Developing Concepts of Musical Style

Abstract

This paper describes three studies which investigate age changes in different aspects of listeners' responses to musical styles. In the first study, 105 children between the ages of 8 and 14 years were asked make “odd one out” discriminations amongst triads of classical and popular excerpts drawn from four stylistic groups in each case. There were no consistent age differences, and there was a much higher proportion of correct identifications of the target excerpts for the popular than for the classical styles. The second study investigated stylistic knowledge in 196 participants between the ages of 8 and 80 years by asking them to list what they considered to be 8 prominent styles of music. Participants made finer distinctions amongst the specific styles with which they were likely to be familiar as a result of their particular age cohort. In the third study 275 participants between the ages of 9 and 78 years were asked to name as many styles as they could within each of three genres (classical, jazz, and pop/rock), and to rate how much they liked these nominated styles. The total number of styles nominated followed an inverted-U-shaped pattern with increasing age, and liking for the styles overall was similar across the age groups apart from a significant increase in the oldest group. These results are discussed in terms of LeBlanc's (1991) life-span model of stylistic tolerance and of arousal-based processes In aesthetic preference. Cognitive, or knowledge-based aspects of age differences in responses to musical style are clearly dependent on the social and cultural contexts within which they occur.