14/6/2014

Genre in Oxford Music Online

Oxford Music Online

Grove Music Online
Genre

Results list

Next result

article url: http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com:80/subscriber/article/grove/music/40599

Genre.
A class, type or category, sanctioned by convention. Since conventional definitions derive
(inductively) from concrete particulars, such as musical works or musical practices, and are
therefore subject to change, a genre is probably closer to an ideal type (in Max Weber's sense)
than to a Platonic ideal form.
Genres are based on the principle of repetition. They codify past repetitions, and they invite future
repetitions. These are two very different functions, highlighting respectively qualities of artworks
and qualities of experience, and they have promoted two complementary approaches to the study
of genre. The first is properly a branch of poetics, and its students have ranged from Aristotle to
present-day exponents of an analytical aesthetic. The second concerns rather the nature of
aesthetic experience, and is best understood as an orientating factor in communication. This
perspective has been favoured by many recent scholars of literature and music, and reflects a
more general tendency to problematize the relation between artworks and their reception.

1. Typologies.
Since Aristotle, a central concern of Western poetics has been with the classification of works of
art. The principal role of classification is arguably pragmatic to make knowledge both
manageable and persuasive but its effect can be to shape, and even to condition, our
understanding of the world. In this sense the underlying tendency of genre is not just to organize,
but also to close or finalize, our experience. This implies a closed, homogeneous concept of the
artwork, where it is assumed to be determinate and to represent a conceptual unity. Only then is it
readily classifiable.
In literary studies, and in studies of operatic and other vocal music from the Western tradition,
typologies have been conditioned in large part by the philological orientation of scholarly inquiry,
at least until relatively recently. This has privileged classical genres such as tragedy, comedy,
epic and lyric, with the novel a more recent addition. A classical emphasis has likewise shaped
ethnological classifications, foregrounding genre titles such as ballad, legend, proverb and lyric
folksong, all of which have been used extensively as a focus for the collection and classification of
folk poetry and folk music. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries some of these genre titles
began to infiltrate art music, where they joined functional titles such as those associated with
courtly, rural or (increasingly) national dances. Since these genres, like key characteristics and
affective figures, were part of a larger complex of representations with a basis in rhetorical
concepts, they had an explicit communicative function. This function was rather less apparent
(though it was by no means excluded) when the genre title referred to a work of so-called
absolute music. Titles such as sonata, symphony and quartet did, after all, mark a quest for
autonomy within instrumental art music.
The repetition units that define a musical genre can be identified on several levels. In the
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40599?q=genre&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit

1/4

14/6/2014

Genre in Oxford Music Online

broadest understanding of the concept, they may extend into the social domain, so that a genre
will be dependent for its definition on context, function and community validation and not simply on
formal and technical regulation. Thus the repetitions would be located in social, behavioural and
even ideological domains as well as in musical materials. The lyric piano piece of the early 19th
century might be considered an undivided genre in these terms, and so might contemporary rock
music. A narrower understanding of genre, and a more common usage, separates musical
works from the conditions of their production and reception, and identifies genre as a means of
ordering, stabilizing and validating the musical materials themselves (the lyric piano piece has its
own constituent genres, as does contemporary rock). This was largely the understanding of
Gattung promoted by Guido Adler in his influential scheme for Musikwissenschaft. Yet even here
repetition units would normally reach beyond the notes themselves, embracing instrumentarium
and performance-site, as well as less tangible qualities such as tone and character. Formal
archetypes and stylistic schemata may well be constitutive of a genre, but they are not in any
sense equivalent to it. Indeed a genre, working for stability, control and finality of meaning, might
be said to oppose the idiomatic diversity and evolutionary tendencies characteristic of both form
and style.
The classification of genres essentially a systematic activity begs larger historical questions.
How are genres created, and why? Within literary criticism, several evolutionary models have
been proposed (see Bovet and Brunetire). Of these, one of the most persuasive was the theory
developed by Russian Formalist critics such as Shklovsky, Tnyanov and Tomashevsky. Here the
governing principle is one of struggle and succession (Shklovsky), a process, internal to the art,
in which the dominant or canonized line comes into conflict with co-existing minor lines and is
eventually overthrown by these minor lines, now duly canonized. New genres emerge, then, as
accumulating minor devices acquire a focus (a dominant), and challenge the major line. An
alternative view, and one applied more directly to music, emerges from Adorno's Aesthetic
Theory. Here the dialectic is not between major and minor lines, but between Universal and
Particular, where deviations from a schema in turn generate new schemata. Moreover, the
deviations are seen as indispensable to the function and value of the schema in the first place.
Universals such as genres are true to the extent that they are subject to a countervailing
dynamic.
Unlike the Russian Formalists (or for that matter New Critical students of genre such as Northrop
Frye), Adorno located artistic genres within a larger social dialectic, and for that reason his
analysis is historically contingent. Thus he could refer to nominalism and the demise of artistic
genres in the 19th century. Similar arguments were presented by Irving Babbitt and Croce, and
they were made specific to music by Carl Dahlhaus, who claimed that from the early 19th century
onwards musical genres rapidly lost substance. The suggestion here is that the performanceand genre-orientated musical culture of the 18th and early 19th centuries was increasingly
undermined by a swerve towards the musical work. This work-centred perspective (the product of
a more general intellectual shift from doctrinal to rational knowledge) was ultimately formalized in
the discipline of music analysis, which tended to minimize the power of genre in its discourses.
Musical works, in other words, were less concerned to exemplify genres than to make their own
statement. It is notable, then, that genre definitions and classification systems have played a
subsidiary role in discussions of 20th-century art music, though the quest for norms (Ki Mantle
Hood) continues to inform the work of folklorists and ethnologists such as Alan Dundes and Dan
Ben-Amos.

2. Genre and social practice.

From the mid-1960s a very different approach to the study of genre developed, due in large part to
a shift in critical perspective from the nature of artworks to the nature of aesthetic experience. That
shift was accompanied by a parallel shift in the understanding of genre from the classification of
historically sedimented categories towards a more fluid, flexible concept concerned above all with
function, with the rhetoric or discourse of genre within artistic communication and reception. The
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40599?q=genre&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit

2/4

14/6/2014

Genre in Oxford Music Online

simplest semiology recognizes the sign as bipartite, with both parts essential to its meaning.
Thus a genre title is integral to an artwork and partly conditions our response to its stylistic and
formal content, but it does not create a genre. Nor will a taxonomy of shared characteristics of
itself define a genre. It is the interaction of title and content that creates generic meaning. Clearly,
within this interaction, the content may subvert the expectations created by the title, though it can
do so only where a sufficient correspondence of title and content has been established in the first
place. In this sense, as Heather Dubrow has noted (in her chapter The Function of Genre), a
genre behaves rather like a contract beween author and reader, a contract that may be purposely
broken. Genre, in short, is viewed as one of the most powerful codes linking author and reader.
While this approach was developed above all in literary studies, it very soon found applications in
ethnology and in art music. A seminal ethnological study was William Hanks's Discourse Genres
in a Theory of Practice, where a genre is viewed as a pairing of (socially and historically
produced) conventions and expectations. This highlights the communicative properties of genre.
Genres, according to Hanks, consist of orienting frameworks, interpretative procedures, and sets
of expectations, and as such they may be manipulated for a wide variety of communicative ends.
This more flexible, open-ended conception of genre has also been developed in recent writing by
musicologists. One signal of a renewed interest in the subject was a group of papers on genre at
the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society in 1986, given by Leo Treitler, Anthony
Newcomb, Laurence Dreyfus and Jeffrey Kallberg. Kallberg in particular went on to develop the
notion of genre as contractual in two influential papers: Understanding Genre: a Reinterpretation
of the Early Piano Nocturne, and The Rhetoric of Genre: Chopin's Nocturne in G minor. By
revealing that Chopin subverted genre titles in ways that created specific historical meanings, he
demonstrated that the communicative properties of genre depend not only on a consensual code
that enables meaning to be created, but also on the reconstruction of contexts in a
historiographical sense.
An attractive aspect of this understanding of the concept has been its capacity to accommodate
About the Index
the mixing or blending of genres, a device that might well confuse the classifier, but which greatly
strengthens the communicative and programmatic potential of genre. Since genres
possess
Show related
links
certain recognizable identifying traits (genre markers), they can be counterpointed within an
artwork to generate a play of meanings which may, in some later style systems, extend into irony
or parody, or even point beyond the work into the sphere of referential meaning. Thus in the 18th
century a sequence of generic topics (Leonard Ratner), closely tied to conventional affective
meanings, might well have registered more forcefully with contemporary listeners than any sense
of the work as a unified structure. The work, in other words, would have been heard in sequential
terms less a structure than a succession. In the 19th century there was a greater degree of
cross-fertilization, as emotionally loaded, popular genres increasingly penetrated the world of the
symphony, the sonata, the quartet. In such cases an ironic mode may be introduced. The work is
not itself a march, a waltz or a barcarolle but rather refers to a march, a waltz or a barcarolle. The
popular genre is part of the content of the work rather than the category exemplified by the work.
By the end of the 19th century this counterpoint of genres could be a powerful agent of expression,
strongly suggestive of reference. Robert Samuels has suggested (in his chapter Genre and
Presupposition in the Mahlerian Scherzo) that the play of three generic types in the Scherzo of the
Sixth Symphony (march, lndler, folkdance) succeeds in teasing out a referential meaning which
is neatly embodied in the topos of the Dance of Death, itself a resonant allegorical motif in
Western culture. The strength of genre for Samuels's purpose is its double existence as a
musical category and a social construct, inviting a journey through musical intertextuality to the
world beyond the notes. What the analysis demonstrates is that the demise of artistic genres is
real only to the extent that an auteur-based model of history is allowed to dominate, and with it a
one-sided understanding of genre as a generalized typology of shared materials. The recognition
that a social element can participate in both the definition and the function of genre releases its
energy and confirms its continuing value for our culture.

Bibliography
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40599?q=genre&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit

3/4

14/6/2014

Genre in Oxford Music Online

F. Brunetire: Lvolution des genres dans l'histoire de la littrature (Paris, 1890, 6/1914)
B. Croce: Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale (Bari, 1902, 4/1912; Eng. trans.,
1909, 2/1922/R)
I. Babbitt: The New Laokoon: an Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston, 1910)
E. Bovet: Lyrisme, pope, drame (Paris, 1911)
P. Kohler: Contribution une philosophie des genres, Helicon, i (1938), 23344; ii (1939), 13542
N. Frye: Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ, 1957)
V. Propp: Morphology of the Folktale (Bloomington, IN, 1958, 2/1968/R; Russ. orig., Leningrad, 1928)
G. Adorno and R. Tiedemann, eds.: T.W. Adorno: sthetische Theorie (Frankfurt, 1970, 2/1972; Eng. trans.,
1984)
P. Hernadi: Beyond Genre (Ithaca, NY, 1972)
A. Dundes: Analytical Essays in Folklore (The Hague, 1975)
D. Ben-Amos, ed.: Folklore Genres (Austin, 1976)
T. Todorov: The Origins of Genres, New Literary History, viii (1976), 15970
C. Dahlhaus: Die neue Musik und das Problem der musikalischen Gattungen, Schnberg und andere (Mainz,
1978), 7282; Eng. trans. in Schoenberg and the New Music (Cambridge, 1987), 3244
L.M. O'Toole and A. Shukman, eds.: Formalism: History, Comparison, Genre (Oxford, 1978)
H. Dubrow : Genre (London, 1982)
F. Fabbri: A Theory of Musical Genres: Tw o Applications, Popular Music Perspectives, ed. P. Tagg and D.
Horn (Gteborg and Exeter, 1982), 5281
W. Hanks: Discourse Genres in a Theory of Practice, American Ethnologist, xiv (1987), 66692
J. Kallberg: Understanding Genre: a Reinterpretation of the Early Piano Nocturne, IMSCR XIV: Bologna 1987,
7759
J. Kallberg: The Rhetoric of Genre: Chopin's Nocturne in G minor, 19CM, xi (19878), 23861
J. Samson: Chopin and Genre, MAn, viii (1989), 21332
R. Pascall: Genre and the Finale of Brahms's Fourth Symphony, MAn, viii (1989), 23346
C. Goodw in and A. Duranti, eds.: Rethinking Context (Cambridge, 1992)
R. Samuels: Mahler's Sixth Symphony: a Study in Semiotics (Cambridge, 1995)

Jim Samson

Copyright Oxford University Press 2007 2014.

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40599?q=genre&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit

4/4