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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 styles of song, instrumental music, and opera of the Sibe people in demonstrate aspects of change and continuity in Sibe music during their 240-year residence in Xinjiang, China. It aims to show that contrary to the conclusions of Chinese and Sibe musicologists, Sibe music in Xinjiang has undergone a great degree of change and innovation, and has been substantially influenced by other musical styles in the region. The chapter discusses existing accounts of Sibe music and comments on the approaches and agendas that underlie them.

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.

This chapter concerns the musical form and social history of djanba songs—public dance-songs in Murriny Patha language from Wadeye, in Australia’s northwest Northern Territory—and how they fit within the musical landscape of traditional Australian Indigenous song styles. One djanba song composed by Lawrence Kolumboort is compared with exemplars of other relevant public dance-song genres, namely junba (from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, composed by Ngarinyin-Miwa composer Scotty Nyalgodi Martin) and lirrga (a didjeridu-accompanied dance-song in Marri Ngarr language, composed by Pius Luckan and often performed alongside djanba in the community of Wadeye). Analysis shows how encounters and exchanges with other musical styles have been of profound importance in the genesis and development of djanba song style, and suggests that composers consciously refer to and adapt elements of other musical styles to maximize the effectiveness of their performance.

It has long been known that music played by human performers involve subtle expressive variations in timing and dynamics. It is based on experience with such expressively-performed music that we develop our habits of metric entrainment. These habits are acquired relatively early in life, highly practiced, and subject to continuing refinement. Meter may thus be regarded as a highly skilled behavior. Metric skills allow us to hear these subtle variations in timing as characteristic of meters in various styles, genres, and even particular performers. Thus, our knowledge of meter (a kind of procedural knowledge) involves not a few basic patterns, but a large number of context-specific, expressively-nuanced tempo-metrical types. This is the many meters hypothesis. The number and degree of individuation among them increases with age, training, and musical enculturation.

This chapter provides a broader overview of the different musical elements that form the hybrid genre electric folk. This includes adaptations from the tradition (e.g. Child Ballads, broadsides, uneven metric-rhythmic structures), borrowings from modern music (particularly progressive rock), and specifically hybrid elements like the sound combination of electric and acoustic instruments. The complexity of electric folk becomes particularly apparent in the variety of arrangement possibilities employed by the musicians. Another significant characteristic is the integration of traditional singing styles. The physical and ornamental techniques have been adapted from a variety of sources and were combined with new elements (including Bulgarian singing styles). The chapter is completed by a discussion of the performance practices such as rehearsal practices, differences between live and recorded versions, yet also amplification and volume of electric and acoustic instruments.

It has long been known that music played by human performers involve subtle expressive variations in timing and dynamics. It is based on experience with such expressively-performed music that we develop our habits of metric entrainment. These habits are acquired relatively early in life, highly practiced, and subject to continuing refinement. Meter may thus be regarded as a highly skilled behavior. Metric skills allow us to hear these subtle variations in timing as characteristic of meters in various styles, genres, and even particular performers. Thus, our knowledge of meter (a kind of procedural knowledge) involves not a few basic patterns, but a large number of context-specific, expressively-nuanced tempo-metrical types. This is the many meters hypothesis. The number and degree of individuation among them increases with age, training, and musical enculturation.

In studying the rise of musical styles it is also important to remember that composers or elite musicians do not create musical styles; people do. No matter how musically promising a style may appear, its cultural power will ultimately depend on the degree to which it fulfills the role of self-definition among a group of people and not on its potential for purely musical development. In the end, the attempts of progressive rock's most ardent supporters to keep it alive in a state of unchanging, pristine “perfection” distorts, to a certain degree at least, one of the major reasons for progressive rock's importance: its role as a mirror through which the cultural history of the 1970s can be viewed. The whole underlying goal of progressive rock—to draw together rock, classical music, jazz, folk music, and avant-garde styles into a new metastyle that would supersede them all—is inherently optimistic.

This chapter examines the issues on value, genre and style in the film-music industry in Mumbai, India. It considers the distinctive notions and patterns of style and genre construction in film music and explores film musicians' representations of and relationships with musical style. It suggests that the cultural dominance of film music in India may have produced a similar form of conceptual myopia among its listeners and practitioners.

Music has different styles: on the conservative end are wedding, funeral, and most religious repertoire, in the middle is the relatively unchanging “canonic” music, and on the informal side is popular music, highly variable and constantly shifting. It used to be, back in pre-World War II days, that performing style in Romantic music would “demode” very slowly. In those days, there was only a single performing protocol, one style that “fit all” and was used for music of many different kinds of composition. It was only in popular music that musical styles developed and atrophied in the space of a year or less. Before the Romantic Revolution, however, concert music was much less stable. This chapter discusses musical style, innovation in music, chronocentrism, and the rise of pluralism in the music scene.

Two styles of performing music are Period style and Modern style. The other one, Romantic style, was in full sway at the beginning of the 20th century but is heard now only on recordings. Romantic style began to mutate after World War I toward the accuracy and precision of Modern style, to a degree that eventually changed its identity. Modern style is thus the direct descendent of Romantic style; being the product of its time, it shows the typical attributes of Modernism, following written scores quite literally and being tight-fisted with personal expression. The Modernist spirit had been a disastrous blight on the music of the latter part of the 20th century. Within these three general types, there are many variants. Aside from the three musical styles, this chapter discusses authenticity in music, the adoption of Period instruments, and musical rhetoric.

This concluding section explores the interactions of constraints, freedom, and style in improvisation, drawing on all of the materials discussed in previous chapters. These ideas are presented in cross-cultural context, as well as with respect to the music-language comparisons developed in previous chapters. In conclusion, improvisation is explored as an evolutionarily adaptive feature of everyday cognition and neurobiological development.

This chapter presents a background of the current study. Jazz has become a facile metaphor for American democratic ideals, a paradigmatic instance of racial/cultural integration, and/or the most singular contribution of the United States to the world. This book was conceived, in part, as a response to those alternatives. Rather than confront jazz using a loose biographical approach or conventional musicological techniques, it instead focuses attention on the kinds of “interpretive moves” that performers and other participants in musical events make as they engage with music. The author seeks to understand how participants in the jazz scene, and especially musicians, construct and construe meaning in musical events. He focuses on the jazz scene in New York City, where he conducted fieldwork continuously between July of 1994 and December of 1995, and more sporadically, from 1997 to 2001. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.

This chapter shows how composers who considered themselves progressive in different ways shared a single goal of fostering musical progress in the string quartet genre and how they communicated that goal to fellow composers and musicians in a musical dialogue that continued throughout nineteenth century. Their works often demonstrate a response to Beethoven and to more recent composers, representing a private conversation not just among the four members of the performing quartet but also among the composers of the past, present, and future. Whereas Liszt, Wagner, and their successors avoided addressing Beethoven head-on in genres associated with his achievements, composers in the Mendelssohn-Schumann circle responded directly to the innovations of Beethoven and his predecessors on their own terms and in the genres where those innovations were introduced.