I love it when writers help me clarify some categories that I feel intuitively but would have trouble articulating on my own. Here are some helpful categories from Douglas Wilson on musical condemnation and freedom:
There should be no ordinary conflict between genres of music. There might occasionally be a conflict of opinions when it comes to an evaluation of “what kind of occasion this is,” and one of the indicators of those differing opinions was the music chosen. For example, I once had a pastor acquaintance who had done a funeral, and the music selected for it was Kenny Rogers’ “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille.”
There are three basic kinds of musical condemnation that I think are appropriate. I am writing here about the music itself, not music as contaminated by the lyrics.
1. Judging a piece of music as substandard within the rules of its genre — bluegrass badly done, according to the standards of bluegrass, blues badly done, according to the standards of the blues, classical badly done, according to the standards of classical, jazz badly done, according to the standards of jazz, and so on.
2. Taking a piece of music on its face value and rejecting it, when that music declares openly its rebellion against God (e.g. John Cage’s random music, Schoenberg’s atonality, and Johnny Rotten’s entire oeuvre). I leave room here for some very limited and lawful uses for atonal music — as when you need some really creepy music in a movie, right before the axe murderer gets into the house.
3. Judging a piece of music for being wildly out of place — say, Mozart’s Requiem at a third grade birthday party, Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag for the offertory, or Lipbone Redding’s Dogs of Santiago for the bridal march. But with all such negative judgments, the problem is not the music itself, but rather the placement.
Outside these basic areas, if we reject a form of music out of hand because it is not the form of music we prefer, then we are trying to kick against the variegated world that the triune God created. And if we are doing this in a spirit of musical snobbery, we are demonstrating that, however adept we are in the form we prefer, when it comes to music at large, we don’t really know what its for.
You can read the whole thing here.