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03 Feb 16
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14 Dec 14
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produces the stimul
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merican music from its inception accepted the division as something pre-given,
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standardization
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the chorus consists of thirty two bars and that the range is limited to one octave and one note
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not overt like the latter but hidden behind a veneer of individual "effects" who
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ere with bad serious music which may be as rigid and mechanical as popular music —
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Structural standardization aims at standard reactions.
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Listening to popular music is manipulated not only by its promoters but, as it were by the inherent nature of this music itself
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. In serious music, each musical element, even the simplest one, is "itself",
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the structure underlying the piece is abstract, existing independent of the specific course of the music. This is basic to the illusion that certain complex harmonies are more easily understand
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stereotyped patterns
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No such mechanical substitution by
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institutionalized effects
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divests the listener of his spontaneity and promotes conditioned reflexes.
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Not only does it not require his effort to follow its concrete stream; it actually gives him models under which anything concrete still remaining may be subsumed.
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Popular music is "pre-digested"
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02 May 14
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13 Apr 14
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produces the stimuli
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difference
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is looked upon as a difference of levels considered so well defined that most people regard the values within them as totally independent of one another.
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from its inception
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can be arrived at
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A clear judgment
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10 Apr 14
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Popular music, which produces the stimuli we are here investigating, is usually characterized by its difference from serious music.
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One possible method of achieving this clarification would be an historical analysis of the division as it occurred in music production and of the roots of the two main spheres. Since, however, the present study is concerned with the actual function of popular music in its present status, it is more advisable to follow the line of characterization of the phenomenon itself as it is given today than to trace it back to its origins.
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American music from its inception accepted the division as something pre-given, and therefore the historical background of the division applies to it only indirectly.
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A clear judgment concerning the relation of serious music to popular music can be arri -
ed at only by strict attention to the fundamental characteristic of popular music: standardization. [1] The whole structure of popular music is standardized, even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardization.
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The general types of hits are also standardized: not only the dance types, the rigidity of whose pattern is understood, but also the "characters" such as mother songs, home songs, nonsense or "novelty" songs, pseudo-nursery rhymes, laments for a lost girl. Most important of all, the harmonic cornerstones of each hit — the beginning and the end of each part — must beat out the standard scheme.
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This inexorable device guarantees that regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced.
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he details themselves are standardized no less than the form, and a whole terminology exists for them such as break, blue chords, dirty notes.
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It is not overt like the latter but hidden behind a veneer of individual "effects" whose prescriptions are handled as the experts' secret, however open this secret may be to musicians generally. This contrasting character of the standardization of the whole and part provides a rough, preliminary setting for the effect upon the listene
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he primary effect of this relation between the framework and the detail is that the listener becomes prone to evince stronger reactions to the part than to the whole.
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His grasp of the whole does not lie in the living experience of this one concrete piece of music he has followed.
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Serious music, for comparative purposes, may be thus characterized: Every detail derives its musical sense from the concrete totality of the piece which, in turn, consists of the life relationship of the details and never of a mere enforcement of a musical scheme
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Only through the whole does it acquire its particular lyrical and expressive quality — that is, a whole built up of its very contrast with the cantus firmus-like character of the first theme.
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ecapitulation over the pedal point of the first movement of Beethoven's "Appassionata".
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By following the preceding outburst it achieves the utmost dramatic momentum. By omitting the exposition and development and starting with this repetition, all is lost.
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The beginning of the chorus is replaceable by the beginning of innumerable other choruses. The interrelationship among the elements or the relationship of the elements to the whole would be unaffected. In Beethoven, position is important only in a living relation between a concrete totality and its concrete parts. In popular music, position is absolute. Every detail is substitutable; it serves its function only as a cog in a machine.
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t is possible to object that the far-reaching standard schemes and types of popular music are bound up with dance, and therefore are also applicable to dance derivatives in serious music
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t may be maintained either that this part of serious music is also to be comprehended in terms of detail rather than of whole
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The following consideration provides an answer to both objections by showing the radical differences even where serious music employs dance types. According to current formalistic views the scherzo of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony can be regarded as a highly stylized minuet to
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he whole movement is conceived as an introduction to the finale in order to create tremendous tension, not only by its threatening, foreboding expression but even more by the very way in which its formal development is handled
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To sum up the difference: in Beethoven and in good serious music in general — we are not concerned here with bad serious music which may be as rigid and mechanical as popular music — the detail virtually contains the whole and leads to the exposition of the whole, while, at the same time, it is produced out of the conception of the whole.
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In popular music the relationship is fortuitous. The detail has no bearing on a wholes, which appears as an extraneous framework. Thus, the whole is never altered by the individual event and therefore remains, as it were, aloof, imperturbable, and unnoticed throughout the piece. At the same time, the detail is mutilated by a device which it can never influence and alter, so that the detail remains inconsequential. A musical detail which is not permitted to develop becomes a caricature of its own potentialities.
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he previous discussion shows that the difference between popular and serious music can be grasped in more precise terms than those referring to musical levels such as "lowbrow and highbrow", "simple and complex", "naive and sophisticated". For example, the difference between the spheres cannot be adequately expressed in terms of complexity and simplicity. All works of the earlier Viennese classicism are, without exception, rhythmically simpler than stock arrangements of jazz. Melodically, the wide intervals of a good many hits such as "Deep Purple" or "Sunrise Serenade" are more difficult to follow per se than most melodies of, for example, Haydn, which consist mainly of circumscriptions of tonic triads and second steps.
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Harmonically, the supply of chords of the so-called classics is invariably more limited than that of any current Tin Pan Alley composer who draws from Debussy, Ravel, and even later sources. Standardization and non standardization are the key contrasting terms for the difference.
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Structural standardization aims at standard reactions. Listening to popular music is manipulated not only by its promoters but, as it were by the inherent nature of this music itself, into a system of response mechanisms wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society. -
In serious music, each musical element, even the simplest one, is "itself", and the more highly organized the work is, the less possibility there is of substitution among the details. In hit music, however, the structure underlying the piece is abstract, existing independent of the specific course of the music.
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opular music, however, is composed in such a way that the process of translation of the unique into the norm is already planned and, to a certain extent, achieved within the composition itself.
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The composition hears for the listener. This is how popular music divests the listener of his spontaneity and promotes conditioned reflexes. Not only does it not require his effort to follow its concrete stream; it actually gives him models under which anything concrete still remaining may be subsumed. -
. Popular music is "pre-digested" in a way strongly resembling the fad of "digests" of printed material.
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o far standardization of popular music has been considered in structural terms — that is, as an inherent quality without explicit reference to the process of production or to the underlying causes for standardization.
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he production of popular music can be called "industrial" only in its promotion and distribution, whereas the act of producing a song-hit still remains in a handicraft stage. The production of popular music is highly centralized in its economic organization, but still "individualistic" in its social mode of production
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The musical standards of popular music were originally developed by a competitive process. As one particular song scored a great success, hundreds of others sprang up imitating the successful one.
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Under centralized conditions such as exist today these standards have become "frozen".
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That is, they have been taken over by cartelized agencies, the final results of a competitive process, and rigidly enforced upon material to be promoted.
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Popular music must simultaneously meet two demands. One is for stimuli that provoke the listener's attention. The other is for the material to fall within the category of what the musically untrained listener would call "natural" music: that is, the sum total of all the conventions and material formulas in music to which he is accustomed and which he regards as the inherent, simple language of music itself, no matter how late the development might be which produced this natural language. T
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In terms of consumer demand, the standardization of popular music is only the expression of this dual desideratum imposed upon it by the musical frame of mind of the public — that it be "stimulatory" by deviating in some way from the established "natural", and that it maintain the supremacy of the natural against such deviations. The attitude of the audiences toward the natural language is reinforced by standardized production, which institutionalizes desiderata which originally might have come from the public.
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Pseudo-individualization. The paradox in the desiderata — stimulatory and natural — accounts for the dual character of standardization itself. Stylization of the ever identical framework is only one aspect of standardization. Concentration and control in our culture hide themselves in their very manifestation. -
In the sphere of luxury production, to which popular music belongs and in which no necessities of life are immediately involved, while, at the same time, the residues of individualism are most alive there in the form of ideological categories such as taste and free choice, it is imperative to hide standardization. The "backwardness" of musical mass production, the fact that it is still on a handicraft level and not literally an industrial one, conforms perfectly to that necessity which is essential from the viewpoint of cultural big business. -
he necessary correlate of musical standardization is pseudo-individualization. By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization itself.
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Pseudo-individualization, for its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them, or "pre-digested".
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The most drastic example of standardization of presumably individualized features is to be found in so-called improvisations. Even though jazz musicians still improvise in practice, their improvisations have become so "normalized" as to enable a whole terminology to be developed to express the standard devices of individualization: a terminology which in turn is ballyhooed by jazz publicity agents to foster the myth of pioneer artisanship and at the same time flatter the fans by apparently allowing them to peep behind the curtain and get the inside story.
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mprovisations — passages where spontaneous action of individuals is permitted ("Swing it boys") — are confined within the walls of the harmonic and metric scheme.
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two main socio-psychological qualities of popular music. One is the fact that the detail remains openly connected with the underlying scheme so that the listener always feels on safe ground. The choice in individual alterations is so small that the perpetual recurrence of the same variations is a reassuring signpost of the identical behind them. The other is the function of "substitution" — the improvisatory features forbid their being grasped as musical events in themselves. They can be received only as embellishments.
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Understanding popular music means obeying such commands for listening. Popular music commands its own listening habits.
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There is another type of individualization claimed in terms of kinds of popular music and differences in name bands. The types of popular music are carefully differentiated in production. The listener is presumed to be able to choose between them.
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he listener is quickly able to distinguish the types of music and even the performing band, this in spite of the fundamental identity of the material and the great similarity of the presentations apart from their emphasized distinguishing trademarks. T
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his labeling technique, as regards type of music and band, is pseudo-individualization
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It provides trademarks of identification for differentiating between the actually undifferentiated.
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There are two main types and their derivatives from which to choose. The listener is encouraged by the inexorable presence of these types psychologically to cross out what he dislikes and check what he likes. The limitation inherent in this choice and the clear-cut alternative it entails provoke like-dislike patterns of behavior. This mechanical dichotomy breaks down indifference it is imperative to favor sweet or swing if one wishes to continue to listen to popular music.
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26 Mar 13
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03 Jan 11
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26 Sep 09
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28 Jul 09
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10 Feb 09
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12 Dec 06
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So far standardization of popular music has been considered in structural terms — that is, as an inherent quality without explicit reference to the process of production or to the underlying causes for standardization. Though all industrial mass production necessarily eventuates in standardization, the production of popular music can be called "industrial" only in its promotion and distribution, whereas the act of producing a song-hit still remains in a handicraft stage. The production of popular music is highly centralized in its economic organization, but still "individualistic" in its social mode of production. The division of labor among the composer, harmonizer, and arranger is not industrial but rather pretends industrialization, in order to look more up-to-date, whereas it has actually adapted industrial methods for the technique of its promotion. It would not increase the costs of production if the various composers of hit tunes did not follow certain standard patterns. Therefore, we must look for other reasons for structural standardization — very different reasons from those which account for the standardization of motor cars and breakfast foods. -
The necessary correlate of musical standardization is pseudo-individualization. By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization itself. Standardization of song hits keeps the customers in line by doing their listening for them, as it were. Pseudo-individualization, for its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them, or "pre-digested".
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In a great many cases, such as the "break" of pre-swing jazz, the musical function of the improvised detail is determined completely by the scheme: the break can be nothing other than a disguised cadence. Here, very few possibilities for actual improvisation remain, due to the necessity of merely melodically circumscribing the same underlying harmonic functions. Since these possibilities were very quickly exhausted, stereotyping of improvisatory details speedily occurred. Thus, standardization of the norm enhances in a purely technical way standardization of its own deviation — pseudo-individualization.
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The most successful hits types, and "ratios" between elements were imitated, and the process culminated in the crystallization of standards. Under centralized conditions such as exist today these standards have become "frozen".
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The original patterns that are now standardized evolved in a more or less competitive way. Large-scale economic concentration institutionalized the standardization, and made it imperative. As a result, innovations by rugged individualists have been outlawed.
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This also accounts for revivals in popular music. They do not have the outworn character of standardized products manufactured after a given pattern. The breath of free competition is still alive within them.
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