[FA Worldmusic] music chains and knowledge transfer

[Mark D. Moss / Sing Out!]

At 11:57 AM 8/14/2007, Dore Stein wrote:
>What I meant is I'm not a fan of music categorization.  It results in
>arbitrary boundaries that encourage pre-conceived biases and
>discourage open-minded listening.

As someone who *likes* categorization, I'd argue this: I don't treat 
the labels I put on music as a box with high, impenetrable sides and 
coils of barded wire ... I treat those labels as a way to 
*communicate* with folks who might not be able to necessarily hear 
the music I'm writing or talking about. This might not be a *big* 
problem for a radio programmer (though if you want to build your 
audience beyond accidental stumbling onto your show, I'd argue that 
you need to be able to describe your show to folks as well).

The trick here, I'd agree, is to educate folks that all music has 
cross-influences, connections and roots that intermingle, and to 
encourage the use the artefacts of "labels" as a way of *making* 
discoveries, not predetermining what they might not like. So many of 
those labels themselves have such amorphous, personal definitions 
(World, Americana, folk, jazz, new age, etc.) that treating them 
rigidly -- either in marketing OR as a listener -- is pretty foolish, imo.

Looking at Dore's web site, for instance, he *does* use labels: 
world, roots and jazz (albeit in exactly the kind of non-simplistic, 
communicative fashion that I would suggest). Perhaps without the 
dogma, we're really not all that far apart?
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