Difference between revisions of "What"

Latest revision as of 13:41, 27 August 2018

If you turn on the radio these days – if you even listen to the radio – you hear really strange sounds. And it is even more obvious if you listen to streaming services. You hear R&B that sounds like indie rock (and indie rock that sounds like R&B), top 40 pop that sounds like hard rock, hip hop that samples prog, and country artists that rap. But they don’t sound weird to us. And that’s because, as Steven Hyden has said, we live in a “post genre” world. There are no more musical boundaries. And so the definitive quality of any and all new popular music is idiosyncrasy: whatever the artist, or band, or producer wants to do, they do.

The state of music today is due, in no small part, the result of various forms of music we might call Art Rock. Art Rock is best generally conceived as rock music mixed with art, whether art music or non-musical art forms. That could mean a lot of different things. This site is an attempt to authoritatively and exhaustively document Art Rock.

The term "Art Rock" is used on this site in its loosest possible sense, the combination of art music with pop rock music. It's an even more expansive definition than that, as there are some artists and genres discussed in these pages that don't even play a version of "pop rock" but rather some other form of popular music that has been combined with art music, often due to the influence of art rock music.

What is Art Rock?

Art Rock can be grouped into four broad categories:

• Art Rock proper
• Progressive Rock (Prog)
• Avant Rock or Experimental Rock
• Post Rock

These four categories or supra genres are discussed on their individual pages. The rest of this concerns the broad definition of art rock and what it is.

== What is Art Music? ==

Art Music itself can be divided into four separate traditions, the most famous of which is "Classical."

== "Classical" aka Western Art Music ==

"Classical" is the colloquial name we give the European musical tradition. That tradition has been existence since the Middle Ages and can be divided into different genres, primarily by chronology:

• Plainsong (c. 1st century CE to c. 1400)
• Medieval (c. 500 to c. 1400)
• Renaissance (c. 1400-1600)
• Baroque (c. 1600-1760)
• Classical (1760-1820)
• Romantic (1780-1910)
• Modernist (1890-1975) including
  • Impressionism (1890-c. 1925)
  • Expressionism (c. 1908-1950)
  • Post Tonal
  • Serialism
  • Indeterminate
  • Musique Concrete
  • Minimalism
• Post-Modern
• Contemporary
  • Modern Creative

Jazz

Jazz is known as "America's Art Music". It emerged out of a confluence of African music brought over through the slave trade and European musical instruments that slaves learned to play to entertain their masters. (This is obviously a very simplistic version.) Jazz can be divided into a number of genres, again mostly differentiated by chronology:

• Original/Traditional jazz or Dixieland: teens to twenties, small groups of 5-10, featuring horns, normally without drums and relying on guitar for percussion - improvisation became a part of jazz late during the Dixieland era;
• Big Band or Swing: late twenties to mid-forties, large "orchestras" playing dances, with short solos;
• Be Bop: mid-forties to the present, small groups of 4-7, playing long solos and absolutely not for dancing;
• Afro-Cuban or Latin: late forties to the present, influenced by African and Caribbean rhythms and also by South American music;
• Cool: late forties to the present, focus on tone and aesthetic over improvisational ability (often wrongly used to describe jazz pop);
• Hard Bop: mid fifties to the present, Bop influenced by soul and other contemporary forms of African American music, such as gospel;
• Third Stream or Orchestrated or Progressive Big Band: late fifties to present, jazz that aspires to some level of "Classical" sophistication, through the use of orchestras and / or orchestrated parts of music, with much less emphasis on improvisation;
• Free: late fifties to present, Bop freed from conventional tonality (though at first it was a lot more traditional)
• Post Bop: sixties to present, a catchall for various forms of jazz not readily identifiable as any of the above or below;
• Fusion: late sixties to present, jazz influenced by rock (though often wrongly used to describe rock influenced by jazz, and even things like jazz pop and new age);
• Electric: late sixties to present, usually the same as fusion, but refers to the use of electric amplification and obvious studio editing;
• ECM: early seventies to present, European form of post-Free Cool jazz, primarily recorded for the ECM label;
• Klezmer jazz: early eighties to present, jazz that uses Klezmer instead of Blues as its base

(Post Free: catchall for Bop and other forms influenced by Free

Indian Classical Music

India has also had a Classical tradition, dating back far longer than Europe's. I don't know very much about it.

== Chinese Classical Music ==

Non-art musical influences

Art Influences