What makes a genre a "genre"

teh gerg will never be miro v0.2 cos gerg doesn't have the skillz to write posts that look like he knocked over a scrabble board...
 
In classical music the word genre is much easier because it generally corresponds with a time frame. You can always get more specific but if you say Baroque people are going to think Bach, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Handel, Telemann, etc. Even though those guys wrote in diverse styles it's still baroque and certain features are going to dominate such as sonata form with short developments, suites where movements still resembled dances, complex harmonies, fugues from hell, etc. Classical was a return to simple catchy melodies with simpler tonalities. It mostly sucked with a few exceptions. Then Beethoven was bam bitch, 3rd symphony(!) and that shit changed everything and he (IMO) pretty much ended the classical era by demonstrating how much more awesome music could be.
 
grimtraveller said:
Do you hate that in terms of your own music or music in general ? I can understand it where it applies to one's own stuff, especially when skating outside rigid confines {not that there's anything wrong in remaining within rigidly defined boundaries}, but I'm curious as to how that applies in general ~ if it does.
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Yeah, I do. Calling some music (these days) "country" when it is really pop with a pedal steel or banjo (sometimes); "indie" when it's just pop with low fidelity and a banjo (sometimes) ... If you genre-ize it, you immediately turn off a large percentage of possible listeners who "don't listen to _____". On Saturday I was wearing an 'Albannach' shirt. Albannach (Scottish for 'Scottish') is a pipe-and-drums band, and one person immediately said she didn't like bagpipes - end of discussion. I've seen this band (1 bagpiper and 4 drummers) a couple of times and the music kicks ass - for me. Maybe its my Scottish blood. But anyway, people have become so conditioned by 'genre' that if anything is related to a genre that they don't (think they) like they close their minds completely.
 
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