Lee, Deborah; (2025) Genres, forms, types and somewhere in-between: exploring the category of “musical genre” for organizing bibliographic music collections. Library Trends (In press).

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Abstract

Genre is an important facet in bibliographic classification schemes. Yet, the nature of musical genre as a type of information, especially its close but indistinct connections to the related ideas of form and type, has received little deep analysis in knowledge organization discourse. This article uses classification scheme and superfacet analysis, alongside music domain analysis, to contemplate musical genre as a classificatory unit. The bibliographic and domain analysis of genre illuminates the synonymous nature of genre/form as terms and the porous genre/form boundary of categories, as well as highlighting the dependency between genre and medium/function facets. The analysis of forms reveals interesting questions about the it-ness versus about-ness question in music, and explores the relative dominance of genre versus form and how this compares to the music domain. The analysis of types introduces the novel idea of types of music as supergenres, as well as discussing the connection between types of music and the (de)centralization of Western art music. The article concludes with a model of the classification of musical genre, showing the complexity of the classificatory unit of genre and how it occupies a shared space between genre, form, type and other music information.

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