A Question of Musical Boundaries

via suntimes.comI have some questions, and I don't have the answers:

Why is West Side Story a piece of musical theatre, but Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story" a piece of classical music? Why is Radiohead rock, but Christopher O'Riley's albums of Radiohead music classical? Just what exactly is John Adams' I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky?

Should we eliminate musical genre terms, as David Lang wrote, partly because they're dictated to us from others? Do they help us fulfill a human desire to categorize? Would it be easier to shop (virtually or in a brick and mortar store) if CDs were organized by artist, regardless of genre (as Christian McBride, I believe, described in a record store in Philadelphia)?

Comments

[alexbasasa]

I think eventually genres will change to labels or tags. The bigger categories were useful when the music stores where place for discovery of new music. The problem with them is not only that, as you say, they're dictated by others, but that these categories are exclusive (if a record in a physical store is categorized under one genre, it's wasteful to have also under a different one).
This is no longer a problem with digital information, and a single composer, record or track can have multiple tags. I think that the Internet is the new place for discovery of music and that this genre-imposition thing loses a lot of its strength online. I don't mind of someone's tagging practices are absurd as long as everyone can tag according to his own taste. For all I know, tags don't even have to make any sense at all as long as there's some technology that can use them to find like-minded people with similar tag-clouds, and recommend new stuff to me :)