Search Results

This chapter explores the trajectories of musical styles across genre forms by engaging in what are called “parallel comparisons,” in order to show how several musical styles follow (or do not) the same patterns. It describes two primary trajectories taken by musical styles across the four genre types. The first trajectory is shared by the three styles explored in Chapter 2 (bluegrass, bebop, and rap). The second trajectory, abbreviated IST, describes the transit of nine musics that started as industry-based genres, then inspired a scene-based genre form, and acquired a traditionalist following. The chapter first identifies these two trajectories and illustrates them with examples from several musical styles. It then explores the three mechanisms of inertia that produced incomplete musical trajectories across genre forms.

This chapter examines the progression of three musics through the four genre types, focusing on the hanging mix of the resources they use. These resources include organizational form, scale, and locus; the sources of income and press coverage for artists; the codification of genre ideal, performance, and technological conventions; boundary work; styles of dress, adornment, drugs, politics, and argot; and the invention of a name for the style. In order to focus on the attributes that characterize genre forms, the chapter selectively presents examples from three musical styles: bluegrass, old school rap, and bebop jazz. It hopes that focusing on examples from a sample of musics will highlight the features of genre types and their attributes without producing unnecessary confusion.

This chapter first sets out book's purpose, which is to study the ideological, social, organizational, and symbolic attributes of twentieth-century American music. Three questions guide the investigation: (1) What are the common economic, organizational, ideological, and aesthetic traits among contemporary music genres? (2) Do music genres follow any patterns in their development, and if so, what explains their similarities and differences? and (3) Using contemporary American musical genres as a point of reference, how can we discover new genre forms and trajectories? It explores these questions in music in order to offer a comprehensive view into both classificatory schema employed to organize sound and sociocultural classification systems in general. The remainder of the chapter discusses the formal characteristics of twelve attributes found across styles of music. These organizational, economic, interpersonal, and aesthetic attributes are used to differentiate one musical style from another, and a given style from one moment in time to the next. Drawing from an inductive coding of histories of sixty American market-based musical forms from the twentieth century, it demonstrates patterns of attributes.

This chapter expands our view to include music produced in other countries. A preliminary survey of the popular music of countries with widely differing political economies, music cultures, and levels of development revealed that the four genre forms (avant-garde, scene-based, industry-based, and traditionalist) do exist to greater or lesser degrees across the globe. However, there proved to be another widely distributed form that was not found in the U.S. sample: the government-purposed genre. Musics in this genre receive substantial financial support from the government or oppositional groups with a direct interest in the ideological content of popular music. There are two major types: those sponsored directly by governments, which benefit from national distribution and legal protections, and an antistate type supported by an opposition party or constituency. The chapter examines four nation-cases to advance the argument: the People's Republic of China, Chile, Serbia, and Nigeria.

Creativity is valued and nurtured to different degrees in different musical genres. This chapter explores the informal learning practices of the communities of Western classical, Scottish traditional, jazz, and popular musicians, which reveal some important differences between these genres, and in particular between the Western classical musicians on the one hand, and three ‘ other-than-classical’ genres on the other. In comparison with the Western classical musicians, the other three genre groups tended to spend more time listening to their own music, and to play for fun; to see the ability to sight read as relatively less important; to rely more heavily on improvisational skill and ‘playing by ear’; to place more value on group than on individual practice; and to gain more pleasure from performing in their own genre.

This chapter discusses classification systems that exist within music and its peer culture-producing fields. It emphasizes the role of power in setting boundaries around categories and defining these categories as legitimate. It considers the application of this model of classification to the sociological study of science and collective memory. Finally, it addresses the future of music, and closes with a consideration of the link between music categories and taste. It argues that our tastes are instruments of power and that there are three important components to this instrument. First, tastes encode the power of your origins. When it comes to taste, the socialization process—specifically, the process of acquiring a “habitus”—plays a central role in shaping our desires, aspirations, and choices. Second, this socialization process teaches us not only what tastes are appropriate to our life circumstances, but also how to make meaning from the consumption process. Third, taste is used to exert and reveal power in subtle ways.

This chapter provides a synopsis of each of the preceding chapters, along with commentary on the main issues emerging in the book and within Indonesia itself through the prism of the author's own experience. The chapters have delineated the multi-shaped plurality of the musical genres associated with Islam, and thus the various interpretations of Islam within Indonesia. They have highlighted the importance of musical genres in the Indonesian conception of religion and the body politic, and they have looked at how deeply discourse about music and Islam has become central in Indonesia in recent decades.

Queer reading strategies based on the approach of Alexander Doty reveal transgressive moments in Cukor’s three musical comedies: Les Girls (1957), Let’s Make Love (1960), and My Fair Lady (1964). Queer conceptualizations of the Hollywood musical, particularly the concept of “excess,” lead to readings of specific scenes that disrupt the heteronormative flow of the narratives. Gene Kelly performs a spoof of Marlon Brando in The Wild One, within a tale of a womanizer and the three women who love him; Milton Berle camps up a lesson on dating opposite Yves Montand; and Rex Harrison ponders why a woman can’t be more like a man, within a narrative that resists romantic closure.

Chapter 6 draws on the Ghanaian Ewe conception of “planting a musical genre”—wudodo. So, West African dance drumming is metaphorically a transplanted genre that continues to flourish and “bear fruits,” and its thriving in the American academy depends on factors the chapter explores. Furthermore, Furthermore, Dor argues, these dances draw a remarkable patronage because of the aesthetic pleasure they provide both audiences and student participants. The Ewe metaphor, Detsivivi yehea zikpui (“It is the sumptuous soup that draws the [eater’s] stool” vividly captures this “sweetness” concept of a music genre. Additionally, chapter 6 discusses a) the genre as a university subculture; b) the unflinching following from audiences; c) African American perspectives; d) the English language as a post-colonial imprint that enables or constraints the selection of dances, instructors, and countries in which the genre can be taught; and e) the influence of city/regional demography on the development of university ensembles.

This chapter examines the development of the earliest Latino communities in New York during the 1940s and 1950s. It explores how music played a role in the growth of the community, looking into the musical and cultural contributions of musicians Mario Bauzá, Marco Rizo, and many others. These musicians discussed topics about musical innovation, authenticity, and commercialism which disrupted “Cuban,” “Afro-Cuban,” and “Latin” as static or singular musical genres and identity categories. Racial ideas and practices, as well as cultural traditions and expectations, informed these conversations and prompted individual and collective desires for social mobility and racial equality, especially among Cuban musicians. The chapter highlights the role of race and class in shaping the stories of the musicians, describing their migration, participation in entertainment, and their sense of racial and ethnic identity.

This chapter examines the two main musical genres performed at northwest-coastal Sumatran weddings and baby thanksgiving ceremonies between Singkil and Natal: lagu sikambang asli (original sikambang songs) and lagu sikambang kapri (sikambang songs with violin, harmony, and couples dancing). It considers the vocal style of the sikambang asli songs and how the harmonically generated violin accompaniment is blended with the Malay vocal style and frame-drum part in the sikambang kapri songs. The chapter begins with a discussion of “Buai,” a ceremonial lullaby, the Penang Island Song and the Umbrella Dance, and “Lagu Sikambang Tarian Anak” (“Sikambang Song-Dance [to celebrate the birth of a] Child”). It then describes some Pasisir song-dances that are also performed by artists in and around other Malay areas, along with the spread of the violin and couples dancing to the Pasisir Sumando coast. The chapter hypothesizes that the musical genre's harmonic elements and use of the violin are derived from Malay-Portuguese contact during the Portuguese colonial era in Southeast Asia (1511–1641).

The role of the new Arab mediascapes is quite important in reconfiguring the Arab popular music industry. The division between the rich and the poor is demarcated by access to the technological gadgets required to receive popular music disseminated via new and costly technology. Egyptian sha'bi music, though extremely popular among the masses, has not been granted access to emerging media equal to that bestowed upon other forms of Egyptian music. Although there are many similarities among international music that are identified as “popular,” Egyptian popular music defies some of the basic Western understanding of popular music. The categorical dynamism of Egyptian music means that the classification “popular” must be construed as an index of currency and acclaim, as opposed to designating a specific musical genre.

This chapter describes the modern musical genre Runa Paju, a genre that features clever Quichua lyrics, electronic amplification, and eclectic use of instruments and musical styles. It focuses on the social dynamics of the music and its relationship to Quichua cosmology and mythological thought. It argues that, although Runa Paju is a new, modern genre, it follows the same communicative and social assumptions of storytelling as traditional genres. Runa Paju brings into artistic contour the experiences of life's problems and experiences with a larger narrative of cosmological destiny. By targeting the human soul, Runa Paju musicians must “reverse” many of the superficial or apparent relations of modern life and revert destiny to shared cosmology. The threads of Quichua life become newly interwoven into musical pathways of cosmological communitas, a moment of communitywide experience of the circularity and relatedness of all things.

This chapter traces how the stories people tell through and about hip hop produce diasporic connections. It introduces two fundamental and interlinked origin myths that are central to how music means in Senegalese hip hop (Rap Galsen). One connects hip hop to griots and indigenous oralities; the other centers on the South Bronx and urban marginalization. It argues that analyzing hip hop within specific local musical histories complicates frameworks of resistance in global hip hop studies. Rather than objectifying the sounds of hip hop or reducing them to a medium of resistance, it approaches hip hop meaning through an ethnographic analysis of musical genre that examines the social significances of sound and musical gesture. It shows how hip hop’s aural palimpsests relate to strategic practices of memory.

This conclusion considers the border-crossing process involved as women come together as a community, applying educational theorist Etienne Wenger's ideas about learning as engaged by a community of practice to musical activity—specifically to the musical activities of professional women musicians both inside and outside institutions. By contrasting practices within and beyond the Uzbek State Conservatory and by putting the rhetoric surrounding each of these musical styles into conversation, the diverse nature of women's musical contribution to the Uzbek national project comes into sharper focus. The more everyday context of a social gathering allows not only border crossing, but also an emphasis on the pleasure of music making and the joy of singing along. Institutions define musical genres, not musical experience. The conclusion emphasizes the complex relation of national identity to individual feminine experiences.