Search

Are higher status cultural tastes in the modern United States better described as being inclusive and broad or exclusive and narrow? We construct an original dataset in response to conflicting answers to this question. We fill a major gap in the literature on cultural tastes by simultaneously considering taste for both musical genres and artists within genres. By examining the compositional balance of respondents' taste portfolios, we reconcile seemingly incommensurate theoretical frameworks of class homology and omnivorousness. The results indicate that an omnivorous disposition to music is a relatively middle-status position in the social structure. In contrast, positions characterized by higher levels of cultural capital map onto exclusive and narrower tastes for consecrated culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In music studies, genre theory has primarily been used to study popular music rather than classical music. This article demonstrates how genre theory can be applied to studying classical music production in order to understand how its value is negotiated and reproduced. Drawing on data from interviews with early-career female classical musicians in London, it explores discourses of classical music as a genre in order to understand how genre shapes working lives. We identify three themes within the data: first, genre hierarchies contribute to the (re-)production of divisions of labour, in ways that reaffirm gendered hierarchies. Second, many research participants actively portrayed themselves as being interested in different musical genres, both as listeners and as performers, but identified other classical musicians as having pejorative attitudes towards non-classical genres or practices such as playing in a band. Third, genre hierarchies were (re-)produced in institutional settings, in musicians' working practices and in social interactions. Overall, analysing classical music as a genre through examining the perspectives of freelance musicians shows that subgenres within classical music, as well as classical music itself, are understood relationally to other genres in a hierarchy of value that reaffirms existing inequalities in the cultural labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]