WOLFGANG MARX

MUSICAL GENRES IN THE AGE OF LIMINALITY

WOLFGANG MARX

University College Dublin wolfgang.marx@ucd.ie

Our understanding of the genre category is influenced by the general trends and values of our time. Today “genre” means something other than what we understood it to be even 15 or 20 years ago, as the questions we ask in musical scholarship are different ones. In this talk I will explore three central issues that have impacted musical classification in recent years, namely liminality, neoliberalism, and power structures. All three are united in that they use genre as a flexible communicative strategy rather than a normative, set-in-stone category.

We live in an age of liminality. Research in the humanities and social sciences regularly names among its main goals transcending boundaries, engaging with the intersectional, and exploring the liminal. In both popular and art music, new pieces are praised highly if they push boundaries or merge separate traditions. A normative classification of music according to genres does not seem to fit into this world. However, they still form the unloved yet indispensable basis of our “in-between-ness” – without them we would lose all bearings in this constantly shifting world.

Most recent literature on musical classification is dedicated to its use in online presentation and marketing. Spotify in particular has created an impressive, ever-expanding “genre cloud” (see Every noise at once). Yet this exercise is no longer about categorizing music, it is about classifying the user/ customer. The neoliberal target is reached if each listener can be defined by a unique combination of generic preferences which then allows for an extremely precise targeting of new content and ads.

Finally, being able to establish new genres and determine how they are used indicates a position of power. Like all other discourses, those around the classification of music can be deconstructed in order to learn what those dominating them want to achieve, and how they use language to create trends and steer developments in society. Of course, this aspect overlaps with the two previous ones. All of them are deeply influenced by the opportunities provided by our digital technology.

I want to invite all delegates to visit the following two webpages in advance of the conference:

Every noise at once (<https://everynoise.com/>)

Musicmap (<https://musicmap.info/>)

They will be featured at the beginning of my talk, yet are too large and complex to be explained and demonstrated in detail on screen – you should explore and play with them a little bit yourself to see how they work.

Keywords: genre as communicative strategy, genre and liminality, genre and neoliberalism, genre and power, genre in the digital age.

Wolfgang Marx is an associate professor in historical musicology at the University College Dublin (UCD) and a member of the UCD Humanities Institute, where he leads the Research Strand “Death, Burial and the Afterlife.” His main research interests include the theory of musical genres, György Ligeti, the representation of death in music, and post-truth and music. He is the editor of the Dublin Death Studies series.

Between 1992 and 2002, Marx worked as a freelance author and product manager for several labels (Sony, Teldec, BMG, and others). In 1994 he co-founded the Dachverband der Studierenden der Musikwissenschaft (German Musicological Students’ Association) and was its chairman between 1996 and 1998. He was awarded his PhD by Hamburg University in 2002. In the same year he joined the then UCD Department of Music and served as head of the restructured School of Music from 2005 to 2008, 2012 to 2013, and 2017 to 2018. From 2002 to 2012 he was co-editor of the journal Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, and from 2004 to 2012 he was editor of the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland. He served as Honorary Secretary of the Council of Heads of Music in Higher Education in Ireland and as council member of the Society for Musicology in Ireland. In 2012 he was a visiting lecturer at the Institute of Musicology Berne/Switzerland and in 2016 at the Gheorghe Dima Music Academy in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He has been involved in organizing eleven international conferences at UCD (five of which he initiated) and regularly presents at conferences in Europe and the US. Forthcoming publications include an edited volume on Music and Death (Boydell and Brewer, late 2021) and an edited volume on György Ligeti in the context of his centenary in 2023 (Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini, Contemporary Composer Series, late 2022). A recent (June 2020) presentation on the Requiem by Bernd Alois Zimmermann can be watched here: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbdB5ACyRgo&t=820s