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2.5.3 How Many Music Genres Are There? Hard to Say; Instrumental Music Lacks Referential Meaning
When several languages blend to form a new language, the new language tends to have a unique identity with a unique vocabulary. Those who don’t know the language cannot understand it until they learn the language, because words have referential meaning.
Not so with music.
You can recognize a tune whether it’s played as a rock, jazz, or country arrangement because musical notes do not have referential meaning the way that words do. When several music genres blend to form a new one (such as rock, originally a blend of R & B and country), the new genre can easily be understood. So it's hard to say how many genres and sub-genres there actually are.
Most music genres, once established as infrastructures, do not fade away (although, like some languages, some music genres have become extinct for various reasons. A couple of examples are noted below). A music genre functions something like a language, but without the referential meaning. Each music genre has a particular set of stylistic elements, which songwriters and performers working in the genre observe. These elements define a genre, just as vocabulary and grammatical rules define a language.