Pop music

While there has always been "popular" music in the United States, and all forms of music are popular with certain audiences, the term "pop music" generally denotes forms of music that are non-classical, very mainstream, intended for very wide audiences, and often controlled by the giants of the music business: sheet music publishers in the early decades of the century, recording companies after 1930. While these companies often produced a great variety of music, their need for profits mandated a constant search for the "next big thing," the next great artist, or style of music whose popularity would generate big record sales. Thus fueled by the profit motive, companies sought to reach the widest markets possible. And while the large companies did produce music targeted at markets considered "marginal," such as the African-American population, they tended to focus on music that was unchallenging, unthreatening, and palatable across the spectrum of listeners.

Rock "N" Roll music

Music in the 1950s was dominated by the birth of rock and roll. Rock and roll was a powerful new form of music that combined elements of rhythm and blues (R&B), pop, blues, and hillbilly music to create a sound that truly shook America. Musician Ray Charles (1930–) described the music this way: "When they get a couple of guitars together with a backbeat, that's rock and roll." Rock and roll was raw, powerful, and compelling; it drew young people on to dance floors and into record stores in a way that no music had done before.

Heavy metal

Heavy metal, a genre of rock music that was hugely popular in the United States and much of the world during the 1980s, not only left an influence on successive trends in rock music, but affected the cultural tastes and style of its many fans. The heavy metal sound was characterized by loud and distorted guitars and vocals; its image by aggressive male posturing and a preoccupation with sexuality, identity, and the corrosion of traditional social institutions. While sometimes causing controversy, even outrage among the establishment for its perceived negative influence on youth, heavy metal expanded the range of recognized images and sounds in rock 'n' roll, developing a formula that combined musical virtuosity with social rebellion. While the groups achieved little Top 40 success even at the height of the genre's popularity, their albums and concerts outsold all their contemporaries, and outlasted them in influence.

Folk music

Before the twentieth century, a dichotomy prevailed between cultivated music, by educated, formally trained musicians and composers, and folk music, performed by everyone else. Cultivated music was created by and for the upper classes, and was taught and transmitted within a written tradition, while folk music was created by and for the lower classes, and was transmitted orally. Since folk songs were remembered rather than written down, they changed over time—sometimes gradually over centuries, sometimes all at once at the hands of a particularly innovative interpreter. The changes might be accidental, resulting from a lapse of memory, or a deliberate improvement. This communal re-creation is one of the defining characteristics of folk music. The songs and variation belonged to the whole community and were not associated with specific individuals. The names of great classical composers were transmitted in the written tradition along with their compositions, but traditional folk songs are anonymous. Cultivated music had to please the wealthy patron who paid the composer, but a folk song had to appeal to the entire community in order to survive over generations. Thus cultivated music was aristocratic and folk music was communal.

Hip Hop music

Hip-Hop music, or to use the more popular marketing term, Rap music, was the most popular, influential, and controversial form of black and Latino urban popular music throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It emerged in the early to mid-1970s in the Bronx, though in later years, distinctive East Coast and West Coast styles would emerge and clash, sometimes with fatal results for its performers. Rap and Hip-Hop culture entered mainstream America's collective consciousness as a novelty, resulting from the massive success of the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight." "Rapper's Delight" contained all the elements that would characterize Hip-Hop's essence: spare instrumentation, rhythmically spoken rhymes, and the borrowing of previously existing musical elements to construct a new song ("Rapper's Delight" borrowed heavily from Chic's then-current hit, "Good Times").

Blues music

In James Baldwin's, Sonny's Blues, the title itself is symbolic of the blues in the matrix of the African-American culture of music and suffering. To understand the significance of the blues, one must first define the blues, where the blues originated, and how it is related to suffering and how it is communicated in music.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines blues as (1) a state of depression or melancholy, and (2) a style of jazz evolved from southern American Negro secular songs. It is also inclusive of pensive reflection and contemplation which is descriptive of Baldwin's writing of Sonny's Blues.
It is very difficult to determine the exact origin of the blues. Although its earliest roots evolved from West Africa, the blues probably emerged in the United States around the 1800's relative to the African America plight into.....

Classical music

Classical music is a broad term that usually refers to music produced in, or rooted in the traditions of, Western art, ecclesiastical and concert music, encompassing a broad period from roughly the 9th century to the 21st century.[1] The central norms of this tradition became codified between 1550 and 1900, which is known as the common practice period. It is still played by many of today's musicians. When used as a synonym for Western art music, the term encompasses a range of musical styles and approaches, ranging from compositional techniques (such as fugue)[2] to entertaining operettas.[3][4] European classical music is largely distinguished from many other non-European and popular musical forms by its system of staff notation, in use since about the 16th century.[5] Western staff notation is used by composers to prescribe to the performer the pitch, speed, meter, individual rhythms and exact execution of a piece of music. This leaves less room for practices, such as improvisation and ad libitum ornamentation, that are frequently heard in non-European art musics (compare Indian classical music and Japanese traditional music), and popular music.