Before discussing what genres of music are, we should mention the following. We need some system of coordinates in order to be able to put all phenomena into it. The most serious and global level in this system of coordinates is the notion of style or art-historical system.
There is the style of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque or Romanticism. And in each particular era, this concept encompasses all the arts (literature, music, painting, and so on).
However, music has its own categories within each style. There is a system of genres, musical forms, and expressive means.
What is genre?
Each era defines for musicians and listeners a certain set of stage platforms. And each venue defines its own rules of the game. These venues may disappear over time, or they may persist for a time.
New groups of listeners with new interests arise – new venues arise and new genres arise.
For example, during the European Middle Ages until about the end of the 11th century, the only such stage for professional musicians was the church. The time and place of worship.
The emergence of church music
This is where the genres of church music took shape. And the most important of them (mass and matet) would go far into the future.
If we take the late Middle Ages, the era of the Crusades, then here arises a new stage – a feudal castle, a feudal court of an aristocrat, a court festival or just a place of leisure.
And this is where the genre of secular song emerges.
For example, the 17th century literally explodes with the fireworks of new musical genres. This is where things emerge that go far ahead of our time and will still remain after us.
For example, an opera, an oratorio, or a cantata. In instrumental music, it is the instrumental concerto. Even a term like symphony is emerging. Although it may have been structured a little differently than it is now.
Chamber music genres are emerging. And underneath it all lies the emergence of new stage venues. For example, an opera house, a concert hall, or the ornate parlor of a city aristocratic house.
Before you create music, be sure to start learning about different directions. This then translates very well into practice. It will be especially helpful when creating something new!
Musical Form
The next level is the musical form. How many parts are there in the piece? How is each part arranged, how many sections are there, and how are they related to each other? This is what we put into the concept of musical form.
Let’s say an opera is a genre. But one opera can be in two acts, another in three, and there are operas in five acts.
Or a symphony.
Most familiar European symphonies are structured in four movements. But let’s say Berlioz’s Fantastic Symphony has five movements.
Expressive Means.
The next level is the system of musical expressive means. Melody in its unity with rhythm.
Rhythm is the deep organizing force of all musical sound. It is at the core of music’s existence. Because through rhythm, human life is connected to reality, to the cosmos.
Very many labor movements are rhythmic. Especially in agriculture. Much is rhythmic in stone and metal working.
The rhythm itself appears, perhaps, before the melody. One might say that rhythm generalizes while melody individualizes.
The sense of rhythm as a kind of magic emerges at a very early stage of civilization. And later in the age of antiquity such a feeling is realized as a notion of the universal connection of phenomena, which is rhythmic.
What is the rhythm of music and what is it for
Rhythm is associated with number. And for the Greeks, number was an extremely important concept of world order. And so this whole notion of rhythm held for a very long time.
In the early 17th century, the German composer Michael Prithorius said of the Italians’ early experiences with opera (there was no orderly rhythm): “This music is without connection or measure. It is an affront to God’s established order!”
The nature of movement comes in quick, lively, moderate, and quiet. They, too, set the tone for any superstructure that is made over them. There, too, is a sense of universal connection. Four sides of the nature of movement, four sides of light, four temperaments.
If you go even more in-depth, it’s timbre or sonic coloration. Or let’s say how a melody is pronounced. Clearly disjointed or coherent.
Melody, rhythm, and everything else emerges as a direct emotional response to reality. And they are formed in those infinitely distant times in the primitive communal system, when man was not yet aware of his own self in comparison with other selves or with nature.
But as soon as class society appears, there is a distance between self and other selves, between self and nature. And that is when genres of music, musical forms and styles begin to form.