The examples you give of court music, religious music…these are forms that we have ignored, because they are too “old” for the sample design. However, they perhaps do bear formal resemblance to some communal, state-sponsored musics we find in the present day. Many share a family lineage, as well. I’ll have to give this some more thought, before I am equal to your response.

I think these genre forms are rather comprehensive, and virtually every contemporary musical genre I can think of can be included in one (or more) of these classifications. I wonder how tightly coupled you intend the vertically arranged elements to be, and it’s not always clear how sharply differentiated the horizontally arranged elements are. For example, argot to me implies a kind of communicative stylization, so I’m not sure why it’s only associated with the ‘preservationist’ genre). And, I think the distinction – with respect to boundary work – between defending ‘against rivals’ and policing ‘deviants within’ is in fact blurry, and I can imagine examples of scene music that are all about mixing up different traditions…what this suggests to me is that while the taxonomies are fairly comprehensive, it becomes more difficult to account for the hybridity and cross-referencing and outright borrowing and thievery that often takes place in musical productivity. Maybe that’s accounted for, but I wasn’t clear from how given the emphasis in your post on ‘trajectory’ between simpler and more complex forms.

With respect to the island music question, you have a lot of music that was originally court, religious, ‘field’ music – music sung in the fields, etc. – and especially festival music which you could assimilate to one of your categories, e.g., preservationist. But I guess I’m reluctant to try to assign it to a single genre-form, much less a posited trajectory or sequence of transitions between these forms: doing so is certainly possible, but it would require leaching out some of the meaning or some of the dynamic of what’s really going on, I think. While court and religious functions gradually are all but gone, communal festivals – perhaps the ‘informal’ correlate or your state-based genre form – remain important for a variety of reasons, partly preservationist but also providing venues were a lot of avant-garde and industry-sanctioned music has to be performed and prove itself in order to get popular credibility and legitimacy. These aren’t purely concerts or heritage festivals or festivals for devotees of particular genres (e.g., bluegrass festivals). Traces of this can be seen in the utagoe-kissa (public singalongs) that have reproduced themselves at various levels of scale, from the private karaoke room among friends where all kinds of music, though today typically ‘pop,’ are sung, to local community festivals where acts attempt to establish ‘identification of feeling’ between performer and audience, to major national televised events were the ‘stars’ are expected to show up as civic duty, almost. I hate to sound like a gemeinschaftliche romantic, but there’s a communal dimension that the ‘state-sponsored’ music touches upon, but doesn’t cover entirely, that seems to me to be part of what I extract out of island music and its particular sensibilities.

I think I may simply be misinterpreting your framework with respect to its explanatory aims and intentions, or its construction. In any event, I hope this helps a little to clarify what I was getting at, even if it only points to where I’m going wrong in reading your approach.