Boston’s More Diverse Than You May Realize

Diversity is core to what makes cities great. In the ideal, people of different backgrounds and perspectives live side by side, creating new businesses, solving big problems and enjoying one another’s cultures and traditions. Among major American cities, Boston has long had the reputation of being a White city. But this has changed rapidly in recent years. Boston is now the sixth most diverse U.S. city, according to new Census data released this month.

People often use diverse as synonymous with non-white, but that’s not what it means. Diversity means having a mix of different people represented across multiple groups—this is why a single person can’t be “diverse.” For example, San Antonio has a large non-white population, but isn’t especially diverse. San Antonio is 75 percent non-white, and 64 percent of the city is Hispanic or Latino (there is, however, lots of diversity by national origin within the broad category of Hispanic or Latino). Boston, on the other hand, has a strong mix of people from several different racial/ethnic backgrounds.

Greek philosophers and medieval theorists defined music as tones ordered horizontally as melodies, and vertically as harmonies.

If painting can be viewed as a visual art form, music can be viewed as an auditory art form.

The broadest definition of music is organized sound. There are observable patterns to what is broadly labeled music, and while there are understandable cultural variations, the properties of music are the properties of sound as perceived and processed by humans and animals (birds and insects also make music).

Music is formulated or organized sound. Although it cannot contain emotions, it is sometimes designed to manipulate and transform the emotion of the listener/listeners. Music created for movies is a good example of its use to manipulate emotions.

Music theory, within this realm, is studied with the pre-supposition that music is orderly and often pleasant to hear. However, in the 20th century, composers challenged the notion that music had to be pleasant by creating music that explored harsher, darker timbres. The existence of some modern-day genres such as grindcore and noise music, which enjoy an extensive underground following, indicate that even the crudest noises can be considered music if the listener is so inclined.

20th century composer John Cage disagreed with the notion that music must consist of pleasant, discernible melodies, and he challenged the notion that it can communicate anything. Instead, he argued that any sounds we can hear can be music, saying, for example, “There is no noise, only sound,”[3]. According to musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1990 p.47-8,55): “The border between music and noise is always culturally defined–which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely a consensus…. By all accounts there is no single and intercultural universal concept defining what music might be.”