What is a Musical Genre and What is its Use?

This essay is dedicated to the study of the nature of musical genres. I will ask and try to answer such questions as: What sort of object are they? What do all musical genres have in common and how do they differ from each other? Why do we classify music into genres? How do we distinguish between musical genres and what are our distinctions based on? What is their importance from an æsthetic point of view? My methodology will be to first draw desiderata from common uses of the phrase, philosophical theories on the subject, and discussions of examples1 and then to give a final analysis trying to fulfill those desiderata in a satisfying way2. The four main conclusions found in the final analysis will be that (i) whether a musical output (a general term embracing e.g. a musical work, performance, improvisation, composition, recording, draft, …) is considered to belong to such or such genre is an important matter for æsthetic evaluation. (ii) Musical genres are social objects (the sort of entity that John Searle calls status functions) owing their existence to a collective recognition of their status, which serves a specific function, in paradigmatic cases: to give the genre’s musical outputs a set of æsthetic constraints that the audience can expect to be respected. Furthermore, the fact, if it is one, that a musical output belongs to a specific musical genre and that it thus acquires a specific status function (iii) depends strongly on the ontological nature of the musical output which can consist not only in its musical structure, but also in its musical medium, its historical context of creation, its process of transmission, and other features. Finally, (iv) musical genres depend strongly on the artist’s intentions that his or her musical output be considered as belonging to a certain art category.