Genre in Oxford Music Online Página 1 de 4

Oxford Music Online

Grove Music Online

Genre
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 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 About the Index
lyric piano piece of the early 19th century
Show related links Search across all sources

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40599?print=true 12/06/2013
Genre in Oxford Music Online Página 2 de 4

narrower understanding of genre, and a more common usage, separates musical works from the Copyright © Oxford
conditions of their production and reception, and identifies genre as a means of ordering, stabilizing University Press 2007
— 2013.
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 Brunetière). Of these, one of the most persuasive was the theory
developed by Russian Formalist critics such as Shklovsky, Tïnyanov 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 performance- and 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
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 thatthe
About may be purposely broken. Genre, in
Index
short, is viewed as one of the most powerful codes linking author and reader.
Show related links Search across all sources

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40599?print=true 12/06/2013
Genre in Oxford Music Online Página 3 de 4

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 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 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, ländler, 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
F. Brunetière: L’évolution des genres dans l'histoire de la littérature (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, épopée, drame (Paris, 1911)

P. Kohler: ‘Contribution à une philosophie des genres’, Helicon, i (1938), 233–44; ii (1939), 135–42
About the Index
N. Frye: Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ, 1957)
Show related links Search across all sources

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40599?print=true 12/06/2013
Genre in Oxford Music Online Página 4 de 4

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: Ästhetische 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), 159–70

C. Dahlhaus: ‘Die neue Musik und das Problem der musikalischen Gattungen’, Schönberg und andere
(Mainz, 1978), 72–82; Eng. trans. in Schoenberg and the New Music (Cambridge, 1987), 32–44

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: Two Applications’, Popular Music Perspectives, ed. P. Tagg and D.
Horn (Göteborg and Exeter, 1982), 52–81

W. Hanks: ‘Discourse Genres in a Theory of Practice’, American Ethnologist, xiv (1987), 666–92

J. Kallberg: ‘Understanding Genre: a Reinterpretation of the Early Piano Nocturne’, IMSCR XIV: Bologna
1987, 775–9

J. Kallberg: ‘The Rhetoric of Genre: Chopin's Nocturne in G minor’, 19CM, xi (1987–8), 238–61

J. Samson: ‘Chopin and Genre’, MAn, viii (1989), 213–32

R. Pascall: ‘Genre and the Finale of Brahms's Fourth Symphony’, MAn, viii (1989), 233–46

C. Goodwin and A. Duranti, eds.: Rethinking Context (Cambridge, 1992)

R. Samuels: Mahler's Sixth Symphony: a Study in Semiotics (Cambridge, 1995)

Jim Samson

About the Index

Show related links Search across all sources

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40599?print=true 12/06/2013