In Class, Control, and Classical Music, Anna Bull poses a key question to classical music stakeholders: “how are musical institutions, practices, and aesthetics shaped by wider conditions of economic inequality, and in what ways might music enable and entrench such inequalities or work against them?” (p. 1) Through ethnography and careful historical analysis, she interrogates youth classical music programs and explores how they participate in class reproduction, the formation of middle-class selfhood, and classed boundary-drawing.
As a music education scholar, I appreciate the considerable extent to which Bull’s observations, which predominantly target music education, draw upon literature outside the field to produce a robust call to action. She purposefully draws on different disciplines that deepen and add complexity to her approach to core questions about economic inequality and classical musics. Stuart Hall’s theorizing of “articulation,” Georgina Born’s intersecting “planes of mediation,” and Pierre Bourdieu’s approach to class as relational...
University of California Press