Class, Control, and Classical Music

This book explores the relationship between classical music and social class, arguing that it is primarily the preserve of the white middle classes due to wider economic inequality. It proposes a new approach for a socio-cultural analysis of classical music that emphasizes its role as a bodily practice of control and restraint. Through a detailed ethnography of middle-class English youth, the book demonstrates how classical music reproduces the middle-classes' habitual roles and privilege through its aesthetic of controlled excitement, precision, and detail. It highlights the need for debate over how classical music's socio-cultural heritage shapes its conventions in contemporary debates on class, gender, and whiteness.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 264 pages
Publication date: 14 November 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc

Contemporary connections between classical music and social class are still not fully understood, and classical music has mostly been studied as a text rather than as a practice until recent years. In order to address this question, this book proposes a new socio-cultural analysis of classical music, exploring how musical institutions, practices, and aesthetics are shaped by broader economic inequalities and how music can either enable or reinforce these inequalities or work against them. This approach is implemented through a detailed ethnography that locates classical music within one of the cultures that produce it: middle-class English youth. The book emphasizes classical music as a bodily practice of control and restraint, focusing on youth orchestra and youth choir rehearsals as spaces where young people learn the unspoken rules of this culture of weighty tradition and gendered control. It highlights how the habitual roles of the middle classes, such as boundary-drawing around their protected spaces and reproducing their privilege through education, can be traced within the everyday spaces of classical music. These practices are concealed, however, by the ideology of autonomous art that classical music carries. Instead of solely examining the social relations around the music, the book demonstrates how this reproductive work is facilitated by its very aesthetic, of controlled excitement, getting it right, precision, and detail.

This book holds particular relevance in the present context, given the widespread proliferation of El Sistema-inspired programs that teach classical music to children from low-income backgrounds. By examining the ways in which classical music is perpetuated and reproduced within these programs, the book offers valuable insights into the ways in which social class and cultural capital intersect in the realm of music education.

Overall, this book provides a fresh and insightful perspective on the relationship between classical music and social class, challenging traditional assumptions and offering new avenues for understanding and analysis. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of music, culture, and social inequality.

Weight: 392g
Dimension: 158 x 235 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780197646069