[Xmca-l] The idea that our categories are created

[Glassman, Michael]

I found this article from the New York Times incredibly interesting

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/technology/personaltech/spotify-sees-a-future-where-music-genres-dont-really-matter.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Having developed a very nascent knowledge of music late in life because my daughter is studying to be a jazz guitarist and I don't want to feel like a complete idiot when I discuss one of her concerts with her - the article reminds me that we (or the media trying to sell us stuff) creates categories that then for some reason become set in stone until they aren't anymore (but the decisions always seem to come from some place else) and the ways the Internet may be changing that faster than many of us can understand.

If you read the first paragraph and the children of the writer going through different types of music as a stream -  I wonder though if the writer has it wrong, that if you went back and listened closely you would find they shared chord progressions taken in different directions.

I may have this wrong the way I'm talking about it (I can see my daughter rolling her eyes in my mind), but jazz has its developing chord progressions, blues has its chord progressions, they swap back and forth, rock and folk and new wave takes from both and from classical, and derivative pop takes and simplifies from all.  Perhaps there is a natural flow as they move between each other, something we can never hear when there are strict category boundaries.  The steaming music phenomenon makes these boundaries transparent, almost as if they don't exist, so we traverse them without thinking we are making some type of transgression.  How will appreciation of music change when we don't have the gatekeepers (using Lewin's original concept) determining what we listen to?

This of course is not just music.  In the academy there has been greater and greater move towards particularization and strict boundaries - AERA isn't one big conferences but hundreds of small conferences.  Will the boundaries start to break down so we can see and appreciate the "chord progressions?"

Interesting to me, wonder what others think.

Michael