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It might be interesting for “Evening Calm” to smuggle elements from other traditions or ethnicities or centuries: say, Sylvia Rexach, or Gilberto Gil, or Ravi Shankar, or Debussy. That might involve a greater trust in non-obvious juxtapositions, and in the person programming the juxtapositions.
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I wonder if there is a way of listening that acknowledges the vastness of the library and casts it in a positive light, even for the indifferent. So what are you going to do? Will you dig deeper into the old classifications and consider yourself a lifer with, say, blues or classical music? (I should mention that I have been impressed by the depth of some streaming-service playlists, particularly Songza’s, within a given genre or artist most are attributed to “Songza’s music experts.”) Will you listen according to a radiolike model, either with a purely algorhythmic logic, or playlists sequenced by humans, or the 24-hour live radio service promised by Apple Music? Will you listen to playlists based on mood or time of day or occasion - which usually turn out to be presentations of genre, or at least format, by another name? Or will you find some way to better expand your listening? But they also seem to sense that you associate the concept of musical genres, and their ever more imprecise names - R&B, country, Latin, punk - with the old ways. The Callimachuses of the music-streaming services know that you need help navigating the great library of music. It was overseen by the poet and scholar Callimachus, who understood that users would need to easily find things, and so he cataloged it. Their goal, it is said, was a half-million volumes, and they contacted rulers of the world, asking them to send scrolls of all kinds. The creators of the great library of Alexandria, in the third century B.C., sought to bring together the history of intellectual activity. If there is a basic human desire to have “everything,” there is also a need to manage it. So will the management of your “discovery” involve a narrowing of your library or an expansion of it? And can the streaming services help us “discover” without confining us? You may never know what you aren’t being exposed to. That great library is virtual, not physical. For music-data analysts and others, “discovery” is very important - the idea that listeners can be guided, through stated or anticipated preferences, toward music just slightly to the side of what they like, and ideally by pressing a single button. This is where all those playlists come in, and the other ways services manage or choose songs for you. They hope that you can be slotted into predictable contours: a look, a format, a genre. For the streaming services to take over your listening, they need to know who you are. If I was being soothed, I was also being sold to. It was consistently soft and warm, but focused almost exclusively on the last five years of English-speaking, postfolk Caucasians singing and playing acoustic guitars. Later in the day I checked out Spotify’s “ Evening Calm” playlist. The listening experience felt similar to the mainstream-urban-radio format called rhythmic contemporary. A few different styles may have been represented, directly or through reference - hip-hop with Missy Elliott’s “We Run This,” postdisco with Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” Antillean pop with Becky G’s “Can’t Stop Dancin’ ”- but this was still a closed loop of pop for an off-the-rack kind of morning. So I went to Songza - the music-streaming service that offers only predetermined playlists, much of them designed around mood, time of day or activity - and chose the playlist “Best Morning Ever.” One day last week I woke up and decided I wanted to have the best morning ever.