ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is based on a study I carried out during my PhD research at Goldsmiths, University of London. I had exceptional supervisors in Professors Les Back and Bev Skeggs, and I consider myself enormously fortunate to have had the privilege of their feedback on my work over the course of the thesis. I hope I have done them justice.
However, it was while working with Professor Georgina Born, during my undergraduate and master’s degrees, that I started writing sociologically about classical music. I didn’t find it easy, and this research would not have happened without her encouragement and mentorship. Professor Born was also immensely supportive in helping me apply for the Economic and Social Research Council funding that made this research possible.
I would like to extend very warm thanks to my editor, Suzanne Ryan, for her enthusiasm about the book. I have also been lucky to have several supportive academic networks during the process of writing this book. With the NYLON research network and NYLON alumni research network I have had honest discussions, helpful feedback, and good times. The Music and Culture reading group under the wise guidance of Anahid Kassabian has been hugely formative, and it was a privilege to be part of such an inspirational PhD cohort at Goldsmiths. More recently, I have had collegiality and support from my colleagues in the sociology team at the University of Portsmouth.
I have had an immensely supportive co-organizer and mentor in Christina Scharff, and our conversations and co- writing have influenced this work. In addition, Geoff Baker’s encouragement right from the start of this project has been invaluable, and his own work remains an inspiration. Dave O’Brien has been a fantastic sounding board and supporter. I have also had formative discussions with and pep talks from other academic friends: Chloë Alaghband-Zadeh, Kim Allen, Lucy Delap, Liz Fearon, Seferin James, Clare Hall, Sarah Hickmott, Erin JohnsonWilliams, Helen Keyes, Annie Ring, and Fiona Wright, among others. There have also been countless people along the way— friends, musicians, academics,
students, and others— with whom I have had thought-provoking conversations; I hope this book will help these conversations to continue.
Enormous thanks to those who have read and commented on chapters: Chloë Alaghband-Zadeh, Geoff Baker, Joseph Burridge, Laura Seddon, George Ackers, Terese Jonsson, Christy Kulz, Christina Scharff, and Joe Browning, and especial thanks to Emily Nicholls for commenting on a full draft. David Hesmondhalgh’s generous feedback was influential at a formative stage. Three anonymous reviewers also gave very helpful comments.
My colleagues in The 1752 Group, Antonia Bevan, Emma Chapman, and Tiffany Page, as well as being incredibly inspirational activist-academics, have allowed me to stand back from our work to complete this manuscript, and Tiffany has been an immensely supportive friend and colleague right from the start of this project. Thanks also to all my family for their patience and support during the lengthy process of producing this book. I have had unfailing support from my partner, James, who has been instrumental in making sure that I actually finished it.
Finally, my sincere thanks to all my participants, who welcomed me into their groups and generously gave their time to talk to me. I hope this account is helpful in making sense of all of our lives.
Earlier versions of some of the material in the book were published in 2016 under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) as ‘El Sistema as a bourgeois social project: class, gender, and Victorian values’ in the journal Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education, 15(1), 120–53.
An earlier version of chapter six was published by Sage in 2016 as ‘Gendering the middle classes: the construction of conductors’ authority in youth classical music groups’ The Sociological Review, 64(4), 855–71.
Some material from chapters two and four were published in 2017 by Sage in an article co-authored with Christina Scharff, ‘McDonalds’ Music’ Versus ‘Serious Music’: How Production and Consumption Practices Help to Reproduce Class Inequality in the Classical Music Profession, Cultural Sociology, 11(3), 283–301.
A section of chapter three (pages 142–153) was previously published in ‘Uncertain Capital: Class, Gender, and the “Imagined Futures” of Young Classical Musicians’ in The Classical Music Industry, edited by Chris Dromey and Julia Haferkorn. Copyright 2018. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc.
INTRODUCTION
As a child growing up in New Zealand, I started learning the piano at age six and cello at age seven. By my teens I was immersed in the busy life of a ‘talented’ musician, playing in orchestras and chamber music groups and attending courses, competitions, and masterclasses across the country. It was obvious to myself and those around me that I would study music at university, and by the time I left home at seventeen, my sense of self was fully formed into the powerful identity of ‘classical musician’.
There were huge benefits to this identity. It garnered me great approval and high levels of one- to-one attention from adults. Being regularly told that I was talented nurtured a feeling of being special and important. Classical music gave me access to a social scene of other teenage geeks, at the Friday night rehearsals for my local youth orchestra and at the residential courses that I attended during the holidays. It also encouraged in me a sense of being somehow apart from the rest of the world—everyday concerns didn’t touch my fellow musicians and me because we were doing something much more important than everyone else.
However, as I progressed through higher education, I started to feel doubts about my vocation. I valued classical music’s strong social scene, but the manipulative modes of pedagogy I was sometimes experiencing felt toxic, and I started to feel frustrated that my whole life was organized around a genre of music that I felt was trying to shut out the contemporary world. My doubts only intensified on moving to the UK, where I studied further and worked as a musician. What I perceived as classical music’s lack of social and political engagement and its values of authority and control felt increasingly unhealthy and confining to me. Not only that, but musically my classical training stifled my ability to participate in more informal kinds of music-making. I was frustrated by the lack of discussion about how gender shaped my musical experience; for example, I hardly ever played music by women composers. Coming from New Zealand, a country that was becoming more confident in its bicultural identity, I found the relentless whiteness of this tradition especially noticeable. Long before I read any ethnomusicology, Class,Control,andClassicalMusic. Anna Bull, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190844356.001.0001
I sensed that musical practice could be a space for exploring different ways of being social, and I felt cut off from these, even while classical music afforded me many fulfilling, exciting and magical experiences. Eventually, these doubts led me to stop playing altogether.
Some of these concerns with classical music education, practice and culture are shared by other commentators (for example, Burnard 2012; Green 2003; Pace 2015a; Small 1996). However, these critical discussions have rarely been linked into a wider socio- cultural analysis of classical music’s place in contemporary society and its associations with classed, gendered and racialized identities. Indeed, questions of class and socio-economic inequality are notably absent from the musical biography I have given here. This is no coincidence. Popular discussions of classical music are characterized by an impoverished language for talking about economic inequality and how it is manifested socially and culturally. Such discussions fail to address how economic inequality intersects with claims to morality and value, and how cultural inequalities are not just about economic factors but also about the social distribution of resources and power. And so, despite decades of investment in outreach programmes and education schemes intended to broaden its appeal, classical music in the UK remains predominantly a taste and a practice of the white middle classes.
To attempt to understand why this is the case, this book examines classical music within one of the cultures that produces it— white middle- class English youth— to analyse it as a social scene as well as a musical practice. Through an ethnographic study of young people playing and singing in classical music groups in the south of England, this book demonstrates that being a classical musician is a powerful social identity for the young people in this study. It explores how this identity, and the culture and practices associated with it, fits closely with the values and dispositions of the professional middle class in the south of England. Studying classical music in practice today also allows an examination of the middle classes’ habitual roles: of boundary drawing around their protected spaces and of reproducing their privilege through education, both of which are camouflaged by the ideology of ‘autonomous art’ that classical music carries. The book also outlines how these young people’s pathways through classical music education followed routes set out by their gender and class, and it describes how these pathways, and the culture and practices that they reproduce, were strongly shaped by the Victorian music education institutions that safeguard and preserve this tradition.
A sociological analysis of classical music in practice allows its bodily practices and their associations with a Protestant, imperialist white identity to become visible. Against prevailing ideas that classical music allows us to ‘transcend . . . the bodily’, as musicologist Julian Johnson argues (2002, 112), the book foregrounds classical music in this youth scene as bodily practice of control and restraint, revealing a culture where many of the conventions— wearing black, being ‘faithful’ to
a written text, and emphasizing the organic unity of the musical work—downplay the body’s role in creating sound and prioritize a cognitive approach to the music. It examines how sound works on and through the body to create powerful emotional states that do unrecognized political work. In this way, it demonstrates the ways in which learning classical music can work as a mechanism for storing value in particular bodies, thus reproducing inequality.
Key Arguments and Contributions
Classical music, or ‘Western art music’, has more often been studied as a text rather than a contemporary cultural practice. As Tony Bennett et al. note in their major study of class and cultural consumption in the UK:
Those who study popular music generally use qualitative and ethnographic approaches often strongly informed by cultural studies, whilst those who study classical music are more likely to use quantitative data, focused historical studies and more ‘orthodox’ social theory. We badly need to bridge this divide if we are to understand the relationships between musical tastes more comprehensively. (2008, 77)
While, as chapter 1 describes, sociologists and ethnomusicologists have now begun turning their attention to classical music, this book is the first to comprehensively analyse the culture of classical music practice in relation to economic inequalities in the UK. Against earlier approaches in the sociology of music (Becker 1982), this book not only explores the social relations around the music but also asks how these socialities can be heard in the music itself. Through examining musical practice, I demonstrate how dispositions associated with a particular social position have become inscribed into the aesthetic properties of the music. One of the book’s key arguments, therefore, is that inequalities in cultural production need to be understood through examining the practices that are used to create the aesthetic. In the culture of classical music analysed in this book, these embodied practices— codified and passed on through its institutions— show continuities with cultures associated with the professional white middle class in the UK and uphold white middle- class social domination.
While this book focuses on practice— what people do—it argues that the practices of classical music contribute to the formation of a middle- class form of selfhood. As Skeggs (2003), Reay (2017), and others have demonstrated, middle- class identities and culture are valued more than working- class or ethnic minority identities across a range of social institutions. Christina Scharff and I have already argued that classical music has an unspoken and uncontested value attached to it (Bull and Scharff 2017, 15). This book develops our argument by outlining the
ways in which the normal practices of classical music, as observed in my research sites, form a type of personhood that is valued among the middle classes, and especially among the dominant group among my participants which I am labelling the professional middle class: those whose families have been middle class for more than one generation, and whose parents were predominantly in professional occupations (as outlined in chapter 1). I suggest that classical music is an ideal site for the middle classes to construct symbolic, cultural and economic boundaries to safeguard their privilege, as the discourse around the ‘autonomy’ of the aesthetic— the idea that this music exists in a separate realm from any social concerns—allows issues of inequality to be sidelined in favour of prioritizing ‘the music itself’. The clear ideas of right and wrong around the aesthetic of classical music, as institutionalized in British music education, mean that any questions of how the aesthetic itself might contribute to reproducing inequalities are disallowed. Crucially, however, I link these debates back to some of the cultural institutions that reproduce and legitimize classical music’s practices, and thereby its inequalities, and I suggest that it is classical music’s institutions that should lead change.
As well as examining the culture of classical music within a youth scene in England, this book also uses classical music as a lens through which to examine the norms and values of different fractions of the English middle classes. This study is particularly timely given increasing levels of inequality in the UK. Recently, sociology has begun to focus on elites in the UK and US (R. Atkinson, Parker, and Burrows 2017; Khan 2012; King and Smith 2017; Rivera 2016; Savage and Williams 2008), and there is also a long tradition of sociological research looking at working- class subcultures. Within this space, the middle classes also need to be studied as political and economic actors; it is necessary to examine groups who store and pass on resources—economic, cultural or social— to be able to understand how this closes off spaces of privilege to others. Studying the middle classes is also important because their ‘commonsense’ norms are often universalized in social theory, government policy, and the media, and those inside this bubble are likely to be unaware that different ways of seeing the world and different value systems exist, even within their own country (Savage 2003, 536; Skeggs 2003). Critically examining the culture of the white middle classes can help to shed light on the invisible norms of this politically powerful group.
In addition, the role of institutions in storing value over time has been identified as an important way in which the middle classes retain their position. The development of classical music institutions between the 1830s and 1890s paralleled the rise of the middle classes in nineteenth- century Britain, as described in chapter 2, and the historical formation of the patterns that we have inherited today are a crucial part of the story of this book. Classical music represents the continuation of a cultural tradition forged in the nineteenth century that in many ways
has attempted to eschew the technological and social changes of the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. Nevertheless, waves of institution-building during the twentieth century have influenced this tradition. In the UK, classical music could be theorized as the original post- war youth movement; the first British youth orchestra appears to be the Reading Youth Orchestra, set up in 1944, which toured Germany in 1949 (Reading Youth Orchestra 2014), and every decade since there has been a steady stream of new groups. Classical music is therefore a fascinating lens through which to examine the legacies of class and value that have been accrued and passed down through these institutions. Many of these institutions are still powerful in shaping young people’s musical lives today, and the book lays out the values and norms that they reproduce.
Focusing on young people allows aspects of classical music’s culture that might normally remain unspoken to become visible. In education, its norms are spelled out in pedagogic instruction from adult leaders and teachers. Examining youth engagement with classical music also foregrounds an interesting contradiction: classical music in the UK is predominantly listened to by ‘older age groups’ (Savage 2006, 169), and there are regular panics about the grey- haired audiences at concerts (Service 2009). Why, then, are these young people bucking this trend? Who are they, and do they represent the future of classical music?
Finally, this book contributes to ongoing debates about democratizing public funding for and access to culture (Neelands et al. 2015). In the UK, classical music—particularly opera—receives a disproportionately high level of state funding compared to other forms of culture, as outlined later in this introduction. This should be problematized and discussed more openly. By contrast, from within classical music’s ranks, fears are regularly reported that it is dying out or that it is failing to reach young people. There is an urgent question to be addressed, therefore, of how to renew this cultural tradition while also democratizing cultural funding. This book will, I hope, open up ways in which changing the culture of classical music could also lead to creative renewal. This question of renewal feeds into debates about music education; music educators often hold a strong commitment to social justice, but the means to work towards this goal are not agreed on. This book shows how the everyday practices of classical music are an important part of a discussion about ethics, social justice, and respect for diverse musical cultures.
Against this backdrop, I put forward four ways in which the tradition and practices of classical music as found in my research sites form a contingent connection with the middle classes. Firstly, its repertoire requires formal modes of social organization that can be contrasted with the anti-pretentious, informal, dialogic modes of participation found in many forms of working- class culture. Secondly, its modes of embodiment reproduce classed values such as female respectability. Thirdly, an imaginative dimension of bourgeois selfhood can be read
from classical music’s practices, and finally, the aesthetic of detail, precision, and ‘getting it right’ requires a long- term investment that is more possible for, and makes more sense for, middle- and upper- class families.
Most notably, I argue that the ideology of the ‘autonomy’ of classical music from social concerns (Bourdieu 1984; Born 2010; Eagleton 1990; Goehr 1992; Wolff 1993) needs to be examined in historical context as part of the classed legacy of classical music’s past. While for Bourdieu the apparent autonomy of high art enables boundary-drawing around taste, I follow Michèle Lamont (1992b) in theorizing this boundary-drawing as not limited to taste but including symbolic boundaries that can have moral, economic or cultural content. A theoretical intervention of this book is to suggest that we need to examine the practices of classical music alongside other forms of classed boundary-drawing such as private schools, gated communities, and suburbanization. The sonically sealed spaces of many classical music venues, insulated from their urban surrounds, enable its aesthetic of detail, precision, and dynamic extremes, and I argue that these are simply another of the middle classes’ ways of closing off their protected and exclusive spaces to other groups in society. This is both an historical legacy of the institutions that we have inherited and also a tradition that is actively reproduced as a resource for recreating classed identities. But at moments of heightened social inequality, classical music’s autonomy is threatened, and the moral guilt/responsibility that also characterizes middle- class identities (Reay, Crozier, and James 2011) comes to the fore, for example, through classical music’s recent discovery of class inequality through the proliferation of El Sistema–inspired music education programmes (as discussed later). It is therefore necessary to examine classical music’s autonomy from the social as contested, uneven and never absolute in order to make sense of many of its social and aesthetic practices today.
This book focuses on class inequality in relation to classical music education outside of school in the UK context. There is a specific historical formation to class in the UK that has sedimented into the classed identities and structures that are visible today. This means that the extent to which the arguments put forward here are also helpful for explaining patterns of inequality around classical music production in other contexts must be a matter for empirical investigation. The expansion of British music education institutions to Commonwealth countries (Johnson-Hill 2015; Kok 2011) suggests that there are likely to be some similarities in practices elsewhere, even if the meanings of these practices and the ways in which they intersect with structures of inequality may be different. In addition, rather than examining the vital issue of music within the school curriculum, the book focuses on out-of- school music education. The declining number of students receiving music tuition within schools in England (Daubney and Mackrill 2018; Scott 2018) makes it even more urgent to understand how out-of- school music education can reproduce inequalities. In this way, this book also aims to contribute to discussions of the status of music within schools.
Defining Classical Music
While for many people ‘classical music’ may be a familiar, commonsense term, it is currently being questioned and problematized both within and outside academia. In academic music studies, it has become the norm to use the term ‘Western art music’ to describe the canon of repertoire and body of practices that I am describing. However, as Laudan Nooshin argues, ‘Whatever its historical legacy, clearly “western art music” is (solely) western no longer’ as ‘the forces of colonialism and, more recently, globalization, have afforded this music a global reach that can no longer be captured by the term “western” ’. She suggests that we need a more appropriate terminology for a genre that ‘has taken on a multitude of forms and meanings globally’ (2011, 296) but still remains ‘ideologically loaded, since it claims exclusive ownership of a cultural space whilst denying the existence of “others” who have been and continue to be central to it and who are rendered invisible by the dominant discourses’ (294).
In the interests, therefore, of locating this musical practice in a particular time and space, I use the vernacular term that my participants used: ‘classical music’. For them, this term had a taken- for-granted meaning that didn’t require explanation. Indeed, mainstream, online and specialist media also use the term ‘classical music’, further confirming that there exists in public discourse a commonly understood phenomenon by this name. However, while the term is common parlance, its meaning is explored throughout the book, as is the question of what is included in this definition and what is excluded from it. The way in which ‘classical music’ is defined is important—and contested—because the boundaries drawn around it work to store value in this space.
Theorizing classical music as a genre with common ‘orientations, expectations and conventions’ (Neale 1980, 19),1 it is possible to give a working definition drawing on existing theoretical and empirical studies (Frith 1996b; Gilmore 1987; Green 2003; Goehr 1992; Kingsbury 1988; Small 1996, 19) to identify a set of shared conventions. These studies identify classical music as a practice that reproduces from staff notation a canon of music composed between around 1750 and 1950, using acoustic instruments and tending to eschew post-1900 technologies.2 It draws on the ‘work- concept’, where the performer attempts to faithfully reproduce the intentions of the composer (Goehr 1992). This reproduces a hierarchy between composer, performer and audience (Small 1996) where the composer’s wishes take priority. It requires distinctive modes of adult-led pedagogy where
1 In television, Steve Neale theorizes genre as ‘systems of orientations, expectations and conventions that circulate between industry, text and subject’ (1980, 19). For the purposes of understanding genre in classical music, we need to examine different circuits: cultural and educational institutions, texts (including performances), and musicians/audiences.
2 Contemporary classical music and early music are distinct genres in their own right, and as such they are outside the scope of this book.
pupils usually take one- to-one lessons to learn ‘musicianship’; how to interpret the composer’s intentions; staff notation; and technical skill at their instrument or voice (Kingsbury 1988; Green 2003).
As well as these conventional practices, classical music is also characterized by discourses of transcendence or autonomy from social concerns (Born 2010; Bull 2009; Frith 1996b; Goehr 1992; James H. Johnson 1996; Yoshihara 2008). Indeed, as Born notes, a ‘defining feature of the ontology of Western art music from the nineteenth century to the present’ is ‘the disavowal of music’s social mediations’ (40), although for David Clarke (2012, 174) this autonomy should be seen as more or less strong at different points in time. These conventions and discourses are reproduced through institutions; Simon Frith notes that ‘art music discourse’ has developed on the basis of its validation in academic institutions, which ensure that ‘[only] the right people with the right training can . . . experience the real meaning of “great” music’ (1996b, 39). Despite this, classical music’s contemporary institutions, particularly education institutions, have received relatively little critical attention (although see Baker 2014; Benzecry 2011; Bohlman 1989; McCormick 2015). And yet, its institutions play an important role in safeguarding and reproducing this tradition. As such, this book critically analyses the ‘institutional ecology’ of classical music.
These institutions and practices produce classical music’s distinctive aesthetic qualities. Aesthetics are commonly understood as qualities that relate to sensory beauty as distinct from social or cultural interpretations (R. Williams 1976, 32); for example, Goehr (1992, 121) describes aesthetics as a shift from ‘extra-musical to purely musical criteria of value and classification’. In this book, I understand the ‘aesthetic’ of the music to refer to its sonic qualities, but throughout I attempt to link the aesthetic of classical music with its social, institutional and historical conditions of production.
Classical Music and Inequality: What We Know So Far
David Hesmondhalgh (2013, 4), in his manifesto for a more ambivalent music sociology, suggests that we explore ways in which the arts and culture might draw upon and reinforce patterns of social inequality, rather than reproducing arguments about the ‘power of music’ (Hallam and Creech 2010) that focus exclusively on its benefits. There is no simple formula for understanding the relationship between music and inequality. As chapter 1 theorizes, one of the ways in which classical music reinforces patterns of inequality is through being valued, in various ways, over other genres. Indeed, existing patterns of consumption and production of classical music as well as its unequal funding structures show stark patterns of inequality.
Data on cultural consumption from the UK shows that listening to classical music is strongly stratified by age and education level.3 A mixed-methods study of cultural consumption and class, across a variety of types of culture, found ‘beyond question, the existence of systematic patterns of cultural taste and practice’ (T. Bennett et al. 2008, 251). Notably for this study, the authors found that people with higher education qualifications were six times more likely to listen to classical music than those without (Savage 2006, 169). Particularly for white respondents, Bennett et al. found that ‘classical music remains attuned to class’, and among this group, for the working class, it evoked ‘a response which is much more complex than a straight rejection or distaste for it’, for example, distancing themselves from it (2008, 82–84). They conclude that ‘classical music thus emerges as a mainstream, established musical field, whose appeal is somewhat broader than a narrowly defined middle class, but taste for which is highly correlated with university education’ (169). For many of this group, however, classical music was viewed as ‘soothing’, enjoyed for its ‘easy listening’ qualities (86) and ‘claiming affiliation with classical music denote[d] respectability’ (87). Confirming this link between classical music consumption and the middle classes, Crawford et al.’s study of orchestral audiences highlighted ‘the continued individualistic, middleclass, and exclusionary culture of classical music attendance and patterns of behaviours’ (2014, 1) arguing that ‘classical music helps make and maintain who the middle classes are’ (15).
Examining those who play classical music in the UK, whether in education or professionally, reveals a similar picture, although, as Christina Scharff (2017, 41–42) notes, data on inequalities is difficult to come by and even when it is available, socio-economic data is often missing. Examining the music industry more generally (not just classical music), O’Brien et al. (2016) found that it, along with publishing, it is the most difficult of the creative industries to gain access to as a working- class person. In Scharff’s (2017) study of sixty- four early- career women classical musicians in Berlin and London, she found the majority (n = 44) identified as middle class, with eleven more unsure of how to describe their socioeconomic background. We therefore have to look to music education institutions for more data. The most comprehensive picture is painted by Born and Devine’s (2015) study of tertiary education music degrees. Using admissions data from 2007–11 for music and music technology degrees in the UK (excluding conservatoires), they demonstrate that there is a clear class divide between those studying music at university and those studying music technology; the former are predominantly middle class, while the latter tend to be working- class young men.4
3 Chapter 1 will discuss ways of theorizing and measuring class. Education level is usually understood by sociologists to constitute one aspect of class.
4 This finding is supported by earlier research by Nicola Dibben (2006, 91), who reported that while the total number of students studying music at UK universities increased 38% between 1996–97 and 2001–2, there was no significant increase in the numbers from the lowest social classes.
These figures also reveal a genre divide between different types of musical knowledge. Music degrees tend to have a relatively large component of classical music and require the ability to read standard staff notation (Born and Devine 2015), while music technology degrees instead require knowledge of music technology software.
The dominance of middle- and upper- class young people in tertiary classical music education also extends to music conservatoires (specialist tertiary music education institutions). The Royal Academy of Music took fewer than half its pupils from state schools in 2017, and the Royal College of Music took 56.9% (Coughlan 2017; this contrasts with the 93.5% of pupils in the UK who attend state schools, the remainder attending fee-paying independent schools). Even among those pupils from state schools who attend music conservatoires, very few tend to come from disadvantaged backgrounds or areas.5 Students and staff across conservatoires are also disproportionately white, as Scharff details; only twenty-eight, or 2% of staff at UK music conservatoires in 2014 could be identified as black or minority ethnic (Scharff 2017, 57), and black applicants were less likely to be accepted (48). Gender divisions are also striking. While roughly equal numbers of males and females study at conservatoires, fewer than a third of the teaching staff are female, and in 2014, women made up only 1.4% of conductors and 2.9% of artistic directors in British orchestras, and only a quarter of principal players (55).
These inequalities at the tertiary level are set up through unequal participation in music education for students younger than eighteen. A report6 from the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) found that 90% of children from AB backgrounds (the most privileged) had ever played an instrument,7 against 74% from grades C1 and DE (lower socio-economic groups) (Hume and Wells 2014). This reflects a long- term pattern for music exams to be predominantly undertaken by the middle classes, as David Wright has described (2013, 226). The ABRSM study also found that the main reason both children and adults gave for choosing not to play a musical instrument was a lack of interest; or if they had learnt and given up, the main reason was having lost interest (Hume and Wells 2014, 18–19). By contrast, the cost of lessons was only the seventh most important factor for those who had given up playing and the second most
5 In 2007–10, fewer than ten pupils per year in the UK who received free school meals (a commonly used measure of disadvantage in the UK) had attended any of the music conservatoires by age nineteen (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills 2013). Supporting this finding, data from the five top conservatoires in the UK in 2012–13 shows that only 3.9% of students came from ‘low participation neighbourhoods’, the lowest fifth of the UK, by area, for participation in tertiary education (Scharff 2017, 46).
6 Because study was not weighted according to class, these figures should be treated with caution.
7 These descriptions use market research categories to analyse class. A, B, and C1 roughly correlate with middle class; C2, D, and E roughly correlate with working class. For further discussion, see Crompton (2015).
important factor for those who had never played. This suggests that economic barriers may not be the principal explanation for why people do not play an instrument. This finding is supported by wider research in music education on young people’s music-making and identity (A. Lamont et al. 2003), suggesting that the social identity of young people playing classical music is the greatest barrier to participation, working in conjunction with economic barriers.
As well as stark inequalities in consumption and production of classical music, it receives disproportionately high levels of public and philanthropic funding. Analysing the value of music in London at the end of the last century, Dave Laing and Norton York (2000) showed that classical music attracted 90% of the available public music subsidy. In 2015–18, 24.8% of total Arts Council England portfolio funding for music was allocated to orchestral music, and 57.9% was allocated to opera and music theatre (Monk 2014), a level of funding disproportionate to the size of audiences (Hodgkins 2013).8 Antony Feeny (2016) shows that between 1946 and 2015, across all four UK Arts Councils, grant expenditure on each category of classical music has increased relatively steadily until quite recently (although other areas of the arts have increased more than classical music). By 2015, classical music (including opera) accounted for around 20% of Arts Councils of Great Britain’s expenditure (Feeny 2016). Moving away from public funding, philanthropic organizations show a similar trend. In a directory of UK music education charities using 2010–11 data on their income, assets and wealth, seven out of the top ten music education charities are dedicated to classical music, opera and ballet (Arts Council England 2012a). As chapter 2 will explore, this uneven weighting of the institutional ecology of music education towards classical music is formed through the historical legacy passed on by the Victorians that shapes provision and progression routes today.
How can explain these enduring patterns be explained? While similar middleclass dominance of publicly funded culture occurs across high art genres (Neelands et al. 2015), classical music is one of the most deeply stratified forms of cultural taste and practice. This is exacerbated by the commonly held assumption that inequality within classical music is purely an access issue; it is simply that some people have not had a chance to learn to love it yet. The explanation given in media and cultural sector discussions follows this logic to suggest that this access is solely economic as learning an instrument is too expensive for working- class families, especially at a time of cuts to music education provision (see, for example, Hewett 2014; Richens 2016). While this is certainly true, it is only one part of the explanation. Against this position, this book puts forward the argument
8 This trend was also apparent in the region in which my research took place. When I crunched the 2012 numbers for Arts Council portfolio funding (encompassing regularly funded organizations), I found that one pound in every five went to organizations that are dedicated to classical music. The actual proportion of funding that went to classical music was therefore higher, as some organizations supported classical music as well as other art forms, and so are not included in this figure.
that enduring patterns of unequal participation in classical music education are not solely a reflection of economic barriers but instead reflect the types of music that different groups in society enjoy and want to play.
However, while classical music in the UK is almost exclusively played and listened to by the middle and upper classes, in the last ten years there has been a worldwide explosion of music education programmes that teach orchestral instruments to disadvantaged children. Inspired by the Venezuelan music education programme El Sistema, an intensive orchestral programme that claims to rescue disadvantaged children from a life of drugs and crime through learning classical music, a worldwide movement of nearly three hundred El Sistema offshoots has grown up (‘El Sistema Global Program Directory’ n.d.). Geoffrey Baker’s ethnography of El Sistema Venezuela, rather than finding an inspiring model of social change through music, describes predominantly middle- class children being yelled at by untrained and poorly paid teachers in a pedagogic model that would seem dated to the Victorians. Furthermore, as he notes, there is something that doesn’t add up about using an inherently exclusive organization, the symphony orchestra, for a social inclusion programme (Baker 2014)—and, indeed, a 2016 study by the Inter- American Development Bank suggested that the poverty rate among El Sistema’s intake was one- third that of wider Venezuelan society (Baker 2017a). A major evaluation produced to demonstrate El Sistema’s effectiveness, as Baker, Bull, and Taylor describe, is characterized by flaws and limitations so serious that it is ‘impossible to take seriously’ (2018, 6).
Despite El Sistema’s flawed and partial evidence base, the idea of using classical music to alleviate inequality has caught the worldwide imagination, and cultural entrepreneurs in the UK have been among those leading the charge. In the UK, Sistema Scotland’s first project was set up in 2008, followed by In Harmony Sistema England (IHSE) in 2009. These programmes are ‘social action’ programmes first and foremost; the Arts Council England 2011 funding guidance for IHSE programmes requires that participation in these programmes lead to ‘avoidance of anti- social behaviour, drug abuse, and crime’ (Arts Council England 2012b, 6). As I have argued elsewhere (Bull 2016a), this assumption that without classical music disadvantaged children are headed towards a life of drugs and crime perpetuates stigmatizing stereotypes about working- class identities. In addition, the idea that disadvantaged children can change their material circumstances through learning classical music reinforces Victorian ideas that people in poverty would no longer be poor if only they acted more like middle- class people, thus diverting attention from structural and state-led solutions to inequality. This book contributes towards debates around El Sistema–inspired programmes in the UK and around the world by showing how the social identity and musical values of classical music are not neutral but fit with the identity and values of the professional middle class. This book makes visible what is at stake in such programmes by outlining how classical music’s classed history shapes its conventions and practices today. If education programmes such as El Sistema drew on
music’s potential as a form of radical critique that could transform consciousness, as Theodor Adorno envisioned (DeNora 2003, 3), then they might serve as incubators for social change. Instead, many rely on the most conservative and authoritarian aspects of classical music culture: the symphony orchestra, the dominant conductor, and the hierarchical teaching dynamic that relies on a ‘banking’ model, as described by Freire (2000). As such, they are more likely to stifle critique than produce social change.
Introducing the Study
While the data just outlined on inequalities in classical music education, consumption, and work lays out patterns within the social world, such quantitative data is less useful in understanding why and how such inequalities occur. This study aims to explain these patterns through an ethnography of four youth music groups in a county in the south of England. Ethnography involves a long- term participant observation of a particular social scene. It draws on naturally occurring data by observing real events, interactions, and processes in the social world and is often combined with other methods; I also carried out interviews and drew on archival data from music education institutions.
I focused on youth classical music groups, carrying out research with four such groups between 2012 and 2013: a youth choir, two youth orchestras, and a youth opera group. The first, Cantando Youth Choir,9 was run privately as a charity and included young people aged from around twelve to twenty-one. A further group, the Whitchestershire County Youth Orchestra, was run publicly by the county music service. I accessed these two groups through contacting them after an online search. The other two groups in my study were accessed through young people I met in Cantando youth choir. One was the New Symphony Orchestra, which was run by two of its participants and had an older demographic of up to age twenty- five. These three groups, which all rehearsed intensively for up to a week at a time during school holidays, are introduced in detail in chapter 3. The final group was a youth opera group that I have called the Young Opera Company. As it staged dramatic performances rather than concerts, rehearsals took a different form than in the other groups, so I have discussed it primarily in chapter 7. I participated as a cellist in the two youth orchestras and played as a rehearsal pianist for the Young Opera Company, but for Cantando youth choir I did not participate, instead observing rehearsals and performances. While there are differences between the rehearsal practices of choirs and orchestras, the inclusion of a variety of groups allowed me to gain a wider perspective on this youth music scene, and indeed there was a continuity of culture and membership across these groups.
9 All names of individuals and organizations have been changed; in order to preserve anonymity, some other identifying details have also been changed.
In addition to these observations, I carried out thirty- seven semi- structured interviews and three focus groups with young people and interviews with nine of the adults involved in running these groups. Participants in these groups were aged between twelve and their early twenties, but interviewees were all aged sixteen or over due to ethical considerations. They had all started instrumental lessons before the age of ten,10 and many of them had therefore been having oneto-one music lessons for at least ten years before joining these groups. Twentyone of my interviewees were female and sixteen male. All interviewees were white other than one British Asian young man, one East Asian young man, and three mixed-race participants, all of East Asian/white British heritage. Interviewees’ class position is discussed in chapter 1, and a list of interviewees is included in the appendix. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim with permission, and thematic analysis was carried out in dialogue with field notes from observations and participant observations.
I chose to carry out my research in Whitchestershire as there was a thriving youth classical music scene in the city of Whitchester but also high (although hidden) levels of inequality between young people across the county. This allowed me to gain a picture of the geographical spatiality of different class fractions: the professional middle classes in the town of Whitchester, and the small-town new middle classes in the county of Whitchestershire. In addition, it offered a picture of a provincial middle class that forms a contrast to recent work that has focused on London (Vincent et al. 2012b; T. Butler and Robson 2003; Jackson and Benson 2014; Reay, Crozier, and James 2011). The pseudonyms of the town and county were chosen to reflect the Roman history of the area, ‘chester’ and ‘cheshire’ being common suffixes in England, drawing on the Roman castra, meaning ‘camp’. ‘Whit’ means ‘a very small part or amount’ or an ‘iota’, so together they could mean ‘a small part of England’. I also like the way the name sounds quintessentially English, allowing the reader to imagine the elite provincial town along the lines of Bath, Chester, or York in which this book is set.
The discussions in this book rest on certain normative assumptions about how music could work against inequalities in society more generally, rather than perpetuating them. Pickett and Wilkinson (2010) demonstrate that economic inequality is bad for everyone, not just for those who are worse off in society, as high levels of inequality lead to adverse social outcomes such as lower trust, higher suicide rates and more crime. The question of what roles cultural production and education take in contributing to economic inequality, as discussed in chapter 1, is a complex one. I suggest that the values and ethics we practice in music and the arts, such as classical music education, affect our worldview more generally and form part of our ethics and our politics. The ethics and politics of classical music,
10 Eleven had started at age four or five; fifteen started at age six or seven; and a further ten started at age eight or nine (for one further participant, the age at which they started learning was unclear).
while contested, are shaped by institutions and practices developed in the nineteenth century and retain traces of the ideals and the class politics of that era, as explored in chapter 2. One example is the curious centrality of strong authority in classical music, which I explore in chapters 5 and 6. While this mode of social organization is an efficient way of reaching high musical standards, its social consequences, as I will describe, are to reinforce normative, unequal gender positions and to discourage critical reflection and debate. However, these normative positions are always informed by the data, as this is first and foremost an empirical study that aims to reveal wider social and historical patterns through an in-depth study of a particular scene.
My perspective as a researcher is, of course, a situated one that is shaped by my own social position. Being a white middle- class woman from a Commonwealth country meant that certain aspects of this musical scene were more accessible to me than others; for example, as chapter 7 shows, young women appeared to be particularly likely to open up to me about their lives. My classical music training and experience meant that I was an insider to the musical culture of my research sites, and this was indispensable for carrying out this study. Yet I was an outsider to these particular groups and also to the world of English middle- class youth that I found myself in, and this gave me some helpful critical distance. In addition, while the ideas in this book initially grew out of my experiences studying and working as a classical musician, the book also has its genesis in my formation within elite higher education institutions. Academia, similarly to classical music, is a space of white middle- class privilege that relies on self-discipline and a separation from everyday concerns, functioning as a space where resources are passed on to others who resemble the incumbents. These similarities between academia and the classical music world may mean that there are also aspects of the world I was studying that were less visible to me. However, overall, while my positionality undoubtedly affects how I have interpreted the empirical data in this study, I draw from feminist standpoint epistemology the understanding that knowledge is always socially situated, and that this positionality can lead to a stronger objectivity than more positivistic methods (Harding 1996).
It would be possible to argue that critiques such as mine lessen the chances of lower-middle- class and working- class people experiencing what some scholars see as the emancipatory potential of classical music (Harper- Scott 2012, 17). After all, much of classical music’s canonic repertoire was anti-bourgeois, even revolutionary, at the time of its writing, and for some musicologists, Western art music can bring the ‘power structures [of contemporary capitalism] with immense clarity into view’ (Harper- Scott 2012, 20). This position draws on an older critique by Adorno which argues that the autonomy of the musical material can create a space of critique against capitalist and neoliberal forces, including the commodification of music (Adorno and Bernstein 2001; DeNora 2003; ‘ “Can Musical Conservatism Be Progressive?” ’ 2018). A more sociological defence of the potential autonomy of classical music is provided by Lucy Green, who argues that
‘to dismiss the concept of autonomy . . might also lead to overlooking one of the most critical capacities made available by music’, that ‘music can cross boundaries’ and take on meaning to those who are not part of its vernacular culture (2005, 91). However, she cautions ‘against making any assumption about how music is understood by others’ (91).
As these authors suggest, therefore, textual analyses may identify emancipatory potential. However, this does not mean that the music is interpreted in progressive ways by those who play or hear it (S. Hall 2005), and so it is crucial to examine the meanings of classical music in practice. Even if classical music does have the potential to create a non- commercialized space that defies neoliberal logics, it does not necessarily follow that this actually takes place. As chapters 3 and 7 outline, in my research sites there were ways in which classical music did form a space for positive forms of identity and bodily practice that led to flourishing, but these were not spaces of critique. Any critical potential that the repertoire may hold was not generally foregrounded in the practices of rehearsing and performing classical music. Instead, on the whole these practices contributed towards forming bourgeois subjectivities of investment, order, hierarchy and control. Therefore, I suggest that the meaning of classical music today needs to be sought within the practices that produce it. As Anamik Saha argues in his analysis of racial diversity in the cultural industries, ‘a radical cultural political programme is absolutely contingent upon production strategies’ (2017, 27). Indeed, critique can be present across a variety of forms of production, and commodified popular culture has sometimes—despite tendencies towards homogeneity and standardization—managed to produce progressive forms of multiculture (Saha 2017, 27). Furthermore, the intense commercialization of the linkage of classical music and social inclusion represented by conductor Gustavo Dudamel, or ‘Rolex Man’ as Geoffrey Baker (2017b) describes him, demonstrates that classical music is by no means alien to commodification. Rather than discussing autonomy, then, in this study I use the concept of ‘articulation’ to outline a more complex, contingent connection between music and the social, as introduced in chapter 1, in the hope that this will help to theorize the ‘more dynamic, frictional view of musical autonomy’ that David Clarke calls for (2012, 173).
Overview of the Book
This book is interdisciplinary and draws on literatures from a variety of fields. Therefore, in order to make the book accessible to readers from different disciplines, chapter 1 brings together literatures from sociology, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music education to outline a theoretical paradigm for studying music and inequality. It asks, how are musical institutions, practices, and aesthetics shaped by wider conditions of economic inequality, and in what ways might music enable and entrench such inequalities or work against them?
