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Musical styles, for instance. Specifically I am dealing with choosing "blues" or "Blues"? I assume it would be the same for visual art styles.

Wilbur Whateley
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    Possible...but no answers there mention art or music, or explicitly suggest the same rules apply, so someone will end up asking this again specifically about music. – Wilbur Whateley Jun 11 '15 at 19:17
  • The same rules apply, Wilbur. – Robusto Jun 11 '15 at 19:18
  • @Robusto That's great, but my point is that if I am looking for THIS answer, about music, even if I would have read that whole other post, I would not have seen anything about music, and asked this anyway. So, it's not helping clarify for future askers. It would be helpful to see this question marked as a dupe and assume the rules apply, but burying in down votes doesn't help that ;P – Wilbur Whateley Jun 11 '15 at 19:21
  • Sure. There are probably others as well. – Robusto Jun 11 '15 at 19:22
  • Just to answer your question: the blues, blues, classical, jazz, hip-hop, trance, psychedelic, trip-hop, atonal, impressionism, neo-classical—none of these are capitalized. Sometimes you will see the Romantic movement capitalized, but I think that is just a writer being worried that people will think he means small-r romantic. – Robusto Jun 11 '15 at 19:24
  • @Robusto No, it's because the Romantic Movement is a proper noun, just like the Computer Science 101 class. But romantic music is the case we are discussing here. – Wilbur Whateley Jun 11 '15 at 19:31
  • So this is a dupe of a useful question, yet this has a negative rating (as of now). Makes no sense. Is it poorly constructed? Also I just got the "popular question" badge for this question. Welcome to the Twilight Zone of intuition that is Stack Exchange...(the Twilight Zone was a show in the US so the capitalization is correct I believe ;) – Wilbur Whateley Nov 19 '15 at 19:21
  • The question of which this one is a dupe got 28,828 views, and your 1060 by rights should have gone to it. All you did was tap into the mojo that happens to pervade this topic. Also, Twilight Zone: Yes, I understand and sympathize. The workings of SE can seem very strange and even downright hostile at times. Hope you haven't taken offense. – Robusto Nov 19 '15 at 20:34
  • The point to which the ratings (on questions and answers) is overloaded on SE is absurd. In this case you would suggest it is a means to flag the "right" answer, in other words all dupes should be buried by ratings (not deletions?, hello admins, anyone home?) so that people end up at the "right" answer. Isn't the But when I mouse over the ratings buttons, it mentions usefulness and clarity. What does the fact that someone else asked this have anything to do with the quality of a question marked as a dupe? – Wilbur Whateley Nov 20 '15 at 21:13
  • Also, I'm beyond offended, I'm an open critic of this platform. I can't deny that the answers are here (I use Stack Overflow a lot), but I've given up on being part of the community; I feel better about myself as a humble troll... – Wilbur Whateley Nov 20 '15 at 21:16
  • NOTE: just got the "Famous Question" badge for this with 10K views. But, we must keep funnelling votes to the other question to keep the rep flowing... – Wilbur Whateley Mar 23 '17 at 20:54

2 Answers2

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I'm an arts journalist, so I read (and write) a lot of material which is relevant to this question. I would say: no, the overwhelming majority of writers don't capitalise the names of genres.

I admit that I do have an instinct to capitalise "blues" - I think that's because it's often referred to as "the blues", which makes it sound more like a proper noun than other genres do. But it would be very strange to capitalise "Rock", "Pop" or for that matter "Classical", so for consistency "blues" shouldn't have a capital either.

The obvious exception is when the genre is named after a person. So for example, "Brechtian" theatre gets a capital B, because it's named after Bertolt Brecht and acquires its capital from him.

Morton
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    Similarly, some musical genres derived from proper place names can be capitalized; for example, Europop, Britpop, Western swing, etc. – Steven Littman Jun 11 '15 at 20:57
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This question is very similar to the Capitalization of Artistic Trends on ELU.

It seems there's no agreed answer, partly because we can equivocate over how to define artistic movements/styles/genres etc, particularly when many terms are also used more generally.

I'd say... do what you want. If you need an authority, though, here's one.

Don't capitalize genres (use opera, symphony, jazz-- not Opera, Symphony, Jazz). Remember this rule by thinking about genres in literature: you wouldn't capitalize Novel, Short Story, or Poem, either. - University of Richmond Writing Centre

I do like the point made by Morton (who posted while I was still typing this answer) about the seeming proper noun quality of The Blues, though.

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Margana
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