gen • re (n.)
A category of artistic composition, as in music or literature,
marked by a distinctive style, form, or content.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

The following is adapted mainly from Chapter 1 “Introduction” of Imploding Music Genre.  To read the entire chapter in PDF format, click here.

Dictionary definitions of musical genre have their basis in the term’s classical typological conception, a historical system of signifying labels used to distinguish ‘species’ of composition from one another, usually on the basis of form, use or instrumentation, and mainly, although not exclusively (for example, strathspeys, reels, airs, laments and jigs are some of the dance- and vocal-derived genres within certain a certain anglo-folk instrumental idiom), within the realm of what is now called western ‘classical’ music. 

The system of musical genres grew organically in a tree structure.  From an arbitrary beginning point (as viewed in many accounts of western music), in the Middle Ages with the only broad distinction lying between the sacred and the secular, it was then to expand and flower along with the art form it addressed, adding branch after branch as new forms were born and then in turn branched into sub-branches.  The sacred vocal music of Gregorian chant (itself, of course, derivative of earlier forms) grew into organum, motets and masses; secular instrumental music grew into chamber and symphonic music, and so on.  As the process continued, broad genreal categories could be further split into sub-genres along various lines such as nationality, historical era, content, size (for example, opera into “Italian opera”, “romantic opera”, “comic opera”, “chamber opera”, “operetta”, etc.) - each then often evolving further along its own path.

In the ‘Genre’ article of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Jim Samson describes the old and new as complementary approaches to the understanding of musical genre: the older, stressing classical typology, and the newer (dating from the 1960s) stressing aesthetic experience.  He explains the emergence of the latter in terms of a newer tendency to problematise the relationship between artworks and their reception.  Under this latter view, genre refers more generally to the conventions and expectations affecting a piece of music, drawing context and consumer into an equation that previously had involved only the composer, the composition, and their forebears.  

The difference between the historical and contemporary conceptions of genre is a subtle but important one.  It is crucial that in 1950 most North Americans knew about classical and jazz music, and that they were different: but no one would have used the word ‘genre’ to say what was different.  Genre could be used to distinguish a jazz ballad from a jazz waltz, a piano sonata from a piano concerto, possibly even a jazz ballad from a piano “Ballade”... - but in no way did the term refer to the musical, cultural and connotive identities which together defined jazz music and classical music.

The term has always served to delineate different species of composition within the ‘genre’ now widely known as classical, and indeed within other identifiable ‘types’ stretching well back in time before the crucial 20th century .  But the late 20th century, with its global media and artistic scene, its postmodern interest in pluralism would have in store for it a much grander responsibility, classifying the music of a global society, of every nuance of musical history, and of every future musical development, real or imaginary.

Almost as though bloated beyond capacity with this expanded meaning, in an almost corrective implosion of its own musical genre is losing its original ability to differentiate types of composition within a musical idiom.  While in dictionaries and academic usage genre remains fiercely loyal to this historical role, in common parlance genre is more concerned with distinguishing types of music, not types of piece.  A not-so-brief statistical analysis of the anarchical and paradigm-crossing listing of musical genres of online encyclopaedia Wikipedia reveals... not just nearly 2000 musical genres, but also a vast overwhelming of structural and instrumentational terms (such as minuet, string quartet and jig) by those determined by history, ethnicity, tradition, and the ever-elusive “style.”

Genre is a more artistically-loaded term (the French language has been especially kind to English in its gifting of more formal or otherwise elevated terms to English) for the more clinical ‘type’, the more scientific ‘idiom’, the elusive ‘style’, or the most banal, ‘kind’ used when different species of music existed in a definite hierarchy of highbrow-to-lowbrow, good-to-evil, etc.

The commonly-accepted meaning of musical genre (that of the record store and its descendent the Internet music download site) is constructed differently, but it must be seen principally in terms of a broader conception of its original typology... one which seeks not simply to address the totality of music in our diverse musical culture, but also to ‘scientify’ a very organic and not easily quantifiable phenomenon.

Music is not the only area of artistic expression in which ‘genre’ has undergone a change of this nature, but it could be argued to have undergone the most radical transformation.