The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions (and their recreation in performance), through improvisational music to aleatoric forms. Music can be divided into genres and sub-genres, although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to individual interpretation, and occasionally controversial. Within "the arts", music can be classified as a performing art, a fine art, or an auditory art form.
Music may also involve generative forms in time through the construction of patterns and combinations of natural stimuli, principally sound. Music may be used for artistic or aesthetic, communicative, entertainment, ceremonial or religious purposes, and by many composers purely as an academic instrument for study.
The examples and perspective in this section, particularly after about 950, may not represent a worldwide view of the subject.
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Figurines playing stringed instruments, excavated at Susa, 2nd millennium BC. Iran National Museum.
Harwood, Dane (1976). "Universals in Music: A Perspective from Cognitive Psychology", Ethnomusicology 20, no. 3:521-33.
Johnson, Julian (2002). Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value. Oxford University Press. .
Kertz-Welzel, Alexandra. "The Singing Muse: Three Centuries of Music Education in Germany." Journal of Historical Research in Music Education XXVI no. 1 (2004): 8-27.
Kertz-Welzel, Alexandra. "Didaktik of Music: A German Concept and its Comparison to American Music Pedagogy." International Journal of Music Education (Practice) 22 No. 3 (2004): 277-286.
Kertz-Welzel, Alexandra. "General Music Education in Germany Today: A Look at How Popular Music is Engaging Students." General Music Today 18 no. 2 (Winter 2005): 14-16.
Molino, Jean (1975). "Fait musical et sémiologue de la musique", Musique en Jeu, no. 17:37-62.
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques (1987). Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (Musicologie générale et sémiologue, 1987). Translated by Carolyn Abbate (1979). .
Owen, Harold (2000). Music Theory Resource Book. Oxford University Press. .
Small, Christopher (1977). Music, Society, Education. John Calder Publishers, London.
Habib Hassan Touma (1996). The Music of the Arabs, trans. Laurie Schwartz. Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press.
Dolmetsch free online music dictionary, complete, with references to a list of specialised music dictionaries (by continent, by instrument, by genre, etc.)
"On Hermeneutical Ethics and Education: Bach als Erzieher", a paper by Prof. Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz in which he explains the history of the different views hold about music in Western societies, since the Ancient Greece to our days.
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