ABSTRACT
The label "bad music", is only interesting as part of an argument. There is no purpose to discuss music which everyone agrees is bad. For musicians, bad music seems to fall into two broad categories. First, incompetent music, music that is badly played, that reflects inadequate skill, technique and so forth. Musicians' incompetence can be explained in two ways. Either they are untutored or they are unprofessional. Even in classical criticism reviewers tend to favor a "passionate" performance, wrong notes and all, over something that is technically flawless but "cold". This argument spills over into a second sort of conception of bad music, that it is self-indulgent. Bad music may also be described as music in bad taste, and this involves a different kind of judgment, in terms of its appropriateness or inappropriateness to a particular function or occasion. Bad music is heard to be music made in bad faith.
