The End(s) of Genre

Abstract

This article presents a critique of the commonplace trope that holds genre to have declined in relevance under modernism. Contrary to the widespread notion that composers' repudiation of received tradition rendered the very idea of genre categories obsolete, this article argues that such categories have never ceased playing a decisive role in the production, circulation, and reception of post-1945 art music. In interrogating the assumptions that underpin the "decline-of-genre" thesis, this article underlines the utility that renewed attention to genre and its framing effects may have for the analysis of this repertoire. To this end, an alternative to standard theories of genre is advanced, one that draws on actor-network theory to destabilize categories too often conceived as fixed, solid, and binding. This revised theory of genre is applied to Gérard Grisey's six-part cycle, Les espaces acoustiques . Habitually regarded as an exemplar of spectral music, Grisey's cycle may be understood as participating in a number of additional generic contexts at the same time. Taking such generic overdetermination into account not only sheds light on the range of conflicting interpretations that Les espaces acoustiques affords but also suggests how music analysis might better address the heterogeneous contexts and multiple listener competences that this and other musics engage.

Technology, Creativity, and the Social in Algorithmic Music

“…Magnusson's account can be considered an instance of what the musicologist Eric Drott has dubbed the 'decline of genre' thesis; the narrative that, during modernism, the categories that had once shaped the production, circulation, and reception of Western art declined in relevance, as the vanguard heroically rejected tradition and convention in a wave of aesthetic renewal (Drott 2013). By emphasizing these qualities of theoreticism, formalism, and the lack of any kind of aesthetical coherence over other ones, Magnusson aligns live coding with art music and the avant-garde, despite the fact that, in most of the artists he surveys, a clearly audible dialogue with popular forms of electronic music is being conducted: namely, electronic dance music, glitch, and noise.…”

The Rise and Fall of “Indie Classical”: Tracing a Controversial Term in Twenty-First Century New Music

“…These discussions around terminology might seem insular and petty, but they participated in a longer tradition of composers attempting to resist categorization-classic cases include Debussy's rejection of the term Impressionism, and Philip Glass refusing to be labeled a minimalist-that reassert Eric Drott's claim that "the continuing instability of genre categories within this repertory is their furious denial within the aesthetic discourse of new music, which takes it as an article of faith that the only relevant context for comprehending a composition is furnished by the composition itself." 115 But indie classical is also distinctive in that it was invented by composers to explicitly brand themselves in a musical marketplace, attesting to what might represent a new configuration of the relationship between concert music and capital in the twenty-first century. That New Amsterdam chose post-genre to replace indie classical testifies to its directors' desire to defy classification, but also possibly their desire to benefit from a post-genre current in the aesthetics of recent popular music.…”

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

“…The names ‘circuit bending’, ‘black music’, ‘riot grrrrl’ and ‘spectralism’ all represent very different grouping conventions despite their clear purchase in musical discourse; indeed, one could go further and add to this list the use of record labels and even record stores as aesthetic descriptors – ‘the Mego sound’, ‘the Raster-Noton sound’, ‘the Volcanic Tongue aesthetic’ and so on. This is essentially the argument that Eric Drott (2013) makes in his call for genre to be reconsidered in art music. For Drott, what Dalhaus, Adorno, Croce and others had diagnosed as a ‘decline’ in genre as a concept in fact amounted to no more than a decline in a particular way of classifying musical texts; other types of classifications took hold and were used that were not necessarily granted ‘genre’ status.…”

“…Brackett (2005: 76) describes a mirage-like quality, where ‘close inspection of any text inevitably raises doubts as to [its] genre identity’, but also, ‘the more closely one describes a genre in terms of its stylistic components, the fewer the examples that actually seem to fit’. Faced with these difficulties, some writers have turned to Bruno Latour et al’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to analyse how scenes and genres hold together (see Prior 2008; Drott 2013; Piekut 2014). The methodology has some merits relative to genre theory and music in general.…”