The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Ian Peddie, Ian Peddie

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501345371
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Teoria e gusto musicale

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class is the first extensive analysis of the most important themes and concepts in this field. Encompassing contemporary research in ethnomusicology, sociology, cultural studies, history, and race studies, the volume explores the intersections between music and class, and how the meanings of class are asserted and denied, confused and clarified, through music. With chapters on key genres, traditions, and subcultures, as well as fresh and engaging directions for future scholarship, the volume considers how music has thought about and articulated social class. It consists entirely of original contributions written by internationally renowned scholars, and provides an essential reference point for scholars interested in the relationship between popular music and social class.

Part I

Methodologies

1

Being In-Between: Popular Music and Middlebrow Taste

Morten Michelsen

It will be my object, however, to avoid these two extremes [the highbrow of Edith Sitwell and the lowbrow of red-nosed comedians], to steer a middle course and try to provide something that shall be acceptable to the normal mediumbrowed Englishman (like myself). And, since I am only human …, it is quite natural for me to feel that the perfect programme must be one which consists almost exclusively of my own works. I shall enjoy it, anyhow, and after all, I take it, this is the most important thing.

Graham 1927: 493

Concert Sideboards: The score for good taste. This catalog of the Grundig stereo sideboards is a delight to the eye for everyone who appreciates beauty and good taste. Here, you will find concert sideboards in the noblest wood and in masterful processing: you may purchase boards in designs stretching from classical baroque to modern lines. They are the epitome of the world-famous Grundig sound. The evolution of the “guten Tones” [good sound/nice manners] is so closely related to the Grundig brand that the buying public rightly expects listening to something special.

Grundig Revue 1959: 26, translated by the author

To state it crudely: the intellectual, well-educated middle-class, the high school and university students, have “nicked” rock music from the broader youth groups. … When the Beatles and the other Liverpool groups broke through, they became the music of the teenyboppers, these small, screaming girls in their sweaters and skirts in 65 and 66. Then the long-haired and well-educated middle-class youth began to take over. The music became still more artistically aware and then came the American groups.

Nielsen 1970: 283, translated by the author

These three quotes from quite different places, periods, and contexts each articulate an aspect of the relations between popular music and class, in this case the middle classes. The first, a British broadcaster’s written presentation of his program, sets up the well-known contrast between the working class and the educated classes using the lingo of the time, that of lowbrows and highbrows. He places himself and his audience in-between the two, thus making the binary opposition more complex. The second quote, nearly thirty years later, demonstrates Europe’s largest radio manufacturer, the German company Grundig, aligning their product with the middle classes when relating their high-end music sideboards to good taste, nice manners, and high-quality sound. The third quote, by an early Danish rock critic, returns to class antagonisms when describing how middle-class youth had stolen the music from broader youth groups; that is, from youth with working-class backgrounds. By highlighting the intellectual turn of late 1960s rock, his remarks also diagnose the emerging split between pop and rock.

The quotes indicate three chronologically different musico-cultural situations of the middle classes which, following Pierre Bourdieu, together with the lower- and the upper-class constellations, constitute social space ([1979] 1984: 242, 244), while their respective, class-related tastes might be conceived of as a field of culture. The three classes are separate in many ways, but also deeply interrelated. Their relations are dominated by the discursively active antithesis between the upper classes and the working classes (the high/low) while the middle classes, the “middle region of social space,” is a “site of relative uncertainty and indeterminacy between the two poles of the social classes” (Bourdieu [1979] 1984: 243). In the following, I would like to sketch out the musico-cultural positions of this in-between region and how such tastes have changed from the advent of early, sound-based mass media via the material advent of high-fidelity equipment to the advent of rock, that is, during a period from the late 1920s to the early 1970s.

These changes constitute a movement from an in-between taste defined in negative terms as neither high nor low, but nevertheless dominated by them, towards an in-between taste defined in positive terms as a cultural space unto itself and mainly related to the middle classes—although still related to the high and the low classes. It is a movement from the socio-cultural tensions of not being able to live up to the standards of the cultural “powers that be” towards specific middle-class or middlebrow standards founded on class-based appropriations of values from many walks of life (a self-sufficient, but still tense, taste stating that “we are good enough”). Middlebrow tastes moved from being placed as a “middle,” without having the qualities of a center, towards becoming a center (if not the center), which is very much like the expansion and consolidation of the middle classes during the same period. During that journey, the ever-present and perhaps defining tensions of middlebrow tastes changed from a relatively simple tension between good (high) and bad (low), which ideally strived towards cultural uplift, and moved towards a much more complex set of tensions between fun and seriousness, heteronomy and autonomy, commercialism and authenticity.

I use Bourdieu as a frame of reference because his magnum opus on distinction is still the most thorough theorization of taste as a social phenomenon. It is based on extensive empirical research, but I am mainly interested in his analysis of how taste works in forming and being formed by social hierarchies as concrete expressions of general class structures. Even though he claims music is the best indicator of taste (“Nothing more clearly affirms one’s ‘class’, nothing more infallibly qualifies, than tastes in music” ([1979] 1984: 18)), it is not central to his discussions. Many sociologists have followed in his footsteps and produced comprehensive research reports in critical dialogue with his theoretical and methodological insights. Some of these carry full chapters on music; for example two large-scale empirical projects led by Tony Bennett on musical tastes in Australia and the UK (Bennett et al. 1999: 170–201; Bennet et al. 2009: 75–93), and a mainly theoretical study (Stewart 2014). German scholars have produced full books on musical taste in continuation of Bourdieu’s analyses (Berli 2014; Parzer 2011). They are part of the broad field of musicology and popular music studies, where also English-language researchers have debated Bourdieu’s work quite extensively in the last two decades; for example Georgina Born’s, Tia DeNora’s, and Antoine Hennion’s critiques (see Prior 2013 for a brief presentation of their “post-Bourdieusian turn” focusing on micro-sociological approaches and the materialities of music) or Nick Prior himself (2011; 2013) and Will Atkinson (2011) for arguments for Bourdieu’s continued relevance.

Another reason for using Bourdieu’s work as a frame for this essay is that its three cases are historical, just as Bourdieu’s empirical material (French culture in the 1960s) is. Bourdieu’s depiction of a rigid hierarchical culture corresponds grosso modo to Western European and North American musical cultures from the 1920s to the 1970s—though much more so in the early years than in the later. Of course, basic changes happened in that fifty-year period, but, as I argue, the general notion of a cultural hierarchy remained stable (as also Bennett, Berli, and Parzer argue based on their post-2000 research). Nevertheless, some of the criticisms leveled at Bourdieu need to be taken into account, first and foremost those pointing to the sometimes rigid structural domination of agents. I will briefly refer to Antoine Hennion’s work to sketch out why it is necessary also to account for personal agency (for “tasting”). Cultural hierarchies in democratic times have never been completely dominant as competing factions have negotiated their influence under widely different circumstances and as individuals have sometimes made choices entirely on their own terms without any regard whatsoever for cultural hierarchies. I will depict these negotiations and their circumstances in the cases dealing with three institutions’ contributions to the construction of middlebrow tastes. But before we reach that point, a few words on the middle classes, on taste, and on middlebrow will be necessary.

Popular Music and the Middle Classes

Middle class is an almost hopelessly broad concept, not least because it has changed considerably over time. Scholars from divergent backgrounds have defined it differently, and there are divergent opinions as to who is included and who is not. Nevertheless, it is a term that makes sense as it is used by historians, sociologists, and musicologists in order to point to the many social and cultural positions, practices, and hierarchies located between the upper and the lower classes. Historically, and in most definitions, the middle classes have been thought of in negative terms; for example as consisting of all those belonging neither to the working class nor the nobility. In most cases, the middle classes were a very diverse and ever-changing group stretching from small business owners to heads of large mercantile organizations and civil servants of most ranks, and since World War I onwards, the number of members have increased enormously as employees with technical educations like engineers and science-based professions joined (McKibbin 1998: 44–50). Writing about the British middle classes, historian Simon Gunn has pointed out that in the nineteenth century the concept of class was quite broad and its discursive elements became a driving force in developing an integrated, elaborate cultural classification system and thus a cultural hierarchy. By the same process, notions of not a, but the middle classes appeared. A broad array of tastes, educations, and occupations were ascribed to these classes, often construed as the lower, middle, and upper-middle class and classified as such according to cultural and social characteristics (Gunn 2005: 52–53). In such ways, a middle social stratum had already been firmly established for decades, maybe even a century, when civil society reappeared after World War I. But what class meant then had changed: “It was only in the twentieth century, and particularly after the First World War, that ‘class’ came regularly to be defined in sociological terms of income, expenditure and, above all, occupation” (Gunn 2005: 54). Important to the following is Gunn’s observation that the middle classes were placed somewhere in between in a social hierarchy glancing upwards at wealth, power, and privilege, and looking down at poverty, marginality, and dependency:

[T]he “middle-class” in England can be seen as a pre-eminently historical category, the result of accumulated “middles” or spaces between—between aristocracy and working-class, land and labour, highbrow and lowbrow, provincial marginality and metropolitan power—the balance of which has altered over time. (Gunn 2005: 62)

Demonstrating culture in one way or another was essential, and music was to become an important mark of one’s “culture,” both when playing in one’s own home and when attending public concerts. In his study of the musical life of the middle classes in three European cities before the mid-nineteenth century, William Weber points to the development of taste-based hierarchies within this middle-class framework, organized along the notions of a general taste (what is accessible to most) in contrast to musical idealism (for example a morally based stand against mixed programming) and a popular music in contrast to classical music (Weber [1975] 2004: xxi–xxiv). In particular, the repertoire that related to the general taste might be associated with middlebrow aesthetics ([1975] 2004: xxxiv). Such musico-cultural hierarchies became more important in the decades around 1900, as demonstrated by Lawrence Levine in his Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988). He has portrayed how the dichotomy between high and low became basic to North American musical culture through a process of sacralization of the arts and a general deprecation of popular music. The forming of professional symphony orchestras in many US cities and the disciplining of the concert hall audiences were elements in this process. Derek Scott has noticed a similar tendency in Europe in his account of the developments in popular music in the nineteenth century. To Scott the processes of commercialization or commodification were probably the most important to the “rupture between art and entertainment” (Scott 2008: 87).

Twentieth-century popular music emerged from the first wave of musical commercialization, which was spear-headed by the musical-instrument and music-printing industries. The music played from the sheets was a wide variety of arrangements of opera and operetta highlights, parlor music, sentimental songs, and waltzes, gallops, polkas and other dance music. The commercialization also indicates that music was becoming a mass cultural phenomenon. “The Maiden’s Prayer” (1852), for example, was published by hundreds of publishers and sold in millions (Wicke 1998: 28) and Caruso’s recordings for the Victor company also sold in millions (Gronow and Saunio 1998: 17–18). One reason for this early industrialization of music was the continually growing middle classes. They were not rich, but they earned enough to buy first pianos and sheet music, then gramophones and records, and in the 1920s a radio. The ever growing middle classes had still more money and still more spare time, leaving room for all kinds of music consumption and education in the twentieth century.

Taste and Tasting

“Taste classifies the classifier.” This famous Bourdieu dictum ([1979] 1984: 6) indicates that pointing to what you like or do not like is not an innocent business. Proposing a judgment of taste indicates not only what you think of something, but also what you think of yourself, and it might suggest to others what they ought to think of you. The dictum also indicates that judgments or classifications are inherently social acts, statements and sentiments addressed to someone other than yourself. To Bourdieu, taste is concerned with distinction, with the basic production of meaning, “it raises the differences inscribed in the physical order of bodies to the symbolic order of significant distinctions” (175). In such processes of classification, indications of social class positions inevitably manifest themselves, and classifying thus becomes a “symbolic expression of class position” (175). At an individual level, “taste is the basis of all that one has—people and things—and all that one is for others, whereby one classifies oneself and is classified by others” (56). One’s taste is part of one’s habitus, thus influencing, though not necessarily determining, who one is and how one lives.

A hierarchical class perspective is vital to Bourdieu. In his analysis of French 1960s culture he discerns between three main classes, each consisting of several class factions based on employment. Although background, education, and employment are important indicators of class affiliation, there are many overlaps between the classes, also because agents may move between them. Each of the three main classes has corresponding tastes. The upper classes will normally demonstrate a “legitimate taste” based on an aesthetic disposition of disinterestedness towards established works of art while the middle classes demonstrate a middlebrow (le goût “moyen”) taste focusing on “the minor works of the major arts” (Bourdieu [1979] 1984: 16). The lower/working classes demonstrate a popular taste that focuses on the morality and functions of aesthetic objects (41–42). Within this system, where legitimate taste is dominating, each taste may be quite extensively varied. Legitimate taste includes both bourgeois (conservative) and intellectual (avant-garde) tastes, where the former is considered the dominant faction of the dominant class (292–94). This structuring, which is also related to the distribution of economic and cultural capital, can be found in middle-brow tastes as well (342), and age serves as a basis for yet another division in this class (the declining petite bourgeoisie and the new petite bourgeoisie, 346–65).

Based on his extensive empirical studies, Bourdieu detected a correspondence between specific classes and specific taste palettes. Despite the actual complexity demonstrated in his discussions of overlapping class factions, he used musical examples to demonstrate the elementary difference between the three tastes: The Well-Tempered Clavier (legitimate taste), Rhapsody in Blue (middlebrow taste), and The Blue Danube (popular taste). Such strict divisions were challenged by American sociologists Richard Peterson and Albert Simkus (1992, see also Peterson 1992) when they introduced the concepts of cultural univores and omnivores. Based on the US 1982 national Survey of Public P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Ian Peddie
• Part I Methodologies
• Part II Theoretical Approaches
• Part III Genres
• Index
• Imprint