Chapter 7: Style
by ccdmassmedia
Chapter 7: Style (page 39)
In School of Rock Jack Black gives his class a crash course in rock appreciation. Filling the blackboard with little boxes containing words like “punk,” “soul,” and grunge,” as well as a host of band names and lines connecting the various boes, he takes his students on a whirlwind tour of fifty years of rock.
As he points to the boxes, Finn relies on his students to make connections between the boxed words and the music that they have heard. This pedagogical approach is a frenetic version of one strategy for introducing students to music: play examples of different kinds of music and link them to words that represent the style of each example.
…Style labels in music work only to the extent that they call to mind a set of choices in one or more musical elements. Whether it is Baroque or blues, hip-hop or bebop, Romantic or rock, a label is meaningful only if it evokes sound images that are representative of the style.
A. Musical Style
- Style: a consistent and comprehensive set of choices that define a body of music from a time, place, culture, or creative entity (a composer, performer, or group)
- A style description is a generic portrait in words of what we might expect to hear in a body of music connected by time, place, circumstance, and composer.
- Style describes likely features, NOT requirements. Features may include instrumentation, texture, rhythm, harmony or form, etc.
- In some cases, certain elements may be more prominent, or more indicative of the style, by either their presence or their absence.
B. Listening for Style
- We study style because style is the gateway to understanding a work, its creator, and the culture from which it comes.
- Listening for style is valuable for all the music that we encounter – in Music Appreciation class and outside of class, too.
- Style provides the common ground between creator and audience, no matter how distant they may be, which makes meaningful communication between them possible.
Music Appreciation 