Class, Control, and Classical Music

"Why is classical music predominantly the preserve of the white middle classes? Contemporary associations between classical music and social class remain unexplored, with classical music primarily studied as a text rather than as a practice until recently. Author Anna Bull contributes to this ongoing debate with a timely and provocative intervention. Through a richly detailed ethnography, Bull locates classical music within one of the cultures that produces it--middleclass English youth--and foregrounds classical music as bodily practice of control and restraint. Drawing on her own background as a classical musician, Bull's closely observed account examines youth orchestras and youth choir rehearsals as a space where young people learn the unspoken rules of this culture of weighty tradition and gendered control. She highlights how the middle classes' habitual role--boundary-drawing around their protected spaces and reproducing their privilege through education--can be traced within the everyday spaces of classical music. However, these practices are camouflaged by the ideology of 'autonomous art' that classical music carries. Rather than solely examining the social relations around