ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines a theoretical and methodological framework for the diachronic processes that engender such developments, commenting on existing taxonomic explanations in an attempt to improve them. Paramusical aspects are quite often involved in discourses about music types; 'genre' is therefore a more appropriate term than 'style'. Nineteenth-century positivist musicologists even treated them as living entities. Genres are also about beliefs and lies: as such, they can be an object of semiotic study. Another advantage of semio-linguistic approaches to genre, opening new, interesting perspectives to the otherwise 'mysterious' act of initial codification, is pointed out by the philosophical study of convention made by David K. Lewis in 1969. Usually, the community accepting genre conventions is the union or stratification of many diverse communities. Investigating the present, which is what music sociologists, music anthropologists, cultural scholars do, demands a similar approach. 'Community' and 'convention' are the key concepts: an interdisciplinary approach to their understanding is fundamental for the study of genre.
