Musical style...

[Badly Shaved Monkey]

I think the best hypothesis as to what music actually is neurologically is that music is an evolutionary spandrel...

Ooh, interesting metaphor. Never seen that word used like that before.

Thanks for the reply.

 

[DrMatt]

Style is basically defined by a few things:

1) Melodic contours

2) Chordal progressions and contrapuntal techniques

3) Instrumentation and orchestration technique/"color" in general

4) Form

5) Rhythmic devices

It really depends on what styles you're talking about when trying to figure out what is most determinative of a distinctive style being distinctive. For instance, minimalism often uses very pedestrian musical ideas that have been used by composers for generations before, but it defines itself by repetitive formal structure. Beethoven most clearly distinguishes himself from his musical forbears by his heavy textures, although that is not to discount his originality to be found in other aspects of his style. Even in his "lighter" pieces, you can still recognize him. Debussy can perhaps be most succinctly defined in his pioneering use of the whole-step scale and his dreamy washes of sound. In the end, it's really a gestalt coming together of all these things that makes a style.

I'd like to point out that this approach treats style as an attribute of the wave forms. An approach that works over a wider variety of cultures would treat style as an attribute of perception. Thus, my grandfather's generation would hear all of rock, rap, reggae, metal, young country, Rhythm-n-blues, folkrock, etc. as one big lump, but would discern what to us are subtle shades in the light musics of his generation. People sometimes claim that my own music spans two or more distinct styles--a notion with which I'm not really set up to quibble.

An extensive argument about "What is music" recently ravaged news:rec.music.compose. On reflection, I was forced to go with a phenomenological approach, music as a listener's perception of something special in sound.

 

[Batman Jr.]

I'd like to point out that this approach treats style as an attribute of the wave forms. An approach that works over a wider variety of cultures would treat style as an attribute of perception. Thus, my grandfather's generation would hear all of rock, rap, reggae, metal, young country, Rhythm-n-blues, folkrock, etc. as one big lump, but would discern what to us are subtle shades in the light musics of his generation. People sometimes claim that my own music spans two or more distinct styles--a notion with which I'm not really set up to quibble.

It's absolutely true that perceptions and familiarity with a certain kind of music can affect how discerning we are of all the stylistic differences to be found in a given musical "genus." This is similar to one's inability to understand the differences between accents in a language they aren't familiar with. However, I'd still say that we could still define the disparate accents as actually being disparate regardless of our initial comprehension of their differences. It's also pretty much certain that if given enough time to spend getting acquainted with a language or kind of music, a person will eventually be able to perceive all the little differences in either. I don't think it's fair to say that a style is affected by a perception when it could more accurately be said that a person's perception must be fine-tuned to understand all of the small idiosyncrasies of the style.

Ooh, interesting metaphor. Never seen that word used like that before.

Thanks for the reply.

Oh, I didn't come up with that. Gould and Lewontin first brought the phenomena of "spandrels" in evolutionary biology to wider attention. The whole idea is that there are side effects to necessary constructions that have no use in and of themselves. I would say that it is important to understand others' emotions through their vocalizations and understand sounds which suggest something threatening or peaceful, but it is not really important to survival to create music. However, because of the nature of the construction of the parts of the brain that interpret these more important things, we've developed from this construction an ability to create and listen to music. There have been numerous studies pointing to a link between speech inflection and music; I know one identified a tendency for people to speak using notes on the dodecaphonic scale and others found that anger in a person's voice was characterized by dissonant musical lines, whereas happiness was characterized by consonance. It's all really interesting stuff.