Talk:History of music/Archive 2

Disambig
In the Classical traditions section, the main article link links to the disambiguation page Classical music. My problem is what to change the link to. Should it be European classical music? Foxjwill 18:33, 30 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Since that section of this article is about the history of music and not the history of European music I think the disambiguation page is appropriate. Hyacinth 22:06, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Popular Music Catagories
I think the catagories for pop music are incorrect. The broader genres should be listed, while the subgenres should not. The following is what I consider a list of the genres of pop: Jazz, Blues, Country, R&B(funk & soul are sub genres of R&B), Rock (r&r, heavy metal, punk), Hip-hop, & Electronic/Dance. There are other genres that I am not sure about. Reggae for instance could be considered a board genre or you could lump it as a sub-genre of rock. Regardless, all of the broad genres should represent the larger musical movements. Georgiapatio 17:14, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Split - to 20th century music
Per comments in the nomination for 20th century music as COTW, and another editors bold copying of the content across, i've added split tags to the modern music sections in this article.

(i'm not an active participant, just an bypasser. But i do agree with the nomination comments, that this article could benefit by becoming less modern/western-centric. I suggested at talk:20th century music, that they move everything under "folk music" from here to there, and replace it here with a short section and a {mainlink} to them. Hopefully some of them will come here to facilitate, and continue the discussion should it prove contentious. Thanks :) -Quiddity 18:08, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

A few minor edits and why
I just changed a few things:

" the situations that music is played and listened to in "

is not perfect grammar.

" the situations in which music is played and listened to "

is better.

In the Music in ancient civilizations section, there were a couple of sentences that were also in the Greek section. I removed them so that we don't waste space:

" In ancient Greece, mixed-gender choruses performed for entertainment, celebration and spiritual reasons. Instruments included the double-reed aulos and the plucked string instrument, the lyre, especially the special kind called a kithara. Music was an important part of education in ancient Greece, and boys were taught music starting at age six. Greek musical literacy created a flowering of development; Greek music theory included the Greek musical modes, eventually became the basis for Western religious music and classical music. "

Finally, in the India subsection in the Classical Traditions section, I found the following typo:

" The origins of Indian classical music (marga), the classical music of India... ">

and removed

", the classical music of India "

Also... I didn't change anything there, but this sentence in the subsection Europe in the section Classical traditions:

" 'Classical European music' is a somewhat broad term, referring to music produced in, or rooted in the traditions of, European art, ecclesiastical and concert music, particularly between 1000 and 1900. "

has tortured the English quite a bit. Anyone want to fix it?

Gavintlgold 15:28, 17 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Provided sources/citations for homophonic comments as requested.Greenwyk 07:23, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Origins of music
From the first paragraph: "Since all peoples of the world including the most isolated tribal groups, have a form of music, scientists conclude that music must have been present in the ancestral population prior to the dispersal of humans around the world."

I think we need to find a better source (or a better summarizing of the existing source). This reasoning is weak - humans could have developed music independently in different places, as we have with so many other things. This is probably moot, as human music is likely far older than 50,000 years anyway, but i don't have a source to reference on that, so meanwhile cleaning up the existing paragraph would be nice. --John_Abbe 16:58, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

POV
This article does not convey a neutral point of view WP:NPOV. There are no popular or folk musics described and very little non-European music. Hyacinth 21:00, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I think a better tag for what you described would be Template:Globalize/Europe. I'm going to change the tag. Although the article has changed since you tagged it, I think it still could use some improvement for around-the world music. It would be really great if we had music samples of folk music worldwide. -Tea and Crumpets (Talk - contribs) 18:58, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

The article nauseatingly eurocentric. The article essentially includes a paragraph on every single style of Western music, and then contributes a sentence or a link to every other civilization. Great. (And no, it's not because Western music is more "influential." No one in the non-western world probobly knows who Beethoven or Mozart even are. They probobly know more about Britney Spears than they do about Baroque style). How about a little equality. -68.43.58.42 04:35, 12 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Maybe it's because people haven't written those sections, not because of "nauseating eurocentrism". It's a volunteer project, 68.43, and people write what they know, and what they want to write. If you're expert enough on the musics of the "non-western world" to know that no one in Japan, China, or Korea has ever heard of Beethoven, but yet has extensive knowledge of Britney Spears, then by all means further enlighten us with your expertise, and start writing. Antandrus  (talk) 05:03, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Is a history of music viable?
After considering a response to the nauseated poster in the POV thread, I realize I have an issue of my own. I am beginning to doubt whether a broad, all-encompassing history of all musics is necessary, possible, or even desirable. After the prehistorical and ancient music sections--both of which are concise to a degree that perhaps threatens their helpfulness to the reader--, the main musical traditions of the world are each mentioned in brief in a more or less chronologically static way (except of course for the Western music history section and the Greek music section--perhaps there were others). Granted, this may reflect the need for further contributions. I propose that this issue may be symptomatic of a larger problem: that the premise of this article needs to be reconsidered. Here are some questions to think about: Would it be helpful for this article to flesh out the primary music cultures of the world according to the chronological history-of-civilization model? If so, how would that be best accomplished? Could all of these geographically distinct traditions be discussed in a more blended manner, according to time rather than place? Might the history of these musics be better handled within the main articles, rather than together in this one? It just seems to me that this article would be better served by going in one of two directions: either (1) by discussing the history of music in a more broadly-conceived fashion, paying attention to how all music cultures developed and interacted over time (rather than one by one), or (2) by leaving historical discussion to the articles for each music culture. This is just a suggestion, and the length of this paragraph rather deceptively conceals the fact that I have almost no time to devote to this project. What do you all think? Dunkelweizen 14:33, 12 November 2007 (UTC)


 * What bugs me about this article is how it devotes a huge section to Western music, and then has only a few sentences on other types of music. If there's anyone out there who knows anything about the history of any type of Oriental music, please, please edit this article!


 * Dunkelweizen, I think both of your suggestions are laudable. I like your comparison to the "history-of-civilization model", Civilization gives a bit of an idea of what we're talking about here.


 * The history of music in each area should have equal coverage, though whether that means we should shorten all of the sections on Western music, I'm not sure. Since this is the article on the history of music, It should give enough information about the history of music in each place and in each period, and how they developed over time, to make the average reader satisfied. It also shouldn't use too much jargon, but should give the average reader a good summary of what the music was like, without needing to click into a lot of different articles to find out what all the jargon means. The best way to describe what the music sounds like is to provide music samples. We already have a few, but it would be great if we could find one for each section. If anyone reading this knows where to find a sample, and wants to help, see Music samples and Media for more information.


 * I, too, don't have a lot of time to work on this article -- I'm working on so many other things. I'll add this article to my list of things to do, but I can't guarantee I'll be working on it a lot. Anyone else have any suggestions? -Tea and Crumpets (t c) 17:00, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Any other thoughts??? Dunkelweizen (talk) 14:34, 17 November 2007 (UTC)


 * In answer to your first question, yes. We can balance this article. It doesn't really matter if it's primary organization is geographical or chronological. This is a WP:summary style article. That means that each section begins with Main. If a section is too large we move material down into the lower level article. If a section is too small we gather more material up from the lower level article. You can't fail. This much is obvious.


 * What we need is a standard for how much emphasis each region (and/or era) should receive. Typically, we allow more room for more recent history, less room for more ancient history. We also need to allow for globalization: towards the end of the 20th century, music is increasing being shared between regions. Genre replaces region as a primary organizing principle. Those are the issues. They can all be solved. CharlesGillingham (talk) 08:22, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Page move
I have moved this article to 'History of classical music traditions', because that is exclusively what this article focuses on. There is actually not a single mention of the existence of popular music. This is a fairly good article, but it should not be called 'history of music', because it is not. A new article at History of music should be created. Zazaban (talk) 23:09, 29 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Wouldn't it make more sense to add those sections? Here is what the article looked like four years ago, for example, just picking one at random.  I haven't picked through to figure out why folk and popular music vanished from the article, but wouldn't it be better to add them back, and make it better? Antandrus  (talk) 23:12, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I had no idea those had even ever existed. Yes, for the love of all that is good and holy, put them back. Why on earth were they deleted in the first place?! Zazaban (talk) 23:20, 29 August 2009 (UTC)


 * After a bit of digging, I see it happened here (5 June 2006). I do not quite understand why the entire twentieth century (of all types of music) was split off entirely (or, for that matter, why things like "folk music" are considered to be exclusively "twentieth century music").  Is anyone else watching this page?  It's on my watchlist, but I haven't actually edited it since it was the "collaboration of the week" back in the Wikipedia Jurassic period sometime like 2005 or so.  (I probably wrote a bunch of the stuff on Renaissance music.)  Not sure how to handle this.  It's a colossal subject.  Antandrus  (talk) 04:43, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm going to be watching it like a hawk. There are a lot of very opinionated people in this area of interest on both sides of the field. Most people who edit this article seem to be on the 'classical' side of things, though. Zazaban (talk) 06:26, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

(outdent) For the record, (as everyone above has pointed out) there have been past versions of the article (like this one) that featured the distinction Classical/Folk/Popular and had separate sections for each of these "types" (btw, the term 'Folk music' is a bit faulty, since it is so-to-speak Anglocentric and its meaning is ambiguous which might somehow explain why it was considered to be "20th c. music"; "History of Traditional music" should have been the term instead). However, since these 'Folk' and 'Popular' sections referred only to developments during the 20th c., they were eventually copy-pasted to the '20th-century music'-article; thus, only the 'classical/historical music' sections were left to the article on the History of music, but such an article could not possibly bare such a generic name anymore. In that respect, the page-move was a really good idea if it was meant to reflect the present condition of the article. Now, whether that split on 5-6-06 was justified or not is another matter. The distinction Traditional/Folk vs. Classical/Historical vs. Commercial/Popular is to be found in articles such as Dance music and Music of the United Kingdom and I don't see why this shouldn't be the case here, as well. In other words, either 1) leave this article exactly as it is, or 2) restore the 'Folk' section (which is to be renamed to 'Traditional' and "globalized" so as to include most of the regional traditions studied by Ethnomusicologists) and a part (or all or a synopsis) of the 'Popular' section, and then move the article back to the 'History of music'. --Omnipaedista (talk) 04:00, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Dates
It would really help if in the first part of the sections on Baroque and Classical era's there was some indication of dates. For someone unversed in classical music this is a serious omission. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.223.177.97 (talk) 03:18, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

CSD for History of Music
"History of classical music traditions" is an existent article and moving it to History of Music would provide both a more commonly used search term and a more commonly used name. Also, an interesting discussion was raised at TAFI on the subject, more rationale can be seen there. Revolution1221 (talk · email · contributions) 02:25, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

what was the first song recorded?
Does anyone know Samuelson&#39;s (talk) 13:54, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
 * See Phonautograph. Ghmyrtle (talk) 16:53, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

African music
It is very important for this article to be balanced and comprehensive, however there is virtually no information available describing African music and its influence. Africa itself is only mentioned once, in the first paragraph, as the place where music may have first originated. If Africa is the birthplace of music and home to thousands of cultures with over a billion people between them, why is it neglected so? B14709 (talk) 02:48, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

It's a shameful omission. I've added some material on Africa. I hope other readers will add more into it.DanJazzy (talk) 19:20, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Music History is not only about Western History
Why is this all about western music history ! allow for the addition of articles from years 700-1100 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 51.235.84.118 (talk) 06:13, 9 September 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
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I have just modified 4 external links on History of music. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20150402105719/http://dasa.baua.de/nn_35984/sid_2C8A99B3F31A58C62BBE3312986DC568/nsc_true/de/Presse/Pressematerialien/Sonderausstellung_20Macht_20Musik/Schamanen-Musik.pdf to http://dasa.baua.de/nn_35984/sid_2C8A99B3F31A58C62BBE3312986DC568/nsc_true/de/Presse/Pressematerialien/Sonderausstellung_20Macht_20Musik/Schamanen-Musik.pdf
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20061214121029/http://www.music.ed.ac.uk/euchmi/ to http://www.music.ed.ac.uk/euchmi/
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20061222132944/http://www.essentialsofmusic.com/ to http://www.essentialsofmusic.com/
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20061129191825/http://www.music.ed.ac.uk/russell/ to http://www.music.ed.ac.uk/russell/

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External links issue
This article has too many "External links". Three or four is sufficient, possibly 5 with consensus on longer articles, but when there are 19 references and 14 external links, that is just too many. I have not been involved in this article, so a discussion would be better than BRD by my removing the bottom 10, someone replacing them, and then appropriate dispute resolution requests for more broad community consensus. Otr500 (talk) 19:20, 28 December 2017 (UTC)
 * I deleted one "External link" thinking it was bot-added --- but it was bot-rescued. There are still too many and I will just wait for some dialog. Otr500 (talk) 20:27, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

And the Baroque music? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Molloyyy (talk • contribs) 14:14, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Table of contents hierarchy is confusing
I don't understand like why it says "Eras of music" then has modern eras on the right but then it only goes from prehistoric to ancient to biblical (what is diff?) to "early music" it's very very confusing. I think we may have to restructure the whole article! Krehel (talk) 03:03, 12 May 2019 (UTC)

Blues, the last common ancestor of all post-classical genres of music
We now have in front of us an entire article about the history of music, but it's one that doesn't make a single mention of blues or jazz, or the countless other genres that they begot. This seems like a rather conspicuous omission. Arthur E. Stewart (talk) 03:27, 10 September 2020 (UTC)