Re: Dig if u will my research paper

[Kelly Coyle <kellycoyle@earthlink.net>]

In literature, at least, they've been trying to make the concept of "genre" work forever, and, in the main, failed utterly. Anytime someone tries to list a set of formal qualities that define a particular genre of story the whole project kind of vaporizes into dribbly nothingness. Everyone can agree that THESE stories are obviously westerns, and THESE are obviously mysteries, but as soon as one is forced to say how one knows that, things get pretty blurry, in part because the good ones (not the good examples, but the ones that are wonderful books) tend to mess with the genre conventions.

The concept has been useful in a couple of ways, though. First (and more trivially), there's the marketing aspect of these terms. If you like Louis L'amore, you might like Zane Grey. So if I want to sell Zane Grey, I may want to associate him with Louis L'amore. But if you like L'amore, you probably won't automatically like Max Brand, so there's limitations to this. Best to think of it (as someone more or less said earlier) as a kind of rhetorical strategy (my field is rhetoric). This use is just a question of where you shelve a text so that people who might want to buy it will see it.

Another useful application of genre has been the idea of a context for reading, coming out of the reader-response school of criticism. One reads the movie "Memory" in the context of detective fiction, and many of the riffs in the movie are enriched by that association. Is "Memory" a detective movie? Doesn't matter -- it isn't about the qualities of the movie, it's about the community from which the movie is viewed. (I hope that made sense.) A "literate" reader of science fiction will see a whole different "Matrix Reloaded" than an expert on action-adventure films. Both valid experiences (they all are), but very different ones.

Neither of these approaches depends much on any particular qualities of the text that is read. You CAN read the Matrix as a romance or a western, it's just liable to not be a very good one. And you can market it as a romance or a western, but people might be disappointed when they get there if the reading strategy they bring to it isn't satisfying.

Having said all that (and reaching way back into my former academic incarnation), for the subject at hand both approaches here work: you label your music to sell it to someone, and listeners can hear your music from a variety of contexts. In that sense, then, "looping" could well be a genre. I expect when Kim hears music involving loop gear, he "hears" the use of the loop gear, and hears the music in terms of that vast experience with music involving loops. Then the music is innovative and surprising, or same old same old, AS AN EXAMPLE OF LOOPING. The fact that the music could ALSO be heard as ambient (whatever) is just another place to hear it from, in the context of other ambient music. Most people aren't pure like this of course: simply, you hear music in the context of your experience, and "genre" used in this way describes a set of experiences shared by a community of listeners. So that the formal qualities of the generic music, what Kim seems to be fishing for, aren't really the important thing. It's what the listeners bring to the table.

Too early. I hope that made some sense.

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