Class, Control, and Classical Music - Paperback

by Anna Bull (Author)

Why is classical music predominantly the preserve of the white middle classes? Contemporary associations between classical music and social class remain underexplored, with classical music primarily studied as a text rather than as a practice until recent years. In order to answer this question, this book outlines a new approach for a socio-cultural analysis of classical music, asking how musical institutions, practices, and aesthetics are shaped by wider conditions of economic inequality, and how music might enable and entrench such inequalities or work against them. This approach is put into practice through a richly detailed ethnography which locates classical music within one of the cultures that produces it - middle-class English youth - and foregrounds classical music as bodily practice of control and restraint. Drawing on the author's own background as a classical musician, this closely observed account examines youth orchestra and youth choir rehearsals as a space where
young people learn the unspoken rules of this culture of weighty tradition and gendered control. It highlights how the middle-classes' habitual roles - 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 camouflaged, however, by the ideology of 'autonomous art' that classical music carries.

Author Biography

Anna Bull is Lecturer in Education & Social Justice at the University of York. Her research interests include class and gender inequalities in classical music education and staff sexual misconduct in higher education. Bull has published in leading sociology and music education journals, and has also written for a variety of non-academic publications including The Guardian and Arts Professional. Before becoming a sociologist, Anna worked as a pianist and cellist in her native New Zealand and across Scotland with ensembles including Scottish Opera, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the New Zealand Chamber Orchestra, and Live Music Now!.