The Supergenre Theory

As an undergraduate music composition student studying under Henry Gwiazda I became intrigued by an entire world of music I never knew existed. As part of my private lessons Dr. Gwiazda had me listen to music he thought I would benefit from hearing. This music included everything from singer-songwriter types like Bob Dylan, to classics such as the Beethoven string quartets, to music I had no way of classifying or comprehending. These listening experiences were the beginnings of my explorations into the labeling and interpreting of musical genre classifications.

Over the years my ideas have evolved into a broad all-encompassing genre labeling scheme which takes the form of a tree -- a taxonomic or genealogical-type tree. At the top of the tree is music -- just music. That is, organized sound, organized in any possible way.

From this basic starting point of simply music, the first division is into, what I label, the three Supergenre Systems. The Supergenre Systems are Art Music, Improvisational Music, and Popular Music. These large divisions occur due to their broad musical and socio-musical differences. Making sense of these broad categories is a primary goal for this blog. Stay tuned to future posts for more information about them.

The labels of Art Music, Improvisational Music and Popular Music seem to be more controversial than any perceived problems in creating the divisions. There is a perceptual problem with the "art" and "popular" labels, as if they are qualitative terms rather than categorical ones. I am in no way suggesting that Art Music is in some way more "artistic" than Improvisational or Popular musics. Nor do i suggest that in labeling a music as Popular music makes it appeal to a wide audience. ...and Improvisational does not suggest lack of coherent structure. All three are simply labels for making sense of this world of organized sound.

On a superficial musical level, the three Supergenre Systems seem fairly clear. Art Music as label takes the place of numerous constrictive synonyms such as "classical," "new music," "contemporary-classical," "chamber music," "Romantic opera," etc. to create an all-encompassing category for music which follows the western "serious" music tradition of following composers' intentions through written instructions. Popular Music could be seen as nearly the opposite of Art Music as it is transmitted primarily through oral tradition, tends to be simpler in form than Art Music and typically does not require formal training to become fluent in its musical language or technique. Improvisational Music is just that - improvisational. Improvisational music may have a general skeletal structure specified but it is primarily created as it is performed.

With these very general definitions of my Supergenre Systems, and your prior notions of musical genre in mind. Check out these examples and try to decide how you might categorize and label them.

Databases and Stores

I have more sites to offer that tackle the issue of musical categories. I completely forgot about them when writing the last entry here. Although their organizational schemes aren't as obvious and transparent as the All Music Guide , the sites are fun and interesting to explore.

First is Gracenote (formerly CDDB) - a service many people have used repeatedly but maybe not realized it. This is the (often) default database service that CD identifying software will contact to give you the album, artist, and track names to display while playing or ripping. The company seems to exist primarily for that purpose - other software contacts it to get the required info. However, as a consumer you can manually type in artists or albums to get biographical information as well as album information and even lyrics. Great fun!

A service very similar to Gracenote is the Open-Source MusicBrainz. This does for MP3s what Gracenote does for CDs, plus lots more! Being an Open-Source project, MusicBrainz has a number of client software applications and databases that make use of its technology. Some of the fairly unique features include the ability to identify a piece of music by sound, as well as having a listing of remixes and alternate versions of pieces of music created by other artists. And, relevant to my topic of genre - the database lists all the user-generated musical categories that an artist or piece of music fits into.

Discogs , another user-generated database, is similar to the All Music Guide, as it is a more traditional type of database with informational listings for artists and albums. It is not created as a software type database for music identification like MusicBrainz or Gracenote. Discogs major difference from the others is that it seems directed toward a collector type of audience. Catalog numbers are given for commercial releases on a number of formats. Users are also able to buy, sell, and create want-lists for other users to browse. As a bonus, Discogs lists production information such as musicians, producers, engineers, songwriters, etc.

These databases create ways of thinking about relationships of musical creators to listeners. Two principles tend to govern musical categorization - listener common-practice, and the music industry's common-practice for marketing purposes. Discogs and MusicBrainz are user generated while Gracenote is industry-driven. Previously mentioned Pandora Radio is a hybrid of the two, as is Last FM . What about some other industry-driven genre schemes? I'll be writing more about them later, but I encourage everyone to check out some online stores you've maybe never explored.

Everyone knows itunes - it remains the online sales leader, so I'll ignore that one for now. In second place, but catching up, is Amazon.com - another one everybody knows.
For something different check out:
Rhapsody - this link lets you skip the membership stuff
MP3.com - been around forever, changed formats a number of times, not sure of their future, currently a place to get free stuff
PureTracks - no frills
HDGiants - For those who hate the sound of downloaded music - only sells lossless format WMA files
LegalSounds - cheap and legal
Beatport - My favorite for dance music

These require membership, but can be good deals if you regularly buy music:
Emusic - mostly independant music - great for discovering new stuff
Napster - my personal favorite - get a napster lite membership to just buy mp3s without the extras

I know there are others out there. Do you have a non-itunes, non-amazon, favorite?

Intro and stuff

One of my goals for this blog is to expound my theory of musical supergenre. My idea is one of musical taxonomy taking into account fundamental differences in the way musical information is conveyed. Is the music written down in its entirety, conveyed aurally, or exchanged in skeletal form (the common jazz-world practice of lead sheets)? My theory aims to provide taxonomy for the entirety of human musical creation progressing from three supergenres into genre, subgenre, and style. Eventually, I hope to provide a database of musical creators and their creations, with their musical taxonomy defined.

Similar projects do exist but have organizational schemes that I feel are overly influenced by the music industry where categories exist primarily for marketing purposes. Some fantastic (but flawed J) resources are the All Music Guide (artist database) and the Music Genome Project (implemented in Pandora Radio).

Perhaps an anecdote might be a good introduction to why I feel standard musical categories are important. I recently attended a conference hosted by the American Composers Forum at McNally Smith College of Music. The American Composers Forum (ACF) has, traditionally, catered to composers with a capital “C”. That is, people who work within that type of music at times labeled as serious music, art music, classical music, as well as those who create film music, or think of their works as avant-garde, or maybe electronic, or new music, contemporary classical, or concert music. It seems to me as though all of these labels refer to music that is created with careful intent toward posterity – toward high art. Art Music. At the conference, different presenters used the labels classical, new music, and contemporary. Art Music is a standard label used in academic circles so why hasn’t it become the standard label? Composers don’t have a standard label to describe what they do to those outside the high art musical world. The best they can do is attempt a description in terms of music the “outsider” might already know. Such explanations quickly become labored until common musical descriptors are found. Similar difficulties arise with all musical creators attempting to describe what they do to musical “outsiders.”

I’m sure all the musical creators reading this have experienced the frustration of trying to explain what they do to someone who doesn’t have a clue about their type of creation. Tell me about it!

Greetings

My name is Sheldon Kessel. I do music. I don't identify myself as a composer, musician, songwriter, engineer, producer , musicologist, or educator, though I am involved in all these pursuits. If I were to identify myself as any one thing, however, it would be that I am a student. Above all I am interested in learning, exploring, and making discoveries.

My interest in writing this blog stems from an intellectual breakthrough I had as an undergraduate music composition student in the late 1990s studying under Henry Gwiazda. It occurred to me that public perception of musical creation was based nearly entirely on a popular music model and that anything outside that model was not only misunderstood, but largely ignored and dismissed. Dr. Gwiazda introduced me to a world of musical creation that, until then, I was unaware of. He got me thinking about the significance of differing personal concepts of the thing called music and the ways in which those personal concepts are shaped by culture.

These ideas of musical conception and perception have been floating in my head for many years, which brings me to why I am blogging. I am here to discuss ways of conceptualizing music. My theory is that the big questions of music begin with genre. From genre, deeper questions of traditional musicology naturally follow.

I am interested in the ways we all think about music - from children and consumers to musical professionals. As such, I definitely encourage feedback. I fully expect some of my posts to incite controversy, but I believe that all discussion is valuable - even heated discussion. So please, feel free to comment!