Popular Music
| The examples and perspective in this section may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article and discuss the issue on the talk page. |
Popular music, sometimes abbreviated pop music (although the term "pop" is used in some contexts as a more specific musical genre), is music belonging to any of a number of musical styles that are broadly popular or intended for mass consumption and wide commercial distribution—in other words, music that forms part of popular culture.
Popular music includes Broadway tunes, ballads and singers such as Frank Sinatra.
The relationship (particularly, the relative value) of classical music and popular music is a controversial question. Richard Middleton writes:
Neat divisions between "folk" and "popular", and "popular" and "art", are impossible to find... arbitrary criteria to define the complement of "popular". "Art" music, for example, is generally regarded as by nature complex, difficult, demanding; "popular" music then has to be defined as "simple", "accessible", "facile". But many pieces commonly thought of as "art" (Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, many Schubert songs, many Verdi arias) have qualities of simplicity; conversely, it is by no means obvious that the Sex Pistols' records were "accessible", Frank Zappa's work "simple", or Billie Holiday's "facile".
Moreover, composers such as Scott Joplin, George Gershwin and Andrew Lloyd Webber tried to cater to both popular and high brow tastes.
Read more about this topic: 20th-century Music
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or music:
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Music is spiritual. The music business is not.”
—Van Morrison (b. 1945)