Browsing Music Spaces: Categories And The Musical Mind

@inproceedings{citeulike:493808, abstract = {It seems very difficult – even impossible – to begin any activity with or about sounds without referring to categories such as ‘kind’, ‘type’, ‘genre’, ‘style’, or to metaphors like ‘field’, ‘area’, ‘space’. Thinking about music, talking about music, making music: all these activities imply reference to a more or less detailed taxonomy, whose structure – not to mention its very existence – is too often taken for granted. Easy access to the world’s diverse musical cultures (and so to even more ‘types of music’) has encouraged expanding and articulating existing taxonomies. However, some of the categories that we use date from more than two thousand years ago, and have been developed differently in different musical and/or national cultures. So, while categories like ‘genre’ or ‘style’ seem to be used mainly to ‘put some order’ and reduce the overall entropy in the musical universe (or, at least, in our talks and writings about music), sometimes they seem to create even more disorder and confusion. Some questions arise: 1) why do we need musical categories? 2) How are such categories created? 3) Are historical categories like ‘genre’ or ‘style’ useful in all contexts? 4) What is the status of terms like ‘field’, ‘area’, ‘space’, ‘boundary’, and ‘frontier’?}, author = {Fabbri, Franco }, citeulike-article-id = {493808}, journal = {Proc. IASPM}, keywords = {ology}, posted-at = {2008-03-01 13:28:47}, priority = {2}, title = {Browsing Music Spaces: Categories And The Musical Mind}, url = {http://www.mediamusicstudies.net/tagg/xpdfs/ffabbri9907us.pdf}, year = {1999} }

TY - CONF ID - citeulike:493808 L3 - citeulike-article-id:493808 TI - Browsing Music Spaces: Categories And The Musical Mind JF - Proc. IASPM N2 - It seems very difficult – even impossible – to begin any activity with or about sounds without referring to categories such as ‘kind’, ‘type’, ‘genre’, ‘style’, or to metaphors like ‘field’, ‘area’, ‘space’. Thinking about music, talking about music, making music: all these activities imply reference to a more or less detailed taxonomy, whose structure – not to mention its very existence – is too often taken for granted. Easy access to the world’s diverse musical cultures (and so to even more ‘types of music’) has encouraged expanding and articulating existing taxonomies. However, some of the categories that we use date from more than two thousand years ago, and have been developed differently in different musical and/or national cultures. So, while categories like ‘genre’ or ‘style’ seem to be used mainly to ‘put some order’ and reduce the overall entropy in the musical universe (or, at least, in our talks and writings about music), sometimes they seem to create even more disorder and confusion. Some questions arise: 1) why do we need musical categories? 2) How are such categories created? 3) Are historical categories like ‘genre’ or ‘style’ useful in all contexts? 4) What is the status of terms like ‘field’, ‘area’, ‘space’, ‘boundary’, and ‘frontier’? KW - ology AU - Fabbri, Franco PY - 1999/// UR - http://www.mediamusicstudies.net/tagg/xpdfs/ffabbri9907us.pdf ER -