Genre Trouble: Genius as a Classical Preserve?

Underlying much of the criticism around vocabularies of genius is the question of genre and with it what the role of a music education should be. A key site of this has already been explored in the notion of the canon, which is characterized both as a tool of oppression and a weapon against neoliberalism. The latter conception relies on a view of popular music—or at least that which is most prevalent in social and retail spaces—as the unmediated agent of the market. Such a view is unlikely to hold out much hope for the analysis and deeper understanding of this music as it is seen as a placeholder for the pursuit of capital. While this can be a source of interest from a sociological point of view, it does not satisfy the desire of those who wish to engage with music’s autonomy, i.e., how it sounds and is structured.

This links in with a debate that seems about as old as popular music studies itself, whether such music is “worthy” of study, particularly in higher education, and in relation to this, what kinds of music are “dominant” in society. In 2002, David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus described an increasing, though sometimes grudging, acceptance of popular music studies (2002, p. 1), a trend that has only continued, though unevenly throughout nations, regions, and particular institutions. The school music classroom has not traditionally been the nursery for the hip-hop artist or DJ, which some would see as a missed opportunity to inform children’s creativity, others as a vindication that, in these cases, the “market will provide.”

Ian Pace argues in this vein when he offers a parodic vision of Western musical exposure: “Personally, I can rarely go into a bar without being barraged by Japanese gagaku music, cannot go shopping without a constant stream of Stockhausen, Barraque, midperiod Xenakis” (Pace, 2016b). Pace also argues another point, which seeks to turn the “diversification” debate on its head. This relates again to literacy and primary and secondary education. He states that “removal of core musical skills from state education can only reinforce the privilege that is already fostering elitism in music” (2017). Any relinquishing of the duty of schools to teach staff notation can be argued, then, as a step back for class diversification, particularly if that is a necessary skill for university music study. This view is complicated by the very real contributions of private musical education to supposed “school-taught” literacy but can also be criticized for a narrow view of what musical literacy means (Benedict, 2012).

Yet there is no binary decision to be made on classical versus pop. There are many musical cultures to explore, including the traditional music of the ethnic groups making up the student cohort and the traditions of wherever the school is situated. Moreover, aligning popular music study with a lack of literacy is an elision that is by no means unavoidable: reading notation, knowledge of instruments and scoring, and significant music technological know-how could all be important parts of a popular musician’s toolkit. The “lack” of skills in music literacy is also regularly seen as simply a transferal of skills to other domains, particularly knowledge of recording and digital technologies.

Questions of genre are linked to vocabularies of genius by an—often reflex— evaluative process: genius can only take place in genres that are worthy of the name. In many high school classrooms this evaluative framework has already been dispensed with and popular, traditional, and classical genres already coexist. In higher education, the situation is still contested, with doctorates in the composition of, for example, popular song still not mainstream. Horton and Pace would see the academy as one of the last bastions—already breached to a degree—against encroaching marketization. For all practitioners there is a great deal at stake.