Banding Together
How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music
by Jennifer Lena
2012
Banding Together is a sociological study of the development of musical genres. Lena looked at the histories of 60 different musical styles and develops a theory by finding commonalities in the ways they changed over time.
The most common trajectory for a (successful) musical style is to start as a small Avant-Garde of people who innovate musically, to grow into a local Scene with multiple groups and a dedicated fanbase, succeed as a nationally popular Industry-based style, and eventually become the subject of a Traditionalist revival.
Lena also observes that the size of the genre and its available resources (performers, audience members, performance and recording space, money, etc) also affect the cultural and aesthetic debates within the genre. Every avant-garde is against the current establishment, every industry-based style is part of that establishment. Scenes argue about what the style ought to try to sound like, traditionalists argue about what sound is most authentic.
Although Lena's data only comes from music history, it's easy to imagine that other forms of cultural production might adopt similar forms and follow similar trajectories.
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