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12. The Musical-Contextual Level: Genre and Style

This contextual level adds complications but also provides depth of expressive nuance to music in its respective style. Let’s start from a completely uninitiated position, as we find ourselves in when we encounter music from a foreign, other part of the world than our own. We will probably understand some of the basic expression along the musical dimensions, the “iconic coding,” but much of the finer nuances will be lost because we don’t have the necessary knowledge to provide any reference points. Juslin calls this “Intrinsic coding” and it’s dependent on knowledge of the musical style, or the culture of which the music is part (Juslin 2019: 169-72).

In Western cultures, we can understand many different genres and style that all operate within tonality, while other cultures have other paradigms. That means there are some shared features between otherwise diverse Western styles such as classical music and metal rock, to be found within both. Both styles feature the tonic as a stable harmony, and other chords as various degrees of unstable (see chapter 5). However, different Styles start to vary and form their own systems quite soon after this. Blues for example has included the 7th to the basic chords of I, IV and V, creating the typical blues feeling of having the 7th chord as a stable harmony. In contrast, the same chord within a classical piece would sound unstable and in need for resolution to a more stable chord. Jazz in turn has evolved from Blues; it features even more extensions as stable harmonies and has a very rich flora of harmonic coloring from different combinations of extensions. Within the Classical genre, different eras also have different rules of how the most stable harmonies work. In Classical style, most of the harmony consists of basic chords, and dissonances are treated as significant events; while in the Romantic era, dissonances to chords are less salient and rather part of the basic harmonic language. These are just generalizations, and all styles have richly developed systems for how their music works. Even within a style, every composer has their own personal style that comes from their creative choices. Many of the great composers whose music have lived on after their deaths even have different stages during their lives when their personal style changed.

In a general sense, Jennifer Judkins proposes that style comes from the five major stylistic elements of form, texture, rhythm, harmony, and melody (Judkins 2011: 138). Form is meant more as I have used structure here, but the reader of this framework should be well acquainted with these entities by now. Different styles put different weights to these elements, and the prominence of one usually means passing others to the background as identifier of style, even though they are always constituent of the music. But,

“In music, it has been noted that style is not as easily isolated from substance as it can be, for example, in literature. The elements of musical style … are not clearly distinct from the substance of the work itself. Musical styles may share elements, and yet each element may have a very different significance in each context. … Thus how each element contributes to the aesthetic significance of the piece is what matters more to the musical style, not the mere fact that a given element is employed.” (Judkins 2011: 141)

Knowledge Level

This is where the musical value starts to depend upon the listener’s knowledge level. Even on the structural level, a listener should be able to roughly follow the music and its inherent logic. That is to say, the music makes its case on the structural level only by referring to itself as previously stated (with the mechanisms of identity, variation and novelty as stated in chapter 10). This is why even children who has not yet developed a familiarity with any style can still take great pleasure in hearing classical music, and why both institutions and audiences around the world do not require any formal music education to attend classical concerts. But at the same time it’s only the starting point and not the full extent of possible musical experience. For that, style has a central role to play. In Meyer’s words:

"The patterns of style are fixed by neither God nor nature but are made, modified, and discarded by musicians. What remains constant is the nature of human responses and the principles of pattern perception, the way in which the mind, operating within the framework of a learned style, selects and organizes the sense data presented to it." (Meyer 1956: 73)

More concretely, music can reference other music by way of Citation, Paraphrase, Homage or Parody. The only way to differentiate among these is to know enough about the music that is being referred, to judge if the referral is meant as identical (citation), as an inspiration to create something else upon (paraphrase), as paying tribute (homage) or mocking (parody).

On a more subtle level all traits used in different styles gain some part of their expression through culturally agreed convention. At the opposite end we have the basic dimensions and their valence on the perceptual level, the iconic coding, which doesn’t require cultural convention. But just as soon as that is produced, because of the fact that music or human creation does not exist in a vacuum but is created in close proximity to its surrounding culture, the music takes on stylistic properties and identities. They are still built upon the underlying basic iconic coding, but it is often painstakingly difficult to tell the different aspects apart. A most telling example: the perfect cadence (see chapter 5) in classical music works on a basic perceptual level because the dominant has a relationship to the tonic that is objectively special, but at the same time the cadence also takes on a role of a stylistic signifier of classical music in the way it’s used. In contrast pop music does not use the perfect cadence in the same way and instead relies more on other chord relations. From here on upwards we get a rich flora of disparate musical styles, all of them adhering to the basic iconic coding in some way, but all of them using stylistically unique traits.

For extensive coverage of larger families of style within classical music I can warmly recommend the following books:

• Classical era:

  • Charles Rosen: The Classical Style (1971)

  • Charles Rosen: Sonata Forms (1980)

• Romantic era:

  • Charles Rosen: The Romantic Generation (1995)

  • Carl Dahlhaus: Nineteenth-Century Music (1989)

• Modern era:

  • Carl Dahlhaus: Between Romanticism and Modernism (1980)

• Impressionist piano music:

  • Paul Roberts: Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy (1996)

  • Paul Roberts: Reflections: The Piano Music of Maurice Ravel (2012)

Innovation

Lastly to the fundamental feature of Innovation. Composers often want to try to create something new, and thereby push the evolution of style. This is an important criterion for the classical canon: music that have contributed with something new and innovative is often regarded as important and saved in our Western culture. There is always a balance between adhering to style (convention) and breaking off from it (innovation). It needs to be similar enough to be recognizable as being part of the style without being cliché or prototypical, and at the same time novel enough to be regarded as innovative without being too strange. Juslin includes both Typicality and Originality as aesthetic criteria for the emotion mechanism of aesthetic judgement: we can think music is good because it is typical for a style, or because it is original and does not adhere to convention! (Juslin 2019: 439-42, 448-50).