Why GENRE is important: Martin Suckling 

Martin was one the best professors in Uni I could've hoped for. Thank you Martin!

As a visual artist, I can only agree. The limitations, expectations, and restrictions of genres are sometimes ironically very liberating. I think the most important thing is that you love them, and you don't break or push against it because you don't like them but because you can see the possibilities of the genre.

I was just about to do a drawing of you as an underpinning. Thanks for this video ❤

1:43 WII U (NINTENDO'S FAILED WII SUCCESSOR) MENTIONED WOOOOOO

❤

Just cited Prof. Suckling's work on H. Rădulescu for my dissertation --- good to see him pop up here; it's a small world after all.

I think what could be said here is that an interaction between the artist and an audience somehow generates these "categories" of perceptions, these genres. The problem for contemporary composers seems to be that, well, a lot of conventions are simply unknown to the audience. It is hard to teach and express at the same time. On a perhaps more esoteric note, I question the idea that the world is inherently too complex and must be simplified through categories. You have an old kantian framework there - the idea of reality as unknowable chaos (the thing in itself), but this is probably not very exact. One could hypothesise that the world, in fact, is made very simple, and must be somehow made more complex through concepts and ideas. Concepts multiply and problematize more than they simplify and categorise, in my mind. This is something that makes sense to me on a philosophical and even literary level, but I'm not sure how it would make sense for music.

An interesting discussion, but I don't think it has much to do with genre. The boundaries to push against of which Martin speaks have largely dissolved, and I don't think it's possible to delimit the expectations that today's audiences bring with any precision. In a world where any organization of any sounds is permissible as "composition," individuals' listening histories are too disparate to speak of any collective horizon of shared expectations. I may hear the note G in a certain harmonic context and find it enormously stimulating, while the listener next to me finds the whole idea of functional harmony retardataire. With no definable boundaries to push against, the idea of "genre" ceases to be useful.

Everybody who had tried to write music in any roughly popular vein knows all tbis but doesn't say it.