music

Publié le 25 mai 2006 par Françoise Pistre

general article :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_music

Popular Music (from wikipedia) :
The term "popular music" is used in broad and narrow senses.
At its broadest, it refers to all music other than classical music, also known as art music.
In the early 19th century, the traditional songs of the common people were referred to as "popular songs."
By the late 19th century these songs were referred to as "folk songs."
At that time, a distinction was made between folk music and more recently developed urban popular music.
Today, popular music is distributed via mass media such as recordings and radio (as classical music is now also).
Popular music forms part of popular culture.

Popular music as a business enterprise

Much popular music is the product of the modern business enterprise, disseminated for the purpose of earning a profit. Executives and employees of popular music businesses try to select and cultivate the music that will have the greatest success with the public, and thus maximize the profits of their firm. In this respect, popular music differs from traditional folk music, which was created by ordinary people for their own enjoyment, and from classical music, which was originally created to serve the purposes of the Church or for the entertainment of the nobility.

Although the controlling forces of popular music are business enterprises, young people who aspire to become popular musicians are not always driven by the profit motive. Rather, they often want to find an outlet for their sense of expression and creativity, or simply to have fun. Historically, the conflicting motives of business people and musicians has been a source of tension in the popular music industry.

Debate continues about the status of popular music. Some emphasize the commercial motive and suggest the big companies manipulate the audiences and sell them products with no intrinsic value.

The electric guitar and amplification has had a big impact on modern music. In the 30s and 40s amplified instruments became necessary to compete with the loud volumes in the Big Swing bands of the era. Gibson introduced the first Gibson Les Paul solid body guitar in 1952. In the 1960s, the tonal palette of the electric guitar was further modified by introducing an effects box in its signal path, the wah-wah pedal.

Many people play popular music together with their friends, often in garages and basements, on a casual amateur basis.
This activity is one of the most widespread forms of participatory music-making in modern societies.
As participatory music, "garage bands" are in a sense a resurrection of the old tradition of folk music, which in premodern times was composed and performed by ordinary people and transmitted exclusively by word of mouth.
The difference between the old folk music and modern amateur performance of popular music is that the participants in the latter genre are well acquainted with the expert performances that they hear on recordings, and often try to emulate them.

Popular music dates at least as far back as the mid 19th century. Below is a list of genres.

Different genres often appeal to different age groups. These often, but not always, are the people who were young when the music was new. Thus, for instance, Big band music continues to have a following, but it is probably a rather older group, on average, than the audience for rap. For a few of the genres listed below (for instance, Ragtime), the original target generation may have died out almost entirely.

This "generation gap" in the consumption of popular music is particularly marked since the second world war and the increased economic and social independence of younger people. Music hall and other forms before the 1940s are not so clearly marked by generation.