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In music studies, genre theory has primarily been used to study popular music rather than classical music. This article demonstrates how genre theory can be applied to studying classical music production in order to understand how its value is negotiated and reproduced. Drawing on data from interviews with early-career female classical musicians in London, it explores discourses of classical music as a genre in order to understand how genre shapes working lives. We identify three themes within the data: first, genre hierarchies contribute to the (re-)production of divisions of labour, in ways that reaffirm gendered hierarchies. Second, many research participants actively portrayed themselves as being interested in different musical genres, both as listeners and as performers, but identified other classical musicians as having pejorative attitudes towards non-classical genres or practices such as playing in a band. Third, genre hierarchies were (re-)produced in institutional settings, in musicians' working practices and in social interactions. Overall, analysing classical music as a genre through examining the perspectives of freelance musicians shows that subgenres within classical music, as well as classical music itself, are understood relationally to other genres in a hierarchy of value that reaffirms existing inequalities in the cultural labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 2000s, video compact discs (VCDs) have come to occupy a prominent position in the Andean musical world and making music videos has become an ordinary and expected activity for many traditional and popular musicians. While the widespread uptake of VCD technology itself occurred with little comment or controversy, the material affordances of this new technology have fuelled contestation about aesthetics, culture and identity. Focusing on the production ofsantiagomusic videos in Huancayo, Peru, this article investigates the impact of this technological shift on genre conventions and genre politics. The article examines how cultural producers have harnessed, resisted and debated the possibilities of VCD music videos, as well as how genres have been discursively (re)constructed in the process. The article argues that the possibilities afforded by new visual technologies and emerging markets have been a driving force behind recent processes of genre-fication, whether in the service of perpetuating tradition or being part of the next big thing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Boys don't cry. God is a woman. I can't talk right now, I'm doing hot girl shit. Popular music has a long history of defining gender for its listeners. Our introduction to NANO Special Issue 16, "This Is What Makes Us Girls," offers a reading of contemporary singer Lana Del Rey as a participant in pop music's obsessive theorization of gender, race, and other intersecting genres of embodied identity. We propose that Del Rey's body of work provokes shared questions about how other artists (and their fans) use the tropes, sounds, and platforms of pop stardom to theorize raced, gendered, and national identity. On the road to introducing this issue's top-billed performers--Melissa Weber, Ebony L. Perro, Patrick Clement James, William Mosley, and David Wills--we map some of Del Rey's innovations and provocations without putting forth a unifying theory of gender or genre within the realm of pop music--a perhaps impossible task. Instead, we hope to encourage readers to ask what the genre of pop music--and the genres within pop music--teach us about race, femininity, and masculinity in our current moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• I propose a dispersion model in explaining the outcome of political interventions in genres. In the case of censorship of an artistic genre, the stylistic conventions of the censored genre are dispersed from its salient works of that genre to less influential ones as well as to adjacent genres. • The dispersion model is substantiated in the empirical analysis of the Hip-Hop censorship in China in 2018. Investigating an original dataset of 53,364 songs, I found Chinese Hip-Hop songs sound significantly different after the censorship than those before; the difference is more obvious among high-profile songs than low-profile ones. The censorship also made Hip-Hop musicians engage less with topics related to violence or deviant behaviors but more with sex, albeit in a covered form and not necessarily related to sexual conduct per se. • The Hip-Hop censorship also affected other musical genres: The close genre (Rock) sounds more like the censored genre (Hip-Hop) after the censorship, while the category reflecting the trending genres (Pop) sounds less like the censored trending genre (Hip-Hop); the impact on these two genres is more salient among their low-profile songs. The distanced genre (Folk) was generally intact. • The musical similarity of the songs and the topic prevalences in the lyrics are measured by using a set of computational tools, including Music Information Retrieval algorithms that synthesize audio signal processing and neural networks, as well as topic models. How do political interventions reshape genre boundaries? Previous studies on genres only tangentially touch on this question as they mostly focus on the artistic, economic, or critical consequences of genre spanning. This paper fills in this gap by exploring the impact of music censorship on the censored genre and other related genres. Using an original dataset of 53,364 songs released on a Chinese online music platform, I study how Hip-Hop censorship in China in 2018 impacted Hip-Hop as well as Pop, Rock, and Folk songs in terms of how they sound and what topics are engaged in the lyrics. I propose a novel, computational approach to measure sound similarities between songs by using Music Information Retrieval (MIR) algorithms which synthesize audio signal processing and neural networks. I also measure the change of topic prevalence in song lyrics by using topic models supplemented with a dictionary approach. I found that post-censorship Hip-Hop songs sound significantly different from pre-censorship ones, with a bigger impact on the high-profile songs. Moreover, Rock, as a close genre to Hip-Hop, became more "Hip-Hoppy", while Pop, a mixed category that reflects trending genres, became less "Hip-Hoppy"; the impact on these two genres is more salient among their low-profile songs. Folk, a genre distanced from Hip-Hop, remained generally untouched. The censorship also made Hip-Hop musicians engage less with topics related to violence and deviant behaviors but more with sexual terms, albeit in a covered form and not necessarily related to sexual conduct per se. The findings suggest a dispersion model in explaining the outcome of political interventions in genres, where stylistic conventions of the censored genre are dispersed from salient works of that genre to less influential ones as well as to adjacent genres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]