Genres exist to organize and homogenize musical works into definable categories. With a knowledge of genre, musicians, audiences, and general listeners develop an understanding of musical concepts based on the similarities and differences between categorized works. This provides listeners with a set of expectations that will influence their response to new musical material. While this can help listeners gain a deeper understanding of the subject matter, works that do not follow the rules of one specific genre may be miscategorized by subjective or uninformed review of musical content. Listeners tend to first react to the aesthetic nature of music before considering the much deeper meanings and traditions behind the music: This can distort our views and create a biased and misrepresented historical outline of a genre’s development. Additionally, genres have been used to create power structures that suppress the ideas of certain peoples and cultures for the sake of maintaining “traditional” rules, which has created unequal and unbalanced representation within the canons of jazz, free jazz, and experimental music styles. If a work’s relation to these restrictive genre norms, rather than musical merit or quality, can influence its ultimate success, is genre even a necessary categorizing tool? The purpose of my project is to apply an analysis of genre theory to saxophone works by Alex Mincek, Anthony Braxton, and Jack Wright that transcend traditional genre labels. Chapter 1 outlines genre theory and its applications within the context of contemporary musics that exhibit characteristics of multiple genres. In Chapter 2, I discuss the role that genre, criticism, and bias have played in the development and reception of jazz, free jazz, free music, and experimental music. In Chapter 3, I use this history to understand Alex Mincek, Anthony Braxton, and Jack Wright’s distinct approaches to music making and saxophone playing, and I examine how these approaches push past detrimental ideas of institutionalized genre norms to create their own musical voices. Finally, I apply these ideas in Chapter 4 to analyze and interpret Mincek’s saxophone works Ali and Karate, Braxton’s “KSZMK’2 (Opus 77D)” from his album Alto Saxophone Improvisations, 1979, and Wright’s improvisation “Untitled 1” from his album The Indeterminate Existence in order to demonstrate how an analysis that is not based in genre norms can more effectively interpret these works.
