JOHN FALLAS

“TALKING ABOUT OUR DECISIONS”: CLASSIFYING SPREES AND GREY AREAS IN THE CONSIDERATION OF MUSICAL GENRE

JOHN FALLAS

Independent scholar johnfallas@yahoo.co.uk

Writing on Nabokov, the critic and scholar Michael Wood proposes a distinction between what he calls “signature” and “style” in literary writing, and emphasizes its provisional and speculative quality – not as a drawback but as an advantage. Such a distinction, he suggests, can usefully function as the beginning of a discussion rather than the end of one.

In this paper I examine two competing understandings of what genre means in connection with music: a relatively recent but now exceedingly widespread one which emerges from a presumed association between stylistic features and particular, sociologically defined groups of listeners; and a more “traditional” one which, in instrumental music at least, is expressed in work titles such as “sonata,” “symphony,” or “string quartet.” I consider the degree to which, on each of these definitions, genre is made “discussable,” drawing on the work of Gérard Genette to elucidate the status of titles and other paratexts as markers of (but not only of) compositional intention.

Moreover, I argue, on neither of these definitions is genre strictly speaking a system of classification. Yet the ghost of taxonomy haunts discourse around this topic. I return to the term “signature,” considering the relatively openended concepts of identity with which it is now associated but also its earlier sense as “a peculiarity in form or colouring etc. on a plant or other natural object formerly supposed to be an indication of its [medicinal or other] qualities” (Oxford English Dictionary), and argue in conclusion that in all its many forms, classification takes its place on a spectrum of conceptual activities and modes wherein its borders are deliberately and usefully porous.

Keywords: genre, paratext, signature, taxonomy, grey areas.

John Fallas is a writer, editor, and musicologist specializing in the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular interest in the question of how both individual genres and genre as a concept function under modernism and after. His research is also much concerned with the question of paratexts – titles and other “ways in” to the work. He was born near Manchester, and studied at the University of Cambridge, King’s College London, and the University of Leeds. He has written booklet essays for over thirty CDs featuring some of the leading composers and performers of our time.