I often begin my popular and global music courses with an exploration of the roles the media, academia, and we, as musicians, fans, and scholars, play in shaping musical sounds and performances. Who decides how to label musical forms when they are commodified, preserved, and/or performed, and what are the problems that arise with these labels? For musicians, how do the decisions made about the music that is performed and its interpretation alter the music and/or inform those listening? These questions always challenge my students’ perceptions of tradition, ownership, and authenticity. They also challenge me as an educator. Questions surrounding ownership, branding, promotion, interpretation, and labeling are the themes that tie the essays in this volume together. Throughout, the impacts of genre creation and categorization, music criticism, and performance are discussed, reminding us of the influences academia, the media, copyright law, performers, and listeners have on the many ways we identify, authenticate, categorize, and historicize musical sounds. In all, this is a powerful volume for exploring these larger issues and the ways we as educators and students can challenge past preconceptions and labeling practices and their perpetuation today.
Stephanie DeLane Doktor’s essay, “Racializing Sound in Early Jazz: A Case Study on Fletcher Henderson (with Help from Lil Nas X),” addresses the representation of artists, the creation of genre, and the segregation of musical sound from production and promotion. The author compares the career of Fletcher Henderson with that of contemporary artist Lil Nas X, going beyond a historical overview of Henderson’s career and the early recording industry to discuss the music industry’s continuation of segregation and racialized branding tactics and the ways we as listeners identify with specific genres. Most importantly, from a pedagogical standpoint, Doktor addresses how these decisions continue to influence the ways we discuss, teach, and learn music history. I found the approach effective for exploring the role race has played and persists in playing in the marketing of musical sounds and personalities. From the multiple “kings of genres” (e.g., Elvis Presley as the “king of rock ’n’ roll”) to the jazz tradition itself, music has long been repackaged, marketed, and validated by an industry that privileges the white voice. Doktor’s analysis of this continuation, through the “new” sounds of jazz to those of the genre-bending Lil Nas X, addresses the bigger issues of the ways we have categorized and persist in categorizing musical sound. These decisions, made by numerous institutions, including those of the media and academia, have long connected race to musical sound and, as Doktor demonstrates, have pigeonholed musicians into specific genres, designations that do not accurately represent the American soundscape but instead reinforce preconceptions of what artists and their associated practices should sound like. Artists such as Lil Nas X, Tyler, the Creator, and Beyoncé, like earlier artists Fletcher Henderson, Ray Charles, and Bobby “Blue” Bland, challenge genre’s imagined sounds. Together, they showcase a more complete and complex musical world than the commodification (the media) and preservation (academia) of musical sounds and categories suggest. This raises the questions: How do we teach classes that are largely rooted in genre in a responsible and accurate way? How do we categorize musical sound while challenging the construction and reification of genre? And how do we step away from the foundation of genre laid out in textbooks and musical instruction to more fully explore the complexities and diversity of musical sound and performance?
The questions addressing the branding and commodification of Fletcher Henderson and Lil Nas X are returned to and elaborated upon in Vilde Aaslid’s essay, “Spontaneous Composition and Charles Mingus’s ‘Scenes in the City.’” Aaslid discusses Charles Mingus’s merger of poetry and improvised music, framing her analysis through an examination of the multiple meanings inherent in a sound/genre, which are influenced by the musical, the extramusical, and the composer/performer’s intent. Whereas Doktor’s essay questions the issue of musical branding and genre construction in the production and historicizing of music, Aaslid’s scrutinizes the presentation of and relationships among the arts, most notably poetry and jazz, and between the processes of composition and improvisation. The mid-twentieth century provides an interesting case study for exploring how the combination of music and spoken word can change in meaning and how we as scholars and students label and discuss these mergers. Harlem poets borrowed the blues (structure, rhyme scheme, and meaning) to create new art based on lived experience and personal history. For Beat poets, the merger of jazz, blues, and spoken word challenged genre and provided a novel and spontaneous compositional style that provided new spaces for creativity. These two contrasting reasons for combining poetry with older musical forms and creative processes point to the larger issue of music as product or process. For Beat poets, jazz was a “new” musical product that empowered alternative modes of creativity and enabled a step away from established tradition. For Mingus, the merger was a process rooted in improvisation, experimentation, and the extramusical that created a living art form that referenced past product, process, and meaning. This combined approach shaped his “Scenes in the City” and would have a profound impact on more contemporary mergers between musical sound and spoken word.
In “Marathi Kirtan: Before and After ‘the Classical,’” Anna Christine Schultz explores the definition of “the classical” in Indian music, pointing to the impact of colonialism and the ways others are excluded from traditions. These “cultures of exclusion” (p. 85) illustrate that musical genre is often defined by the idea of the music and what it represents (caste, class, etc.) rather than the musical sound itself. Schultz’s essay points to the classification of musical sound by those often outside a given tradition and showcases that this practice predates recorded music and the recording industry’s commodification of musical sound and image. By questioning what the term classical means and how this meaning changes when applied to global traditions, Schultz illustrates that this labeling is a process rooted in colonialism and that labels (genres) contain meanings that go far beyond musical sound. The essay’s broader line of inquiry considers the ways in which sound is identified and commodified while also illustrating how these labels shape musical thought and listening. While the first two essays discuss labels created by the music industry in the twentieth century, this essay addresses the long history of genre and musical categorization, demonstrates their role in cultural exclusion, and reminds us that, in most cases, genre construction is facilitated by those in power but is most impactful on those being labeled.
In “Thinking About Music History, an Introduction to Marxism,” Marianna Ritchey provides a critical-theoretical framework for exploring the commodification and labeling of music. The reader is encouraged to reexamine the concept of genre as a product of capitalism. Ritchey asks: Who owns music, and who owns the means of production? The essay’s central placement in the volume encourages the reader to ask this question in relationship to all musical practices discussed in the surrounding essays: classical, global, jazz, spoken word. It also challenges the numerous roles played in musical production and consumption, roles that persist in shaping how we hear musical sound and what musics we listen to. After reading Ritchey’s piece, I was encouraged to revisit the volume’s preceding essays. Ritchey’s political-economic framework provides a useful way to explore the reasons behind music’s classification, the roles played by those in power who make these decisions, and the impact music classification makes on the ways we study, understand, and present musical form.
In “Music and/as Work,” John Pippen likewise examines the larger question of our desire to classify and its effect on both listener and performer. Not only do we identify music by genre, he shows, but also by functionality. By discussing the distinction between music as leisure and/or as work, we are reminded of the ways the music industry, academia, and we, as listeners and performers, authenticate and validate musical sounds through categorization. Pippen’s focus on capitalism reinforces the previous essay’s consideration of Marxist theory and once again interrogates the capitalist approach to music identification and commodification, tracing the history of music as work and leisure in both industrial and postindustrial societies. By discussing the relationship between music and labor, Pippen reemphasizes the impact of the extramusical and the dollar on the creation, authentication, and validation of musical sound: From patronage systems to guilds, the rise of independent musicians, and the recording industry, all have shaped and still shape the music we hear as well as our preconceptions of musical tradition. Although focused on classical music, Pippen’s essay also helps us to better understand popular music and its industry’s control over what is presented and how.
Similarly, issues surrounding musical labor and music as a monetary and social commodity are highlighted in Katherine M. Leo’s “Dangerous Undertakings: Judicial Copyright Opinions as Music Criticism.” In the modern soundscape, the musical sound as recorded commodity raises many questions concerning music’s value. Once recorded, is music process or product? And who really owns and controls music––those who shaped the compositional process or those who create the commodified product? Leo’s essay is a fascinating case study about the judicial opinions that define musical genres, shape the creative process, and impact the lives of both musicians and listeners. As an educator and student of many of the discussed musics, I was struck by how effectively this essay connects the historical categorization and legal judgment of music to discussions of meaning and ownership in contemporary forms of music production. Like the earlier essays in the volume, the larger question here is how these decisions, often based on nonpractitioners’ opinions and preconceptions, affect musical traditions and the ways we as fans understand, label, and listen to music. Whether it is the historian, the critic, the recording engineer, or the judge, the outsider is often making decisions that shape not only what we listen to but also how we listen.
In the volume’s final essay, “‘Should I Perform the Music?,’” Tony Parman shifts attention to the performer. What should we, as musicians and educators, perform and/or teach? This is a question that often arises when teaching classes on global music history and culture. I typically address these concerns by pointing out that when studying music from different cultural, historical, and/or geographical spaces, one will never fully and completely understand a given music culture. Instead, our goal is to ask questions, talk to people, and get as close as we can to understanding the perspectives of those who compose and consume a given music. Parman provides a template for better understanding music cultures of which one is not a part, questioning our intent for engagement, and, most importantly, answering the question: Should we try? Parman’s questions are effective in encouraging us, as educators and performers, to rethink our intent when borrowing from and interpreting music cultures and provides a template for further exploring questions of ownership, meaning, and appropriation. However, the approach has limitations, which are highlighted through Parman’s honest and compelling method of inviting a diverse group of scholars, including Deborah Wong, Putu Hiranmayena, Nkululeko Zungu, and Renata Yazzie, to try out and comment on the provided template.
Overall, the essays in this volume interrogate the ways we label, commodify, and appropriate musical sound and performance. Anyone teaching, performing, or studying musical sound and/or performance should read this collection. While the case studies are fascinating in themselves, the larger questions repeated throughout the volume are applicable to the study of all musical “genres” and styles. Why do we categorize musical sound, and what effect does this have on musical creation and listening? Who is making the decisions, and what roles have the media and academia assumed regarding what we know and do not know about musical artists and sound? How has the desire to label and filter musical process and commodify musical sound shaped our understanding and the historicizing of musical artists and cultures?
The volume prompted me to reevaluate my own ideas about music and music education, what and how I teach, and what and how I perform. As I conclude this review, I am thinking about the establishment and reification of these categories and how the resulting preconceptions have now become algorithms and, through AI, are reinforcing and solidifying the ways we categorize and commodify music. This realization points to the importance of the questions explored in this volume, which serve as a call for all educators and students to reassess the construction and commodification of musical genres, the limitations of these genres, and, most importantly, who makes decisions about them.