Virtually every community in the world has some tradition ofmusic.
Some musical traditions are on theUNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list, but many that do not make that list are also important or interesting, at least to some people.
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
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—Victor Hugo
There are arguments about how to categorize music, but there are some commonly accepted genres:
Folk music is created and survives through local tradition. Folk songs are often by an unknown author, or traditional songs in a style similar to those. There is also an "urban folk" style, fusing folk, popular and other types of music, which was developed starting around the 1960s in various places, including theUnited States andLatin American countries.
Classical music has been written down inEurope since no earlier than the 9th century CE, though it had already existed for some time before that. It is roughly divided by period, between theMiddle Ages (5th-early 15th century),Renaissance (early 15th-early 17th century),Baroque (late 16th-mid 18th century), theClassical period (early 18th-early 19th centuries),Romantic (19th and early 20th centuries) andcontemporary (20th and 21st centuries). Western classical music spread to other continents through colonization and immigration from Europe and cultural exchange, and now exists throughout the world, though it is not uniformly distributed.
Popular music is made for a mainstream, contemporary audience, including genres such asrock and roll.
World music combines different musical traditions.
Blues originated among African-Americans in theDeep South of the United States in the 19th century. It forms the roots of jazz, bluegrass and rock and roll.
Jazz is a type of music that originally arose among African-Americans and Creoles inNew Orleans in the early 20th century and has since gone through several style changes and become international. Almost every jazz performance includes improvisation or embellishment, with musicians creating their own impromptu melodies, usually based upon the chord changes of a preexisting melody (with the exception of free jazz). There are so many different styles of jazz that they are almost impossible to list; however, the main jazz subgenres aretraditional jazz (starting in the early 1900s),big band andswing (1930s and 1940s),bebop (1940s and 1950s on the East Coast but a few years later on the West Coast),soul jazz (late 1950s and early to mid 1960s),free jazz (1960s to 1980s) andbossa nova (1950s and 1960s inBrazil).
Electronic dance music is made with synthesizers and drum machines and played at nightclubs, raves and electronic music festivals in many countries. It includes such subgenres as techno, house, electro and psytrance.
Country music is a style of American popular music that traces its origins to the rural white working class in the South, thus incorporating folk styles from different parts of Europe, though the banjo, which is a common instrument in country music, traces its origin to West African lutes.Nashville is considered to be the spiritual home of this type of music.
Reggae is a style developed mainly byRastafarians inJamaica. its best-known star is Bob Marley.
Musicals exist at the intersection of theater and music. While musicals have been written and performed in many styles of music, there is a certain style that at least some songs in the vast majority of musicals adhere to. While musicals are a huge phenomenon in Great Britain and the United States, they are much less of a factor outside the Anglosphere and often viewed as "less high brow" than theater or opera in continental Europe and thus usually do not benefit from state sponsoring while opera and spoken theater do.
Memphis has the Blues Hall of Fame Museum, the Rock 'n' Soul Museum, Stax Museum of American Soul Music, Graceland (Elvis Presley's home, now a museum) and Sun Studio.
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