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The Musical Body: How Gender and Class Are Reproduced Among Young People Playing Classical Music in England

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The Musical Body: How Gender and Class Are Reproduced Among Young People Playing Classical Music in England The musical body: how gender and class are reproduced among young people playing classical music in England Anna Bull Goldsmiths, University of London Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D. in Sociology December, 2014 1 I declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Anna Bull 2 Abstract Scholars of western classical music have predominantly studied it as a text and positioned it a site of ‘absolute value’ through which musicians and listeners ‘transcend […] the bodily’ (Johnson 2002). This thesis uses ethnography in order to critique this approach, exploring the experience of young people who participate in classical music ensembles in the south of England. It interrogates the relationship between classical music and the middle classes, asking what classed and gendered dispositions are being (re)produced through this musical practice. The thesis argues that rehearsal processes shape the embodied dispositions of young musicians to cultivate a mode of restraint and gendered control, which is congruent with a particular classed identity. This occurs within a powerful affective group setting, which interpellates participants as subjects of value through the intimate, embodied, non-linguistic call of this music. This argument is built through four key claims. First, the boundary-drawing which legitimises the protected status of classical music draws on the classed, gendered history of its institutions in the Victorian period. This camouflages the ways in which musical standards of ‘excellence’ are formed socially, in and between certain bodies. Second, this musical practice simultaneously disciplines but also effaces the body. A major theoretical contribution of this thesis is to argue that the dispositions this produces are audible in the aesthetic of the music. Third, an ethic of correction is central to classical music education. Those in less privileged positions capitalise on this as a route towards classed self- improvement, gaining access to a musical world where they find an expressive voice, a strong sense of identity, and a supportive and intimate social scene. Fourth, mediated through sound, the sensuous body acts back against its disciplining to share powerful affective states with others, creating a powerful allegiance to bourgeois social norms and values. 3 Contents Introduction: Relocating classical music in culture: ‘the music of the universe’?.....9 Classical music education: from high art to civilising mission........................................15 Middle-class boundary drawing in education..................................................................23 Studying music as culture: unpicking the legacy of the Birmingham School.................30 Evading homologies: the ideology of the aesthetic..........................................................32 Classical music as bodily practice....................................................................................36 Key themes and chapter outline.......................................................................................41 Chapter one: Writing the body, reading against the grain, and other problems with turning life into words...................................................................................................43 Autobiographical reflections: why sociology has neglected classical music...................44 The unfamiliarity of the familiar......................................................................................46 Provincialising the middle classes...................................................................................51 Insider or outsider?...........................................................................................................54 The elusive body..............................................................................................................55 Revealing encounters.......................................................................................................57 Negotiating a critical position: reflections on ethics........................................................61 Reading against the grain.................................................................................................64 Part one: Musical and social boundary-drawing........................................................67 Chapter two. Boundary-drawing around the proper: from the Victorians to the present.............................................................................................................................67 Mapping the institutional ecology of youth classical music............................................69 Institutionalising bourgeois values...................................................................................74 ‘The College would be a place of work, and not of recreation and amusement’. Music and morality.....................................................................................................................78 A ‘systematic’ finishing school: disciplining while denying the female body.................80 Examining refinement: bodily discipline and the music exam boards............................83 Boundary-drawing around the proper in the present........................................................85 Safeguarding classical music’s privileged status.............................................................89 Conclusion: performing respectability.............................................................................91 Chapter three: ‘Everyone here is going to have bright futures’. Capitalising on musical standard............................................................................................................94 ‘She crafted me’. The intimate moulding of the teacher-student relationship.................95 Breathing socially: how musical standard is recognised in and between bodies...........100 ‘In orchestras, it's set out by hierarchy, it's made on a hierarchy’. Musical and social hierarchies......................................................................................................................104 ‘Being with such like-minded people’. Structures of affinity in social space...............106 4 Competitiveness and criticism.......................................................................................108 Musical standards and the flight from public services...................................................111 Uncertain capital............................................................................................................115 Conclusion: how standard trumps all.............................................................................122 Chapter four. ‘Getting it right’ as an affect of self-improvement...........................125 ‘The satisfaction of doing something right’. The ethics of aesthetics............................127 Constructing rightness, part one: gendered respectability.............................................129 Constructing rightness, part two: the morality of hard work.........................................131 Affects of rightness and wrongness, part one: ‘Doesn’t it feel good!’..........................136 Affects of rightness and wrongness, part two: tuning, shame and silencing.................139 ‘If it sounds easy you're doing it right’. Concealing labour...........................................142 ‘He really, really broke me — which I really needed’...................................................145 Conclusion: classical music as a means towards classed self-improvement.................149 Conclusion to part one...................................................................................................151 Part two: The rehearsal as cultural practice.............................................................154 Chapter five. Rehearsing restraint, or, how the body comes to be transcended....154 Why my pleasure must be interrupted, take one............................................................157 What happens if we bring the body back in?.................................................................161 Interlude — how is the body effaced or abstracted?......................................................162 Controlled excitement: the body as a site of contradictions..........................................165 Why my pleasure must be interrupted, take two............................................................170 Conclusion: a bourgeois aesthetic?................................................................................177 Chapter six. ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m his dog’: How conductors construct authority through intimacy.........................................................................................180 The structures of charisma.............................................................................................181 1. The people manager...................................................................................................183 2. The charismatic charmer............................................................................................184 3. The cult of personality...............................................................................................186 Intimacy of gaze, gesture and breath..............................................................................189 Gendered mirroring: the embodiment of ‘rightness’.....................................................193 ‘You know that he will have heard it’. Fear and surveillance........................................195
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