Recent years have witnessed renewed interest in questions of musical genre, ranging from thinkpieces on whether genre is irrelevant or stubbornly persistent in the 21st century, to critiques directed at the gatekeeping function that genre has historically served within the music industry. While recent research has fostered a deeper understanding of genre and its sociohistoric functions, much of the discussion to date has paid less attention to the specific sonic features of musical works, recordings, and performances. The Music Theory/Genre Theory conference seeks to address this gap. The time is ripe for music theory and analysis to be more fully integrated into discussions of genre, and for a reconsideration of genre’s importance for music theory and analysis. By focusing on questions of genre, this conference hopes to prompt a reimagination of the discipline’s understanding of how different theoretical paradigms relate to different repertoires, as well as how music might or might not work for different audiences and contexts. Further, as a site where the sonic and structural elements of music are connected to its social, political, and economic dimensions, genre shows promise for opening up new vistas of music theory research.
We invite proposals for twenty-minute presentations in areas addressing questions such as the following:
How does genre mediate the relationship between cultural categories and musical features? How are these shaped by factors such as race, class, gender, and sexuality?
What light can existing theoretical paradigms (e.g., music cognition, corpus studies, timbre studies, transformational theory, schema theory, semiotics, etc.) shed on genre? What light can genre shed on these paradigms?
How do musical genres interact with genres in other related media like film, video games, television, musicals, etc.?
How might different theories and analytical tools specific to particular genres facilitate a more nuanced discussion of them? Conversely, how might such tools limit cross-genre analytical conversations?
How are digital media potentially reshaping the nature of genre at present, and how should music theory respond to such changes?
How might music theorists fruitfully engage with the distinctive vocabularies, competences, and aesthetic priorities of practitioners within a given genre? How might these relate to the vocabularies, competences, and priorities embedded in different traditions of music theory?
How do differing understandings of genre in classical music versus popular musics inflect how the term is used within music theory and analysis?
Keynotes will be given by Dr. Lori Burns (University of Ottawa) and Liz Pelly (freelance music journalist).
Please submit proposals of up to 250 words to drott@austin.utexas.edu by September 30, 2024. For more information, feel free to contact Eric Drott (drott@austin.utexas.edu) or Chelsea Burns (cburns@austin.utexas.edu).