Okay, good, so she's onto a winning tactic with that one! Blaze mentally refines their route to focus on 'places she's heard music around', although for now they're just heading back toward the lift.

"Interesting question. There's a lot of classical stuff played here, especially on the jukeboxes. You know, all the way back to the twentieth century. Guess it's not surprising if we Guardians have old-fashioned tastes, huh? But the newer stuff from the City sounds pretty good too. You can dance to it, you know?"

This is the primary criterion. Blaze doesn't know enough to discuss how the music of the City includes and reworks numerous traditions much older than the twentieth century, harking back to the myths and carefully-protected treasures of antiquity as often as they experiment. Successfully preserving their heritage is a symbol in itself, to these people.

But Verity will soon discover that 'classical' covers pretty much anything from the twentieth to the twenty-second centuries, because City Age people are roughly as discerning when it comes to their ancestors' genres as twentieth-century people are of theirs.