Many societies have broad spectra of genres of music, which generally have labels and are usually associated with (more or less specifiable) listening publics. Often (and especially where mass media are a main vehicle for distribution) the dimensions include the age of the participants --the music(s) of 'young people' are an obvious example, and especially prone to evolutions that puzzle (and often alarm) older folks. And 'classical' forms are also pretty widespread, often associated with cultural variants considered to be "high", and sometimes surrounded by bastions of snobbery. The point is that people use music for lots of purposes. And music is invested with a great deal of power in a remarkably wide range of contexts --ceremonial, liturgical, emotional, age-stratificational, etc.
It's remarkable how little this vein of 'culture' has been mined, though there are specialists (musicologists, ethnomusicologists) who talk to one another (but very rarely to anybody else) about such issues. And it's also interesting to me the degree to which serious interest of academics has concentrated on the music and ignored the musicians, as if they are just the vehicles for the delivery of the music, rather than its creators and producers. Virtuosity is surely admired, but it's far from being understood; it tends to be considered "a gift" or understood to come from excesses of singlemindedness.
I'm often surprised at how readily people decide that they "like" or "don't like" specific music, and how shallow the underlying perceptual apparatus seems to be, which may index the importance music has for most people's lives. This surprise is largely a function of the extreme importance of music in my own life --it's difficult for me to grasp that I am at an extreme on the continuum of involvement, and on the continuum of what I guess I'll call catholicity --meaning that I am actively interested in an extraordinarily wide range of musical expression. I do have blindspots and prejudices and areas of willful ignorance, plenty of them...
One of the ways to approach musics is the organological --via the instruments themselves. This has a certain attraction for those who admire objects and craftsmanship, because the finest instruments are highly refined in design and materials. An example of an instrument with broad geographic distribution is the long zither with movable bridges, which occurs in Japanese (koto), Korean (kayagum), Chinese (zheng), Vietnamese (dan tranh) and Mongolian (yatga) musics.
Gagaku (and links to other Japanese music types and sources), and Gagaku history
(As we've seen, the Japanese imported many items of culture, most often from China. Gagaku is a Japanese version of Tang dynasty court music, --gone from China for more than 1000 years, but alive and well at the Japanese Imperial Court)
In Search of the Sound of Empire: Tanabe Hisao and the Foundation of Japanese Ethnomusicology (part 1) (part 2) by SHUHEI HOSOKAWA
New Directions in Chinese Music (By Dennis Rea)
excerpt from "Garbage Dump" (Zhang Xing):
The place where we live is like a garbage dump
We're all insects fighting and squabbling
We eat our conscience and shit out our thoughts
Is there anything we can do?
No-tear it down!