brettworks

Genre & style thinking is reflecting on the kind of music you could be making. You may find inspiration in what you listen to, but the music you could be making is more than the sum of your fandoms. In fact, it probably isn’t like anything you already know. Try to imagine its sound— its synergistic sum of obsessions, its fusion of influences. Genre & style thinking is an exercise in musing broadly about the musics you know and don’t know. Originality is born not of echoing, but of venturing and attesting to what you find. Don’t copy, do something new.

But know your history: to do something new it helps to understand musical genre and musical style. Genre broadly classifies a music according to its instrumentation, techniques, context and audience, geographic locale, and describes how it’s used. Jazz, for example, is a collectively improvised and swung concert music intended for close listening, while film music is intended as soundtrack, dance music is for dancing, pop is for quick consumption, and so on. We speak of style to more specifically classify musics within a shared genre, dividing genre by describing how its varied musics sound. So jazz might sound like bebop or fusion, rock like prog metal or shoegaze, dance music like salsa or techno, electronic music like house or ambient, and so on, out into thousands of subcultural styles. Today, musical styles appear and evolve like memes, while distinctions among genres are increasingly porous. The acoustic music of a jazz band (such as Dawn Of Midi or GoGo Penguin) might sound electronic-ish, for example.

In sum, musical styles regularly rise and fall in popularity and social relevance while their genre counterparts are resilient and hold steady over time. The lesson of genre & style thinking then, is commit to genre rather than fret over style. For example, you can use the timbral palette of the orchestral genre without boxing yourself into a classical style. Style takes care of itself, but the genre we’ve chosen becomes a landscape for our creativity. Once you embrace being the jazz band, film soundtracker, or techno orchestralist, the music you could be making may, like light on the horizon, finally reveal itself.