The category of genre in modern musicology is among the basic ones, because it is directly related to the sphere of the very functioning of music in society and the variety of forms of this functioning, the nature of relationship in this process of extra-musical factors and immanent musical ones. Moreover, the term itself marks one of the directions of musical theory.
Genre in music and music science appears as a triad: phenomenon – concept – term, and the latter is the most stable component. The term itself (Fr. genre ← Lat. genus ← Gr. genos) appeals to the general scientific category of the genus associated with the classification procedure: division into genera and species. Already in ancient science, this category, which was developed primarily in logic and rhetoric, entered in the music theory, and it was used in a variety of cases, not always with the meaning of “genre”. Essentially the own concept of genre and its theory in European music science grew later from those various classification constructions that sought to cover the genre “repertoire” of musical practice; at the same time, the classification method remained an important tool in the development of genre problematics.
In contemporary musicology, there are various concepts regarding what a genre is, its nature and essence: genre is considered as a category of sociological, morphological, semantic, axiological, communicative, institutional, etc. But one of the most significant concepts traditionally remains the interpretation of the genre as a classification category.
The article pays attention to three points of this classification trend in the historical period of “reflective traditionalism” (in S. Averintsev’s terminology): these are the classifications by Boethius, J. de Grocheo and M. Praetorius.
The logical basis of the classification operation is a proportionate and consistent division of the volume of the notion (the examined object) into sub-volumes. The choice of the classifications of Boethius, Grocheo and Praetorius is due not only to the authority of these names, but also to the fact that in their comparison they clearly demonstrate the three states of the classification system in music science, marking the stages of movement from the category of genus to the category of genre. Based on the above-mentioned classifications, we can see: as a whole, the line associated with the awareness and the designation of the object of division runs from the general concept of Musica (where world harmony and science, theoretical and practical activities were syncretically combined) to a musical work. The logical relationship of genus – species is now projected onto the relationship of “genre – opus”.
In the modern theory of musical genres, in parallel with the renewed attempts at classification, doubts are growing about the appropriateness of this procedure itself (W. Wiora, C. Dahlhaus and others). Indeed, genres are characterized by a number of heterogeneous features, sometimes historically unstable; one genre can be assigned to several genre groups simultaneously, depending on the comparison parameter, etc. It is becoming increasingly obvious that scientific attention is shifting from classification to a more flexible taxonomy, which considers genre features not as a basis for genre differentiation, but as criteria for genre types attribution, the “volume” of which is not fully known in advance, and the composition of genre features is objectively variable and is the subject of discussion.
Thus, the transition in the systematization of genres from classification to typologization should be defined as a new scientific paradigm in the musicology.
In conclusion, based on the problems discussed in the article, the author offers his own definition of the concept of a musical genre.
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