Key Points

• Folk music is a type of music that is rich in oral tradition and is considered by many to be simple, unsophisticated music. Love, children, work, protest, and religion are just a few of the aspects of human experience expressed through folk songs.
• Popular music is widely disseminated through mass media. For the most part, popular music is less complex than art music and not as bound by sets of composition and performance rules.
• Art music—also called cultivated or classical music—refers to the tradition of Western religious and secular music produced from the eleventh century until the present day. One of the most beloved pieces in the art music répertoire is the Clarinet Concerto in A major by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Listen to the second movement of this wonderful piece.
• Jazz, over the years has come to be recognized as an acceptable art tradition (although in some cases, begrudgingly so). Jazz uses improvisation as a primary structural component.
• When describing its main attributes, it may be said that jazz originated with Black Americans of the early twentieth century in the urban areas of New Orleans, Chicago, and New York and jazz relies heavily on syncopated rhythms and a combination of
  improvisation and riffs (short melodic and rhythmic patterns) for its basic structure.