Every culture in human history has had some tradition of music, argues music researcher Daniel Levitan. As music is a part of both folk and popular culture traditions, it can be used to illustrate the differences in the origin, diffusion, and distribution of folk and popular culture.

Folk Music

According to a Chinese legend, music was invented in 2697 B.C.E., when the Emperor Huang Ti sent Ling Lun to cut bamboo poles that would produce a sound matching the call of the phoenix bird. In reality, folk songs usually originate anonymously and are transmitted orally. A song may be modified from one generation to the next as conditions change, but the content is most often derived from events in daily life that are familiar to the majority of the people. As people migrate, folk music travels with them as part of the diffusion of folk culture.

Folk songs may tell a story or convey information about life-cycle events, such as birth, death, and marriage, or environmental features, such as agriculture and climate. For example, in Vietnam, where many people are subsistence farmers, information about agricultural technology was traditionally conveyed through folk songs. The following folk song provides advice about the difference between seeds planted in summer and seeds planted in winter:

Ma chiêm ba tháng không già

Ma mùa tháng ruôi át là không non.1

This song can be translated as follows:

• While seedlings for the summer crop are not old when they are three months of age,

• Seedlings for the winter crop are certainly not young when they are one-and-a-half months old.

English-language folk songs often draw upon similar themes, even if the specific information conveyed about the environment differs.

Festivals throughout Vietnam feature music in locally meaningful environmental settings, such as hillsides or on water. Singers in traditional clothes sing about elements of daily life in the local village, such as the trees, flowers, and water sources

Folk Music:Quan Ho, Vietnam

Vietnamese singers perform Quan Ho folk songs as part of the Lim Festival, which is held annually on the 13th to the 15th day of the first lunar month. Quan Ho folk music dates back more than 500 years. It is included by UNESCO on its Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage, which has the goals of protecting and increasing awareness of the world’s most important cultural features.

Popular Music

In contrast to folk music, popular music is written by specific individuals for the purpose of being sold to or performed in front of a large number of people. It frequently displays a high degree of technical skill through manipulation of sophisticated electronic equipment.

For example, popular music as we know it today originated around 1900. At that time, the main popular musical entertainment in North America and Europe was the variety show, called the music hall in the United Kingdom and vaudeville in the United States. To provide songs for music halls and vaudeville, a music industry was developed in a district of New York that became known as Tin Pan Alley. The diffusion of American popular music worldwide began in earnest during the 1940s, when the Armed Forces Radio Network broadcast music to American soldiers and to citizens of countries where American forces were stationed or fighting during World War II.

In the past, according to Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Kevin Stolarick, musicians clustered in particular communities according to shared interest in specific styles, such as Tin Pan Alley in New York, Dixieland jazz in New Orleans, country in Nashville, and Motown in Detroit. Now with the globalization of popular music, musicians are less tied to the culture of particular places. As with other elements of popular culture, popular musicians have more connections with performers of similar styles, regardless of where in the world they happen to live, than they do with performers of different styles who happen to live in the same community.

Popular musicians increasingly cluster in communities where other creative artists reside, regardless of the particular style (Figure 4-14). Nashville has the highest concentration of popular musicians, especially those performing country and gospel (Figure 4-15). New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, which are much larger metropolitan areas than Nashville, have relatively high total numbers of musicians, as well as high concentrations. Musicians cluster in these places so they can be near sources of employment and cultural activities that appeal to a wide variety of artists, not just performers of a specific type of music. Popular musicians are also attracted to these places for better access to agencies that book live performances, an increasingly important component of the popular music industry.

Popular Music Clusters

The location quotient is the percentage of employees who work in music in a city compared with the percentage of employees who work in music throughout the United States and Canada.

Nashville Popular Music Cluster

Regional variations can be observed in popular music preferences. For example within the United States in 2017, Rihanna was especially popular in the southeast and east, Justin Bieber in the southwest, and Twenty-One Pilots in and around Utah

Most Watched performers on Youtube, 2016-17

Pause & Reflect 4.2.1

What type of music do you like? Does the distribution of performers in Figure 4-16 match your preference?