To Whom It May Concern:

My doctoral document is centered on the clarinet-violin-piano trio as a new genre. This new genre has well over 250 works commissioned by the Verdehr Trio since 1971, and probably over 100 works composed by composers not associated to the Verdehrs. Before 1971 there were only a handful of works for the combination, but they are quite significant (Stravinsky-l'Histore du Soldat trio, Bartok's Contrasts, Khachaturian's Trio, Krenek's Trio, Poulenc and Milhaud wrote original works as did Charles Ives-and that is it). Having several hundred works composed in the past 40 years is an interesting development for a musical genre.
For my research, can you tell me what makes a musical genre a genre? Is it based on number of works? Number of professional ensembles that specialize in the genre? Performance and recording records? Other?

Thank you!

Maxine Ramey, Director
School of Music
Professor of Clarinet
The University of Montana
Missoula, Montana
maxine.ramey@umontana.edu

Maxine,

For our music genre/form project, we used the New Grove definition of genre for our working definition, which we summarized as "A class, type or category, sanctioned by convention." We also included styles of music as genres. According to this definition, the clarinet/violin/piano trio would seem to be recently 'sanctioned by convention', due to the number of works being added to the genre.

In music library terms, we would probably consider the genre "trio", combined with the specific medium of performance "clarinet, violin, piano". There are very few genres that inherently include medium of performance (string quartet and piano trio are two big ones). Most genres exist separate from instrumentation.

If you haven't already, you might ask Tammy Ravas, the music librarian at Montana, her thoughts: tammy.ravas@umontana.edu

I hope this helps!