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Genre in music is something that is rarely discussed - even in musical academic circles. Attitude toward musical genre is often taken to extremes – either entirely disregarded, or taken as absolute truth. When it is discussed, the labels themselves are rarely questioned, only the music that gets the labels. As a teacher in a music college, I’ve overheard numerous discussions about whether an artist creates in this genre or that. Usually, the students are arguing the characteristics that describe a genre. Unfortunately, there are few resources available on the subject to help solve the argument

Today, in the early twenty-first century, labels used by the music industry have become standard and accepted, even though the labeling schemes are somewhat arbitrary. Within the recording industry, labels are marketing constructs. They are used to create a product, find a market for that product, and sell the product efficiently and effectively. Genre labels used in the music industry tend to be used for no other reason than that they are the ones that are used. Labels that are used within the music industry are, indeed, arbitrary, based on general practices of marketing developed over time (Holt, 26). Music industry scholar Keith Negus perhaps says it best – “Industry produces culture and culture produces industry” (14) in a never-ending feedback loop.

Within music-making communities and musical scholarship, genre labels used by the music industry tend to be accepted only as vague starting points, never as absolutes. For “musical insiders” genre labels are a great deal more significant than marketing tools. Labeling for “insiders” involves musical characteristics (instrumentation, melody, harmony, rhythm), as well as cultural and social aspects (Negus, 25). Marketability, to “insiders”, is irrelevant.

During “insider” discussions of genre, artists tend to be described in terms of other artists they sound like rather than in terms of the sound of their music or any extra-musical or cultural associations. Discussions often surround “best examples” of the sound of a music. This is referred to as the “prototype effect” (Fabbri, Browsing Music Spaces, 7). This solution of “prototyping” simultaneously solves the problem of genre labeling and complicates the matter. Serious problems arise if lineages need to be traced back multiple generations in order to find a commonly known artist. What if the receiver of the prototype description isn’t familiar with anything being described? A much simpler solution would be to offer a standardized category that the artist fit in to describe the sound of their music.

Genre labels are often taken for granted by the public and begrudgingly accepted by musical creators. Author Simon Frith argues, “People do not experience their aesthetic beliefs as merely arbitrary and conventional; they feel that they are natural, proper, and moral” (73). To challenge industry-created labels is to invite criticism and animosity. Industry labels are usually accepted as the proper way to describe a music by consumers. However, musical creators often think of themselves as functioning at a level higher than that which can be described in terms of genre. In a commonly held belief in the “mystery of talent,” musical creators are often thought of as transcending the restraints of genre. While the mass of musical consumers blindly accepts corporate labels, many musical creators dismiss any and all labels. For both those who dismiss genre and those who blindly accept the industry created labels, there are often only two categories of music – good and bad – subjectivity is what counts. That is, until a musical creator makes something that is truly outside of accepted industry labels, and a consumer attempts to connect with the creation. The limitations of industry labels become clear when a consumer can’t find an artist’s work, and the work can’t be categorized to enable being found.

As someone whose life is devoted to music, I’ve struggled with the question of genre for as long as I can remember. It has always seemed strange to me that entire categories of music are dismissed by practitioners and fans of certain other categories. I have always been an enthusiast of music in general, not of particular musical genres. As I went through formal training and became a musical professional, I expected other musical professionals to have minds that were more open – less willing to dismiss entire categories. The shocking realization has been that the time and effort put forth in understanding a particular genre is in inverse proportion to acceptance of other genres. It’s almost as if a type of brainwashing occurs during musical training.

Musicians spend lifetimes pursuing the possibility of perfection in understanding technique of musical style. They often feel it would be a waste of their musical energies to attempt to appreciate a musical style outside the one they practice. What could a first-chair violin player possibly get out of a punk-rock show? Or open mic night at a jazz club? Likewise, what would motivate the punk guitar player to attend a choral concert? Or a Broadway musical? Is it possible that the musicians, themselves, have brought about the current state of confusion in musical genre labeling?

It would be fairly easy to dismiss the entire idea of musical genre. The rejection of sub-genre is fairly popular among rock musicians who will often say that their band is “unlike any other.” When prodded further, they will begin to reveal their influences - “I’m really into 80’s metal like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, Joe likes singer-songwriters – his favorite is James Taylor, Pete likes jazz, and Larry is into bands like Nickelback and Daughtry.” Upon listening, it’s discovered that the band is far from being “unlike any other.” The band’s influences combine to create the blues-rock sound popular in the 1970s – similar to Led Zeppelin or Cream.

Labels are a tool for humans to make sense of the world around us. They allow us to categorize and make hierarchies of existence and give us tools for organizing thought.

For example - a pair of Converse Chuck Taylor shoes goes in the category of “shoes” which goes into the category of “things to put on feet” which goes in the category of “clothing”. Likewise, the band Guyjoepetelarry described above goes into the category of “blues-rock” which goes into the category of “rock” which goes into the category of “popular”. However, these categories are of my own invention. There is no commonly accepted method of categorizing music. Even musicologists, those scholars responsible for studying the intricacies of music without the burden of performance, have largely avoided the question of genre.

To my own mind, avoiding the question of genre is to avoid an entire level of musical knowledge and scholarship. It would seem to be a natural subject of inquiry – before the business of studying various genres is attempted; those genres should be defined and organized.

During every act of listening we are, even if only subconsciously, always engaging in acts of genre labeling (Negus, 25). We may decide a sound isn’t music at all, or we may relate it to sounds heard in the past and begin to recognize familiar musical elements. This is simply how musical enjoyment happens – we relate what is heard to sounds heard in the past. In relating sound to memory, we experience emotion – the essence of musical enjoyment. Perhaps this primal, emotional response is the reason why the genre question is avoided. Conflicts of perception of emotional content produce the most heated confrontations. (…ask any married couple!)

The discussion of musical genre has always been one fueled by emotion focused on minutia of the question. Musicologists, practitioners, and enthusiasts alike find themselves arguing the properties of “enough difference.” Is there enough difference between emo, screamo, hardcore, and metalcore, to make them separate genres? If a pop musician writes a symphonic piece, does it make him or her a composer? If a jazz piece is completely written out in notation, is it still jazz? The problem with all these arguments is that, before sub-genre and style can be defined, there needs to be an accepted group of large, generalized genres. There must be a starting point, but the challenge in creating a starting point has always been in defining it. What will the starting point be, and why?

The starting point is music. Just simply music – not music in performance, not music on recordings, not the cultures surrounding certain styles, not any semiotic or extra-musical meaning – just the idea of organized sound, organized in any possible way. For a more academic definition we can look to the musicologist Philip Tagg –music is “that form of interhuman communication in which individually experienceable affective states and processes are conceived and transmitted as humanly organised nonverbal sound structures to those capable of decoding their message in the form of adequate affective and associative response” (3).

From this, most basic of basic starting points - music, we can develop ideas of genre and subgenre. Perhaps it will be helpful to begin to draw a “tree of musical genre.” The first entry on our tree is:

From this, broadest of categories, we need to determine what the first level of division will be, and what criteria should be used to create the divisions. A number of musical characteristics have been proposed in the past by musicologists.

Some scholars concentrate their energies on instrumentation. This might seem to be an obvious distinction; after all, a symphony orchestra wouldn’t play a folk song. A rock band wouldn’t perform a sacred choral work. However, problems arise when we use the criterion of instrumentation to categorize music of the past. Shouldn’t J.S. Bach’s organ works fall into the same broad category as his choral works? To separate J.S. Bach’s output would be to focus on a further sub-division of genre – a job for our genre tree further out on the branches. Before a tree can grow branches, it needs a trunk.

Culture, intention, and meaning are some other common genre starting points, especially by scholars of popular music. However, these are all extra-musical characteristics, again better suited to distinguish sub-genre. If a rock group plays in a concert hall typically reserved for symphonic performances, does that put the rock group in the same genre as the orchestra? Obviously not. If a jazz group wears baggy athletic clothes and thick gold chains, have they become a hip-hop group? Unlikely. What about symphony orchestras and string quartets that exist as for-profit organizations – releasing commercial recordings and programming concerts to have the widest appeal? Have they become pop? Commercial prospects of orchestral music have been debated for over a hundred years. Maybe they’ve become pop, maybe not.

Leonard Meyer, a leading scholar in the area of musical genre, has proposed a multitude of criteria for category creation. Some of these include time period, utilitarian musical purpose (dance music, worship music, relaxation music, etc.), music of different cultural and/or geographic areas, musical form (song, sonata, opera, etc.), and music of socially defined groups (affluent, folk, counter-cultural, etc.) (38). These distinctions, though fairly comprehensive if taken together, are far too disparate to use as top-level genre categories. Meyer’s studies have only focused on creating categories within the western European symphonic and vocal traditions, and have ignored music outside those traditions. Like most other scholars who have examined the question of genre, he has concentrated his efforts on inventing subgenres within already accepted categories. He has ignored the larger question of broad categorical distinctions and focused on minutia.

Likewise, there are numerous scholars who have proposed theories of why and how to create distinctions within larger genres, but I’ve encountered none who question those larger genres. In a study of various methods for categorization, Allen Moore provides an account of a number of methods and suggests that there should be broad genre categories but fails to offer any. He chooses instead to focus his energies, like most other genre scholars, on how subgenres are created ( Moore).

Currently, based on my research, there are no methods or ideologies for creation of broad musical categories. There are broad categories currently in use, such as “classical”, and “popular” musics, but I have not found any studies defending them. “Classical” and “popular” are commonly used labels simply due to their common usage. Every scholar I’ve found who has accepted these categories has encountered a very problematic, and usually ignored, issue - what to do with music that is neither “classic” nor “popular” – western jazz being the most obvious.

To create broad categories, there must be a common characteristic, or criterion, for creating difference. There must be something that all members of a group have in common that is different. This categorical distinction could be compared to “Phylum” within biological taxonomy. Kingdoms are very broad categories for life such as animals, plants, and fungi. Within each kingdom, the members of that kingdom have something very basic in common. Creatures within the animal kingdom are relatively large, mobile, multi-celled organisms composed of systems of multi-celled components called organs, for example. Music is in the kingdom of artistic creation, along with literature and visual art. The animal kingdom is then broken down into phylum based on body type such as vertebrates and invertebrates. All animals have multi-celled, multi-system bodies in common – phylum divides these into type. To further break down the kingdom of music, we need a similarly broad criterion based on “difference in similarity”. The criterion I propose is the primary document of a music.

The primary document of a music is the thing that allows the music to be understood, studied, and possibly re-created. The primary document’s intention is to disseminate the music free of any extra-musical content inherent in methods of performance and presentation. A musical document transfers musical ideas in much the same way that a book transfers thought from the mind of the writer to the mind of the reader.

After struggling with this idea for many years, I believe there are three primary documents for musical dissemination which form the basis of musical genre. They are the score, oral tradition and recordings (sound as document), and the musical sketch (lead sheet, outline, or oral description). These three primary documents allow the artistic category of “music” to be broken down into the three broad categories of “art music”, “popular music”, and “improvised music”. Our main tree trunk of musical genre has now divided into three parts.

Music

- Art music

- Improvised music

- Popular Music

These three broad distinctions of genre can be made across cultural/national boundaries and throughout time. They exist everywhere and have existed for hundreds of years.

Within each of these broad categories, a number of different criteria must be used to further sub-divide the musical categories. This is similar to the way in which biological taxonomies are further sub-divided from the phylum. Vertebrates and invertebrates are so dissimilar that completely different systems must be used to further categorize them. Likewise, the primary documents of my broad categories are so different that each broad category must use differing criteria for further sub-division. I agree with leading genre scholar Franco Fabbri’s suggestion that broad categories be called systems (Fabbri, A Theory of Musical Genre, 1). So I propose that my broad categories be called supergenre systems.

The first supergenre system is “art music.” This is the one category that enjoys little argument about its label from musicologists, though it is occasionally referred to as “serious music” in musicological discourse, and the music within the category is sometimes debated. The challenge in using the “art music” label is in convincing the general public and the commercial music industry that “art music” is a much better label then “classical.” Not all art music is classical, nor is it all “classic.” The term “classical” refers specifically to European scored music from the eighteenth century within the discipline of western music history. Art music refers not only to notated music of Europe, but of the entire world. It has existed since ancient times and new works continue to be created. The important distinguishing characteristic of a music put into the category of art music is that specifics of performance must be written down. There must be pitch and rhythm information offered in a way that allows multiple performances of the same piece of music to sound extremely similar. Art music is the music of posterity.

The next supergenre system is improvised music. Improvised music uses a simple sketch or outline, also usually written out, as its primary document. These documents differ greatly from those of art music in that only general ideas are given as to the content of a performance. Every performance, even those performed by the same musicians, will be different, and that difference is a major component of the music. The document may offer basic chord changes along with a melody, as in western jazz; may offer an image to think about and improvise upon, as in some avant-garde traditions; or may simply offer a series of pitch relationships to the musician as raw materials for creation, as in Indian ragas. The most important characteristic of improvised music is that every performance of a piece will be very different from every other performance – it is a music of the moment.

The last broad category of musical genre is “popular”. The primary document of the popular category isn’t really a document at all – it is the sound of the music which is heard repeatedly and then emulated. It’s the oldest form of music. Before language was written down, it was spoken. Perhaps language could be argued as being a type of music – it is organized sound. Likewise, any type of organized sound that can be shared and recreated without specialized training falls in the category of “popular music”. Regional, folk, and ethnic musics belong in this category, as does most commercial music for which the primary document is the recording.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the oral tradition of popular music has mostly been replaced by recordings. If a musician wishes to learn a particular piece of popular music, he or she may simply purchase a recording rather than seeking out someone who is already familiar with the music. Recording technology has further democratized popular music – the common people’s music.

Now that the first level of division in the tree of musical genre has been defined, branches can begin to grow. However, the further out from the trunk we go, the more possibility for ambiguity and argument. While the three major divisions can easily be accepted as fact, with arguable evidence (type of document), further divisions occur based on a number of criteria which vary from one supergenre system to another. This will hopefully become clear as branches are added.

I called my broad categories supergenre systems because further subdivisions occur based on criteria within the systems, but not across them. Subdivisions of art music occur based on criteria wholly separate from criteria used to subdivide popular music or improvised music, and vice versa. These divisions are what I call, properly, genres.

From genre divisions, there is often a further subdivision into style, though occasionally genre is the last categorical distinction. Another common occurrence is that genre often is further subdivided into sub-genre before subtleties of style become apparent – especially in popular genres. Distinction of genre and style is, perhaps, the most common topic in musicology. What, exactly, is the difference between genre and style?

Musicologists and semiologists seem to agree that style exists as a subset of genre and that genre creates rules that govern stylistic choices (Fabbri, Browsing Musical Spaces, 8-9; Meyer, 10; Moore, 434-437). Style becomes most apparent to genre “insiders” – those most familiar with a genre and its many types of rules. Genre rules may be musical (melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic), cultural, or semiotic (Negus, 25). Variations made within genre constraints constitute style. To continue my analogy with biology – all dogs are still dogs (musical genre) regardless of breed (style).

Before I begin to add divisions to my genre tree, I would like to add that the tree is by no means complete. Exploration of genre is something I have accepted as a major component of my life’s work. New genres, subgenres, and styles are constantly being added, but take time to solidify into meaningful divisions. Until musical creativity ceases to exist, there will be new forms of musical expression and new styles of music – new branches on my genre tree.

I’ll begin with the supergenre system of art music. Art music exists throughout the world and has existed wherever and whenever an upper-class has existed. Art music exists as the most technically challenging and, traditionally, the form of music that the common people aspire to both appreciate and perform. Being a technically challenging and complex form of music, it requires written documents for performance. Since a great deal of time is required for creation, study, and performance, art music is the music of specialists and exists as such wherever it is found. It is also the genre most studied by musicologists and is the single genre with already useful and accepted sub-genres created.

Musicologists and ethnomusicologists use the criterion of geographical region to divide art music into western music, which follows in the European musical traditions, and non-western music, for art music of the remainder of the world. Although this Euro-centric view would seem to have problems inherent in its Euro-centricity, my own knowledge of non-western musics isn’t sufficient enough to propose better labels. My genre tree will have to live with the non-western genre label, for now.

Within the art music system, genre is further divided into sub-genre based on time for western music and geographical region for non-western musics. Here we encounter a problem in the system – genre should divide into subgenre uniformly within a system. I am using standard musicological and ethnomusicological divisions which are major sources of argumentation within their disciplines. I am neither a professional musicologist nor ethnomusicologist so, until the professionals solve their problem, my genre tree is stuck with the categories that currently exist.

Similar to arguments about non-western divisions of subgenre, professional musicologists have been arguing questions of style within time periods, seemingly forever. As an example of the type of arguments considered by musicologists: Is a solo piano piece written as a fugue during the nineteenth century still considered Romantic (nineteenth century)? Or is it Baroque (seventeen century) since fugues are characteristic of the Baroque era? And is a fugue a style or a sub-genre? …I’ll leave such questions up to the professional musical questioners – the musicologists.

Between the written tradition of art music and the oral tradition of popular music, there lies the sort-of-written, sort-of-oral, tradition of improvised music. In improvised music, basic guidelines are given for a performance, but then the specifics of a performance are left up to the performer(s). Similar to the way supergenre systems are divided based on document type, improvised music is further divided based on the same criterion.

The American jazz tradition is the most prominent of the improvised genres and usually has the musical outline written down on a document called a lead sheet. The lead sheet, a single piece of paper, contains an outline (melody along with harmonic suggestions) for a performance that can last an infinite amount of time, with an infinite number of variations, depending on the creativity of the musicians performing it. Endless variety is the essence of jazz.

Graphic improvised music developed as an offshoot of electronic and conceptual art music. Electronic composers were trying in the mid-20^th century to get computers to interpret graphics as sound, usually with disappointing results. Some composers, most notably Earle Brown and Cornelius Cardew, decided to give the graphics to live musicians to have the performers musically interpret the pictures. Graphic music was born.

Following a similar tradition to graphic music, the genre of gamepieces within improvised music grew out of experiments in art music. In this genre, performances become playful adventures tend to be much more exciting for performers than audiences. Performers get to play the performance game – sometimes they are dealt decks of cards with musical instructions, sometimes they are given a melody to play as fast or as slow as possible, sometimes they are instructed to create and re-create spontaneously by a conductor. No two games are played the same way.

Gamepieces are often erroneously thought to be a recent musical development but, in fact, the first known gamepiece was written by W.A. Mozart in 1787.

Non-western improvised music is disseminated through oral tradition with no written documentation. Again, due to my lack of knowledge of specific non-western practices I am unable to elaborate further on the oral traditions.

My musical genre tree now has its major subdivisions completed, so it’s time to turn our attention to the largest and oldest supergenre system – popular music.

Popular music has always existed as the opposite of art music. Rather than being written down, popular music is transmitted through sound. Before recording technology was developed, popular music was disseminated orally. That is, if a person wanted to learn a piece, song, or style, they had to seek out someone who already had the musical knowledge they desired. Since recording technology was developed, the aspiring popular musician may simply purchase a recording and study it to learn the music he or she wishes to know.

The term “popular music” is often confused with the idea of “commercially successful” music. They are not necessarily the same thing. Some commercially successful music is popular music but not all, and not all popular music is commercially successful. Often rock musicians who play certain sub-sub-genres abhor being called “popular” for fear that popularity somehow lessens their authenticity as musicians. Creating in the popular genre does not necessarily make a musician popular, nor is it a statement about the level of musicianship involved in creating a popular music. It is simply a label.

A very important point is that the further we go out on the branches, the more arbitrary and harder to defend the divisions become. Supergenre systems became that way because of their primary documents. Division of the supergenre into genre is usually based on musical content – instrumentation, or melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic content, but could be based on time or country of origin. Beyond the major genres, into sub-genres, possible sub-sub-genres, then styles, divisions could be based on nearly anything from equipment used to create the music, to political affiliation and sexual orientation of its performers, to tempo and associated dance move of the music. The arbitrary nature of the subdivisions simply doesn’t allow for concise explanations. The subdivisions have been chosen based on many years of studying musical genre.

The subdivisions of popular music have become a major topic for interdisciplinary study. Sociologists, philosophers, musicologists, semiologists, historians, anthropologists, and business scholars have all speculated on what popular music is all about. A greater amount of scholarly research has been done on popular music genre than on any other division. Theories have been presented which divide popular music in, seemingly, every possible way. Most commonly, popular genres are analyzed in literary terms since most genres include vocals with lyrical content. However, the one method for division which has received the least attention, oddly, has been the musical characteristics – instrumentation, melody, harmony, and rhythm. These are the characteristics that I feel are most important and are the ones I concentrate on. We are, after all, interpreting music.

Going through the popular genres alphabetically, I’ll begin with the one most difficult to define – Avant-Garde popular music. This category is a catch-all for weirdness, the unusual, the definitely-not-commercially-successful. Avant-garde popular music was first created in the 1960s and 1970s when musicians and recording engineers began experimenting with equipment in recording studios and discovered that other-worldly sounds were fun and easy to create. Soon people were recording any noise they could find and manipulating those noises in the studio. Experimentation is the most prominent characteristic of avant-garde popular music.

Dance/Electronic popular music is created with electronic instruments such as synthesizers, drum machines, and computers, and is created with the intention of making music with strong rhythmic elements that are easy to dance to. This genre began in the 1970s with disco and funk and has been multiplying and dividing into sub-genres ever since.

Hip-Hop is the next major division of popular music. The roots of hop-hop are commonly referred to as being in the Bronx in the 1970s. The music of hip-hop was traditionally created by a DJ who would create a repeated snippet of music by “juggling” the playback of two identical records on two turntables back and forth. Though the traditional method of music-making is still used, today the more common creation methods involve using the same types of electronic tools that dance/electronic musicians use. The other main characteristic of hip-hop music is in its vocal style called rapping. Rapping uses a spoken, rather than sung, delivery style, and uses highly rhythmic rhymed lines of text.

New age popular music is another difficult to describe genre because of the wide variety of sounds found within it. Perhaps the only common ground in the new age genre is that it is highly consonant and melodic. Its sounds may be acoustic or electronic and may have vocals or be purely instrumental. It is often referred to as relaxing or inspiring and many new age recordings are sold as “relaxation” or “meditation” music.

In contrast to new age popular music which is touted to exist for spiritual or emotional benefit, the sole reason for pop/pop to exist is for economic gain. Pop/pop music is usually created by teams of lyricists, composers, arrangers, musicians, producers and engineers with the performer usually contributing a voice and image. Pop/pop began in the 1940s when early record companies sought greater profit margins then those that were created with recordings of art music. The companies set up “song factories” to allow all the necessary personnel, including the company executives and decision makers, to be under one roof. The most notable of these was the Brill building in New York City.

The musical and lyrical content of pop/pop is meant to have the widest appeal possible. Therefore, controversial topics are avoided in the lyrics and the music is simple and consonant. Ballads and upbeat danceable songs are the focus of pop/pop.

We’ve arrived at the massive thing called rock. The variety within rock is nearly limitless. However, within this nearly limitless genre all the sub-genres have one thing in common – their instrumentation. Rock always features guitars, and usually also features vocals though there are some instrumental sub-sub-genres. Rock music is usually performed by small groups of musicians, though solo acts are possible. Though the instruments of focus are the guitars and vocals, rock groups also usually have a drummer and bass player. Occasionally, groups will also have a keyboard player or other instrumentalists.

Aside from instrumentation, the only other common characteristic of the rock sub-genres is that their music is usually in the structure of song. A song has two basic musical sections – we’ll call them the verse and chorus. It may have more than two sections of sung poetry (lyrics), though one section of poetry must repeat whenever the music goes into its chorus section. A song structure may also have an optional third section called the bridge with its own lyrical and musical content. The basic song structure alternates between verse and chorus, with an occasional bridge thrown in, but there are multiple variations on the basic structure created by repeating a verse or chorus section.

Division of rock into sub-genres is based on various common musical characteristics. For example, punk guitar playing is based on the “power chord”- a chord with only two notes, while country-rock uses fully strummed guitar chords. Rock-Rock tends to be extremely melodic while heavy-metal tends to be highly dissonant. Funk is the one subgenre of rock that routinely uses instrumentation beyond guitar-bass-drums-vocals.

We have arrived at end of the popular music supergenre with roots music. Roots music is the oldest genre of popular music as it contains the traditional regional and ethnic music from around the world. These musics were the original popular music that has been handed down through generations since the beginning of time. This genre is organized according to region with sub-genres coming from ethnic groups.

With the basic divisions of supergenre system, genre, subgenre, and style determined in a logical and systematic fashion, the true work of studying music can begin. However, my genre tree has implications beyond the academic. One of my original goals for the genre tree was to create a comprehensive database for genre and artist suggestions. My vision was to have a web site devoted to categorizing musical creators in completely objective terms – not relating them to other creators, but simply categorizing them with the hope that the categories would become standards for musical discourse.

Recently, two websites have appeared which attempt a similar task. They both attempt to suggest musical creators based on a site visitor’s subjective musical taste. They don’t attempt systematic categorization but try to relate musical creators and their creations to similar sounding creations. The sites are MusicBrainz (musicbrainz.org) and Pandora Radio (pandora.com).

My tree of musical genre can never be complete. There will always be new music being created with new ways of organizing sound. Some day there may even be a new way of spreading music – a new type of musical document that would cause the need for a new supergenre. However, humanity still needs some way of making sense of this thing called music. We have plenty of tools for trying to understand musical content, but are lacking a tool to understand and organize the content created – we currently have no standardized way of organizing music according to genre. My hope is that my genre tree will become that standard.

Fabbri, Franco. “Browsing Musical Spaces: Categories and the Musical Mind.” Philip Tagg

---. "A Theory of Musical Genres: Two Applications." Popular Music Perspectives 1 (1982): 52-

Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge: Harvard

Holt, Fabian. Genre in Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Meyer, Leonard. Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology. Philadelphia: University of

Moore, Allan. “Categorical Conventions in Music Discourse: Style and Genre.” Music &

Tagg, Philip. “Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method, and Practice.” Popular Music 2

Toward Standardized Musical Genre

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