Types of Music

Though in a certain sense music might be thought of as one of the purely entertainment-providing forms of art, essentially direct and sensory in its appeal to listeners, as opposed to an artwork with essential visual or narrative elements, the way in which music is understood and quantified by formal systems of academic analysis and the informal habits of fans is far from being unselfconscious or completely intuitive. Sorting and understanding the different types of music that are in existence is a task that is heavily conditioned by both currents of thought in existence in intellectual culture and social practices and rituals governing the circumstances under which music is made into something of use by its listeners. Music scholars who have departed from the strictly technical means through compositions are created and performed have often looked at the ways in which types of music are created, not only for the purpose of providing classifications for newly formed genres, but also for inquiring into the basis for recognizing differences between types of music and drawing value judgments from such observations. One such important distinction often made by both serious scholars and casual enthusiasts in that made between types of music consists of the supposed difference in existence between serious and popular music.
Though this boundary has long existed for the purpose of differentiating between types of music, it is often applied in different ways and to different fields of music, so that one genre considered to be popular and not worthy of receiving serious analysis during one era in musical thought made by another have come to assumed preeminence in intangible standards of “respectability” and prestige over another, more recently formed genre in music. For instance, jazz music at the start of the 20th century was considered a strictly popular genre, intended primarily for entertainment and for holding dances between people of low social status. Later in the century, however, jazz had been accorded great respect among the different types of music, in comparison to which enthusiasts for jazz music often considered records released in the rock & roll genres to be “merely” commercial, jazz in the interim have moved upward in critical respectability and downward in commercial value. As rock music became more important in the cultural experience of younger generations, for whom it moved away from the strictly social function of functioning as a sonic backdrop to dances and became a genre noted in its own worth for containing worthwhile means for expression, a distinction was created in the rock world between records that were considered to attain the condition of seriousness and those that remained entirely in the realm of popular culture. An ongoing phenomenon in the culture surrounding the production and reception of music in the contemporary world is that of the increasing proliferation in types of music that are identified as existing by serious and casual observers, with the partisans of such fields finding qualities of seriousness that others may be less capable of picking up on.