Genre

Genre
Jim Samson

https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.40599
Published in print: 20 January 2001
Published online: 2001

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.

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Genre

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 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 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.

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Genre

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 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 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

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Genre

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, 1 (1938), 233–44; ii (1939), 135–42

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: 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, 8 (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)

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Genre

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, 14 (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, 11 (1987–8), 238–61

J. Samson: ‘Chopin and Genre’, MAn, 8 (1989), 213–32

R. Pascall: ‘Genre and the Finale of Brahms's Fourth Symphony’, MAn, 8 (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)

See also

Theory, theorists, §12: Theory of genres: 16th to 18th centuries

Bacon, Roger

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