Songs without Words

A project I’ve been thinking about undertaking for awhile is a “musical family tree” of Western musical styles, detailing the evolution and cross-pollination of musical styles over time. There already exist several charts to this effect, but I have yet to find one that really explains all the relationships that I’ve noticed over the years.

But without fully embarking on this endeavor, I did want to at least introduce a basic concept here to explain an important dichotomy of music, namely: music that leads from the pre-dominant to the tonic, and music that leads from the dominant to the tonic. This concept is important because a straight musical genealogy would classify heavy metal and soft rock as descendants of rock-and-roll (which instrumentally, they are), whereas I would actually place them as the closer successors of classical music than contemporary classical music itself.

Without further ado:

Dominant or Dominant Substitute –> Tonic (V to I (i), VII to I (i), III (iii) to I (i))

Baroque
Classical
Romantic
Song
Bluegrass
Country
Musicals
Soft Rock
Heavy Metal
Pop
Pop Rock
Film Scores
Video Games
Smooth Jazz
Techno and Electronica
Latin

Predominant –> Tonic (IV (iv) to I (i), ii (II) to I (i))

Church Hymns
Gospel
Blues
Folk
Early Jazz
Classic Rock ‘n Roll
Soul
Funk
R&B
Hip-Hop (falls into both, actually)

Neither

Contemporary Classical
Free Jazz