Rock is dead,

but Jazz lives on

What makes a musical genre

How dare you? Rock is dead?

Before venturing in dangerous waters (and give solid motivation to this title) it is best to offer some context.

I often perceive a sense of chaos whenever I hear musical genres compared and discussed, often by very educated musicians, with little or no attention for what the terms genre or style might mean. Especially the trained musicians, by virtue of being expert in one or another kind of music, tend to overlook quite significant aspects of music that is not in their field, missing huge differences or commonalities between genres and styles, failing at best to appreciate them, at worst to teach them.

At university I learned that musical instruments are described in non-consistent ways: violin is a string instrument, it has four strings. But a guitar has six and is defined as a fretted instrument. Piano has way more strings than a string instrument but is categorized as a percussion instrument, like drums. Oboe and bassoon are woodwinds, trumpet belongs to the brass section, etc. The lesson showed how in music, instruments are grouped together sometimes by the material in which they are built (brass), sometimes by the way sound is produced (woodwind), sometimes by the performer’s activity on them (percussion) etc.

The way we speak about music genres suffers from a similar confusion. We think that a genre is defined by its stylistic features, the way it sounds. Terms such as rock, classical, jazz are used in conversation implying neat distinctions: I hope to show how these terms are mostly shortcuts for artistic and cultural phenomena that are, as often happens in music, non-linear or quantifiable. Perhaps, exploring this interesting issue will allow you to connect some dots around musical language, and make explicit sense of a vocabulary that might have kept a few things implicit. If anything, the chaos we are about to unfold speaks of how poor is our communication and language with regards to describing and music, if compared to how intuitively we identify different sounds, instruments, styles and genres.

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I will be discussing Rock, Jazz, Pop and Classical Music. Let’s start with the simplest case:

CLASSICAL MUSIC.

When we think of classical music, we think of music related to a period before modern/contemporary times, and by extension everything that happened before today may fall in the classical category. To be precise Classical identifies a specific period (the Classical composers were Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) a style of music that became deeply significant for posterity still to today. Modern day music academia and culture defines almost everything happened in the past in relation to the Classical: Bach is pre-classical, harmony is either classical or non-classical, such and such composers are anti-classical, Ravel has plenty of references to classical, etc.

In university I was taught to distinguish between (Classical music -capital letter) referring to the period of 1756 to 1826, and classical music (lower-case letter) referring to everything that is not modern or contemporary, a much broader container.

At one level deeper we find that the Classical period, the one of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, has established an attitude towards music expression, creation and fruition that influenced musical history since then. The style of those composers was so significant that the whole musical language was reshaped and adjusted according to it. Later musicians (in Europe) could not avoid the influence of the Classical composers when writing music. Today we often show the qualities of later music by comparing it to those of the Classical period and describe the music of 17 or early 18th century as pre-classical, as if composers were writing not following their authentic inspiration, but aiming at sounding as close as possible the way those three finally would have sounded years later. Sometimes the Classical style is seen as a refined and finalized version for music that, until then, was just a series of sketches: great, magnificent, but not fully accomplished. Today many would agree with the idea that the music of Bach, Handel or Scarlatti often displays solutions that preannounce Classical style, as if they were unconsciously driven towards it.

This last point betrays a vision of history highly deterministic, as if art is following a trajectory from less to more progressed, or advanced, as if Brahms and Wagner understood better music than Bach and Handel, and that Debussy and Stravinsky understood it better than Brahms and Wagner. It might be useful to learn music history through a single trajectory of stylistic advancement, but also dangerous cause it blinds the observer from the appreciation of each style as authentically tied to the aesthetic sensitivity of its time. (One example of how misleading this deterministic view of history can be is offered by the invention of the piano, which one would intuitively consider an advancement from harpsichord and organ, instruments at times called early versions of piano. The hammer action that defines the mechanics of modern piano was brought to life by B. Cristofori in early 1700, so the instrument ‘piano’ was available already then, but it has not been used by composers until many decades after its invention. Bach famously wasn’t interested at all in it.)

If a genre is a category that identifies artworks belonging to a shared tradition or set of conventions, classical music is not a genre: the musical traditions and conventions in Europe before modern times are too many and too diverse for us to identify all of them in a single category. It is at once a period in musical history (everything before today) or a style of music created following particular techniques and with particular aesthetic aims in mind (the style conceived and actualized by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, the Classical style). It is true, most European music before 1920 was using tonal harmony, non-electric instruments, was written fully on scores by a unique composer and is now performed indoor in front of a seated, silent audience. However these qualities are neither traditions nor necessary conventions of music per se, but the only way in which musical culture operated in Europe before 1920, informing all musical forms then and today, through performances of works from that time. Calling it a genre would be a disservice to history. When classical music is used to identify a genre (in every music conversation, music platform or playlist), only very broad geographic and historic borders can contain it, rendering the umbrella term classical eventually meaningless.

Today the term can even include works and artists outside that umbrella: a living composer that writes scores of tonal music for acoustic instruments is often called classical (Ludovico Einaudi for example). In this case classical refers to a style of making music (rather than a style of music per se).

If you want to read more about how the Classical composers (Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) have created a style so influential that changed the musical language so deeply to eventually became a modern reference for the entire output of western European music, I recommend the first chapters of “The Classical Style” by Charles Rosen. Dense and heavy book, but remarkable in outlining the reasons of how this was done.

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At next let us look at JAZZ.

Jazz is a container for everything and anything. The case for jazz as a music genre is even more interesting than the classical one, since it relates to the whole western world (not just Europe) and depending for the most part on non-written music (transmitted orally or through recordings)

With jazz we are looking at music that has originated in America in the early decades of 1900. The actual stylistic origins are difficult to point out: African rhythms, work-songs, gospel-singing, blues, street bands, musicals, dancing music, improvised music, etc. Each of these styles of making music is not jazz in itself, and jazz does not need to take from any of these to be ‘true’ jazz. So, there doesn’t seem to be an ‘original’, authentic Jazz. Jazz is neither depending on a geographic area (East or West-Coast, they are all proper Jazz, and even Europe has been making great jazz), nor it is tied to a language (every European non-English culture has appropriated idioms and even tunes from the jazz songbook), and of course it is not linked exclusively to any ethnicity, class, or religion, not a time period.

Is jazz a style then? Possibly. If you think of those musical characteristics that make a tune sound jazz, then yes. Anything can be jazz. For example, a tune such as Embraceable you by G. Gershwin had an original score (therefore composed as in the so called ‘classical’ way) and many later versions -unwritten -interpreted by jazz artists: I heard different versions of Embraceable you, I play it myself, but I never heard the original version scored by Gershwin for the operetta East is West. So, which version of Embraceable you is the correct one? If it’s the one scored by Gershwin, it’s definitely not jazz, cause it’s written down, it’s not improvised, it’s not sung by a gospel choir nor played by a street band. We could say none of them is the right one, or we can say the right one got lost but many later -Jazz- interpretations kept it in the repertoire. The term jazz standard comes to help: Embraceable you is a tune that has been interpreted in many different ways, that has survived the decades and has inspired artists and listeners alike, so much that has become a standard piece of music, onto which musicians develop their take.

Embraceable you is not a jazz tune or a jazz composition, but has entered the jazz repertoire by virtue of having inspired artists for generations, so that their individual style can be expressed through a fixed (written) work that already means something for the listener: the jazz fan would know this tune interpreted by Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald or Nat King Cole, and hearing it played at a local jam session would mean enjoying at once a familiar world (Gershwin, Garland, Cole..) entwined with a new one, the local musicians, interested in expressing their own style through the same tune. Jazz is in a way the definition of a healthy musical culture, in which music carries no exclusive rights, belongs to Gershwin and Judy Garland as much as to the kid down at the jam session who is improvising on it. Individual style then is the currency: a jazz artist is someone who takes existing material and develops it through their personal taste. A composition such as Embraceable you behaves like an idea (initially originated by someone, perhaps) that travels from one conversation to another taking slightly different shapes depending on who is expressing it at any time and who is there to hear it.

There are compositions that are created only to be interpreted in special occasions or for limited periods of time (artists like Miles Davis or Charlie Mingus famously sketched their ideas and wanted their collaborators to add their own). Often there isn’t an ‘original’ version of it, the first recording of it becoming the closest thing to the original there is. Transitioning from one form to another, transformation is possibly what defines jazz at its core. Which is the opposite of classical music, where every interpretation we hear is directly related to an original version, enigmatically enclosed in black dots on the score.

If transition and transformation are key to jazz music, what emerges is the intrinsic collaborative nature of Jazz as a kind of music [here I am deliberately avoiding the terms style or genre]. If I play jazz, what I’m doing is referring to pre-existing material (a tune, a chord sequence, a rhythm, a technique, or just a vision however defined..) and making it mine: I’ll ornament and modify it with the idioms I took from other influences, a bluesy note or a swing rhythm, which is also a way of collaboration, or I’ll improvise in the manner I’m most familiar with or that I enjoy the most, which also reflects the musical influences I had so far.

What is jazz today? Everything that involves transformation as the artistic aim of a performance. No wonder why non-jazz musicians speak about improvisation as substitute for jazz: improvisation is considered the evidence that we are hearing jazz.

Does that mean that when I’m improvising, I am by default playing jazz? Not at all: there are a million different styles one can improvise in: jazz is the one type of music that demands your improvisation to be the appropriate balance between the style at hand (Swing, Boogie, Dixie, Be-bop, Avant-guard, Bossa…) and your individual personal voice. Whether you can improvise in classical style, or in Indian raga, or in Arabic scales or Balkan rhythms, you must adhere to the idioms of that style, while in jazz the artist is one who masters the idiom so well that his/her personality shines through it, individually unique and impossible to mistake for anyone else. This is why the history of jazz is the history of the artists who made jazz: without individuals there is no interpretation, no transformation, no jazz. Here we see the appealing balance between collaboration and individualism that allowed this very American way of making music capturing the whole world.

Is jazz a style then? I think it is more of an attitude towards creativity, a way of modifying existing material. Any tune can become jazz if treated properly. Any musical material can become idiomatic and be used, re-used, transformed, interpreted, if the goal is to express individuality within a collaborative environment.

Of course, jazz artists employ musical styles: you can hear everything from blues to swing, from gospel to rhythm blues, from boogie to be-bop. The term jazz-fusion is exemplary in this regard, since there could be no other way of describing a kind of music that within one track will mix and mash all sorts of disparate jazz and world influences. It is a way of avoiding the problem of labelling music according to its style or content. Today jazz is open (as it should) to everything: not being a style it allows no boundary to expressive devices or solutions.

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POP is an easier case to make in my opinion. As a music phenomenon it is historically and creatively entangled with the market of musical media consumption on mass scale. Without radio, tv, and internet, we would hardly have any pop artist at all. That being said, I think we should look at pop music with the curious eye (and ear) of those who want to make sense of it rather than feeling contempt about it. Contempt might arise as one understands how pop artworks are created paying significant attention to what sells at one time: when creativity is compromised by sales, or when we have a feeling that an artist has been corrupted by success and fame, then we can’t but feel cheated as the art they present is no longer authentic.

In the years I learned to separate between my feelings toward a musician and or his/her music, and the pop musical phenomenon considered more broadly, something that includes the artist, the music, the public sphere, the live performances and the public persona, the impact on the listeners and on the cultural environment.

The pop artist for example is not just a very unique musical voice (too often they are singers, something a bit coincidental. As a famous comedian puts it, often they are young and sexy too. A bit too coincidental, no? Why the greatest pop artist of the time has never been an ugly old dude, bold with a broken leg?). A pop artist is also a mixture of stylistic dimensions, someone who dresses and speaks unusually, who cares for non-politically correct causes, someone who inhabits various worlds at the same time. The creative type, someone who sees commonalities among wildly diverse worlds, like music and poetry, and as many great songwriters have done, is capable of pairing music with words in ways that are new and inspiring. Often their musical talent comes with a way of performing, a unique style of public appearance, an exuberant, extravagant, totally unique positions on social or political issues, a confident, often stubborn, nevertheless appealing attitude of ‘my way or the highway’.

This is to say that there is more to pop music that the music one hears. Perhaps a good pop song delivers -subliminally- a wide range of sensations that are linked to dimensions beyond the emotional and musical, dimensions that are tied to what we see in the artist, in his/her appearance, in the public persona: sense of rebellion towards authorities, physical attraction, aesthetic style and freedom of expression, ideas that are hybrid and not categoric, boldness and self-confidence, etc.

I am taking the long route to say that a good Pop song needs to be open to everything (literally everything, musical and non-musical) and at the same time needs to achieve a very accurate balance of finely chosen elements, for it to appeal to the right public in the right way. It must be very easy to digest at first hearing (meaning, each style and technical device employed needs to be selected and distilled carefully – for example, we can hear a blues reference, but not a blues improvisation; just enough to let us wander in a new direction, not too much to get lost there) and it must be absolutely unique in its mix of elements, meaning, absolutely original in its final form.

I find funny that so many people, often musically educated, describe the creative effort behind a successful pop tune as trivial, irrelevant, insignificant. Since the song is made with 4 chords it looks to them as if it is easy to do: truth is that the perfect balance of all the elements in it, so that the tune has some chance to be noticed, is the delicate job of artists and producers, and for the big labels we are talking about teams of producers and sound engineers, people for which the chord sequence is the least of the problems. Which sound (out of 3.000) should the guitar have and why? Which notes exactly? Is it a 92bpm or a 94bpm? How much reverb should the voice have in the verse vs the chorus and why? Each choice might affect positively or negatively the world of emotional connections experienced by the listener, so it is reasonable that a pop tune is defined better by the musical influences it carries rather than its chord sequence.

For this reason POP is a genre in my estimation. Everything is allowed, as long as the choice aims at triggering a positive reaction from the listener. In the same tune one listener will enjoy the lyrics, another will like the bluesy vocals, another would get lost in the rock beat, another will love the country style guitars of the verse, another will be dancing on its groove, another will be captured by the visual appeal projected by the artist (Pop music artists are also visual, thanks to music videos and cd booklets), etc.

Certain stylistic choices then won’t match the Pop genre: an instrumental solo longer than a certain number of seconds might distract from the core idea of the tune; a whole song longer than 3 minutes might challenge the attention span of younger listeners to which most pop music is directed.

It is a genre that wants originals versions of a song: in this way it is different from jazz and more like classical music. The original tune is the reference by which to evaluate the other instances, whether is a live performance, an interpretation by another artist, a cover version. And only in pop (and rock, as we shall see shortly) a tune -the original of course- can become a classic, meaning it has crossed many generational gaps, sustained the commercial competition for decades, sometimes survived its creators, and have become a standard for evaluating the rest. Yesterday by the Beatles for example, is a classic. It is very difficult to sing Yesterday today and not be booed: daring to touch a song like that is at your own risk, one must be very talented and have something very unique to add to it in order to win the demands imposed by the genre (must trigger popular emotions while being authentic) and to meet the restrictions imposed by the authority (here represented by the Beatles).

So, a genre of music like Pop might employ styles of music like blues, country, or swing: each style is a language, a collection of techniques and expressive devices that are highly idiomatic and recognizable. A genre might be open to any new idioms, as long as they don’t conflict with the basic goals, which in the case of pop have to do with appeal to popular taste.

* * *

On a different note, ROCK was a genre, and now it is a style.

With regards to Rock, I will be making some bold claims which are not related to how much Rock has meant in my personal musical upbringing, neither are a quality judgement on individual bands or artists in the rock area. I grew up with Led Zeppelin, Queen, Jimi Hendrix and many more artists that define Rock as a genre of music. My take in this context is that as per musical instruments that are sometimes identified by the material they are built with, sometimes by the way sound is produced with them (percussion), Rock points at a kind of music that is at once a style of expression (loud electric guitars, heavy drums beat, etc.), a social statement (typically rebellion against the authority), an opportunity for social cohesion mostly for the young (by giving a voice to sometimes very personal issues or feelings, like alienation or love). Rock is not just about music.

Compared to Pop, Rock music seems to be more restrictive in terms of what choices allow for inclusion in the genre: among the elements that must be present, on top we find the electric guitar, historically the signature of Rock; forms and song structures in Rock are generally are very simple, as it is not written music (sometimes not even a sketch, but there are exceptions of course), relying only on the talents in the band to memorize and reconstruct it each time; instrumental improvisation, (like guitar or drums solo) is usually fairly limited, being instrumental ability subordinate to other dimensions of expression (there have been exceptions, Hendrix being an unsurpassed guitar player  and improviser till this day) although other kinds of improvisation, like bands that stay on a chord for 10 minutes while the lead singer speaks to the crowd, or Hendrix destroying his guitar on stage, are different kinds of improvisation.

The social cohesion aspect of a Rock concert seems to be the main reference to have if we want to find the essence of Rock: songs need to sound as the public knows them from the records, therefore there is an element of popular appeal, but the live event is the only occasion when they are brought to life in a real sense. In this way, rock bands and particularly rock singers act in a similar way to priests, officers in charge of a social event that carries many elements of a religious ritual. By the way all musical events involve in a way or another some kind of rituals shared by musicians and listeners, but Rock concerts, since Woodstock, do place a particular interest in that aspect of the performance, creating musical experiences where the audience is allowed and encouraged to join through dancing and singing all the way to hypnosis. No wonder why the ‘make love don’t make war’ people, the hippie phenomenon and psychedelics movements in the 70s have found in Rock music a comfortable home.

Here is my bold claim: Rock is dead. It seems to me that the social and political conditions that brought Rock to the forefront of the musical culture no longer exist, so the determination to rebel against the established authority has no more trajectory forward. In the 80s and 90s the greatest rock bands were swallowed by the market (it couldn’t have been otherwise) so the messages of rebellion coming from them were becoming less and less strong, and less needed by their listeners, who were quite happy to accept the social compromises and comforts brought by modern consumerism.

Are you saying that since the 70s there is nothing to rebel against? Of course not, there’s plenty, but Rock cannot do it, or at least hasn’t done it. From outspoken and bold stances against wars and money, from praise to open love, freedom and social rights, Rock has adjusted its target to personal issues and social alienation (Creep by Radiohead is 1993) or faith (Losing my Religion by R.E.M. is 1991), and the evergreen themes of love and friendship (but also including sex, death, alcohol, drugs, fame, mental disorders, etc..). Separate case should be made for other types of rebellion, like the anarchic Punk.

This is also not to say that since the 70s Rock music is bad, not at all. I believe that rock from the 80s and 90s is great, possibly because that’s the one I grew up with. The music is great, the concerts were amazing, the performers and artists valuable beyond comparison. But they were stylistic representative of a genre that wasn’t there anymore: since the 70s Rock has indeed become a style, and with that, artists had to adhere to the core values, the techniques, the rituals, the principles behind the cultural establishment of rock, represented by the gods of reference (Mick Jagger, Freddie Mercury, Clapton or Slash).

And with the ‘death’ of Rock start to emerge the concept of ‘classic’, a tune that distils all the values of an epoch (whether it’s an epoch I actually belonged to it’s another matter..) and the sense of romantic nostalgia, which is at once part of the original themes of Rock itself (nostalgia for a world governed by purity and goodness, where we all were young, beautiful, and free) and also nostalgia for what has been missing since, a true soul of Rock, expressed and maintained alive only by those individual artists (like Jagger, Hendrix, Freddie Mercury or Kurt Cobain) who during a concert could lift the spirit of Rock up for everyone to see. And for those who noticed that Freddie Mercury and Cobain were rockstars mostly after the 70s, it’s worth noting that a Rock fan gets involved usually with a small range of artists and bands, coincidentally the involvement begins in the teen years, and also coincidentally the involvement lasts a lifetime, to the general exclusion of most other bands. One might argue that the story of young rebellion that slowly, with age, turns into moderate acceptance of conformity flavoured with nostalgia for a past of rebellion and purity, is pretty much the same for all of us, regardless of the decade you were brough up as a teenager and regardless of what Rock bands exactly you were listening to.

Rock today sounds as good as always, and great artists have developed and refined it. But, if you think that Rock is more than just music, then what is Rock standing for or against today? Is it a unifying force that transcends languages and cultures, to meet people in peace against wars and corruption, or it just acts as if it was such force? When I listen to my favourite Rock songs I often feel how I am very consciously maintaining alive my own delusion, a very sweet one, filled with electricity and nostalgia. And I wonder whether the artists know how much I need that delusion to not leave me.

IN CONCLUSION

Classical music is either a big container of music written in Europe somewhere in the past OR is the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, therefore a style of composition, an aesthetic purpose: it is not a genre of music. Jazz is neither a genre nor a style: it is -for me- a way of making music, a way to interpret existing music in an individual way. If a term is needed, I would say Jazz is an oral musical language. Pop is a genre: a huge container of all sorts of influences (whatever is considered popular) that gets distilled and repacked for public appeal. Rock was a genre, when it was alive, and now it is a style, sometimes done well sometimes less so.

You can find this article available as Episode 9 of my Podcast, Where is the Music.

Link here: Where is the Music Podcast