• A lot of performers and songwriters adopt the new set of stylistic elements in their playing, singing (including rapping) and songwriting (including beatmaking).

• A large number of performers and songwriters maintain the use of the set of stylistic elements over time.

Recall from Chapter 1 that music is combinatorial. A finite set of stylistic songwriting and performing characteristics define a particular genre. For example:

• Musical instruments of choice

• Dominance of vocal vs instrumental songs

• Characteristic vocal style

• Dominant subject matter of lyrics

• Variable emphasis on elements such as rhythm, harmony, melody, vocal style, instrumental solos

• Dominant type of rhythmic pulse

• Characteristic tempo range

• Degree of emphasis on improvisation

• Degree of emphasis on syncopation

• Variable use of modes and scale types

And scores of others.

Since music is combinatorial, all it takes is a handful of musical elements and a set of rules governing each that a significant number of musicians agree to play by. The result: music strikingly different from any other.

Imagine, for example, what country music would have sounded like if, in place of the steel guitar as a key element of the country sound, bagpipes had had that role from the beginning. That single instrumental difference would have made country music sound a whole lot different from what we’re accustomed to hearing today.

A major genre of popular music typically spins off numerous sub-genres. For example:

• In jazz, a couple of spin-offs were bop and fusion (among many others)

• In country, honky tonk and bluegrass (again, among many others)

• In rock, metal and punk

• In R & B/Soul, Motown and funk

• In hip-hop, gangsta and crunk

There are hundreds and hundreds of sub-genres and sub-sub-genres.

At last count, there were 647,512 genres and sub-genres in popular music.

No, wait! Some guy with his laptop in his bedroom in Milton Keynes, England, has just created another one. That makes 647,513.

No, wait!

A trio of 14-year-old girls in Amarillo, Texas, has just created a sub-genre of a sub-sub-genre. Now we’re up to 647,514.

No, wait! ...

2.6.2
GENRES EMERGING OVER TIME

Figure 4 below shows the major genres of Western popular music (at least in the main English-speaking countries) from approximate breakout dates to the present. The GSSL only applies to the right half of Figure 4.

FIGURE 4 Genre Breakouts In Historical Perspective

Occasionally, a major genre, after flourishing for a time, becomes extinct, such as ragtime and American minstrelsy. Usually the reason is that another genre comes along with similar, but not identical characteristics, and absorbs the first one. For example, vaudeville took over from minstrelsy. Later, the Broadway-style musical succeeded vaudeville. That does not mean the Broadway musical represented artistic progress over vaudeville. Many Broadway style revues use elements pioneered in vaudeville, but presented with technologically updated stagecraft.

Following are brief sketches of each of the genres represented in Figure 4 above.

2.6.3

FOLK / ROOTS MUSIC, CA. 200,000 YEARS AGO TO THE PRESENT

Origins

• Folk music has several alternative names, such as community music, peoples music, and music in the oral tradition.

• Folk music likely goes back 100,000 to 200,000 years— before Homo sapiens walked out of Africa and colonized the rest of the planet.

• To get an idea of how old folk music is, have a look at the horizontal bar at the top of Figure 4 above. It represents only 200 years. Now imagine this: to accurately represent 100,000 to 200,000 years, that horizontal “Folk/Roots” bar would have to stretch to the left roughly 190 to 380 feet (58 to 116 metres)! If you went riding out of Dodge, looking for the origin of folk music, you would get so lost that not even a halfway competent posse on fresh horses hand-picked by Sadie and Ellie Sue from the Dodge City Horse Store, a posse led by Marshal McDillon himself, would ever be able to find you. That’s how old folk music is, compared with all other musical genres.

• With the advent of the printing press in the 15^th Century, vendors hawked “broadside ballads” in the streets—folk ballads printed on one side of a sheet. Early journalism.

Breakout

• In English-speaking countries, the folk music of the UK and Ireland had a major revival that began in the late 1950s and rocketed in popularity in the early 1960s. Countless musicians in the UK, America, Canada, and other English-speaking nations wrote countless original songs in the English-Celtic folk tradition.

Crest

• The folk music revival crested in the latter part of the 1960s and gave rise to sub-genres such as folk-rock (Dylan, the Byrds, etc.) and the folk-soul music of artists such as Van Morrison (for example, the beloved album Astral Weeks).

Mainstream Genre

• Today, the term “roots” often appears in conjunction with folk music. The folk music revival subsided in popularity, and folk/roots settled into the mainstream of popular culture by the 1980s.

2.6.4
“CLASSICAL” / ART / FORMAL / SERIOUS MUSIC, CA. 2,500 YEARS AGO TO THE PRESENT

You could define classical music ultra-narrowly as the music of an era, the period of European art music of ca. 1750 to 1825 (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) that followed the baroque era and preceded the romantic. Or you could define classical music broadly as formally-notated art music, starting with some of the music of the Greeks, 2,500 years ago. In which case, the bar second from the top in Figure 4 above would need to stretch to the left about 4.8 feet (1.5 metres). Not a long time compared with folk music, but much longer than the genres of popular music with which we’re familiar today.

Historically, racism prevented music from crossing cultural lines. For centuries, Europeans and white Americans considered African music “primitive” and inferior to music of European origin, especially the music of the baroque, classical, and romantic composers of the common practice period (1600 - 1900). People with classical music backgrounds have historically tended to value melody and harmony over rhythm and rhythmic lyrics. The European aristocracy of the common practice period who patronized composers actually believed they were fostering the “progress” of music.

At classical music concerts, audiences were (and still are) expected to sit quietly and listen to The Music. No nodding to the beat (or nodding off), no tapping, clapping, or (horrors) singing or dancing. Pretty much the exact opposite of, say, a hip-hop or rock concert.

2.6.5

MINSTRELSY (AMERICAN), CA. 1830 - 1905

Origins

• American minstrelsy emerged in the 1830s. White musicians, mainly solo or duo acts, would black-face themselves and perform songs and dances from African American culture.

• Horrible racist stereotyping (“See the happy dancing plantation slaves!”) didn’t bother audiences of the day. Even Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826), author of the famous phrase, “All men are created equal,” kept a couple of hundred slaves and did not see fit to free them.

Breakout

• By the 1840s, troupes of 5 or 10 players were common, mainly white males, but not exclusively.

• Abolishionist minstrel troupes had some success.

• America successfully exported the minstrel show to Europe. Of course minstrels had been a fixture in Europe for centuries, but the American style minstrel show was something else.

Crest

• After the Civil War, troupes grew larger, and there were more African American troupes.

• Here is one description of American minstrelsy:

The typical entertainment included instrumental numbers, novelty acts (acrobats, characters in animal costumes, dancers, and circus or museum oddities), short skits, opera burlesques, parodies of urban concert life, comic and sentimental songs, and ensemble dance numbers.

Mainstream Genre

• James A. Bland, America’s first great African American songwriter (“Carry Me Back To Old Virginny,” official state song of Virginia), wrote hundreds of songs but did not make any money on royalties. However, he did earn a good living as a member of various minstrel troupes.

• Stephen Foster, an abolishionist northerner, wrote many songs for minstrel shows, with lyrics in dialect that did not mock or denigrate plantation slaves.

• In the decades following the Civil War, the racist nature of much of minstrelsy led to its demise, concomitant with the rise of vaudeville, which had taken over from minstrelsy as variety stage entertainment by the first decade of the 20^th Century.

2.6.6

MUSIC HALL / VAUDEVILLE / OPERETTA / CABARET, CA. 1850 - 1955

Origins

• The Industrial Revolution began in the latter half of the 18th Century and dramatically transformed European and North American society. Decade after decade, people migrated from the countryside to work in urban factories and foundries.

• Workers demanded more and better entertainment than simply congregating in ale houses and singing traditional songs. By the mid-1800s, music halls were meeting that demand with a variety of entertainment for the working masses.

Breakout

• Some musicians became professional songwriters, furnishing music hall entertainers with new songs. This marked the beginning of the modern popular music industry.

Crest

• In America, a decade or two after the Civil War, music hall entertainment became established in North America in the form of vaudeville. It eventually superceded American minstrelsy.

• Other varieties of music hall entertainment included operetta (in both Europe and North America) and cabaret (mainly Germany and France).

• Great composers and entertainers of the music hall/vaudeville age include: Gilbert and Sullivan, Noel Gay, Harry Lauder, Vera Lynn, Victor Herbert, George Formby, Noel Coward, George M. Cohan, Albert and Harry von Tilzer, James Reese Europe, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, Bert Williams, and Rudy Vallee.

Mainstream Genre

• At the turn of the 20th Century, vaudeville was the most popular form of entertainment in North America, as was music hall culture in England.

• All major cities and towns in Europe and North America had music halls to accommodate “light” entertainment variety shows.

• In America, other ways of presenting variety entertainment, especially radio and film, began to displace vaudeville in the 1920s. However, the music hall genre lived on in Europe for several more decades.

• The Broadway style musical replaced the vaudeville show as stage entertainment. Eventually all of the elements of vaudeville and music hall had migrated to other media or were no longer referred to by their original names (e.g., musical revues, movie musicals, and television variety and talk shows).

• The Beatles recorded a landmark album in the British music hall tradition: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967).

Tin Pan Alley

Jewish immigrants who arrived in America between 1880 and 1910 found themselves discriminated against and barred from many professions. Some turned to what were then considered “low-life” entertainment industries: movies and popular music. They founded Tin Pan Alley, America’s popular music songwriting and publishing industry.

In the 1880s, the vaudeville houses clustered around New York City’s Union Square, which became the first home of Tin Pan Alley. As the entertainment venues moved north, so did Tin Pan Alley, to 28th Street between 5th Avenue and Broadway.

Tin Pan Alley did not get its name until around 1903, after it had moved to 28th Street. The name came from the sound of the out-of-tune pianos in the publishing houses on both sides of the street. (London, England, had its version of Tin Pan Alley—Denmark Street.)

From the1930s to the 1950s, Tin Pan Alley moved north again, up to 42nd Street, hub of the theatre district and the broadcasting and east coast recording industries.

By the 1960s, record company A & R directors had taken over from publishers and the name Tin Pan Alley faded.

The Tin Pan Alley era was the golden age of non-performing songwriters (ca. 1885 - ca. 1965). In the 1960s, bands and songwriters who wrote and performed their own material took over the popular music charts.

Since the 1980s a number of producer-songwriters—non-performers who write and produce songs for pop stars—have become successful. So, in a limited way, this marks a return to Tin Pan Alley.

2.6.7

JAZZ, CA. 1890 - PRESENT

I’m very glad to have met you, Mr. Sartre. I like your playing very much.

—CHARLIE PARKER

upon meeting Jean-Paul Sartre

at a gig in Paris, 1949

Origins

• Jazz started in the early 1890s in the port of New Orleans, a city that was once a French colony. The African American musical culture of syncopation, polyrhythm, melodic embellishment, and improvisation mashed up with European (especially French military) musical traditions and instrumentation: marches and rhythmically “square” dance forms, brass instruments, and the upright piano.

• New Orleans Creole musicians (American born, of African American and European—especially French—ancestry), such as Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, Kid Ory, and Jelly Roll Morton, lived with, and played music with, self-taught African American musicians. Altogether they created a new genre, jazz.

Breakout

• The Original Dixieland Jazz Band made its first recording in 1917. By the 1920s, the Mississippi riverboats had carried jazz north to Kansas City, Chicago, and New York. Not long after, jazz had spread all over America and on to Europe. (Recall that in the 1930s, the Nazis banned jazz.)

• White musicians played alongside black musicians, helping to focus more attention on the appalling state of racial discrimination and segregation that had existed since the botching of emancipation at the end of the Civil War in 1865. Later, jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong played a role in sparking the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Crest

• By the late 1920s and early ’30s, jazz musicians were transforming hundreds of well-crafted songs for Broadway musicals (written mainly by Jewish immigrants and their progeny, who had fled persecution in Europe and Russia) into what would later be known as jazz standards.

• Composers and band leaders such as Duke Ellington were writing brilliant pieces for the jazz orchestra. Historically, most of the great innovators in jazz have been African Americans: Louis Armstrong, Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis.

• By the late 1930s, with the success of swing-era big-bands lead by the Dorsey Brothers, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and others, jazz was the most popular musical genre in America, eclipsing “square” interpretations of Broadway show tunes.

Mainstream Genre

• At the end of World War II, the popularity of jazz was starting to decline. The advent of bebop sustained a healthy interest in jazz well into the 1950s, after which several other emergent genres took the spotlight. Today, jazz remains a solid mainstream genre, showing no signs of fading away.

• Jazz brought improvisation back from near-extinction in Western music. Improvisation combines the creation of music with the performance of music. The hallmark of jazz is that the performer composes while performing—improvises—although the performer follows some sort of model or form (see Section 7.9.2).

2.6.8

BLUES, CA. 1890 - PRESENT

Origins

• After the emancipation, African Americans found themselves shut out of mainstream society, living in nightmarish conditions of poverty and racial segregation. The Ku Klux Klan organized lynch mobs that murdered thousands of African Americans, beginning in the 1880s and continuing into the 1960s.

• The blues began in the Mississippi delta in the late 1880s or early 1890s, with former slaves and their progeny singing about their tragic lives of discrimination, broken dreams, shattered families, and alienation. And disappointment with lovers. And satisfaction with lovers. And ambiguity about lovers.

• Unlike jazz, the blues was mainly rural in origin. It began as a wholly African American folk music genre.

• With voice, guitar, and harmonica, blues musicians combined pentatonic and diatonic scales to create blues scales—hybrid scales with “blue” notes (see Chapters 4 and 5). This black folk/country music didn’t sound much like either jazz or white country music.

Breakout

• With the proliferation of recording studios and the advent of radio in the 1920s, the blues began to find audiences to a limited degree outside the deep south. But the blues never did break big time, not the way jazz did.

• The ASCAP musicians’ strike (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) helped the cause of the blues. The strike led to the formation of BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated) in1939. New labels and BMI publishers signed many African American blues musicians to make recordings to meet the demand for fresh music for radio broadcast.

Crest

• In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the folk music revival rekindled interest in authentic African American folk music. Many blues musicians who had been playing in obscurity for decades suddenly found themselves performing and recording for large and appreciative audiences.

Mainstream Genre

• As with other genres, interest in the blues waxes and wanes. Like jazz, the blues will be around for generations to come.

• Some important blues songwriters and performers include Blind Lemon Jefferson, Pine Top Smith, Leadbelly, Charley Patton, Leroy Carr, Bessie Smith, W. C. Handy, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, Blind Willie McTell, Son House, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Etta James, and B. B. King.

2.6.9

RAGTIME, CA. 1895 - 1920

Origins

• Ragtime was a style of piano-based syncopated jazz that emerged in the mid 1890s. Some musicians played ragtime on other instruments, such as the banjo.

• Like New Orleans jazz, ragtime had roots in the “square” marches and dances of Europe, combined with African American syncopation.

• In ragtime piano style, the left hand plays a “square” march rhythm or dance rhythm against the right hand’s syncopated melody, resulting in a characteristic “ragged” sound.

• One of the main differences between ragtime and New Orleans jazz was that ragtime was usually (but not always) formally composed and notated, whereas jazz was usually (but not always) improvised. Some musical historians argue that much ragtime music was completely improvised, but only the composed pieces remain for the record, as do ragtime piano rolls.

• Rhythmically, both New Orleans jazz and ragtime were syncopated, yet sounded markedly different.

Breakout

•&#

CHAPTER 2: What the Popular Music Industry REALLY Is, and Where It Came From _______________________________ 2.6 A Brief Look At the Major Genres of Western Popular Music

CHAPTER 2:
What the Popular Music Industry
REALLY Is, and Where It Came From
_______________________________

2.6 A Brief Look At the Major Genres
of Western Popular Music