© Copyrighted Material © Copyrighted Material www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com Chapter 11 How Genres are Born, Change, Die: Conventions, Communities and Diachronic Processes Franco Fabbri New types of music emerge at unexpected points in time. The main objective of this chapter is to outline a theoretical and methodological framework for the diachronic processes that engender such developments, commenting on existing taxonomic explanations in an attempt to improve them. 1 Naming Types Concepts of music types, and their associated names, exist (are employed) in many cultures; however, the existence of names for distinct music types does not necessarily imply the existence of a name for the ‘music type’ itself. In European languages, derivatives of ancient Greek and Latin words such as ‘γένος’, ‘τύπος’ and ‘stylus’ are used, often with the addition of nouns and adjectives (in English, ‘music’ and ‘musical’) to specify the context. If we add the German noun ‘Gattung’, we have a wide range of expressions used to denote music types in Western musicology and related disciplines. Some readers will know my preference for ‘genre’ (and its equivalent in my Italian mother tongue, ‘genere’), which I have explained elsewhere. 2 As I contend, paramusical 3 aspects are quite often involved in discourses about music types; ‘genre’ is therefore a more appropriate term than ‘style’. This is why I apply ‘genre’ extensively throughout this article. However, most of my observations do apply 1 Though I have studied music genres in the past thirty years and have investigated related diachronic processes since the beginning of my study, I was moved to write again on the subject by Derek B. Scott’s excellent article ‘The Popular Music Revolution in the Nineteenth Century: A Third Type of Music Arises’ (2009). This happened just a few months before I was invited to contribute to the present volume. An intriguing combination of history and chance. 2 See Franco Fabbri (2007), pp. 49–62. 3 Following Philip Tagg’s usage, I prefer ‘paramusical’ to ‘extramusical’ or ‘non- musical’: see Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida (2003), n. 161, p. 271.