‘All the Musics Which Computers Make Possible’: Questions of genre at the Prix Ars Electronica

Abstract

This article explores the workings of genre in experimental electronic musics. Predominantly sociological in orientation, it has three main foci. First, it addresses practitioners’ and theorists’ resistances to the concept of genre in experimental musics. Drawing on recent developments in genre theory, it discusses the problems of agency, mediation and scale that any discussion of genre calls forth, pitting them alongside theories that emphasise genre’s necessity and inevitability in communication. The second section examines the politics of genre as they play out in practice, focusing on the Prix Ars Electronica festival and the controversy that ensued from the decision to change the name of the Computer Music category in 1999. The analysis focuses on issues of institutional mediation, historicity, genre emergence and the politics of labelling as they come into view when two broad spheres – electroacoustic art music and ‘popular’ electronic music – are brought into the same field together in competition. The third section deepens the analysis of Ars Electronica by zooming in on one of the represented genres, microsound, to examine how it is shaped and negotiated in practice. Using digital methods tools developed in the context of Actor-Network Theory, I present a view of the genre as fundamentally promiscuous, overlapping liberally with adjacent genres. Fusing Derrida’s principle of ‘participation over belonging’ with ANT’s insistence on the agency of ‘non-human actors’ in social assemblages, the map provides a means to analyse the genre through its mediations – through the varied industries, institutions and social networks that support and maintain it.

From Microsound to Vaporwave: Internet-Mediated Musics, Online Methods, and Genre

“…With this formulation we intend to foreground the untidy, overlapping qualities of genre--often a source of disquiet in discussions of electronic music aesthetics. 49 But rather than such 'promiscuity' 50 Third, we take as read the fluxious, temporal nature of genres as evolving constellations with no fixed pattern of development. 52 Music's mediation is, immanently, a process of transformation: the assemblage of sounds, discourses, social relations, technologies, sites (and so on) that together constitute any music genre is not static but dynamic.…”

Animating the Object: Marcelle Deschênes and acousmatic education in Quebec

“…On the other, it faced a mounting crisis of legitimacy. In a cultural landscape increasingly shaped by electronic dance musics and other ‘pop’-derived experimentalisms, acousmatic composers came under attack as convention-laden elitists, disconnected from the progress of technological and aesthetic evolution (Waters 2000; Thibault 2002; Haworth 2016; Adkins, Scott and Tremblay 2016: 106–7). Progressive voices fled to the margins, and acousmatic music was re-defined, both from within and from without, as the conservative orthodoxy young composers are familiar with today.…”