musical genres in your head

[calimac]

I found this quote from Science in a cranky classical music blog:

As stereotypes might suggest, [persons] with the most education were also the main fans of opera, classical music, and jazz. For example, 8.5% of the classical music lovers had Ph.D.s, compared with 1.4% of those who favored disco music. And classical music lovers' incomes averaged $66,000 compared to $44,000 for lovers of popular dance music. Classical music buffs were also inclined toward intellectual fare, such as current-affairs magazines, whereas the rap/pop crowd favored magazines about cars, women, or celebrities.

The original is behind a subscription wall, so I haven't read it and don't know the context, but two things occur to me:

I am pleased to see opera listed as a separate genre from classical music, as jazz is. Some classical music publications have a jazz section, on the grounds that tastes are likely to overlap - they're both elitist minority-taste forms of art music - but it feels odd to me, not so much because I don't like most jazz myself as that it and classical have quite different aesthetic natures. (The existence of successful hybrids does not disprove this.)

But so does opera. Opera is a hybrid of classical music and theatre, and different from either. Its differences from theatre have often been discussed (opera famously does not always operate by solid dramatic rules of plot and story), but not its differences from classical music. But it is plot-driven in a way that even the most blatant program-music tone poems aren't - the construction is different, it doesn't use blocks and recapitulation the same way (compare Wagnerian leitmotifs with Till's theme from Till Eulenspiegel) - and it has a "smell of the greasepaint" about it that's quite alien from classical. This is obvious enough to me because I'm not that fond of opera either, but even when I do like it, it tickles a quite different part of my brain than classical does, the same way as folk music (which I enjoy with an indiscriminance I'd never feel for classical) tickles yet another different part.

I itch whenever classical and opera are thrown together indiscriminately, the same way I itch when fantasy and horror are thrown together. They're as different from each other as either is from science fiction, and while it's balanced enough to discuss all three as "fantastic literature" or something, I find it grotesquely imbalanced to remove SF and treat the other two as if they were one thing. (The big difference is: fantasy elicits the sense of wonder, as SF does. Horror elicits a sense of horror; that's why it's called that.)

The other thing is that this article provides empirical data to support what we already know, that musical tastes have perceived social and personality connotations. I'm sure my musical tastes say something about how my mind works, and if they say less about my social caste (San Francisco Symphony program books are filled with ads for investment banks and fancy wines), they might be perceived as saying something.

Our local paper published yesterday profiles of the mayoral candidates, including a few personal questions of the "What's your favorite book?" sort. Such questions have become popular to put to political candidates recently, but not because they give irrelevant but welcome personality and human interest to the candidates. No, it's for the suposed insights into their political being. And the candidates know this, and the answers come with spin. (When Mr Bush said that his most revered political philosopher was Jesus, he was not only giving a spin answer, he was - judged by his subsequent behavior - almost certainly lying.)

And this applies to the question about "your favorite musician and your favorite style of music" that the mayoral candidates were asked. One said, "The Beach Boys and '60s rock," and the other said, "Earth, Wind & Fire, and Chicago" (is Chicago a style? I thought it was the name of a band). And these may be true answers, but can you imagine what would have happened if one of them had said opera, or classical, or jazz? In the middle of a tightly fought race, it'd be asking for a whisper campaign to paint you as an elitist snob.

So if I were a candidate, and were trying to avoid any answer that marked me either as an elitist snob (classical), or out of touch (electric folk), or too conventional for words (the Beatles), and had to name a pop musician that everyone is likely to have heard of, I'd have to say: Enya (whom I first heard of when she was a member of a then-obscure Irish folk band: how elitist), and for a genre, that brand of female singer-songwriters that someone once brilliantly dubbed New Waif Music, about which I've written before. And no doubt I'd never get elected with those answers either, but that'd hardly be the only reason.

Comments

Lomp bomp doolam ba lomp bam bomp

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

"As you know, Jim," I don't approve of the entire concept of genre "boundaries." To my mind, a genre term is more adjectival than nominal in form, and you can apply many of them to the same object. I see no inherent reason why an opera couldn't also be classical music, jazz, and rock'n'roll all at the same time. I see nothing mutually contradictory about these terms, any more than I see "A science fiction western and motorcycle Grail quest epic" (a perfectly accurate description of the book on whose cover the phrase appeared) as contradictory.

Fantasy/horror is a nondichotomy; they describe two rather different aspects of a text. "Fantasy" isn't about tone, it's about content; "horror" is all about tone. Think about "The Yellow Wallpaper": one of the scariest pieces ever written, but nothing horrific actually _happens_. Or "The Monkey's Paw" -- pure fantasy, the granting of three wishes and the Law of Unexpected Consequences.

I'm coming around to a strong belief in fuzzy-logic for genre descriptions. Instead of a definition, a list of characteristics, none of which is necessary, and none of which is individually sufficient to apply the genre lable; the idea is, "The more of these things a work has, the more likely I am to describe it as belonging to this genre."

Now you can argue that opera is a different form, not merely a different genre of music, but a genre of theatre instead, and I won't argue the point: I'll agree with you. But, like all forms of musical theatre, it has, well, music, and that music can be described generically.

Operatic music has a lot of characteristics in common with classical music proper. Being the "soundtrack" for a theatrical piece doesn't make opera music not-classical any more than being the "soundtrack" for a bunch of people moving athletically around a stage makes "The Nutcracker" or "Swan Lake" (eg) not-classical. That it is sung doesn't make it not-classical any more than being sung makes Schubert's lieder or the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth not-classical. And, speaking of Beethoven, or Mozart, or whoever, I don't think they suddenly jumped genre when they decided to write operas. Fidelio sure sounds a lot like Beethoven's other work to me, and De Zauberwhatever has that Mozart thing going, no? In fact, I'd venture to suggest that Fidelio has more in common, sonically speaking, with Beethoven's symphonic work, than it does with Mozart's operas.

Note, please, that I am emphatically not arguing that operatic music is classical; that would actually undermine the more complex approach I'm taking. Rather, I'm saying that the dogmatic assertion that it isn't classical music has some serious flaws that can't be addressed by the pigeonhole model of genres.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

First, you will note that I did mention hybrids. A thing can belong to two categories without blurring the distinction between those categories. The Caves of Steel did not erase the distinction between SF and mysteries.

Second, it is the mistaken belief that fantasy has no characteristic tone that is responsible for the misclassification of horror as a part of fantasy. I certainly consider "The Monkey's Paw" to be horror, because it has the aesthetic aims of horror, not those of fantasy.

Third, fuzzy logic is best used for defining single nodal points. It creates a series of zones (each of them fuzzy itself, of course): pure X, essentially X, pretty much X, has some things in common with X - or whatever you want to label them.

The problem is different, however, when you're considering two or more nodes that lay claim over the same territory. To take a geographic parallel, it's one thing to discuss the San Francisco urban area, and how far out its essence and influence run, and quite another thing to find the boundary between the San Francisco urban area and the San Jose urban area, defined by the greater influence of each. That's what we're dealing with here.

Fourth, operatic music does indeed have a lot in common with classical music. That's why they're often confused. But the difference is not that the one is used in theatre and the other isn't, or that the one is sung and the other isn't. Neither distinction is true: incidental music for plays by classical composers is classical music by nature, and of course much true classical music is sung. Nor is the "sound world" the difference: that's a characteristic of composer, not of genre as I'm defining it here.

No, the difference lies in things like the way harmonic movement is used as a goal, and the form of the large scale structure. I mentioned an example of this: Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, a symphonic tone poem that tells a story (so it has that in common with opera), uses Till's motif as structural punctuation. Wagner rarely if ever uses his leitmotifs that way.

In that respect, Mozart's operas sound nothing like his symphonies or his religious choral music, nor do those of almost anybody else who wrote both operas and those other things. (It's been said of Verdi's Requiem that, perhaps uniquely among such works, it sounds more like an opera. This couldn't be said if there weren't a difference.)

The foolishly dogmatic thing to say would be that there was nothing in common between opera and classical concert music. But I avoided saying that. I believe, though, that lumping them together as parts of the same thing has caused great harm and misunderstanding of both. The fact that there are many people who like the one, as a genre, and not the other, demonstrates the need. (And this doesn't go one way: I think there are more people who like opera and dislike concert music than the other way around.)

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

The Caves of Steel did not erase the distinction between SF and mysteries.

If you mean "It did not cause the two terms to stop having distinct meanings," I agree. But what it did erase was the claim that one text can't do both well, and so is evidence for my claim that pigeonhole genre definitions are baseless.

The thing is, as soon as you start talking about a "characteristic tone" or "aesthetic aim" of fantasy, you're in trouble. Please consider the following list, and toss out any you don't consider to be "fantasy:"
Gold's "Trouble with Water"
Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings
Beagle's The Last Unicorn
Clark's Jonathan Strange and Mister Norell
Gaiman's American Gods
Dunsany's The Gods of Pegana
Tolkien's "Leaf, by Niggle"
Pratt and de Camp's Harold Shea stories
Baum's The Wizard of Oz
Cabell's Jurgen
Carroll's Alice in Wonderland
Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth
Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday
Peake's Titus Groan and Gormenghast
Nesbitt's Five Children and It
Eager's Half Magic

Okay, now, take your remaining list, and tell me: what "aesthetic aims" and "characteristic tone" do they have in common?

You are right that fuzzy logic is useful for defining -- or, better, delimiting -- zones; but wrong that it requires a "pure X" ideal point. There are terms, and most artistic genre terms strike me as among them, that defy precise definition. Ostensive definition of the "What I'm pointing at when I say science fiction" type isn't really much better; it's basically an appeal to authority, and now that Knight's dead, he can't point at anything anymore anyway, so no new sf can be written by that definition.

I have, because of this, no problem at all in saying that "The Monkey's Paw" is both horror and fantasy. When you come right down to it, the fantastical element is not even a requisite of horror: consider stories like Cujo, Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and Jaws -- granted, some of them may fail to be completely realistic in their depiction of rabies, psychotics, and sharks, but none of them are intentionally "fantastic;" yet I would certainly class them all as horror stories. (A case could be made that Lambs is not so much horror as suspense, and I wouldn't argue the point; rather, I would claim that that case strengthens my argument for fuzziness in genre terms.)

The problem is different, however, when you're considering two or more nodes that lay claim over the same territory. To take a geographic parallel, it's one thing to discuss the San Francisco urban area, and how far out its essence and influence run, and quite another thing to find the boundary between the San Francisco urban area and the San Jose urban area, defined by the greater influence of each.

This parallel fails, because it is impossible to be properly in San Francisco and properly in San Jose at the same time.

The problem arises from trying to think of genres in terms of "boundaries" of this sort in the first place. It is quite possible for The Caves of Steel to be properly a SF novel and properly a mystery at the same time -- the "boundaries," such as they are, are permeable and interpenetrating.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It remains possible to do some sets of two things well at the same time, but there are certain sets which are rarely attempted and even more rarely achieved. There are few, if any, exceptions to the rule that if the sense of wonder and the sense of horror are in the same work, one will clearly dominate over the other.

I don't have any trouble seeing what the items on your list all have in common, though I might have trouble expressing it in words. They all give a heighened, "magical" view of reality, they all excite a varying sense of wonder (varying from the humorous to the awe-full), and not one of them is primarily intended to horrify or scare the reader. Two or three of them I might argue are more something else than they are fantasy, but I have no trouble including all of them in fantasy-as-I'm-defining-it.

Fuzzy sets as I learned them (from Brian Attebery's discussion of the definition of fantasy - a definition which, he says, has three levels, only one of which is a proper fuzzy set) always have a center point. The fuzzy set is defined by a group of characteristics: the more of these characteristics the work has, the closer to the center point it is.

Re fantastical elements not needing to be in horror: yes, I mentioned that when I referred to "psychological horror," which I understand is the standard term for this.

The parallel does not fail, for the analogy was not from San Francisco and San Jose the cities, but from the extent of their urban areas.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"SF is what I'm pointing at" definitions are not so much an appeal to authority as an appeal to a definition which the definer is refusing to give. It begs the question, "OK, so what are you pointing at, and why are you pointing at this thing and not at that thing?"

Continued...

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Even if I were to accept that there was a firm boundary line, a line on one side of which a work clearly is of a certain genre and on the other side of which, it isn't, the interpenetration of the spaces mapped out by these boundaries would illegitimate the geographical simile and, incidentally, require a geography on an n-dimensional surface where all possible genre overlaps are possible. (How many colors will that take, professor Toras?!?)

The foolishly dogmatic thing to say would be that there was nothing in common between opera and classical concert music. But I avoided saying that. I believe, though, that lumping them together as parts of the same thing has caused great harm and misunderstanding of both.

Well. Will you really claim that Fidelio is more different in kind from the Ninth than either is from, say, the "Moonlight Sonata?" If so, then I can't really argue with you; we are listening with very different ears.

But even if you do make that claim, there is (obviously) a "same thing" to which all three belong, which is "music." They belong there alongside jazz, rock, folk, reggae, even (gawdhelpus) rap.

I will go further and suggest that the most important division, before even getting to genres, is between "art music" and "popular music," and that most, if not all, genres have members which fall on both sides of that divide. Yes, there is such a thing as "art rap."

This may actually be a trichotomy: sacred or ritual music may belong outside of both "art" and "popular" music.

I suggest that there is a fundamental similarity in the intentions and attitudes of composers, performers, and audients of "art music" that is independent of genre, and ditto for "popular music." This matter of "intentions and attitudes" is why sacred/ritual music may be a third ur-class.

This, of course, just makes the meaning-space I referred to above more complicated than ever...

Re: Continued...

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Acknowledging the n-dimensions, I still think a geographical analogy is a reasonable one for discussion purposes.

I'm not that familiar with Fidelio. But I will say that to enjoy a Mozart opera, I must listen with different expectations and protocols than I use when listening to his symphonies or his piano sonatas or his Requiem, all of which are similar in a way the operas are not. To put it in a vastly oversimplified manner, they are all built architecturally. Operas are built dramatically. That's a huge difference, as huge as the difference Scott McCloud postulates between art that's built from the inside out and from the outside in, a difference equally hard to prove by pointing to specific points in the narrative.

The "same thing" of "music" to which all these things belong is on a larger scale. They also belong together on an even larger scale in the category of "art." But those are not the scales which we're discussing. Come on. On a narrower scale, each and every work of music ever written is unique; otherwise why write it? Each and every performance is unique too, or why give it? That's not the scale we're talking at, either.

The proof of the irrelevance of the scale of music comes with the mind-experiment of listening to every type of music in the world with the same expectations. That will lead to a lot of frustrations. Fidelio would be a lousy three-minute pop song. A three-minute pop song would make a lousy Beethoven opera, too.

The distinction between art and popular music (which is part of, but not all of, the reason for the distinction I just made) is a totally different line that cuts across all of this.

But if you want to talk "intentions and attitudes," I say there's a fundamental dissimilarity in the intention and attitude of writing music for the theatre from that of writing music for the concert hall.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

more thought:

The thing you're defining when you say fantasy is a matter of content is not "fantasy", but "the fantastic" - a broader category that includes SF and horror (except for purely psychological horror). Nor does the kind of example you use really define fantasy: some fantasy is about the working out of the laws of magic, but much of it isn't.

The problem with this approach is that, to define what's "fantasy" in terms of what's not "science fiction" and "horror", it does so by saying that fantasy is what's left over if you look at the fantastic and take the SF and horror out. This is a negative definition and, as such, not very useful.

What's useful is to look at the "what's left" and observe that it has a characteristic tone of its own that's different from the tone of either of the others. That's fantasy. Or if you don't like that term for it, there has to be a term for the special, positive thing that comes from that literature that doesn't come from SF or horror.

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

Unlike sturgeonslawyer, I heartily approve of genre descriptors (better to say that than "boundaries"), if only because they serve as a positive force to describe individual tastes, if not necessarily to delimn them. And while I will refer to "classical music" and "opera" separately, I see a large overlap, particularly with regard to some composers (Mozart comes to mind most of all) and to the performance of opera excerpts in the concert hall.

Things I don't like:

The lumping of Western art music with anything else perceived as "cultural," in such a fashion as to suggest that this lumping is being done in order to facilitate ghettoization or exclusion. I was livid back in the 1980s when I saw bookstores shuffle all of the product that didn't deal with the sainted pop/rock into what I called "the section with the thirteen-letter name," a/k/a "Musicanddance." (I love classical music and opera, but not ballet, and I think it's ludicrous to lump them all together.)

Now, of course, there are cable/satellite/Internet radio channels with all sorts of fragmentary descriptors for a particular subslice of rock/pop from a particular ethnicity in a particular decade as intended for consumers of a particular age range, dozens of these channels in fact, and then maybe as many as three classical channels (usually something like "Symphonic Favorites," "Classical Lite" [which I will snarkily suggest does not count anyway] and "Vocal Gems"). Bah, humbug!

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Unlike sturgeonslawyer, I heartily approve of genre descriptors (better to say that than "boundaries"), if only because they serve as a positive force to describe individual tastes..."

Pardon me: I never said I disapprove of genre descriptors. They are useful for exactly the reasons you say.

I question ostensive or prescriptive definitions of genre, and favor a more flexible fuzzy style of descriptor. One might list a bunch of characteristics of a work, and say of each, "the more of this it has, the more likely I am to call it genre." The characteristics will probably be weighted -- for example, the presence of an astronaut in a text makes me somewhat likely to call it SF; the presence of an extraterrestrial intelligence or a time-travelling device makes me extremely likely to call it SF, but I can think of texts that had one of those elements that I wouldn't call SF. Etc.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

And why wouldn't you call a text with ETs in it SF? Because it lacked other characteristics of SF. And the most conspicuous such lack would be the characteristic tone of SF.

Why were fans so eager to nominate the film "Apollo 13" for the Hugo? Not just because it recounted events that would have been SF in a story written just a few years before they actually took place. But because it had the tone, the spirit, and the feel of good SF.