The 25 Most Ridiculous Band Names in Rock History

#01.
Porno for Pyros:
The story: Former Jane's Addiction frontman Perry Farrell came up with the name while watching coverage of the LA riots on television. Presumably while jacking off.

Why it's ridiculous: Pornography for pyromaniacs is, for all intents and purposes, regular pornography. Sure, there are maybe a few crazy people out there getting sexual pleasure from watching videos of people setting fires-but your garden variety pyromaniac isn't renting College Slut Matches & Gasoline Party VII. He's out burning down the neighborhood Costco. It turns out they just really like burning stuff.

#02.
Nickelback:
The story: Lead singer Chad Kroeger was having trouble coming up with a name, and so approached his brother, who worked at a Starbucks. Coffee was $1.95, which meant every customer who paid two bucks got-waiiiit for it-a nickel back. (It was either that or We're Sorry About the Homeless Man Shooting Up in the Bathroom.)

Why it's ridiculous: Asking cashiers at franchise coffee shops for career advice can only end in tragedy. (Kroeger suffered similar woes after getting a Wal-Mart greeter to do his taxes for him, resulting in the repossession of his house.) If you walk up to the cashier behind a Starbucks counter and, instead of ordering a Tall Sumatran, ask them to name your shitty band, odds are you're going to get something giving-people-change-for-coffee-based.

#03.
The Alan Parsons Project:
The story: Founder Alan Parsons started a "project" with other "project administration personnel" to "drill down" on this whole "music" thing he'd heard so much about. So he named it that.

Why it's ridiculous: It's one thing to just name your band after yourself, like ego cases Dave Matthews and Ben Folds did. But once you've made the choice to be lazy, you're not allowed to get all clever with it afterwards. Besides, it makes the band sound like the sort of after-school activity all the kids who didn't make the basketball team got stuck with. "Today, class, we're going to build Alan Parsons... from common household items!"

#04.
The Lazily Ridiculous:

These next entries earn their place on the list for the sheer lack of thought the bands later admitted they gave to their names. If the bands had spent any less time coming up with something, they would have ended up calling themselves The Band Name.
Stone Temple Pilots

The story: One of the band members thought the logo on the STP car treatment spray bottles was cool. So yes, in case you were wondering: a lot of thought went into this.

Why it's ridiculous: Most of the band members seemed to think titling songs "Kitchenware & Candy Bars" and getting addicted to heroin was a fantastic idea, too. Evidence suggests they might not be the guys to turn to for well-reasoned decisions. The mental image of four guys flying around ancient Aztec temples matches up better with a psychedelic rock band, not a bunch of cock-rockers penning songs like "Meatplow" and "Sex-Type Thing."
#05.
Matchbox 20

The story: Explanations range from the name being the title of a song from an earlier band to the band's drummer seeing the word "matchbox" and the number 20 on a guy's shirt in a restaurant. Either way, shut the fuck up, Rob Thomas.

Why it's ridiculous: If you're going to pick a band name that doesn't mean shit, there's an unspoken rule it should at least sound cool (Soundgarden, etc). Matchbox 20 manages a triple play of mediocrity: It's incomprehensible, it's boring and it's not even very original, given how many other generic bands showed up at the same time as matchbox with "word-number" combos (Blink-182, Sum 41, 13 Engines, Seven Mary Three, etc.).
#06.
Smashing Pumpkins

The story: More of a cautionary tale than anything else, bandmates Billy Corgan and co. reportedly dashed the name off quickly so they could get on with their lives, not realizing they'd be fielding lame pumpkin-based jokes about it for the rest of their lives.

Why it's ridiculous: According to a November 1993 Washington Post interview with bass player D'arcy Wretzky, even the band thinks Smashing Pumpkins "is a stupid name, a dumb bad joke and a bad idea," which should tell you something. These days, they claim the name doesn't even have anything to do with pummeling squash fruit, in that "smashing" was meant to imply "great" (as in the British slang), like that somehow makes it less stupid. It'd be like accidentally crapping yourself on a bus, then telling everyone it's okay, because you meant to: Nobody cares why you did it, Shitty Pants.
#07.
Def Leppard

The story: Singer Joe Elliott thought of the name Deaf Leopard while he was in school (presumably while failing something). The spelling was later changed so the band didn't become confused with punk bands (who are known for their flawless spelling).

Why it's ridiculous: Putting aside '80s metal bands' fascination with animals for a minute (White Tiger, Whitesnake, Great White, Jackyl, Ratt) unless you're a Mozart-level talent, there's simply no excuse for including a word in your band's name that means you can't hear sounds. You might as well just call yourself Terrible Music and save people the energy of mocking you.

#08.
W.A.S.P.

The story: Eager for a cool-sounding metal band name, Blackie Lawless, Rik Fox, Randy Piper and Tony Richards decided to take the word "wasp," then for no reason punctuate the shit out of it.

Why it's ridiculous: When not naming themselves after animals, insects, or something misspelled, metal bands love acronyms. However, unlike KISS (which at least purportedly means "Knights In Satan's Service") or H.I.M. ("His Infernal Majesty"), the best that Lawless has been able to come up over the years is "We Ain't Sure, Pal." (This is probably better than "White Anglo-Saxon Protestants," but only slightly.) Worse, looking at W.A.S.P. song titles like "L.O.V.E. Machine" and "9.5.- N.A.S.T.Y." you start to suspect they might not even know what an acronym is, and just think punctuating stuff looks badass.
#09.
Puddle of Mudd

The story: The 1993 Missouri River flood left the band's practice space a muddy mess, which led them to this name-instead of the far better one, Missouri River Flood.

Why it's ridiculous: Not only do we get an extra "d" for no reason (these guys are the anti-Staind), we also have the privilege of getting an altogether unnecessary word. No, it couldn't just be Mudd Puddle. We definitely need that extra "of." Just like when you're ordering lunch and will sometimes get a sandwich of tuna with chips of potato. Bonus ridiculousness: This band name would actually work perfectly as the name for a bohemian coffee shop where a girl in an orange tank top with a brown bandana on her head asks if you want an organic wheat muffin.
#10.
Of Montreal

The story: Frontman Kevin Barnes has told many conflicting stories about where this Athens, Ga. band got their name, but the one that seems to have gained acceptance is that he was dating a girl from Montreal and it didn't work out.

Why it's ridiculous: What's the word for those people who change their explanation for something 100 times before settling on an excuse that sounds vaguely implausible? Oh, that's right, liars! Barnes named his band Of Montreal because he wanted people to think his band was from Montreal. He knew just as well as everyone else that if your group is from Montreal, you can record yourself taking a poop on a xylophone and Pitchfork will give it a sparkling review. Meanwhile, the last time a great band came out of Athens, Michael Stipe still thought he was straight. But why not just name the band "We're from Montreal" then, and get it over with? Oh right, because Barnes wanted to make it extraordinarily difficult for fans to use his band's name in a sentence:

Of Montreal Fan: Ever heard of Of Montreal? I'm a fan of Of Montreal. In my book there's nobody above Of Montreal.

#11.
Goo Goo Dolls

The story: The band found the name in an issue of True Detective Magazine after a club owner balked at their original name, the Sex Maggots.

Why it's ridiculous: Say it out loud. There's your reason. But not only does the name sound like something an infant would gargle while bursting forth out of the birth canal, it doesn't come anywhere near to complimenting the band's sound (neither does the Sex Maggots, for that matter). Sure it might have seemed like an ironic name back when you guys were young and confident that you'd always rock the fuck out, but now you're on adult contemporary radio, and your name reminds people of the gurgling mess in the back seat that brought their youth to an abrupt end. ROCK!
#12.
The The

The story: A British act decided to come up with a band name even more ironically detached than the Band, just to make Robbie Robertson feel like an asshole.

Why it's ridiculous: A band name this overtly meta is bound to either leave most people reenacting an annoying version of the Abbott and Costello routine or presuming you have a stutter. It also displays a level of pretentiousness that triggers an innate defense mechanism in most human beings to avoid your smug little dipshit band at all costs. (It's also not terribly smart to choose a name guaranteed to make it impossible for people to Google you.)
#13.
Mr. Mister

The story: The band's name references a record by another band called the Weather Report, which had the line "Mister Fister" in it.

Why it's ridiculous: Mr. Mister manages a one-two punch of mediocrity: They've plagiarized an idea another band had, then changed it around just enough to obliterate all the wit and substance from the idea. We're not suggesting the band still wouldn't be on this list if it'd gone with Mister Fister instead. But at least that sounds like the kind of dumb, filthy joke you and your friends might come up with. Mr. Mister sounds like the kind of joke a five-year-old would tell to one of his toys.
#14.
The Mr. T Experience

The story: The members saw Mr. T on television and thought, for some reason, it would be funny to name their band after him.

Why it's ridiculous: If they'd turned on the TV a few seconds earlier in the credits, would they have called themselves the George Peppard Explosion? Besides, you're just inviting your audience to focus on whichever dumb-assed B-grade celebrity you named your band after instead of on your dumb-assed, B-grade music. People going to your concerts hoping for a dose of jibba-jabba and fool-pitying are only going to leave heartbroken. (Kathleen Turner Overdrive had this same problem.)

#15.
Panic! At the Disco

The story: Named after the Smiths song, "Panic," which includes a line about a disco burning down. Note that this offers no explanation whatsoever for the exclamation mark/typo.

Why it's ridiculous: Much like their contemporaries in the whine-rock genre, the title utterly fails at being either cute or intelligent, and is instead simply annoying. At least Fall Out Boy is a Simpsons reference. A bad and obvious one, sure, but that has to earn you a little mileage. Panic! At the Disco makes us imagine a bunch of effeminate guys running around a dance floor freaking out because they ran out of eyeliner.
#16.
Limp Bizkit

The story: Rumor has it that the name comes from the title of the masturbation game, "limp biscuit," in which a group of, no doubt, highly intelligent scholars stand around a biscuit and masturbate onto it. The last guy to ejaculate has to eat it. So in a metaphorical way, the American public has been losing this game every time Limp Bizkit released an album.

Why it's ridiculous: Following the naming convention of its mentor band Korn, Limp Bizkit intentionally misspelled their band name, because that's phat with the kids. Fred Durst was apparently operating under the impression that naming his band after a game in which a bunch of lonely white teenagers stand around jacking off in front of each other was just a little too intellectually haughty, and decided to "dumb it down a little" for us proles. Oh, and it's pretty much never a good idea to describe your hard rock band as "limp." (See Def Leppard.)
#17.
Chumbawamba

The story: A group of British "anarchists" with strong political opinions needed a band name that resonated with the passion of their views, and so picked a gibberish word that means nothing.

Why it's ridiculous: Rage Against the Machine might be a little trite for a band name, but at least it gets the point across: Its members are furious with society for vague reasons you'll need to purchase the album to discover. U2's name doesn't mean anything overtly political, but Bono makes up for it by writing lots of preachy songs about world peace and running around U.N. conferences pretending to be the President of Earth. Chumbawamba, meanwhile, has a retarded name, and their only political statement to date is 'Tubthumping,' which takes the controversial stance that it's incredibly fun to get shitfaced.
#18.
Enuff Z'nuff

The story: Founding member Chip Z'nuff's name rhymed with "enough." And so a legacy of reason was born.

Why it's ridiculous: We're not even convinced this one needs explaining. We've got misspelling, an unnecessary apostrophe, a name that implies impatience with the band itself, a horribly stupid origin story and a guy whose name is Chip Z'Nuff. Plus it rhymes. All kidding aside, how do you come up with something that stupid and not get stopped by loved ones?

#19.
Mott the Hoople

The story: When the band regrouped in the late 1960s, their new manager changed their name from Silence to Mott the Hoople, after a novel of the same name about a circus freak.

Why it's ridiculous: First of all, we don't know anyone who's ever read, or even heard of the novel. We asked a professor of mid-20th century circus freak literature if he'd read it, and he punched us in the stomach for making up such a stupid sounding novel. Also, calling anything Mott the Hoople basically begs one to enquire what the hell a Hoople is, for which of course there's no good answer. It's basically the band name version of the joke that goes "You've got some updoc on your shoulder!" Only when the person replies, "What's up, doc?" you say, "I have no idea, something about a circus freak."
#20.
Hoobastank

The story: In an interview, here's what the band's vocalist, Doug Robb, had to say about the name: "It's really cool, it's one of those old high school inside-joke words that didn't really mean anything."

Why it's ridiculous: Actually, Doug Robb, it's not really cool. If you're going to name your band after a high school inside-joke word that doesn't mean anything, why not use a word that doesn't sound like something you'd shout if you had to wear a helmet all the time and liked to chase after rabbits? Also, you might want to avoid names that manage to suggest, in some way, that your hoobas stink like shit.
#21.
Toad the Wet Sprocket

The story: The band named themselves after a comment in an Eric Idle monologue on a Monty Python album. This, then, is the musical equivalent of the A/V club nerds who recited the "Knights Who Say Nee" sketch over and over.

Why it's ridiculous: Look, just because your band's name is intentionally ridiculous doesn't mean it doesn't count. It's like wearing a Care Bears T-shirt ironically. Yes, you know it's a joke, but at the end of the day, you're a grown man, you're wearing a Care Bears shirt and, we're sorry, you need to be ashamed of yourself. In the same vein, you can talk all you want about the cred naming your band after a Python gag gets you, but it doesn't change the words, or how stupid they sound. Now, Owl Stretching Time: There's a name for a band.
#22.
Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts

Story: There are competing origin stories for the name of Russell Crowe's band, neither of which anyone but writers of Worst Band Name Lists care about. Since we fall into that category, here's the one that sounds most plausible to us: Russell Crowe added up the collective height of the band members and then came up with the word that most closely approximated his nuanced vocal stylings.

Why it's ridiculous: In Crowe's excitement over coming up with a gimmicky band name that suggests he can't sing, and in his band mates excitement to agree with that name lest he pummel them with whatever household object was nearest at hand, the boys apparently forgot to make Foot plural. Also, you'd think a guy who lives on a secluded all-male ranch and is constantly dodging gay rumors would have come up with something that sounds a little less like a gay porno.

#23.
Hootie and the Blowfish

The story: The band is named for two of singer Darius Rucker's college choir friends, nicknamed "Hootie" and "the Blowfish" because one looked like an owl and the other like a blowfish. Interesting note: That choir was named Darius the Black Guy & The Two Ugliest Dudes on Campus.

Why it's ridiculous: In a word: "hootie." In four: "hootie," "and," "the" and "blowfish." We now know from scientific studies performed in 1998 at Cambridge that there isn't a single aspect of Hootie and the Blowfish's name that doesn't invite you, the listener, on a subconscious simian level, to punch each of them in the face until they agree to change it.
#24.
Archers of Loaf

The story: Because the band members apparently wanted to spend every single interview talking about their name, they came up with the stupidest one they could think of.

Why it's ridiculous: Because it's clearly just the result of opening the dictionary two times and using the first word one of the guys pointed to. Unfortunately, one of the words happens to be "loaf," as in "meat" or "pinching a." Also, here's a hint, fellas: If you go out of your way to give yourselves a dumb name, reporters aren't going to ignore it. They're going to ask you about it. And then you'll have to tell the story about how Mike put on a blindfold and pointed at the middle of page 67 in Webster's every day for the rest of your lives.
#25.
!!!

The story: aka Chk-Chk-Chk. In the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, the clicks in the Bushmen's native language were represented with exclamation marks in the subtitles. The band thought that was cool, apparently, and named themselves three clicks. (This also makes the second band that's completely unsearchable by Google.)

Why it's ridiculous: "Hey, Nic Offer, lead singer of the three-exclamation-mark band whose name I can't even begin to pronounce, even after I heard them masturbating all over you on NPR, why did you name your band three exclamation marks?"

THE 20TH-CENTURY GLOBAL MUSIC CULTURE

Music scholars identify Western music as one of several major musical cultures of the world. Other musical cultures include, but are by no means limited to, East Asia (China, Korea, Japan); Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, and the islands of the South Pacific); Southeast Asia; Central Asia; South Asia (India and Pakistan); the Middle East and North Africa; sub-Saharan Africa; and Native American. Some of these musical cultures, such as the Middle East, are quite unified, while others, most notably sub-Saharan Africa, are incredibly diverse. Even within relatively unified cultures, such as the Middle East, there are complex subcultures. For example, since its establishment as a state in 1948, Israel has been populated to a great extent by Europeans, Middle Easterners, and North Africans, and as a result its musical culture comprises a mixture of many imported music cultures. Musical subcultures or communities are often readily identifiable, by distinctions in performance and the education, age, or ethnicity of the audience.
Some musical cultures have been passed down through the generations orally (by singing for example) and aurally (by listening). The lack of a musical notation system or other historical records in these cultures makes discussion of historical traditions guesswork. Other musical cultures have a long and rich written history. Chinese music, for example, has been written about for many centuries, although relatively little of the music itself was notated for posterity. Historical documents indicate that Japanese music has undergone many changes over the centuries, as a result of political and military interactions with both China and Korea. Especially since Japan opened its society to Western influences in the late 19th century, concert and popular musical activities there have become truly multicultural.

THE WORLD’S MUSICAL CULTURES

Music scholars identify Western music as one of several major musical cultures of the world. Other musical cultures include, but are by no means limited to, East Asia (China, Korea, Japan); Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, and the islands of the South Pacific); Southeast Asia; Central Asia; South Asia (India and Pakistan); the Middle East and North Africa; sub-Saharan Africa; and Native American. Some of these musical cultures, such as the Middle East, are quite unified, while others, most notably sub-Saharan Africa, are incredibly diverse. Even within relatively unified cultures, such as the Middle East, there are complex subcultures. For example, since its establishment as a state in 1948, Israel has been populated to a great extent by Europeans, Middle Easterners, and North Africans, and as a result its musical culture comprises a mixture of many imported music cultures. Musical subcultures or communities are often readily identifiable, by distinctions in performance and the education, age, or ethnicity of the audience.
Some musical cultures have been passed down through the generations orally (by singing for example) and aurally (by listening). The lack of a musical notation system or other historical records in these cultures makes discussion of historical traditions guesswork. Other musical cultures have a long and rich written history. Chinese music, for example, has been written about for many centuries, although relatively little of the music itself was notated for posterity. Historical documents indicate that Japanese music has undergone many changes over the centuries, as a result of political and military interactions with both China and Korea. Especially since Japan opened its society to Western influences in the late 19th century, concert and popular musical activities there have become truly multicultural.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN MUSIC

When most people speak or write of Western music, they are referring to Western tonal music, composed mostly in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and based largely on European folk tunes. Western music is actually much broader than this, spanning many centuries and encompassing many other ways of constructing music.

Music, like language, continually evolves within its culture. Western music, for example, was predominantly vocal monophonic music (music with a single melodic line), and was based upon a scale or scalelike formula until well into the Middle Ages. Around the 9th century ad, the first forms of polyphony were written down and discussed, and vocal polyphony predominated in music through the beginning of the 17th century. During the 17th century, both instrumental music and homophonic music—music in which voice and chordal accompaniment produce a single melody—became increasingly common. The well-documented stylistic eras of classical music (about 1750 through 1820) and romantic music (about 1820 through 1900) represent the height of major-minor tonal music that emphasized clarity of form. This preference was in turn followed by increasing individuality of expression, accompanied by an even greater exploration of the limits of both tonality and formal design.

The pace of musical evolution has accelerated in the 20th century. New compositional styles include chance, the random use of noise and electronically produced sounds in compositions, and serialism, the repetition of sequences of established rhythms, levels of loudness, and pitches. Along with these developments in compositional styles, the 20th century has seen an immense exchange of music that has led to new developments in many music cultures. Both the rapid pace of change and the multicultural cross-pollination of music can be traced directly to improved global communications and the explosion of technologies such as sound recording, radio and television, and computers.

THE ELEMENTS OF MUSIC

At its simplest, music consists of a short, unaccompanied melody, known as monophony. But even the simplest melody consists of many important components. Some of the most obvious of these are the varying heights or pitches of the tones, their durations, their loudnesses, their tone colors or timbres, and their articulations.
A. Pitch
Although most musical cultures share the concept of highness and lowness of pitch, awareness of this concept is not inborn. Psychological studies have demonstrated that few five-year-olds understand the concept of high and low pitch, whereas most nine-year-olds do. Pitch depends on the rate of vibration, or frequency, of sound waves that produce a particular tone. Higher pitches have a higher frequency (greater rapidity of vibrations) than lower pitches. Most musical cultures recognize the octave, a unique relationship of two pitches. Two pitches are an octave apart when their rates of vibration form an exact 1:2 ratio. Tones an octave apart blend together so smoothly that listeners often confuse the two tones or think they are hearing a single tone. Pitch-naming systems reflect this similarity by giving notes an octave apart the same name (A, B, C, for example, in Western music). Most musical cultures recognize the concepts of pitch and octave, but not all. For example, there is no Japanese word for octave although what Westerners call octave is found in traditional Japanese music.
Each musical culture has one or more sets of tunings that define the gaps or intervals between pitches in that group’s music. By the 18th century, most Western music was based on 12 equivalent intervals per octave. This system is represented by the chromatic scale. Its 12 equally spaced tones per octave, called half-steps or semitones, can be heard by playing the tones that correspond to 12 adjacent frets on a guitar fretboard, or to 12 adjacent keys on any modern Western keyboard instrument. The semitone is the smallest gap in traditional Western music, but smaller intervals (collectively referred to as microtones) are used in some modern Western music, as well as in some other musical cultures.
Again, learning plays an important role in what pitch relations are considered pleasing. In a psychological study early in the 20th century, participants spent several months becoming familiar with the sound of a scale based on such small intervals that all 12 scale members fit within a standard half-step. By the end of the learning period, many participants stated that this microtonal scale sounded very natural, and they could recognize melodies composed with this scale. Some participants even stated that the top note of the scale seemed twice as high as the lowest note—the description Western musicians typically give to the octave.
For the past several centuries, the preferred underlying pitch structure in Western art music has been the diatonic scale. This scale consists of seven tones related by a total of five whole-steps and two half-steps, arranged in the sequence from C to C of the white keys of a modern piano or organ. Depending on the pitch relationships among whole-steps and half-steps, scale systems are referred to as either major or minor, or as a specific kind of ecclesiastical or church mode.
B. Scale
A great deal of Western folk music, along with much folk music and art music around the world, conforms to a five-tone, or pentatonic, scale. The best-known form of the pentatonic scale contains no half steps. Instead, it is made up of three whole-steps and two step-and-a-half intervals. The black keys on a modern piano or organ keyboard produce a pentatonic scale.

There are many scale systems in the world, and not all are based on dividing the octave into 12 equal parts. For example, the Javanese Sléndro scale contains five tones, but tunings of these five tones do not correspond to twelve steps in an octave scale as with other pentatonic scales. Scholars have measured several different tuning versions of the Sléndro scale, including some that approximate dividing the octave into five equal intervals. When comparing the sounds of Javanese and Balinese gamelan performances, listen carefully to the tunings of the gongs
C. Time

Musical rhythm is defined broadly as everything having to do with the way music uses time. More specifically, this includes characteristics such as durations of tones and silences, and patterns of durations, both of which can focus attention on certain tones making them more prominent than others. These more-prominent or accented tones often mark regular patterns that enable listeners to perceive tones as members of larger groups. We can illustrate this sort of perceptual grouping with a simple visual example. Look at the string of numbers in the first line and the string of letters in the second line for a minute, and see if you can see any patterns:



The numbers form a simple sequence that repeats itself every three numbers. Rather than saying this is a string of 12 integers, we can recognize that this is a group of three elements each repeated four times. Since the numeral 1 is the first member of each new group, we may pay a little more attention to it. The recurring pattern that enables us to think of these numbers in groups is similar to musical meter (the grouping of beats). In this case, the three-element repetitions are analogous to a common pattern in Western music, triple meter, represented by the metric signature µ.

The string of letters is also fairly simple, because the pattern repeats every four letters. This repeating pattern of four is analogous to quadruple meter, represented by the metric signature ¹. As with the repetition of sets of numbers, the first element in each new pattern claims attention and is more accented and emphatic. But in this sequence a second pattern of emphasis is added by the capital letters. This pattern draws attention away from the expected pattern of accents by shifting the stress to a normally weak beat. This device, known as syncopation, is found in music of many cultures.
D. Harmony
In most music, and especially in Western music, important and style-defining patterns are formed by pitches that overlap with one another in time, producing a chord, or harmony. Two or more tones that occur at the same time form a harmonic relationship called a block chord. These tones are called broken chords or arpeggios when heard separately but in sufficiently rapid succession that the listener perceives them as part of the same harmony.
Composer Scott Joplin used block and arpeggiated chords in his ragtime style. The higher-pitched notes in the ragtime piece “The Cascades,” for example, are played by the pianist’s right hand. These pitches form the same harmonies as do the lower-pitched notes played by the left hand. But the higher chords played by the right hand sound more melodic because they are broken or arpeggiated, while the block chords played by the left hand form the accompaniment.
Two or more tones heard simultaneously may belong to separate melodies that fit well together, but which occupy different octave registers, have distinct rhythmic patterns, or otherwise have different shapes or contours. Music composed of multiple independent but related parts is referred to as polyphony or, when the parts are distinct melodies, counterpoint. Two very different forms of polyphonic music with contrapuntal melodies may be heard in the early 20th-century jazz piece “Dippermouth Blues” and in the 16th-century Missa De Beata Virgine by Palestrina.

FORM Of Music

The overall shape or architecture of music is referred to as its musical form. We will begin with a brief discussion of form in Western art music, and then compare this with an example of form in non-Western music.
A: Classical Form in Western Music
There are several possible reasons why composers of Western art music, which is also called classical music, have tended to pay so much attention to musical form and to build relatively complicated formal structures. One reason is that the widespread use of Western musical notation came to influence the composition of the music itself. The basis of this notation is a staff of five parallel lines. Each line and space between lines represents a different pitch, so the arrangement of notes on the staff allows musicians to take in the entire piece and to compare different sections of the music at a glance. This kind of formal art music has tended to serve as the focus of an event, as in a concert hall or salon, or as a means of directing focus, as in a royal court or church. Given its importance in these settings, the music must hold the audience’s attention. Imbuing music with the repetitions and variations of a story is a standard way of doing this.
Audiences familiar with traditional Western tonal music will resist music that is too repetitive or too complex. A balance in between keeps the listener absorbed in fresh material, at the same time reassuring the listener of the coherence of the piece through the repetition of earlier parts. Variety may be introduced by contrasts in musical elements such as melody, the prominent musical sequences within a piece; rhythm, the durations of patterns and notes that create forward movement; harmony, the combination of notes sounded at the same time; and key, in Western music, the tonality produced by seven tones in a recognizable relationship to a central tone. Repetition of these elements may make the music more unified or coherent, as with the return of a melodic or rhythmic pattern heard earlier in the piece.
Beethoven’s Sonata in C major op. 53 (1803-1804) is a clear example of the simultaneous use of old, new, and modified material in music. Throughout the piece there is a repetitive pattern of longer and shorter notes: long-short-short-long-long. The first 19 notes fall into a pattern of 5+5+5+4, based on this long-short pattern.
The first five notes of this melody descend, establishing the melodic pattern, or motif (also called motive). The next five notes are similar to the first in rhythm, but different melodic direction: something old, something new. The third set of five notes is identical to the first set except that it is heard in a lower octave, or register, tilting the balance more toward repetition. The final four notes are similar, but not identical, to the second set, creating again a counterbalance of old and new. The same melody can be heard again in the first and second halves of the piece, in a lower register than the ornamental tones that first and with greater embellishment accompany it. At first hearing the melody may not be recognizable, but it is definitely there beneath the surface, helping to unify the music.

Musical form can and usually does exist on more than one level in Western classical and popular music. The sequence of the statement of a musical idea, or exposition, the competing statement of a contrasting idea, or development, and the return of the original or a variation of either idea, or recapitulation, constitutes the primary pattern of form in Western classical and popular musical cultures.
B. Beyond Western Classical Form
The formal processes described above are found to some extent in music worldwide, but they are not universal. One reason for this is that not all music is intended for the concert stage. For example, music has been used throughout the ages for important rituals, and some cultures carry on these traditional rituals today. In many rituals the music acts as a powerful lens, focusing and uniting the emotional and spiritual energies of the assembled people. Rather than having sections of contrasting or varying ideas, music with this communal function is often purposefully repetitive so that the group members’ voices and movements can join together in an intense, and sometimes even trancelike, union.
Much ritual music contains subtle repeated and varied melodic ideas, but the most obvious and powerful characteristic tends to be a strong, repetitive rhythm. For example, in one instance of healing music of Malawi, the first thing heard is an exciting, driving beat produced by wooden sticks being struck together, represented in the figure below as red squares. This beat is joined by a drum playing at triple the rate of the struck sticks; this triplet is represented in the figure by the small gold diamonds.
The Malawi example contains a formal element similar to one in the Beethoven sonata discussed earlier, but it is quite subtle. In the vocal part of this ritual music a slightly varied version of the melody returns. The percussive rhythmic foreground of the music, however, is definitely prominent.

VOICE AND MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

Before mass media made it possible to share music worldwide, most musical cultures could be identified through several practices. These included the instruments used in musical performance, the structural components of the music such as scales, and recognizable performance practices such as bending notes in a certain way. The many technological developments in musical recording and delivery systems during the 20th century have helped to blur the boundaries between these cultures.
The voice is the most important element in the music of some cultures, while instrumental sounds are more important in others. According to some historians, Western music has steadily changed in this regard. Before the 17th century, vocal music was the predominant performance medium. Vocal and instrumental music coexisted on essentially an equal basis during the next century. Instrumental music has predominated during the 19th and 20th centuries.
A. Percussion
Instruments of the percussion family are undoubtedly found in the greatest number of musical cultures. Percussion instruments are referred to as membranophones if they produce sound through the vibrations of a stretched skin or other membrane. They are called idiophones if they produce sound through their natural resonance when struck, rubbed, plucked, or shaken. Drums are membranophones; hollowed logs, bells, gongs, xylophones, and pianos are examples of idiophones.
B. Wind
Wind instruments, or aerophones, produce sound in several ways. The performer’s lips may produce the vibration, as with brass instruments. The vibration may be produced by a column of air split across a sharp edge (flutes, pipes, whistles). Or the vibration may be produced by one or two reeds, as with instruments such as the clarinet, saxophone, oboe, bassoon, or the Korean oboe called a piri.
C. String
The string, or chordophone, family has several branches. In one branch, which includes the zither, dulcimer, and Japanese koto, strings are stretched across a flat body. In a second branch, each instrument has a neck, for example the lute, guitar, Indian sitar, Arabic ‘ud, or violin. A third branch includes plucked instruments with multiple strings, such as the lyre or the harp, where each string produces only one pitch.
D. Electronic
Electronic instrument, or electrophone, refers broadly to any means of generating, modifying, or amplifying musical sounds electronically. Thus any instrument played through an amplifier becomes an electronic instrument. The term most often refers to instruments that generate sound electronically.
Although there were experimental electronic instruments in the early 20th century, sound synthesizers and computer-based music composition, arrangement, recording, and distribution have only in recent years become accessible to a broad segment of the population.

MUSICAL CULTURES

American jazz great Duke Ellington once stated that there were only two kinds of music—good and bad. Music is pleasing to its loyal audiences who have learned to distinguish nuances of style and may be able to identify their favorite performers by sound. It may be less than pleasing to others, who may comprehend so little of the music that they think it all sounds alike. Music can also be performed well or poorly. These judgments are made within a musical culture, according to what that culture believes about music. It is obvious how important the composer and the performer are in musical communication, but the importance of the audience’s knowledge and active participation in music is often underestimated or ignored.
Most musical cultures divide into so-called art music and music of the people, though these two categories are not always distinct. Art music demands a high level of training on the part of the performer and a relatively high level of sophistication on the part of the audience. Popular and folk styles of music can become equally sophisticated, but they tend to start out being easier to perform and more easily understood by a wider audience. Almost every musical culture has subcultures, and these subcultures often have their own subcultures. Western music is one of the clearest examples of a multi-layered musical culture.
Baroque, classical, romantic, modern, and postmodern are all recognized styles of Western art music that together span the last three centuries. But more specific musical genres, such as religious music, folk music, military music, popular music, film music, and show music, have coexisted with art music during this time period. And within any one of these broader musical styles, we can find other musical subcultures. For example, within the broad musical range of styles called popular music, we find blues; within the subculture of blues, we find field blues and urban blues, among others.
Two pieces of music within the same musical culture, and even within the same musical subculture (for example, rock music), can sound very differently and can appeal to different groups. Compare, for example, two examples of music that some people would group together as rock music, David Bowie’s “Changes” (from Hunky Dory, 1972) and “Fortunate Son” (from Willy and the Poor Boys, 1969) by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Although these two songs were recorded and released within a few years of one another, they have distinctly different styles, and they tended to attract different audiences. Creedence Clearwater Revival was one of several back-to-basics American rock groups that revisited the traditional blues and country-western musical heritage of rock. This was at least in part a reaction to the influence of British rock singers like Bowie and other groups that had gained a huge international following during the 1960s and 1970s.
Both Symphony No. 4 in G Major by Austrian composer Gustav Mahler and Suite: Pour le Piano by French composer Claude Debussy can be thought of as European art music, and both were completed in 1901. Once again, however, we find music with clearly different sounds. The most obvious difference is in performance medium: orchestra and voice in the Mahler work; piano in the Debussy composition. The two works also differ in pitch structure. The Mahler symphony is still organized around a set of harmonic relationships among pitches and would be described as tonal. It also represents a familiar distribution of notes in Western music known as major mode, based on the relationship of whole and half tones to one particular tone. Fundamentally different, the Debussy suite approaches the atonality (absence of tonality) of a whole-tone scale, a sequence in which no one tone functions as center. Although these pieces come out of the same musical culture, there is a more profound difference between the two pieces than just these characteristics. Mahler was extending the German-Austrian musical tradition, composing within a subculture that included predecessors such as Beethoven, Brahms, and Bruckner. Debussy’s so-called impressionist style was meaningful as a reaction to this same subculture.

These examples of subcultures within musical cultures also begin to suggest how a group can adopt music as a symbol of its identity. In and of themselves, the colors green and orange are not really about anything. But in Europe these colors have been invested with strong religious and political meanings over the past several centuries. In many parts of western Europe and especially in Ireland the colors are associated with religious division: green for the Catholics, orange for the Protestants. In a similar way, music can become part of the glue of a subculture: an intangible but extremely strong identifying and binding element.

WHEN MUSIC BEGAN

It seems likely that everyday activities, such as the movements in repetitive work and in walking, were rhythmically regular enough to invite some sort of embellishment. Related breathing rhythms, chanting, or other accompaniment, such as the tapping of a walking stick while walking or the transformation of a work tool into an instrument while working, may have been early forms of music. In fact, whether sacred Native American corn-gathering songs or melodies heard in elevators or supermarkets, music still accompanies our ceremonial and everyday activities.
Scholars can only speculate about when music began or which cultures had music first. From ancient times people have told stories of its origins. The so-called music of the spheres was thought by Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras in the 6th century bc—and by later classical and medieval philosophers of the Western world—to be a perfectly harmonious music, inaudible on Earth, produced by the movement of the stars and planets. In many non-Western cultures ancient thinkers understood music as part of a system of cosmological, philosophical, or scientific thought. For instance, the musical scale of ancient China, derived through arithmetic from a basic note, reflected the ancient Chinese conception of the organization of the universe. Each degree of the scale was closely related to the cardinal points (north, south, east, west), the elements, the seasons, the planets, the months of the year, colors, materials, numbers, parts of the human body, animals, smells, and so forth. The Chinese found in nature eight different sources of musical sound: metal, stone, silk, bamboo, calabash, terra cotta, skin, and wood.
Many of the elaborate melody patterns of India, called ragas, are believed to have magical or curative powers. Ragas are traditionally played at specific hours or during specific seasons; it is believed that to depart from this timetable would be harmful to the performer and audience. In some tribal societies, music appears to serve as a special form of communication with supernatural beings, and the prominent use of music in modern Christian and Jewish services may be a remnant of such a purpose. Music has always held an important role in religious rituals.

INTRODUCTION

Music, artful arrangement of sounds across time. This definition is obviously very broad, but a narrower one would exclude too much. Music is part of virtually every culture on Earth, but it varies widely among cultures in style and structure. Definitions of music can change dramatically over a short time, as they have across the world during the 20th century.
Can music exist without sound? Some philosophers argue that music should be defined as a kind of “mental image” and that the physical aspects of sound are simply by-products of this image. If you think you can have a musical experience by imagining the sound of a piece of music, then you think music can exist without sound. But most musical experiences involve producing or listening to physical characteristics of sound such as pitch and timbre (quality comparable to texture or color in sight).

Is the tape-recorded sound of a large metal-stamping machine music? Are 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence music? Is the activity of reading a list of hundreds of seemingly unrelated objects, activities, and states of mind music? Each of these “works”, as well as many other sounds (or nonsounds), has been copyrighted as a musical composition, performed, and recorded in the 20th century. One of the legacies of 20th-century music is to have blurred the definition of music as never before.
Other experts argue that whether any particular pattern of sounds (or our mental image of this pattern) is or is not music hinges on the musical culture into which we were born and in which we have grown up. In other words, whether sounds are music or not has more to do with learning than with anything about the physical characteristics of the sounds or the inborn characteristics of people. An American or European, hearing for the first time a Javanese gamelan performance or singing by the Ewe people of West Africa, might feel disoriented and disappointed by the unfamiliar and seemingly meaningless sounds of these kinds of music. Similarly, Javanese or Ghanaian listeners might feel every bit as disappointed when they first hear the music of Austrian composer Franz Schubert or the songs of a popular rock group, and they might find these equally meaningless.

Like language, another arrangement of sounds, music is a uniquely human form of communication with well-developed rules of construction much like grammar. Some language experts would say that you can listen to someone speaking a language you do not understand and still know whether the speaker is excited or tired, angry or delighted. You would be making interpretations based upon the speech patterns: loud or soft, high-pitched or low-pitched, rapid and bitten off, or slow and smooth. Corresponding to these elements of speech are musical variables such as dynamics (force and volume), register (range of music or voice), mode (arrangement of a set of tones), and articulation (such as staccato, meaning abrupt and crisp; or legato, smooth and even). On the other hand, most people would agree that a meaningful conversation can only take place when both the speaker and the listener speak the same language. The conversation becomes even more meaningful when the parties are talking about something or someone they both know well.

Although there is no general agreement as to exactly what music communicates or how it communicates it, some individuals and governments have believed that music possesses great powers of communication. Most ancient Greek philosophers believed that listening to music based on certain of the modes in use at the time was beneficial to the development of a young person’s character, and warned that listening to music based on certain other modes would have harmful effects. For centuries Chinese beliefs about music were influenced by the philosophy of Confucius, whichmusic was not to entertain but to purify one's thoughts.