century within the discipline of Western music history. The term “Art Music” refers not only to
notated music of Western cultures, but also of fully notated music throughout the world. If we
eliminate “classical’ as a catch-all term we might not only eliminate a great deal of confusion,
but also help foster greater appreciation for Western Art Music of the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries. Though the topic is beyond the scope of this work, the Modernist movement
the Art Music art-world has never recovered. Contemporary Western Art Music, both
Modernist and otherwise, continues to be written, but in the Modernist tradition, it is often
ignored by all but composers. Among many other political, economic, social, and cultural
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factors, to the vast majority of the musicking public, “classical” music excludes most everything
written post-Stravinsky and Ives. On the rare occasion when the term “classical” refers to
contemporary works, it is too-often with the understanding that the work follows the sounds of
the nineteenth century, such as neo-Romanticism. By eliminating the catch-all “classical,” and
using the word to refer, specifically, to Western notated music of the eighteenth century we
can, however subtly, broaden acceptance of post-Stravinsky and Ives notated music in the
academic-orchestral-chamber-choral-electronic tradition.
Art Music, historically, has been the music of the middle-to-upper classes but, like fine
literature or visual art, has always been of great cultural significance regardless of the
audiences’ economic status. Historically, the wealthy support the musics’ creators, but the
“product” of this support is presented for the admiration of all. It has existed since medieval
times and new works continue to be created. The important distinguishing characteristic for
taxonomic distinction of Art Music is that specifics of performance must be written down.
Being a technically challenging and complex form of music, it requires written documents for
performance. There must be performance information offered in a way that allows multiple
performances of the same piece of music to sound extremely similar. Art Music is the music of
posterity. Since a great deal of time is required for creation, study, and performance, Art Music
is the music of specialists and it exists as such wherever it is found. It is also the genre most
studied by Western musicologists and is the one Supergenre System with already useful and
With Western Art Music as, perhaps, the most studied music in the world and the topic
of study in traditional Musicology, its study forms the basis of the majority of musicological
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apparent to me that the broad musicological arguments of the past were usually logically
effective while also being discursively relevant. Problems with the classic arguments stem from
narrow and prejudiced views of the possibilities of music. One of my primary aims in creating
the Supergenre System of Musical Taxonomy is to give all music equal status for aesthetic
appreciation. So, while I acknowledge the successes of past scholars’ musicological work, I
believe many of the old arguments to be too myopic to be effectively applied to today’s vast
musical landscape. The arguments were applied only to Art Music, thereby rendering them
authentic conceptions and performances of musical works. We can see parallels here with the
Platonic notion of idealized forms. A musical work exists as a perfected object only in the mind
of the composer; the authentic, idealized, work becomes compromised the moment the notes
leave the composer’s mind to be written down in a score. Scores then become the musical
works as objects and commodities. From the written notational text of the score, the authentic
and ideal work is interpreted by a conductor who disseminates his (rarely her) interpretation to
live performance.
The classic arguments were (and are) often at odds with non-specialists’ notions of
music, and this is precisely the classic opposing perspective. First, the classic musicological
model of the musical work assumes “music” to be notated orchestral and chamber works of the
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18th through 20th centuries’ Western societies. Next, performance is relevant only as a
readings of a composers’ canon. Finally, the greatest musicological debate was (is) whether
music was (is) simply something nice to listen to with meaning non-existent beyond notes on a
page, or whether it represented something loftier – idealized form, scientific beauty, progress,
or emotion, for example. And, it seems, nearly all Western musicological discourse placed itself
in opposition to improvised and popular musics. However, in examining the whole of musical
creation through my Supergenre System of Taxonomy, Art Music is just one of the three
The next Supergenre is Improvised Music. Improvised Music uses a simple sketch or
outline, also often written out, as its primary text. These documents differ greatly from those
of Art Music in that only general ideas are given as to the content of a performance. Every
performance, even those repeated by the same musicians, will be significantly different, and
that difference is a major component of the music. The written document may offer basic
chord changes along with a melody, as in the jazz lead sheet; may offer an image to think about
and improvise upon, as in some avant-garde improvisational traditions; or may simply offer a
series of pitch or rhythmic relationships offered to the musician as raw materials for creation,
as in many Middle-Eastern, Indian, and African musics. The most important characteristic of
Improvised Music is that every performance of a piece will be very different from every other
guidelines for improvisation. Interesting categorization dilemmas can occur here when
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attempting to categorize many non-Western musics as the vast majority of musicking around
distinction between activities surrounding the creation of music and the music itself. For
example, in many African musics consisting primarily of drumming, particular rhythmic patterns
are used as accompaniment for particular activities and rituals. The ritual rhythm provides the
improvisational sketch from our Western perspective, but within the culture, rhythm and ritual
are so intimately connected as to, linguistically, refer to the same activity. The concepts of
sound and ritual are indistinguishable. Also, while there is, typically, no written textual
document, the document becomes the ritual. This idea of music-making as being
indistinguishable, conceptually, from its accompanying activities is often extremely difficult for
Western minds to grasp. In much the same way that Western cultures assume that music is
created by specialists for appreciation by audiences, throughout much of the world the
opposite is true – music does not exist as a specialist activity, nor is it an activity partitioned off
from other aspects of living to be appreciated as a separate aesthetic activity (Cook 17). As
musical sketch, these non-Western improvisatory musics have their accompanying activities,
In recent times, as Western Jazz has become accepted in academia as worthy of study,
there has been a movement to include it in the category of Art Music. My system, however,
disallows this unless the composition is fully written out. The movement to label Jazz as Art
Music has developed first from a desire to eliminate Jazz from the Popular Music label that
befell it during the twentieth century, and second as an attempt to elevate its status owing to
the high degree of technical and theoretical proficiency required for its composition and
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only as a meaning-creation parameter for those participating in the musical culture. The
absurdity of labeling, somehow, certain “difficult” jazz as “Art” and other less-taxing jazz as,
perhaps, something else, should seem self-evident. Performance practice in Jazz requires
The last broad category of musical genre is “Popular.” The primary text of the popular
category isn’t really a document at all – it is the sound of the music which is heard repeatedly
and then emulated. It’s the oldest form of music. Regional, folk, and ethnic musics belong in
this category (unless they are improvised), as does most commercial music for which the
Since the mid-twentieth century, the oral tradition of popular music has mostly been
she may simply listen to a recording rather than seek out someone who is already familiar with
the music. The technical demands of Popular Music performance typically do not require direct
instruction or observation for their re-creation. Yet, in many ways, recordings have become
direct instruction, direct performance, and definitive documents of popular music texts,
especially commercial popular music, according to Theodore Gracyk in Rhythm and Noise: An
Aesthetics of Rock. Gracyk discusses the ways in which recordings have become the essential
and primary performers in the Rock genre. Musicians and their instruments are secondary to
recording and playback equipment as sound generators (Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise 75).
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Recording technology has further democratized popular music, the common people’s music,
beyond face-to-face oral transmission to bring musicking to non-musicians wherever they may
be.
The term “Popular Music” is often confused with the idea of “commercially successful”
music. They are not necessarily the same thing. Most commercially successful music falls into
the Supergenre of Popular Music but not all, and not all Popular Music is commercially
successful. Often rock musicians abhor being called “popular” for fear that popularity
are of major importance to musicking participants – a notion I will return to later. Creating in
the Popular Supergenre does not necessarily make a musician popular, nor is it a statement
about the level of musicianship involved in creating a Popular Music. It is simply a label of
genre distinction.
Recently, the “Popular Music” label has been the subject of scrutiny by certain
argues in favor of “Popular Music” primarily for its use as an all-encompassing label, since
“pop/rock” suggests commercial musics with strong “rock-ist aesthetics” such as the tendency
to put high value on the authorship of a music by its performers (Regev 253) – something
distinctive to “rock” as a Genre subdivision of the “Popular Music” Supergenre. Others have
argued against the “Popular Music” label by proposing that it suggests “mass-mediation via
specialized and complex technologies, in markets, and in the sway of certain well-defined public
discourses about ‘popularity’ that mark both production and consumption” (International
Advisory Eds.) advancing the idea that “Popular Music” can only exist in the commercial
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environments of capitalist societies. “Popular Music” is not a label of economic conditions but
elite” as suggested by sociologist Deena Weinstein (International Advisory Eds.). The “Popular
Music” label is used to designate all music disseminated by sound, not just commercially viable
Now that the first level of division in the tree of musical genre has been defined,
branches can begin to grow. However, the further out from the trunk we go, the more
possibility there is for ambiguous distinction in categorical qualities. The three major divisions
can be accepted as fact, with arguable evidence – that of primary text. To create further
of distinction that shows contrast. Returning to the biological taxonomic model, the next
division after phylum is class. Here we encounter a minor difficulty in that biological classes are
open to disagreement – there are no standard classes, though commonly known organisms
tend to suffer little controversy over class distinction. Likewise, within Supergenres, Genre
distinction may become standard and agreed upon as a cultural attribute. Standard deviations
are created based on traditional musicological criteria of sound as manifest in timbre from
instrumentation along with performance practice criterion such as tempo and instrumental
technique. This is relatively easy to comprehend when comparing, for example, the Popular
Music Genres of Rock and Dance/Electronic. Rock instrumentation is of guitar, bass, drum kit,
problematic and open to debate in other comparisons, such as that between Dance/Electronic
and Hip-Hop Genres. They are both mostly electronic in instrumentation and similar in timbre
content. They may also have similar tempos. This is where we need to progress to the next
distinction we begin to find division based on social forces. Subgenre distinction tends to be
nearly equally a musical and cultural phenomenon. So, to distinguish between Genres within
manifest in their Subgenres as well as differences of timbre, tempo, and musical practice.
On the level of “purely musical” content, Breakbeat, House, Old-School Hip-hop, and
Crunk may be of similar, though not identical tempo. Breakbeat and House, as members of the
Dance/Electronic Genre typically, have faster tempos than the Old-School Hip-Hop or Crunk
Genres of Hip-Hop – typically 120-140 beats per minute (bpm) for Breakbeat and House versus
80-120 bpm for the Hip-hop Subgenres. Crunk will tend to have more synthetic timbres then
any of the others, while Breakbeat and Old-School Hip-Hop almost always use “real” drum
sounds sampled from old recordings. House always uses a “four-on-the-floor” bass drum dance
beat while the others typically use drum rhythms that are less regular and repetitive. There are
further purely musical differences, but these will suffice for the example here.
Socio-political, and therefore cultural, forces are also at work in distinguishing the
helpful to examine some social theories such as those proposed by Antonio Gramsci and Max
Weber.
meanings of struggle against dominant socio-economic and cultural forces (Shepherd 89, Regev
258). In this way, for the example given, the Subgenres of Electronic/Dance can be assigned
meanings of escape from middle class drudgery, while those of the Hip-Hop Genre may be seen
Kessel 61
meanings within the “music itself” but must be ascertained through examination of the social
culture in which the music exists. Weberian philosophy stresses “the use and consumption of
art and culture in terms of their function for the self-definition of collective entities and their
quest for status, prestige, and power” while “serving the interests of rising class formations to
construct their claim for social position and power around their self-definition as specific taste
cultures and lifestyles” (Regev 259-260). Subgenre is primarily a taste-culture distinction which,
though it may have “purely musical” distinctive qualities, those qualities manifest as an
In review, the broadest categories of musical taxonomy are Supergenres and are made
based on the primary text of a music. Division of Supergenre into Genre occurs based on sound
– instrumentation and its attendant timbre. From the Genre division, there is a further
subdivision into Subgenre based on significant and compelling cultural factors as well as slightly
more detailed musical content such as tempo, in addition to timbre. Supergenre is text, Genre
is “the music itself” – the “purely musical” sound, and Subgenre is embodied in musical detail
as well as context of culture . This is an adequately comprehensive system for many, but not
all, musics. Often, to create a sufficient categorical distinction for a music there must be further
categorical distinction. This is where sub-text of social factors contributing to musical subtlety
assumes primary significance for the Subgenre dissection into Style, corresponding to biological
family.
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Musicologists and semiologists seem to agree that Style exists as some subset of genre
and that genre creates rules that govern stylistic choices (Fabbri, Browsing 8-9; Meyer 10;
Moore 434-437). Style becomes most apparent to Subgenre “insiders” – those most familiar
with a Subgenre and its many types of rules – its musicking participants. Style is a semiotic
assertion of social category and perception which directly influences purely musical choices
thereby creating subtle distinctions of sound that may be imperceptible to those outside the
musicking culture. To continue my analogy with biology – all dogs are still dogs (musical genre)
regardless of breed (Style). “Musical Styles are, in the last analysis, artificial constructs
developed by musicians within a specific culture and are recognized as such only by a
community of hearers” (P. Martin 56). Dick Hebdige, in his Subculture: The Meaning of Style,
asserts that personal affectations such as dress and idiosyncratic language help to create Style.
Style may also be apparent in performance environment – bar or club atmosphere, stadium,
Style offers value and meaning for participants in that it provides ways of assessing
“social interactions and symbolic goods against a set of group-specific values” and provides,
“markers of inclusion within taste cultures and are expressive of internalized identities”
(Strachan 202). That is, Style provides meaningful interactions of inclusionary practice through
It may be helpful to examine a musical Style for its sociological content to better
understand the “Style” concept. Punk is a Subgenre of the Rock Genre and has a number of
Styles contained within it. Emo and Hardcore Styles are widely divergent in their sociological
constructions. While the ideology of Hardcore stresses masculine and blue-collar values of
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strength, hard work, and assertiveness in interpersonal communication, Emo Style values
tends to be aggressive and distorted with a shouting vocal Style, Emo music is significantly more
melodic with distinctively melodic sung vocals. Differences in Style participants’ clothing are
often the most telling markers – Hardcore stylists often dress simply and conservatively in well-
fitting t-shirts and jeans with shaved heads or crewcuts and military-Style boots, while Emo
participants’ fashion is of tight-fitting, usually black, clothing with long-ish black hair and
This breakdown of Punk Genre into Hardcore and Emo Style is also an ideal example of
the way in which notions of Genre and Style are not pre-determined constraints of content, but
are constantly shifting and evolving. The accepted history of punk has its origins situated in the
1970s as a Subgenre of Rock. In the 1980s it began to break down into Styles – one of which
was Hardcore. In the 1990s Hardcore broke down further into offshoots such as Emo,
Grindcore, Powerviolence, and Thrash. Emo, then was one of the original offshoots of Hardcore
before it evolved into its own distinct Style. How, then, can breakdowns of Style be categorized
before they evolve into their own distinctive Style? This is the taxonomic breakdown of Scene
which corresponds to the biological Genus, and which is determined by peculiarities arising
from the disintegration of social groups in a certain place and time. These differences are the
results of disagreements within self-determined social groups, and may have any ideological
basis – politics, economic status, fashion and personal adornment, “purely musical” factors, or
interpersonal relations. These Scenes may evolve into Styles, may become obsolete, or may,
given time and circumstance, eventually evolve into their own Genres.
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There is but one major division remaining beyond Scene and that is the Species, or the
type of musicking taking place, corresponding to biological species. Any participation in any
musical activity is musicking, so the question remains: what type of musicking is the participant
engaging in? Composer, musician, listener, dancer, theorist, engineer, roadie, and store clerk
are all species of musicking. Each species ascribes certain levels of meaning to the music and
activities in which it participates. Each species also ascribes differing levels of value to differing
musical and extra-musical content of those activities. At the level of musicking species, or
participant type, it becomes relevant to ask how meaning is created from perceived values and
how those values are determined. In other words, what does music offer to those participating
in it that makes them want to continue participating? Then, as a participant, what does music
provide, internally, as motivation for continued participation within the musicking specimen?
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Meaning Systems
is of what music can express. It seems every possible view has been taken on this issue, from
claiming that music can express nothing beyond movement (Adorno, Essays on Music) or
situation (Lippman), to those claiming music as a basis for entire cultures (Hebdige). To assert
one type of meaning over another is to assert one type of thought process, one type of musical
creativity, or one type of social or cultural expression as having superior value over another.
Music, perhaps more than any other type of artistic expression, has, as its primary artistic
strength, abstraction. Concrete meaning is simply not possible in music, at least not in pure
music free from accompanying literature such as lyrics or program notes. It is impossible to
assert that a music has a particular meaning. We can, however, provide a framework and
language for the discussion of musical affectation while accounting for purely musical
characteristics such as timbre, melody, harmony, and rhythm, as well as placing the music
within a context of socio-cultural conditions. This is the primary value of Supergenre System
analysis. Supergenre System theory places a music along a continuum of music making to
Questions of meaning – of what music expresses, and how that expression occurs,
have been the most persistent questions raised throughout the history of musical thought.
With music as a compelling stimulus, it is accepted that it must offer some sort of significance
beyond superficial pleasure. However, the challenge has always been to separate the meaning
from the experience. In Shepherd and Wicke’s Music and Cultural Theory, they state that
“…musical sound cannot easily be distinguished from the affective experience that has to occur
Kessel 66
if the sound image is, indeed, recognized as musical” (Shepherd and Wicke, Music and Cultural
Theory 139). And so, the goal of Supergenre System analysis, in deciphering meaning, is to
dissect the types of affect in terms of intellectual and aural stimulation, cultural significance,
In considering the first level of distinction within the System – the division of
Supergenre – we encounter meanings suggested by the ways in which the musical material is
shared and understood as an artifact of an art world; keeping with Becker’s definition of art
world. Modes of transmission and dissemination involving written notation, or lack thereof,
suggest possibilities for analyzing pitch, time, and timbre significances along with suggesting
certain levels of acculturation within the musical art worlds from which the music originates.
This cultural familiarization alone offers an abundance of meaning types; from social class and
status, to intellectual analysis of the “music itself”, to suggestions of historical value and
The Genre level offers meaning primarily suggested by sound – timbre and “the music
itself.” Again, acculturation plays a significant role toward meaning suggested by the sound of
intellectually, that music offers meanings corresponding to its challenges. Further divisions into
Subgenre, Style, and Scene provide meanings increasingly based on social factors and less on
“the music itself” the further divided the tree becomes. Eventually, however, beyond the
taxonomic tree, we find the individual musicking participant creating meaning within their own
psychology.
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makes us feel something by triggering a physiological response and that response is the
meaning. (Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music 102). However, the study of
ethnomusicology has made clear that emotional response to the same music varies widely
between cultures. For example, someone accustomed to the values of strong rhythm and who
feels a wide range of physiological responses to rhythm will feel little, if anything, when
presented with a harmonically rich, but comparatively rhythmically sparse, piece of music – i.e.
Hip-Hop versus 19th century Romanticism. Only very general and vague universal relationships
can be made between sound and emotion across cultures. So, if music is has meaning, it must
Cultural and social meanings are embedded in Supergenre, Genre, Subgenre, Style,
and Scene, with meanings created and established by groups of musicking participants within
each socio-cultural system. Anthropologist Alan P. Merriam, in discussing this social process of
musical meaning-creation said, “musical sound is the result of human behavioral processes that
are shaped by the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the people who comprise a particular
culture” (P. Martin 78). It is also largely determined by the power structures within those
systems. Dominant values for meaning creation depend upon the relative power of musicking
participants within the socio-cultural system. “Culture represents a struggle over the definition
of social reality and therefore the issue of the meaning of objects is also an issue of who defines
or appropriates them, where, when, how, and for what purpose” (P. Martin 70). Then, who has
the power to create value and meaning within a system? It depends almost entirely on the
In Popular Music Genres, culture dominates over sound or text in creating meaning.
The music exists less as a “thing-on-its-own” than as something to serve extra-musical needs
such as ritual, social interaction, and/or group cohesion. Art Music genres are served primarily
Improvisational Music genres have primary meanings created through sound and participation
in performance. It is important here to emphasize that all musicking involves text, sound, and
culture since taxonomic categorization of the musics involves all three. It is the dominance and
hierarchy of the three within the Supergenre Systems that determines the types of meaning
ritual. Music can only be described in terms of metaphor, being the most abstract of arts. To
describe music without the use of metaphor would be to present the music itself – direct
experience rather than description. Aligning with semiotic theory, it can be said that any and all
fame, through the act of describing something we are engaging in the ritual of description,
which is to engage in the act of metaphor creation, itself (102). So, by engaging in ritual acts of
metaphorical meanings are then assigned value depending on their socio-cultural musicking
context.
To illustrate these ideas, I’ll apply them to the Jazz Genre within the Improvised
Supergenre. In the Improvised Supergenre, primary value is placed on sound over text or
culture. This has implications for value creation through methods and techniques of
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instrumental sound creation. Within a performance situation, assumptions are made toward
acceptable musical language based on the text being improvised upon in a range of possibilities
constrained by the text (Toynbee 40). Skill of the performers in realizing the text and
maintaining its essential characteristics, while creating variation on the text, within a range of
acceptable possibilities is, perhaps, the highest value. Range of meaning, created as part of the
performance ritual, and inherent in the socio-cultural environment becomes contingent upon
perceived success of the improvisation – whether the meaning acquired as part of the ritual is
positive or negative. As part of the improvisational ritual, since personal mastery of the
participants are valued over the culture as a whole. So, the hierarchy of value in meaning
The Supergenre System, with its hierarchical breakdown, provides a logical structure
for musical categorization, organization, and subsequent interpretation of musical meaning and
considers the whole of musical creation as it relates to the whole of musical activity in
determining comprehensive analytical methods which consider the socio-cultural as well as the
traditionally musicological “purely musical” features of a music. It has been created in an effort
and to provide logical systems for musico-socio-cultural analysis while considering music as a
call music.
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Meaning in art is, fundamentally, metaphor of value, with value defined here in
assert a certain authority toward idealism and meaning creation through metaphor of whatever
art form is chosen as a medium. However, through participation in an art world, all
creation for the work in which they participate, regardless of their role in the art world. In this
sense, all musicking participants contribute to meaning creation within their chosen musical
culture whether they consider themselves “artists” within the musical art world or they
participate in other ways. Through this participation, and through their cultures beyond the
musical, they create meaning by asserting musical and cultural values corresponding to
characteristics embodied in the music and its process of creation. These characteristics and
values become more detailed as the taxonomic tree breaks into ever-smaller and numerous
sub-divisions.
culture, create distinctions of “us versus them” and “our music” versus “the other.” This is one
of the primary ways genre distinctions are made. For a music to be accepted as “our music,” it
must be seen to be sufficiently “authentic” – it must adhere to some sort of significant and
as part of their participation in their art world, engage in discourse concerning authenticity of
fellow participants as well as the artifacts for which their art world exists. These discourses also
become more detailed as the taxonomic tree breaks further into sub-divisions. Authenticity is
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of utmost concern, with evaluation based on a music’s adhering to, or at least acknowledging,
evaluated) is demonstrated by showing cultural significance of musical texts and the ways they
disseminated using a text contrasting with the other two Supergenres, the overall significance
and importance placed on texts is determined by the Supergenre’s culture and criteria for
Supergenre culture, is the first level of meaning creation. It creates the most superficial of
meanings – that of artifact inclusion, that is, determining whether a music is an “authentic”
example of “our music”. If a work’s text – its artifact – is somehow outside the range of things
deemed worthy, the work is often deemed not worthy to be called music or art at all within the
These acts of “deeming not worthy” have created some of the most inflammatory (and
From the earliest days of recorded musical history, the greatest musical controversies have
involved questioning the simple inclusion of a work into the category of “music” as a result of
rudimentary music history class will recall a plethora of historical, prejudicial arguments. The
reader may recall controversies surrounding Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Ornette Coleman’s Free
Jazz innovations, John Cage’s 4’33”, Bob Dylan’s electric guitar, and Milli Vanilli’s lip syncing
In Popular Music, the idea of “music” is intimately tied to personal authorship as well as
textual authenticity, especially in the Rock genre of the Popular Music Supergenre. According
to musicologist Nicholas Cook, this idea of authenticity arose in the 1950s and 1960s in parallel
with the civil rights movement. Record labels had, for many years, been recording white
musicians performing music written by blacks. As the civil rights movement unfolded, a scandal
developed over this and the whole idea of white musicians “stealing” music written by black
artists became distasteful. The culture of Rock music developed an attitude of distrust toward
anyone performing music that was written by someone else. As such, “inauthentic” music, not
Such questions of authorship are completely reversed in Art Music, and irrelevant to
Improvisational music. Art Music performers are specialists at performing, and attempts at
composition are deemed outside their realm of expertise. Likewise, Improvisational musicians
compose the bulk of their performance instantaneously during the performance, based on
These vastly differing notions of authorship become, perhaps, the most noteworthy of all
categorical prejudices when one Supergenre’s values are applied to music in a differing
Supergenre.
outside a given categorical art world. It provides analyses of the significant musical-cultural
values in an effort to prevent attempts to analyze musics of a particular genre using the values
of another. Values create meaning, so without the proper analytical tools (based on
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appropriate values), unfamiliar musics tend to be rejected as “non-music” and meaningless. So,
all people can appreciate the purely sensual sound-pleasure of wholly unfamiliar music. In such
circumstances the unfamiliar music would, indeed, offer meanings of museum-like appreciation
of the music. Those appreciative meanings might foster a further interest in the music to cause
the listener to become more familiar with the music and participate further, which would foster
further meaning creation within the person and, through the participatory action, offer
meaning to the greater musical art world. If however, the music is deemed too unfamiliar for
any sort of appreciation it becomes labeled as “non-music”. This is the first level of meaning
and value interpretation; the instantaneous and effortless instinctual reaction determining
whether a music is, really, music at all according to personal and internal guidelines originating
However, dissecting musical meaning beyond the personal perspective of “is this
music?” is anything but simple. First, an artwork can have as many possible meanings as it has
participants. There can never be a definitive interpretation; all interpretations are highly
individualistic, but discourse surrounding meaning interpretation offers the richness of thought
and experience that is a primary impetus for artistic activity. Next, meaning creation is a
complex interplay of the text, object, or performance itself, along with cultural factors
surrounding those acts and artifacts, and individual readings of artifact and culture accounting
for the individual’s place within or outside the art world. Ultimately, however, meaning
creation and interpretation, at its most basic level involves accepting a work as an authentic
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member of the group of works deemed worthy of inclusion as art artifacts within a particular
art world. This evaluation process is where the three Supergenres divide into Genres.
create the values of significance for each of the three Supergenre cultures. They are:
Music within each Supergenre, naturally, has all three components, but the first level of
meaning is determined by which of the three components is valued above the others within the
musicking culture.
An analogy can be made here with Plato’s cave related to the three Supergenres. Art
music idealizes the text – the ideal form in theory which can never be fully realized in
performance (performance < text). This relates to Plato’s idealized form as true reality.
Improvised music idealizes the act of performance while utilizing texts as mere guidelines
(performance > text). Here the reflection on Plato’s cave wall is most important – there can be
no idealized form, as it changes with each performance. Popular music places the least
importance on text, taking a “non-textual” approach to dissemination through aural and oral
tradition (performance ≠ text). Here the ideal is neither the cave wall, nor an idealized perfect
form – it is the interaction between observers and their participation in determining ideals.
This value triumvirate of text, process, and culture has further implications for meaning
creation and interpretation when examined from sociological perspectives such as group and
individual consciousnesses. Art Music idealizes the writers of texts whereas Improvisational
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Music idealizes performers, and Popular Music idealizes the cultures surrounding musical
creation. Going further, from an Eastern philosophical perspective, Art Music idealizes the
mind, Improvisational Music idealizes the body, and Popular Music idealizes the Spirit (group
consciousness). All three values of significance are embodied in all musics. However,
Supergenres hierarchically emphasize one of the three. I contend that meaning develops from
precisely the types of meaning creation I am proposing, with the objections often stemming
from strict alignment with one of the three primary musical values. For example, in traditional
music theory analysis, any meaning or interpretation beyond that which is found within written
musical notation is disallowed. Likewise, in “traditional” popular music studies, musical analysis
tend to avoid any sort of analysis whatsoever to focus on how a particular piece of music makes
them feel emotionally. So, within each group of musical observers, each analyzes content for
the meanings significant to their perspective, searching for, what John Shepherd calls “discrete
protocols capable of teasing out this sociality at the same time as respecting the
Throughout Shepherd’s work, he consistently asserts the need for an integrative musicology
The integrative approach to musicological discourse would seem to be the most logical,
considering the myriad approaches to meaning creation analysis within musicology along with
the methods’ vehement defenses and oppositions. To consider the variable significances of this
thing we call music, it is necessary to acknowledge and examine the numerous perspectives on
the subject. This includes perspectives from the macro to the micro level; from Supergenre to
musical meaning must include genre theory, traditional musicology and music theory focusing
on the “music itself”, cultural anthropology, sociology, and psychology. And, though an analysis
of musical material must necessarily begin at the Supergenre macro level, meaning
relatively short period of time – the time period in which the music takes place. Within the
individual, melodies, harmonies, and rhythms may trigger biological responses such as changes
in breathing and/or heart rate. These psycho-auditory-biological responses inform the personal
psychology toward interpretation. Within the individual mind, these responses are related,
first, to the immediate social environment of listening, then through a personal perspective
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relating the current personal and social experiences to those of the past and those of a possible
future. Music, “causes the listener to structure each instant in terms of a wide field of presence
related to past, present, and future” (Green 16). In solitary listening situations and
and listening habits are inherently social phenomenon though they are often and typically
perceived as highly personal. This idea will be discussed in detail in a later section of this work.
It will suffice here to say that aesthetic judgment arises from positive past experiences. Those
positive past experiences are then socially reinforced and encouraged through the cultures’
affirmation of the positive experiences. The relevance of those experiences then become
manifest as social and aesthetic value applied to musicking practice within the culture.
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Through musical timbre inherent in Genre we begin to see social significance. It has
now become fairly well established in musical psychology that participation in ensembles of
musical creation fosters solidarity and group cohesion on an emotional level. In addition,
through mere interest in listening to particular ensemble types, listeners assert their own
Countless scholars have advanced the notion that the traditional Western symphonic
ensemble reinforces hegemonic, patriarchal, and bourgeois, social and political values.
Likewise, Popular Music and Ethnomusicological studies often magnify and celebrate the
cooperative and egalitarian nature of their examined ensembles. My intent here is neither to
accede nor contradict such notions, but simply to affirm the notion that Genre is signified by
ensemble-based timbre which, in turn, signifies social and cultural value. These meanings and
values are to be seen, not only in purely social indicators such as modes of communication and
dress, but also tend to be implied by the music itself. Male hegemony and patriarchal power
structures have been argued by numerous scholars to be intrinsic to Western Art Music –
Hebdige, Shepherd, Green, and Susan McClary have all written extensively on the subject.
These ideas fully align with those of Theodore Adorno – often referred to as the father of socio-
musicology.
Adorno’s work has been analyzed, scrutinized, and evaluated almost to the point of
over-analysis in musicological studies. I will spare the reader here any assessment of Adorno’s
dismissal of popular music, or his distrust of the listening public’s tastes for conformist art.
These topics have all been discussed, at length, elsewhere. Adorno’s most significant
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contribution to my own theory is found in his article On the Fetish-Character in Music and the
Regression of Listening, where he says that “familiarity of a piece is a surrogate for the quality
ascribed to it” (Adorno, Essays on Music 288). Musical familiarity is, first and foremost, a
socialization toward particular ensembles. So, I contend that all meaning beyond textual
analysis begins with the musical ensemble and its accompanying timbre.
Following the common Marxist analysis of symphonic ensembles, if the entire culture of
structures, it follows that other types of ensembles and their inherent timbres might promote
standardized performance venues for particular ensemble types. As an example of this kind of
It has been argued that the rise of Rock music in the mid-twentieth century in the
United States was a youth-driven contraposition to dominant cultural values of authority and
conformity. American and European popular music of the time used, predominantly,
symphonic and chamber-type ensembles of “traditional” string and wind instruments, played
by professional musicians, utilizing a power structure similar to the “classical” orchestra, with
conductors, first chair players, etc. In contrast, Rock music used small groups of three or four
(typically) self-taught musicians playing, what were considered at the time to be, “folk”
instruments. These choices of instrumentation and ensemble size allowed Rock musicians to
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proclaim independence from the dominant culture. Musicking participants outside the
ensemble then aligned themselves with the values of rebellion inherent in the Rock culture.
separated from listeners and audience members listening quietly, were participatory, with
audiences close to the stage responding and participating in the performance environment.
blur the Western notion of ensemble versus audience. In many non-Western cultures everyone
is expected to participate in the creation of music with no distinction between player and
listener – players are listeners. This creates a type of group and cultural cohesion in opposition
to any authoritarian notions of ensemble participation. Music may take place anywhere or at
any time in these cultures, though, as mentioned earlier, it often takes on a special role as
Beyond personal and cultural identities and alignments with various structures of
authority and conformity, in the modern era of musical saturation, deciding what music to
participate in, through various forms of musicking, is a significant part of self-creation and
alignment with those who hold similar values. It is, by now, a well established socio-
musicological fact that “social formations often have a strong affiliation with musical genres
and may invest them with intense cultural significance” (Toynbee 103). Through participation
in a particular genre of music, the participant announces to other genre participants as well as
the world at large “this is what I am about, and who I want to be” (Cook 5).
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Differences among Subgenres within a Genre are primarily cultural, with cultural indicators also
manifesting as musical subtlety. General manners of speaking, dressing, and behaving within a
musical culture signify sub-generic inclusion. Supergenre based on text, and Genre based on
timbre are purely musical indicators. With the Subgenre branch we begin taxonomic tree
heavily charged with issues of personal, inter-personal, and cultural authenticity. Across
Supergenres and Genres we encounter opposing criteria for purely-musical and cultural
inclusion. These are the inter-genre criteria for authentic inclusion. Nicholas Cook, in his
saying:
A value system is in place within our culture, then, which places innovation
Tests for musical and personal authenticity within a Subgenre and its culture are cyclical
and self-reinforcing. For a music to be deemed authentic, its creators must also be judged as
authentic members of the Genre and Subgenre culture. They must exhibit, in their displayed,
public personas, certain personal values and characteristics which align with those of the
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implicit and explicit in a particular way of life” (Hebdige 6). Subgeneric meanings rise from
these cultural values, and purely musical characteristics often manifest from these values.
For example, in the Jazz Subgenre of the African-American Genre, of the Improvised
Supergenre, the culture promotes personal individuality arising from highly technical and
athletic skills in musical performance. These interpretations suggest that meaning in Jazz is
instruments, vocals notwithstanding. Tests for authentic inclusion in the Jazz culture might
instrument. For cultural participants who might not be musical creators, authenticity tests
might consist of the ability to appreciate the aforementioned technical skills. Jazz culture
participants, through predominantly casual and social means, acquire the knowledge, skills, and
modes of behavior to become recognizably authentic participants. In short, they acquire what
length, various forms of capital. Capital may be understood as status or wealth. Most
obviously, economic capital is of the monetary kind, but he also argues for distinctions of other
forms of capital such as cultural, academic, and social capital. He argues that aesthetic tastes,
above all, are indicators of capital types beyond the economic, but that economic conditions
often pre-dispose and pre-determine levels of cultural capital. Further he says, “nothing more
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infallibly classifies than tastes in music” (Bourdieu 18). Knowledge of a Genre culture, as a form
of cultural capital, is a way of conferring status and being granted status as being “in the know.”
In the above example, the performer’s cultural capital would, most likely, have come as
highly proficient performer often requires extensive educational resources which typically come
with an economic cost. To understand how a non-performer may acquire cultural capital we
can look to sociologist Sarah Thornton who has taken Bourdieu’s ideas a step further, by
knowledge one cannot learn in school” (Thornton 101). Unlike Bourdeau’s cultural capital
entirely independent from economic influence. In the earlier example, while the cultural
the performer’s skill, subcultural capital would be knowledge of who the “cool” performers
currently are.
Both cultural and subcultural capital create meaning for Subgenre types. For
musical and personified members of the Genre culture. Then, after authenticity has been
Though Subgenre meaning is primarily cultural, there are purely musical criteria for
distinction as well. The purely musical criteria for Subgenre inclusion are expressed in specifics
of “music-theory” such as tempo and distinctive rhythmic, harmonic, or melodic motifs and
conventions. An example is easily shown in the Rock Genre of the Popular Supergenre.
Within Rock, the Subgenres are Funk, Metal, Punk, Pop-Rock, and Country-Rock. The
most obvious distinguishing characteristic is tempo, with Funk being the slowest and Punk
having the highest number beats-per-minute. Next, rhythmic complexity tends to be highest in
Metal and lowest in Punk. Funk tends to emphasize syncopated rhythms while Country-Rock
tends to avoid them. Punk tends to have the least harmonic complexity and funk the most –
often incorporating extended “jazz-type” harmonies such as 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths. Pop-Rock
tempo, triadic harmonies rarely modulating beyond closely related keys, and easy-to-sing
melodies.
These purely musical characteristics reinforce the cultural ideals of their Subgenre. Funk
is relaxed but danceable. Metal is aggressive and complex. Punk is fast, aggressive, and simple.
Pop-Rock and Country-Rock are mainstream and easily understood from both musical and
cultural perspectives.
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sociological and purely musical factors with slightly more emphasis on subtleties of the purely
musical. The distinctive characteristic of Style is that it is in nearly constant change and
evolution with new Styles and Style labels constantly forming, re-forming, and dissolving. These
changes occur in the purely musical characteristics, but are highly informed by sociological
factors. Style is also the final taxonomic level at which the purely musical elements contribute
to meaning. However, the meanings of the term “Style” offer some of the most contested
theories in musical and sociological semiotics. The literature offers discrete and conflicting
occurs.
Even in reference works the term “Style” is wrought with confusion. Beard and Gloag’s
Musicology: The Key Concepts offers nearly three pages of attempted elucidation on the topic,
but serves only to show that the term has been used in innumerable ways to describe
everything from genre, to performance practice, to social influence on music making. The
Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music expressly states that the term can be used to describe
nationality, or time period. The dictionary entry suggests a purely musical approach to Style
responses. The style systems to which these responses are made are …artificial
constructs developed by musicians within a specific culture. The very fact that
there are many different style systems …demonstrates that styles are
constructed by musicians in a particular time and place and that they are not
based upon universal, natural relationships inherent in the tonal material itself.
(60)
So, then, Style is a musical, cultural, and social construct which, ultimately, is a primary
consideration of Western Art Music. How then can “Style” operate outside the Western Art
tradition?
In Popular Music Studies the term “Style” has been formulated and discussed
extensively over the past thirty years while being highly influenced by Dick Hebdige’s 1979 work
Subculture: the Meaning of Style. Formulated as a study of youth subcultures in the United
Kingdom in the 1960s and 70s, Hebdige’s study pays special attention to the rise of Punk as a
working-class revolt against social norms. Hebdige posits “Style” as predominantly a consumer-
leisure commodities such as clothing, apparel accessories, recordings, and club-going activities.
He discusses how subcultures identify with certain musics as constituent to their identifying
agency. Hebdige’s sub-cultural agency offers music as a minute component of a larger cultural
accumulation and display of consumer artifacts becomes a form of art when the commodities
I concur with Hebdige’s notions of identity creation through consumer cultures, but
counter that his use of “style” as a sociological term while including musical elements in his
theories complicates notions of “style” that were already sufficiently complicated before his
work arrived. Perhaps better terms would have been “identity” or “lifestyle” to distinguish his
ideas from musical Style. I do believe there is a strong social element to musical Style creation,
but there is an equally strong, perhaps stronger, purely musical element that Hebdige
downplays. In the Supergenre System, the influential strength of social versus musical
elements toward determination of Style is dependent on the relative strength of the Subgenre
Culture which the Style is a member of. Hebdige’s work focuses, exclusively, on the cultures of
the Rock Subgenre so we are left wondering how his ideas of commodity-culture as personal-
The musical accessory as personal identity creator seems to be prevalent, indeed, within
all the Supergenre Systems, at least in Western Capitalist societies. Certainly, in the cultures of
some Genres, the significance of extra-musical accoutrements is often downplayed, but their
existence and significance cannot be overlooked. This reluctance is, perhaps, most apparent in
Western Art Music cultures. However, like other modern Western musical cultures, it does
indeed have its magazines, websites, record labels, styles of dress, and consumption activities.
Concert-going, in particular, is an occasion to don fine evening-wear and arrive early to the
concert in order to enjoy a glass of wine while mingling with other concert attendees in the
foyer of an ornately styled concert hall replete with gold and marble furnishings. Western Jazz
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culture also prefers publicly to minimize the cultural impact of extra-musical commodities. Yet,
how can we ignore the stereotype of the Jazz-man in dark sunglasses, wearing a beret, and
The concept of Style I subscribe to, as the third level of generic division after
Supergenre, Genre, and Subgenre, is one primarily of musical characteristics which offer value
to the Subgenre culture of their inclusion. In this, I may be hearkening back to a centuries-old
idea of musical Style as set forth by Rousseau in his Complete Dictionary of Music published in
greatly, according to the countries, the taste of the people, the genius of the
He goes on to explain various Styles such as that of the church, particular composers, particular
countries, motets, symphonies, etc. using expressive and florid language, but always describing
the music itself rather than the culture. Yet, he describes Style as a character influenced
“according to the countries, the taste of the people”. This suggests that music and sociology
are in constant dialog – influencing, creating, and reinforcing meaning created between them.
Purely musical characteristics create social meaning, and social influences, in turn, help
determine musical creation and evolution within and among Styles of a particular Subgenre.
state of musical and social evolution with music influencing culture and culture influencing
Styles are in a constant state of evolution. In Popular Music this constant evolution often
confounds new-comers or those outside a particular Subgenre culture. Certain Popular Music
Subgenres evolve so quickly, with so many Style labels appearing and disappearing in near-
constant rotation, that their cultures often seem impenetrable. This is often the point –
Subgenres. The constantly evolving Styles are another way for participants to test authenticity
in participants. Only those with the required dedication to the Subgenre culture are allowed
knowledge of the latest terminology associated with subtleties of sound that the new Styles
offer.
As a rule, in Popular Music as well as Art Music and Improvisational Music, Styles are
distinguished as subtleties of performance practice that inform, and are informed by, notions of
authenticity within their Subgenre culture of inclusion. The authenticity tests create further
We have seen how the further out from the trunk of the taxonomic tree we get, the
more socially influenced the branch distinctions become. The taxonomic division into Scenes is
the logical conclusion of this organizational scheme. Scene is a purely sociological distinction
Self-identification as part of a peer group of Scene participants is a motivating factor for musical
discovery and exploration. In many ways, sociological identifiers for Scene inclusion operate in
reverse fashion to purely musical identifiers. Rather than purely musical characteristics
A leading scholar on the sociology of music, Tia DeNora, in her book Music in Everyday
Life, discusses how music provides aesthetic context and content for human interaction,
discursive ground on which to build interpersonal relationships. In addition she says, “aesthetic
materials …provide motifs that precede, and serve as reference points for, lines of conduct over
time” (129). Further, she argues that music provides a “habitat for social life” including all the
interpersonal thoughts and activities that the term “social life” implies. This idea is reinforced
by philosopher Theodore Gracyk who says music “can only communicate and reinforce
identities shaped by other, nonmusical social forces, because listeners reject (and so cannot be
influenced by) music that might contribute to a different identity” (Gracyk, I Wanna Be Me:
Rock Music and the Politics of Identity 235). These social identities must, logically, begin at the
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local, interpersonal level, among peers. Social identities inform and influence aesthetic taste
Scene can be seen as the locality of musicking participation. This is most pervasive in
Popular and Improvised genres though it does exist, albeit more subtlety, in Art Music,
congruent with Style. Scenes exist as local social groups of self-identifying musicking
acclaim. Examples of such famous sub-styles include: Viennese Opera, Detroit Techno,
Bakersfield Country, and Delta Blues. In these Scenes, the locality becomes widely
acknowledged and identified with a particular Style due to a local Scene’s size and popularity.
However, even without wider recognition, prominent Scenes within a locality tend to take on a
sub-culture of their own, and it is this sub-culture that we define as a proper Scene.
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The final taxonomic branch of group distinction is the musicking Species of participants
and their activities. Species of musicking participants may, in alignment with the definition of
musicking set forth at the beginning of this work, be participating in any musical activity – from
participate in some musically related activity and all provide value and offer meaning to the
musicking culture of their participation. It is, perhaps, through their agency as a participant in a
particular culture that they provide greatest meaning. Individuals create these meanings of
Though the vast majority of musicking participants may claim varying degrees of
romance for their explanations of personal musical taste and preference, it is not at all a simple
or romantically mystical matter. Taste preferences are typically described in subjective and
emotionally charged terms with the taste origin or cause often a mystery beyond romantic
descriptions like “it just speaks to me.” Superficially, of course, the significance of musical taste
is nothing more complex than personal preferences for nice things to listen to. And, these nice
things to listen to are often functional and utilitarian beyond objects for aesthetic appreciation
or identity construction. Sociologist Tia DeNora, has made an exhaustive study of how music is
used by individuals for utilitarian purposes in her previously mentioned Music in Everyday Life.
Through surveys and interviews she found a wide range of uses for music in practice such as
providing motivation for activities concurrent with listening, providing emotional enhancement
or escape, or enhancing interpersonal and social experiences (DeNora). So, it seems, musical
taste may be influenced by pragmatic musical usage in addition to peer-group influences. Yet,
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according to DeNora, most people feel their musical taste as deeply personal, however they
Taste may, at the personal level, seem to the individual to be a matter of personal
agency. However, when examined from the perspectives of psychology and the social sciences,
it becomes obvious that taste is anything but an exercise of personal judgment; especially when
that taste is decided upon by its extra-musical content or is determined and controlled by
external agents.
sounds. Music has become a device for manipulation and control of behavior in public space. It
becomes a way for retailers to influence purchasing behavior, for restaurateurs to influence
eating behavior, and for civic institutions to influence behavior in train and bus stations,
It may be argued, from a “music industry” perspective, that music is simply a functional
entertainment commodity, and any attempt at interpretation is futile and false. From this
viewpoint, musicking creators invent a façade of persona and product. The “music industry”
has evolved over the last hundred years to be subsumed into the larger “entertainment
industry.” As part of this larger media-creation machine, music becomes, simply a functional
object of commodity.
members of this entertainment commodity industry. Trained Art Music composers wishing to
become part of this industry often compose music for films. Those wishing to become Popular
Music musicians are required to make YouTube videos and submit music for possible inclusion
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However, in all these cases, though the immediate goal of the industry-based activity is to
create a product and, ultimately, a paycheck, these acts offer meaning precisely as commodity-
determined as much, perhaps more, by marketing and product placement than by any notion
taste commodity is to purchase a fantasy – the commodity, in some way, offers dreams of
The façade of persona and product – celebrity and industry – generate meanings of
celebrity and industry working within their Subgenre cultures. This very broad subject is far
beyond the scope of this work. It has been discussed, at length, however, by numerous other
sociological question of taste and the importance of this thing we call music. He claims that a
primary function of music is as a mechanism for “behavioral control.” His is a realistic and
decidedly non-romantic notion of how music works. In “How Does Music Work?” he lists six
stimulating compliance with social norms. In other words, music has the
reinforcing social identity. Much work in social identity theory has shown
our most tribal instincts and helps distinguish “us” from “them.”
4. Along these lines, music serves as an important basis for sorting people into
be both the cause and effect of group formation: people not only sort into
groups based on their musical tastes but use musical taste as an important
and social play. Music and dance are, in fact, among the very few devices for
(Brown 4-5)
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This list echoes the ways in which the Supergenre System operates sociologically, on the
macro scale, as an integrated system. Each successive taxonomic division creates meaning for
participants related to one or more of Brown’s “social powers”. In addition, the Supergenre
System provides corresponding “purely musical” criteria associated with each division to
reinforce the division and offer a taxonomy based on musical, as well as extra-musical, social
criteria. Brown sees music purely from a functional standpoint, however, and disregards
semiosis” (Brown 24). Put another way: music’s only function is to reinforce accompanying
social processes.
extra-musical media elements, we encounter two primary objections to any attempt at musical
meaning interpretation – poetry and commerce. Both poetry and commerce do, indeed, offer
types of meaning creation. However, not all music has meaning created as part of the
commercial “music industry,” nor does all music have accompanying poetry to offer literary
extra-musical meaning. Objections at meaning creation beyond commerce and poetry are
simply exclusionary statements responding to “the other” that is not, socially, “our music.”
Coinciding with the romance of aesthetic taste and nice things to listen to, many casual
participants, especially of Popular Genres, claim lyrical song content – the extra-musical
inclusion of poetry – as determinant of taste and meaning. And, again, if a music lacks poetic
accompaniment it is often encountered as “the other.” There is little doubt that lyrical content
and textual accompaniment to performances, in program notes and the like, provide a type of
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meaning for musicking participants. Participants may claim that lyrics provide the meaning and
insight into the music, especially in Popular Music Genres. Interpretation of Rock and Pop lyrics
has become a common topic for college courses in the United States and Europe. In recent
performer’s intended extra-musical meaning for a work that requires interpretive work on the
part of audience participants. In dramatic works which include song, lyrical content provides
storyline narrative and insight toward character development. Regardless of the context in
which lyrical content is used and its content interpreted, it is always a matter of specific and
music is beyond the scope of this work, and is not the intention of the Supergenre System. The
goal of the Supergenre System is to provide a framework for interpretation based on taxonomic
performance may offer insight toward the performers’ or composers’ intended and specific
meanings, but in the context of the Supergenre System, merely provide paraphernalia for
authenticity testing. Program notes, along with lyrical content, offer insight toward Subgenre
the framework for interpretation, lyrics and program notes are, simply, Subgenre cultural
artifacts.
traditionally been undertaken as part of the customary work of Musicology scholars. Many
throughout history have gone to great lengths to create compendiums of meaning based on
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musical elements. Deryck Cooke’s previously mentioned The Language of Music is probably the
meanings to each. Published in 1959, and persistently criticized to the present day, it ushered
in an era in which musicologists avoid questions of meaning, preferring to disregard any notion
analytical method is based on the work of Heinrich Schenker. To simplify and summarize
Shenkerian analysis is to say that it is heavily centered around harmonic content and ideas of
Another popular analytical method, especially for choral and other vocal musics, is
based on Jan LaRue’s 1970 work Guidelines for Style Analysis. LaRue set forth an elaboration of
the Shenkerian model with a method that analyzes a piece of music based on its sound,
harmony, melody, rhythm, growth, and text influence as its primary method. LaRue also set
forth a method for analyzing and evaluating the “quality” of a piece of music based on
subjective affect. His subjective quality analysis was based on three aspects:
1. Affective range – the number of different moods and the contrast in their effect that
we encounter in a piece
(LaRue 219). So, while Shenker created a purely objective approach to analysis, LaRue
elaborated on the Shenkerian model and added subjective analysis. Both approaches,
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however, are analytical methods for dissecting individual pieces. As such, they tend to be
useful only as methods for uncovering how individual pieces are put together; they are not
comparative methods like the Supergenre System. Musicologists often use methods like
Shenker’s and LaRue’s to examine similar works and drafts by individual composers in order to
as the busywork of recent musicology, wondering how many analyses and critical editions of a
work are enough. I would add to his criticism that musicology, as a field, is often inattentive to
research on musical topics in other, but related fields. Most notably here, musicologists often
fail to incorporate any sort of social element into their work. It would seem to be natural and
classification and the relative importance of purely musical versus social criteria, then use a
examine affects, and finally Brown’s framework for specific social meanings. By taking an
integrative approach to questions of the significance of this thing we call music, we can be
question.
Kessel 100
As Musical Psychology, Music Therapy, and the newly emerging field of Medical
Ethnomusicology are re-discovering from the Pythagoreans, music can have powerful effects on
the mind and body. These effects become, regardless of the taxonomic division of the musical
sound, the most intimate and ineffable of all musical meanings. Corresponding to the
Supergenre System of Musical Taxonomy these intimate meanings are meanings of the
individual, for the individual, and how he or she personally relates to musicking activities and
sound itself. These meanings are created deep within the individual psyche. This is smallest
Sound and music throughout the world’s spiritual traditions has been given attributes of
extraordinary creative and destructive power. We have the ancient Greek myth of Amphion,
who built the walls of Thebes by playing his lyre. In Edith Hamilton’s classic Mythology, it is
written that Amphion, “drew such entrancing sounds from his lyre that the very stones were
moved and followed him to Thebes” (Hamilton 348). Alternately, in the Judeo-Christian
tradition, the sound of trumpets blaring brought down the walls of Jericho. “So the people
shouted when the priests blew the trumpets. And it happened when the people heard the
sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat”
(Joshua 6:20). The Christian gospel of John begins by saying “the Word was God.” Likewise,
some Indian spiritual traditions have, as a core tenet, Nada Brahma, or “god-sound” (Berendt).
There are innumerable other examples of sound as a core constituent of religious doctrine
may seem obvious that music touches something deep within the human psyche that makes it
useful for worship beyond the function of social congruence. From prayer, song, mantra, and
dance, to bells, organs, trumpets and flutes, the practice of musical activities is a universal
aspect of spiritual ritual. Sound amplifies emotions and notions of “the other.” These spiritual
practices and emotions are, simultaneously, the most personal, yet most paradoxically social, of
all musical meanings. The experience of spiritual emotions in social settings seems to amplify
their meanings.
The feeling of “the other” may occur during any musical experience; it is not exclusive to
overt spiritual practice, though during such practice the feeling is often amplified. Feelings of
“chills,” “shivers,” or “hair standing up on the neck” is, technically, called frisson (Huron 34) and
may be aroused by any aesthetic experience, not just the expressly spiritual. However, it is
often described by those experiencing it as a spiritual feeling. Books attempting to dissect the
notion that music expresses “something more and beyond” everyday reality have topped the
bestseller lists in recent years with the previously mentioned Music, the Brain, and Ecstacy and
This is Your Brain on Music. In addition, Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia is a collection of anecdotes
from the author’s work as a clinical neurologist confronting the strange ways our minds process
An entire branch of musical scholarship and practice has arisen that seeks to heal the
mind, body, and spirit through music. Music Therapy, though a relatively new discipline, as a
professional practice, has its roots as far back as Pythagoras and Plato, both of whom conferred
Historian of musical mysticism Joscelyn Godwin’s Harmonies of Heaven and Earth offers
a series of historical anecdotes of Music Therapy from biblical times to the present. However,
he offers that “the noble history of music therapy, with its heritage of heroes and kings, its
marvels and miracles, tends to be more of a burden than an asset to the profession today”
(Godwin 27) acknowledging that that scientific community often scoffs at the healing
possibilities of sound and music. Pythagorean ideas of harmonizing bodily frequencies can be
seen in today’s ultrasound therapies. Likewise, as stated on the American Music Therapy
manage stress, alleviate pain, express feelings, enhance memory, improve communication, and
Musicophilia documents the power of music to return powers of speech to those who become
aphasic, return memory to those who have forgotten, and bring about bodily control in those
with epilepsy and Parkinson’s. These therapeutic uses of sound and music suggest that it
stimulates sections of our brains otherwise inaccessible. In acknowledging the power of music
and sound on the mind, body, and spirit, we may be at the genesis of a return to values of the
Historical musicologists study the history of Western Art Music, occasionally collaborating with
music theorists who study musical texts of notation. Popular music scholars usually operate
outside the musicological mainstream to study Popular and Improvisational music, usually of
has, traditionally, been the realm of studying anything that didn’t belong to the Western Art
Music tradition. A number of disciplines have focused on the relationship of music to the mind
and body including Psychology and Music Therapy. In contrast, social and interpersonal aspects
of musicking are typically studied by sociologists and cultural theorists, but not those in
body and mind frequently collaborate and have cross-pollinating ideas with Socio-musicology.
Musicology, Ethnomusicology, and Music Theory – often stand firm in their traditions and
dogmas, holding obdurate and limited notions of the music and musical topics worthy of study.
Joseph Kerman’s volume on the history and practices of Musicology and its sub-
the field who prefer to partition off musical studies in order to avoid contamination of thought
with methods and materials divergent from their own. However, Kerman takes the eminent
scholar Charles Seeger as a hopeful model for the future of Musicological studies.
“Separatists…feel that as a practical matter, they work with such disparate materials, with such
incommensurable methods, and with such divergent ends in view that it is a waste of time to
Kessel 104
try to talk, let alone relate what they are doing. But Seeger …was the universalist par excellence
Analysis will provide organizational means for examining the whole of musical creation,
musical scholarship, perhaps the most logical fit for the Supergenre System is within Systematic
The Supergenre System aims to organize the whole of musicking – organizing the “texts”
of dissemination into Supergenres, the contents of those texts and the sounds they produce
into Genres, and the cultures surrounding those sounds and texts as Subgenres, Styles, and
Scenes. Through this organizational process and examination of the texts and cultures involved,
patterns emerge that suggest broad musical and social values inherent within each taxonomic
division. Through this process of dissecting and applying appropriate musical and cultural
values to specific works, musical and cultural preconceptions may be avoided, and the arduous
task of deciphering specific meanings may be undertaken with sensitivity and clarity. Free from
musical and cultural bias we can objectively and accurately interpret the significance of this
The Supergenre System is a framework for organization and discourse, but makes no
claims of all-inclusiveness in its methods or materials. Considering the vast-ness of music and
complete. By the very nature of musical genre, the taxonomic divisions are constantly evolving
Kessel 105
with the rate of change increasing the further out from the taxonomic “trunk” we get. Sub-
Styles evolve into Styles which evolve into Subgenres evolving into Genres. Only Supergenres
resist evolution, though their contents continuously evolve. My system also provides an
interpretive foundation on which to build meaning and discourse surrounding those meanings,
but is not meant to provide specifics of either. The system does, however, offer an
organizational scheme that accounts for both musical and social phenomena and interplay of
the two. Through this interplay it aims to abolish distortions which arise when value systems of
one musicking culture are applied to another, incompatible, system. The benevolence which
arises from recognizing a music’s value system aspires, ultimately, to bridge the musicological
disciplines and contribute to a more thorough understanding of this thing we call music.
Kessel 106
Works Cited
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University of California Press, 2002.
—. Essays on Music. Trans. Susan Gillespie. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
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Aristotle. Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941.
Beard, David and Kenneth Gloag. Musicology: The Key Concepts. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Berendt, Joachin-Ernst. The World is Sound: Nada Brahma Music and the Landscape of
Consciousness. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1983.
Boretz, Benjamin. "Language, As a Music." Perspectives of New Music 17.2 (1979): 131-195.
—. "Meta Variations Part IV: Analytic Fallout." Perspectives of New Music 11.2 (1973): 156-203.
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Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1984.
Brown, Steven. "How Does Music Work." Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and
Social Control of Music. Ed. Steven Brown and Ulrik Volgsten. New York: Berghahn
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Cobley, Paul and Litza Janz. Understanding Semiotics. Thriplow: Icon Books Ltd, 1997.
Cook, Nicholas. Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Cooke, Deryck. The Language of Music. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.
Copland, Aaron. What to Listen For in Music. New York : Penguin, 1953.
Kessel 107
DeNora, Tia. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1998.
Godwin, Joscelyn. Harmonies of Heaven and Earth. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions
International, 1997.
Gracyk, Theodore. I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2001.
—. Rhythm and Noise. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
Green, Lucy. Music on Deaf Ears: Musical Meaning, Ideology, Education. New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1988.
Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. New York: Back Bay / Little, Brown and Company, 1998.
Harvard College. Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music. Ed. Don Michael Randel. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press - Belknap, 1978.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Methuen, Inc., 1979.
Holt, Fabian. Genre In Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
International Advisory Editors of Popular Music. "Can We Get Rid of the 'Popular' in Popular
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Jourdain, Robert. Music, The Brain, and Ecstasy. New York: Harper Collins, 1997.
Khan, Hazrat Inayat. The Mysticism of Sound and Music. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1991.
LaRue, Jan. Guidelines for Style Analysis. Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2008.
Levitin, Daniel. This is Your Brain On Music. New York: Plume, 2007.
Kessel 108
Liebert, Georges. Nietzche and Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Lippman, Edward. The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Music. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1999.
Martin, Bronwen and Felizitas Ringham. Dictionary of Semiotics. London: Cassell, 2000.
Martin, Peter. Sounds and Society: Themes in the Sociology of Music. New York: Manchester
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Meyer, Leonard. Emotion and Meaning In Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.
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Moore, Allan. "Categorical Conventions in Music Discourse: Style and Genre." Music & Letters
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Negus, Keith. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge, 1999.
Nietzche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.
—. Thus Spake Zarathustra. New York: Dover, 1999.
Pachet, Francois and Daniel Cazaly. "A Taxonomy of Musical Genres." Content-Based
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Patel, Aniruddh. Music, Language, and the Brain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Plato. Collected Dialogues of Plato. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1961.
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Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 251-264.
Robinson, Jenefer. Music and Meaning. Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. A Complete Dictionary of Music. New York: AMS Press Inc., 1975
reprint of 1779 Edition.
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Scott, John T. "The Harmony Between Rousseau's Musical Theory and His Philosophy." Journal
of the History of Ideas 59.2 (1998): 287-308.
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Bennett, Barry Shank and Jason Toynbee. New York: Routledge, 2006. 99-105.
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Toynbee, Jason. Making Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
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Kessel 110
it currently stands August 6, 2010. The tree is ever-expanding and ever-evolving as my research
and topic continues to grow and expand. The tree is by no means complete. By its very nature
www.sheldonkessel.com, and there will always be an updated taxonomic tree linking from that
page. By the very nature of constantly changing internet technologies, I can only guarantee a
permanent link to the taxonomic tree from my home page. However, as of August 6, 2010, the
http://www.sheldonkessel.com/Genre-Tree.html
Kessel 111
• Music
o Art
Western
• Early/Medieval-Renaissance (to 1600)
o Balata
o Caccia
o Carol
o Chant
Gallican
Mozarabic
Old Roman
Gregorian
Ambrosian
o Chanson
o Conductus
Monophonic
Polyphonic
o Frottola
o Hymns
Kontakia
o Lauda
o Madrigal
o Magnificat
o Mass
o Motet
o Organum
Florid
Notre Dame
Franconian
Petronian
Bergundian
o Pastourelle
o Rondeau
Burgundian
o Trecento
• Baroque (1600-1750)
o Cantata
o Canzona
o Concerto
o Concerto Grosso
o Chaconne
Kessel 112
o Chorale
Cantus firmus
Coloration
Chorale partita
Chorale fantasia
o Dance Suite
Allemande
Courante
Sarabande
Gigue
Gavotte
Minuet
o Fugue
o Incidental / Entr’acte
o Mass
o Opera
Ballad opera
Florentine
Masque
Neopolitan
Opera buffa
Opera seria
Opera comique
Roman
Singspeil
Zarzuela
o Partita
o Passion
o Passacaglia
o Prelude
o Ricercar
o Sinfonia
o Sonata
Da Camera
Da Chiesa
Trio Sonata
Turmsonaten
o Toccata
• Classical (1750-1820)
o Concerto
o Opera
Opera seria
Kessel 113
Tonadilla
o Oratorio
o Overture
o Symphony
o Sonata
• Romantic (1820-1900)
o Art Song
o Cantata
o Concerto
o Concert Overture
o Dance
Ecossaise
Galop
Ländler
Mazurka
Polonaise
Walz
o Etude
o Orchestral Variation
o Opera
Opera comique
Grand
Drame lyrique
Romantic
Music drama
Music Theater
o Oratorio
o Prelude
o Song Cycle
o Sonata
o Symphony
Programmatic
Symphonic Suite
o Tone Poem/Symphonic Poem
• Modernist
o Impressionist
o Serial/12-tone
o Aleatoric
• Conceptual
• Electronic/Musique Concrete
• FilmMusic
Kessel 114
•
NeoClassical
o Gebrauchsmusik
• NeoRomantic
• Maximalist/Totalist
• Minimalist
o Sacred
o Drone
o Pattern
• New-Complexity
Non-Western
• al Andalous (Maghreb)
• Chinese
• Chong-ak (Korean)
• Guarania (Paraguay)
• Indian
• Indonesian
• Japanese
o Kabuki
o Shakuhachi
• Karnatie (Southern India)
• Musiqi-e assil (Iran)
o Improvised
African-American
• Jazz
o Bebop
o Big Band
o Cool
o Free
o French/Gypsy
o HipHopFusion
o Latin
o Ragtime/Traditional/Dixieland
o RockFusion
o Smooth
• Gospel
Graphic
GamePieces
Non-Western
• African
• Indian
• Native American
Kessel 115
o Popular
Avant-Garde
• Krautrock
• Outsider
• Post-punk
o Mathrock
o No-Wave
o Noise
• Space
• True-Industrial/Pre-Industrial
Dance/Electronic
• Ambient / Chillout
o Psybient
• Breakbeat / BigBeat
o Baltimore Club
o Florida
o Garage
o New School
o Progressive
• Garage/2-Step
• House
o Acid
o Deep
o Disco
o Electro
o French
o Ghetto/Booty
o Hard
o Minimal/Micro
o Progressive
o Rock
o Tech
o Vocal/Diva/Gay
• IDM
o glitch
• Industrial
o Aggrotech
o EBM
o Epic
o Goth
• Jungle/Drum&Bass
Kessel 116
o Dubstep
• Mashup
• PopDance
• Trance
o Acid
o Anthem/Epic
o Euro
o Goa
o Hard
o NRG
o Progressive
o Psytrance/Goa
o Tech
o Vocal
• Techno
o Acid
o Chiptune
o Detroit/OldSchool
o Minimal
o Schranz
o Yorkshire
o Techstep
Hip Hop
• Alterna/Conscious/Intelligent
o Chicago
o New York
o Minneapolis
• British
o Grime
• Crunk/Southern
• Electro
• French
• Gangsta
o EastCoast
o WestCoast
o Latin
• German
• Hyphy
• Old-School
• Snap
o Atlanta
• Latin
Kessel 117
New Age
• Ambient
• Contemporary Instrumental
• Electronic
Pop/pop
• Adult Contemporary
• Bubblegum / Teen
• R&B
• Traditional
Rock
• Funk
• Heavy Metal
o Alterna
o Death/Black
o Doom/Goth
o Drone
o Glam
o Instrumental/ClassicalMetal
o Nu/Rap/Groove/Funk
o NWOBHM
o Power/Progressive
o Sludge
o Symphonic
o Thrash/Speed
• Punk
o Anarcho
o Celtic
o Chicano
o Emo
Screamo
o Garage/Grunge
o Hardcore
Christian
Crust
Grindcore
Metalcore
Powerviolence
Rapcore
Queercore
Youthcrew
o Horror
o Oi
Kessel 118
o Pop
o NewWave
o Queercore/RiotGrrl
o Rockabilly/Psychobilly
o Ska
o Surf
• PopRock
o Britpop
o College/Indie/Alterna
o Folk
o Mainstream
o Progressive
o Psychedelic/Improvisational/JamBand
o Rock-and-Roll/Traditional
o Soft
• Country-Rock
o Alt-Country
o Pop
Bakersfield
Nashville
o Outlaw
Roots
• African
o Congolese
o Maghreb
o Tuareg
• Asian
o Bhangra
o Filipino
o Indian
o Iranian
o Japanese
o Korean
o Thai
• Blues
Chicago
Delta
East-Coast
Memphis
Texas
• Country-Western
o Bluegrass
Kessel 119
o Cajun/Zydeco
o HonkyTonk
• European
o Albanian
Aheng
Kaba
Kefalonitika
Korçare
Lament
o Austrian
Schnadahüpfl
Schrammelmusik
Yodel
o Baltic
o Basque
Bertsolaritza
Trikitxa
o Bosnian
Gusle
Izvorna
Sevdalinka
o Breton
Bagad
Gwerz
Kan ha diskan
o Bulgarian
Koleduvane
Kopanica
o Celtic
Aisling
Ballad
Bard
Diddling
Drinking song
Keening
Reverdie
o Croatian
Bećarac
Deseterac
Klapa
Tamburitza
o German
Kessel 120
Polka
Waltz
Yodel
o Greek
Amanέ
Dhimokika
Tragoudia
Kalanda
Kantadhes
Kleftiko
Klephtic
Miroloyia
Nisiotika
Rebetiko
Skaros
Taxim
Tis tavlas
o Gypsy
Bulerías
Calgia
Cimbalom
Fandango
Fasil
Flamenco
Jaleo
Loki
Siguiriyas
Soleares
Taksim
Tientos
Tangos
o Italian
Baride
Gozo
Maggio
Trallalero
o Jewish
Klezmer
Sephardic
Mizrahi
o Norwegian
Halling
Kessel 121
o Polish
Lidyzowanie
o Portugal
Fado
Modinha
o Romanian
Colinde
Doina
Lament
Taraf
o Russian
Byliny
Chastushka
Plachi
Pesnia
Zmires
o Serbian
Izvorna
Narodna
Muzika
Novokomponovana
Sevdalinka
o Slovenian
Velike goslarije
o Spanish
Copla
Jaleo
Jota
Romanceiro
o Swedish
Ballad
Halling
Kulning
o Swiss
Yodel
o Turkish
Türkü
Uzan hava
o Ukranian
Dumy
Troista
Muzyka
Kessel 122
o Welsh
Pennillion
• FolkSong
o American Old-Time
o Ballad
o Field Holler
o Jug Band
o Line Out
o NeoFolk
o Protest Song
o Sea Shanty
• Gospel
o Christian hymns / white spiritual
o Black spirituals
o Sacred harp
• Latin American
o Bachata
o BossaNova
o Chacarera
o Chamame
o Cueca
o Cumbia
o Kompa
o Lambada
o Merengue
o Salsa
o Tango
o Tejano
• Native American
o Arapaho
Ghost Dance
Peyote Song
o Blackfoot
o Dene
o Innu
o Inuit
Ayaya
Katajaq
pisiq
o Iroquois
o Kiowa
o Kwakwaka’wakw
Kessel 123
o Navajo
Yeibichai
o Pueblo
Matachines
o Seminole
o Sioux
o Yaqui
o Yuman
• Reggae
o Dancehall
o Dub
o Lovers Rock
o Nyabhingi
o Ragga
o Reggaton
o Rocksteady
o Rumble
o Ska
o Sleng-Teng
o Steppa