Best New Artist: Imogen Heap was a member of Frou Frou, who released an album in 2003. Yeah, she’s “gone solo,” but her being on this list seems kind of silly to me.

Best Male Pop Vocal Performance: Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day” and James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” both hurt my soul a little – partly due to being overplayed. Usually, I feel the same way about John Mayer (though it has nothing to do with being overplayed – his vocal style just makes me cringe), but I really like the way he’s singing “Waiting on the World to Change.” I want him to win this, hopefully encouraging him to make this change in vocal style permenant.

Best Pop Performance by Duo/Group With Vocal: I really love some Death Cab songs, but they don’t seem to be the one’s that are popular. I’d vote for “Brothers on a Hotel Bed” any day of the week.

Best Dance Recording: I love Depeche Mode, but I don’t see how “Suffer Well” is a “Dance Recording.” Compared to a Timberlake song, though, SOLD!

Best Rock Performance by Duo/Group: I absoluetely love Coldplay’s “Talk.” I don’t yet have any of their album’s (Christmas should change that), but I really think Coldplay puts out some good tunes.

Best Banda album: What’s Banda?

Best Polka album: Really? I didn’t know there was still a big enough fanbase…

Best Soundtrack for a Motion Picture, etc.: I’ve actually seen four out of five nominees, and the only one that I clearly remember being moved by is that of Narnia.

Best Instrumental Arrangement: The first two songs on this list are “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” and “Three Ghouls.” This is a great category.

Best Album notes: I can’t believe this is a category. If it was established back in 1997, I hope Loreena McKennitt has won – she has crazy-fun liner notes.

Producer of the Year, Non-Classical: I like that someone goes by “Danger Mouse,” and I’m impressed with the wide appeal of “Crazy.”

Best Choral Performance: Austin’s Conspirare choir was created by Craig Hella Johnson. I went to choir camp led by this guy!

Accessible – approachable (personality), easy to understand (idea, concept), requiring little intellectual effort (music, work of art).

This is a great concise definition, and the last phrase perfectly reflects the elitist tone with which many “serious” musicians and reviewers use the term. I strongly disagree that music must be difficult to enjoy in order to have value, but there do seem to be people who hold such an opinion.

While the definiton of “Accessible” is straightforward enough, I think that its specific meaning differs from person to person, because musical taste is partially developed, rather than wholly inherent. While some people are more flexible than others, we can generally get used to different styles of music. In a broad sense, we’re all used to Western tonal music. Most of us are also used to verse-chorus song structure. Since Top 40 radio is based on these concepts, it’s generally pretty accessible to everyone. This demonstrates an important distinction – the fact that something is accessible to you doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll like it. I’m certainly not a fan of most Top 40, but I can recognize the verses and choruses, and I can quickly decide whether I like the vocal style, the arrangment, the bass line, etc. I have a solid frame of reference, and I think that goes hand in hand with defining how “Accessible” something is.

I have a theory that people like to listen to music that is fairly, but not completely, accessible to them. We like to push our limits, but not too hard. Since preteens and teenagers haven’t been around long enough to get bored with standard radio fare, they listen to Top 40 and other super-mainstream music. Indie rock, which could be described as more varied and challening than Top 40, finds a warm reception in most college towns and radio, where people have had their fill of the straight-ahead stuff. Classical music is frequently associated with the older generation, which is appropriate given the complexity that has developed in this umbreally genre over the past 500 years or so. The excessive familiarity that comes from constantly working with music helps to explain the elitist sneers of my self-proclaimed nemeses, the “serious” musicians and reviewers. Of course, there are many other factors that contribute to musical taste (nostalgia is another big one), but accessibility seems to be an important piece of the puzzle.

A couple of years ago, I heard of the “Duetche Alternative Charts.”  I love these things for a number of reasons.  First, they have nothing to do with “Alternative” as we Americans used to know it.  Furthermore, and again in contrast to our legacy, the bands on these charts are of a distinctly different style than mainstream music.  Finally, a lot of bands on these charts are Synthpop and/or Industrial.  In 2005, Green Day and Coldplay did make it onto the Top 100 singles chart (there are a few other well-known names, but these are the only representatives of “Mainstream” music by American standards).  But, they were beat out VNV Nation, Apoptygma Berzerk, Iris, and many others.  Depeche Mode’s “Precious” was number one.

It seems likely to me that the whole music chart system (admittedly invented as a marketing tool) homegenizes what people listen to.  If an album or single gets to the top of the charts, people listen to it more, and more people listen to it.  The charts ostensibly only reflect trends, but given the existence of Top 40 stations and radio countdowns, they clearly influence what continues to be played as well.  If Billboard, which currently summarizes the trends of the entire U.S. in its charts, were to divide the nation into many regions, I wonder if different and varied trends might emerge.  For now, I’ll have to be content with what Europe has to offer.

Like most musical movements, genres and styles, Minimalism cannot be defined in black and white terms. The understanding of the concept from which I worked is this: The Western music tradition is an epic of cluttering up good, simple music ideas with a lot of extraneous ornamentation. So, I attempted to write a piece of music that embodies what I’ve been working on as Longing for Orpheus, stripped bare of ornamentation. There are no counter-melodies. There aren’t really any melodies. The whole point of “Orpheus, Briefly” is to move from a static a7 to an interplay between that chord and an Fmaj7.

To reflect the World Music influence of Longing for Orpheus, I included a quiet 1-bar hand drum pattern in the background, with accents every 4th bar. It never changes.

Longing for Orpheus makes heavy use of reverb, so there is reverb on the synthesizer line of “Orphic, Briefly.” What I did not anticipate is that the changes in the level of reverb that I programmed in over the course of the song are the most interesting part of the song. Until the very end, the changes are subtle, and you never would have heard them in a more complex soundscape. I think this kind of thing is what the creators of Minimalism found so intriguing about extreme simplicity, and I can understand why.

I have never sung in a choir where everyone arrived on time. I have never sung in a choir that sat quietly and attentively after the director’s cut-off.

Directors must be meant to suffer.

The Western musical tradition is nothing more than the evolution of meaningless ornamentation – the best way to express musical ideas is a few at a time, and you should take the time to appreciate them.

I haven’t really listened to much of this music, but The Photographer is a fine example. Its composer is Philip Glass, probably the most well-known composer in this style. If you’ve seen The Illusionist, Secret Window, The Hours, or The Truman Show, you’ve heard his music (though these are mostly in Post-Minimalist or other styles).

What I find really interesting is that Trance music works on the same principle, though it hasn’t been as thoroughly defined or debated. There have been many recent offshoots of Trance that are more song-oriented (which kind of parallels the evolution of Post-Minimalism from Minimalism), but the original Trance that came into its own during the early-mid 90’s relied on the extended repetition of a few musical lines, which slowly evolved over the course of the song. Ishkur’s guide has plenty of examples.

Celtic Punk

If you’re into punk, you probably already know about Flogging Molly and the Dropkick Murphys. If it was just one group, it could be viewed as a strange experiment, but there are two successful groups, which gives this credibility as an actual genre.

Dance Opera

A lot of New Age/Nu Ambient music incorporates classical elements – that’s established practice. Operatica, however, takes things a few steps further, mashing actual opera arias (and other classical vocal fare) into straight-ahead electronica. If you’ve seen The Fifth Element, you’ve already been exposed.

Lounged (yes, that’s a verb)

Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine perform Lounge-style covers of songs that just weren’t intended to be covered that way, including Papa Roach’s Last Resort, Coldplay’s Yellow, Madonna’s Material Girl, the Beastie Boys’ Brass Monkey, Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus, and that all-time classic, Ice-Ice Baby.

A number of years ago, my mother mentioned to a co-worker that she listened to Classical music. He responsed along these lines: “Oh, a friend of mine really likes Yanni!”. Oh, how I wish I had been there. In case you didn’t know, Yanni’s a New Age artist. He’s performed with an orchestra, but so have The Eagles. That doesn’t qualify Yanni, or The Eagles, for a place in the Classical rack at the record shop.

I think Classical is more widely misunderstood than any popular music genre – people who don’t listen to Classical seem to think that it IS a genre. There’s no more truth to that than the notion that “Pop/Rock” is a genre. Just as Justin Timberlake, Dido, and Pantera get lumped together for the sake of the music store’s efficiency, so do Handel, Orff, and Brahms. The music in the Classical section represents the “greatest hits” of roughly 500 years, and the length of songs, instruments used, and stylistic differences are just as great there as in the popular music of the past 60 years.

Particularly abrasive to me, personally, is the notion that all electronic music is “Techno.” Trance, Chillout, Synthpop, Drums’n'Bass, Industrial, it’s all “Techno” to some people. Well, not to me. Not to all the other fans of electronic music. And, especially, not to Ishkur, who maintains a website dedicated to educating the masses on the fine point of this discussion. Be warned, it’s easy to waste a LOT of time there.

I’m confident that if you take the time to look into the worlds of Jazz, Country, Hip-Hop, or any other type of music, you’ll find that there are many subgenres, that bands are constantly coming and going, and that new sounds are constantly evolving. You don’t have to like them, but please recognize that they’re there.