7
model, primitive, art, and folk music ... A third stage is implied in
[Mantle] Hood's statement [in 1963] to the effect that art, folk, popu-
lar, and primitive music are the norm ... Eventually, further, there also
came the realization that each culture has its own way of classifying
music ... I suggest that while most cultures do indeed have their own
way of classifying music, so that the terms "folk," "art," and "popular"
are at best culture-specific to the West, each culture tends to have some
kind of hierarchy in its musical system, a continuum from some kind
of elite to popular. Where the lines should be drawn is a subject of
discussion.
6
This struggle over where to draw the lines can yield some insights in assessing the position
Eno's music occupies in the schema of musical types. The British-born popular music scholar
Philip Tagg has published an "axiomatic triangle" that represents a recent attempt to classify
musical types into folk, art, and popular.
7
Folk music in produced and transmitted primarily
by amateurs, writes Tagg, art and popular music is largely the work of professionals. Popular
music is usually mass-produced, folk and art music are usually not. The three types of music
have different primary modes of storage and distribution: folk music by oral tradition, art mu-
sic by music notation, and popular music by recorded sound. The type of society in which the
type of music occurs varies: folk music is found mostly in nomadic or agrarian societies, art
music in agrarian or industrial societies, while popular music is largely a phenomenon of the
industrialized world. Folk music is produced and distributed independently of a monetary
economy, art music relies on public funding, and popular music's economic domain is free
enterprise. The presence of an organized, written body of music theory and aesthetics is un-
common with folk and popular music types, but the norm with art music. Finally, folk music
is usually held to be composed anonymously, whereas art and popular music is composed
non-anonymously.
What Tagg has done is to systematize the standard musicological wisdom with regard to the
three types of music. Unfortunately and a growing number of scholars and critics are begin-
ning to recognize this there is a lot of music out there that refuses to be pegged quite so
neatly. Take Eno's music as an example. Eno is certainly a professional, in the sense that he
gets paid for what he does, yet he has largely given up live performance, and as we shall see,
he positively revels in the "amateurish" nature of his instrumental abilities, going so far as to
characterize himself as a "non-musician." Is his music "mass-distributed"? In the sense that
multiple pressings are made of his records, yes, but he has certainly set no records for number
of copies sold, sales figures of each of his solo albums hovering between 50,000 and 100,000.
The "main mode of storage and distribution" of Eno's music is certainly "recorded sound,"
and while the genesis of some of his compositions includes a written sketching stage (though
not in musical notation), the only existing scores have been produced by others for copyright
purposes, and in Eno's opinion bear little resemblance to the music itself. A point to be made
about mode of storage and distribution as a criterion for the separation of art and popular mu-
6
Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-nine Issues and Concepts (Urbana, Chi-
cago, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 305.
7
Philip Tagg, "Analysing Popular Music," Popular Music 2: Theory and Method (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 42.