is it art? is it pop? music classification...

To classify is certainly a human characteristic: after all it's a good idea to know that some snakes and spiders are poisonous and that it's a good idea to stay away from things that resemble them just to be safe.

A famous dictum regarding music comes from Duke Ellington who said (more or less) that there are only two kinds of music: good and bad. This is a very safisfying way of classifying music because it introduces, though implicitly, the element of subjectivity that people often ignore. On the other hand taken all by itself it will fail in those instances where one is not familiar with the musical style at hand. E.g. it would be very hard for a Westerner who only knows Western music (from classical to punk to bossa novas, etc.) to be able to discern whether a performance of Japanese koto music is good or not, except in a case where the performer obviously forgets a part or starts over. In fact it could be hard to know whether a player/ensemble is even in tune if the tuning system were different.

Another way of classifying music is to place it in some sort of continuum which ranges from Artistic to Entertainment. And here Artistic must be convertible with the term "unpopular", and Entertainment "Popular". It isn't to say that Popular and Artistic cannot coincide, but rather that Popular has to have a mass appeal that generally will preclude much in the way of experimentation or complexity.

And I would add another category which would be Serious or Fluff (but not meaning Fluff pejoratively).

So, if we're going to classify music (we do all the time) I would argue that the best way would not be to use a 1-dimensional scheme (good/bad, art music/popular, artistic/entertainment) but to use instead a multi-dimensional one that combines the schemes. We could start by using a grid that measures the Serious or Fluff value and the Artistic/Entertainment one. This has the advantage of allowing us (and forcing us) to consider different aspects combined.



A third axis could then be added which would locate the music with respect to how good or bad it is.

So yes, this may seem a bit silly or unduly complicated, buuuut if we're going to classify music we should recognize that it is a multi-dimensional affair, and that simplistic tools will only yield simplistic observations.