What is this?

What distinguishes one style of music from another? What do we mean when we say something is a rock song? What are the elements that differentiate jazz from blues?

While each of us have our own ideas about how to answer these questions, there exists no universal system of classifying music into genres by its stylistic elements. The purpose of this blog is to chronicle my efforts to develop such a system.

My intention is for this system to be used by librarians to aid in organizing pieces of music. The format in which the music is recorded does not matter; the system is designed to describe individual pieces whether they are written on paper or recorded on CD, LP, cassette, or what have you. It can be thought of as a taxonomy or thesaurus, a set of controlled terms to be used when a piece of music fits a given set of criteria. It will be arranged as a hierarchical “term tree,” showing relationships among the genres. For example, “jazz” is a term with a variety of narrower terms: free jazz, big band, small combo, funk jazz, cool jazz, etc. The system will be set up to elucidate the broader and narrower relationships among the musical styles.

My hope is for this system to be universal; I intend to spell out the characteristics of every style of music known to humanity, so that a piece can be categorized into genres based on these characteristics. However, I am aware that I will be unable to do this on my own; while my expertise in certain styles is extensive, I cannot hope to know all there is to know about every musical movement and tradition. So I am asking for your help. I intend to use this blog to begin a dialog, to allow those of you who know more than I do to contribute to system’s development.

I’d like to start by asking all of you to help me come up with musical elements that we can use to distinguish one style from another. How does rock differ from jazz? What are the things that are different about them? How do we know bluegrass from country music? What specific things can we use to describe different styles?

Here are a few musical elements that I’ve come up with:
• Instrumentation
• Size of the ensemble
• Time period in which the music was written
• Geographic region of origin
• Intended audience
• Performance venue (i.e. where do we go to experience the music live?)
• Volume
• Rhythmic character
• Lyrical content
• Tempo
• Vocal style (Formal or informal? Sung, shouted, screamed?)

These are just a few elements that we can use to describe a style of music. What are some others? I’m interested in the feedback of anyone reading this blog. Use the Comments to contribute ideas, ask questions or simply express what you think about the system and how it might be improved. In the next few entries, I’ll provide a sample of what a record for a particular genre/style will look like, as well as a template for you to contribute styles to the “term tree.”

Whether you’re a musician or a music lover, I need your input and I appreciate your participation.