All entries for Monday 14 May 2012

Scribbles in the margin of A Singer’s Notebook

A couple of weeks ago Mike Savage, one of the co-authors of Culture, Class, Distinction drew my attention to an interesting engagement with our work. The singer Ian Bostridge’s collection of journalism, reviews and essays, A Singer’s Notebook, includes some thoughts on our findings about tastes for music in the contemporary UK, discovered by listening to my colleagues Tony Bennett and Elizabeth Silva’s appearance on Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed. A good advert for the value of public engagement this, because Bostridge has read and reflected on our efforts in a more gratifying way than that immediately provided by the citation metrics which are the usual thin gruel of recognition for academic research. I thought I’d write a brief, personal, response to his observations.

Firstly, whilst praising our empirical detail, Bostridge is critical of our findings in the light of his perception of a field of musical taste in which rock/pop is central and the classical music which is his stock-in-trade is marginal. In contemporary culture, he argues, commodified rock music exists as an illusory ‘bad conscience of a triumphant Western bourgeoisie’ in which, for example, politicians fall over themselves to declare their musical tastes (e.g. Gordon Brown and the Arctic Monkeys, David Cameron and The Smiths) as a badge of their democratic credentials. Classic music commands less authority and so there is less need to either get to know about it or pretend to like it. In relation to our study, he re-iterates this by quoting our assertion that classical music does not generate ‘excitement but, especially for elite groups, it provides repertoires and an arena for socializing’. He characterizes this analysis as manifestly inadequate. I personally plead guilty to his accusation of knowing very little about classical music – but here he mistakes the lack of excitement evident in our qualitative sample -where classical music was only really talked about by highly educated and elite professionals and in not especially animated ways– as some judgment by us, as analysts, of the characteristics of the genre itself. It is true, as he also points out, that classical music was the single most popular genre we asked about on our survey and that forms of popular music (electronic dance music, heavy metal) generated more dislikes than likes. It is also true that Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was amongst the most popular items we asked about – though for at least one interview participant, far from being emblematic of a complex classical piece, it was dismissed as ‘chocolate box music’ and is itself, as Pryer implies, as ‘commodified’ as music comes. From a Bourdieusian perspective the meaning of genres or pieces of music only really makes sense in relation to other genres or pieces – and what people say about them or do with them is more significant in this positioning, I think, than any characteristics inherent in the texts themselves.

Secondly – and more interestingly perhaps - is Bostridge’s own position in the field, as someone with a career trajectory that has gone from professional historian to professional musician. A Singer’s Notebookbegins with a transcript of the Edinburgh festival lecture Bostridge gave in 2000 in which he outlines the relationship between his own career in classical music and his preceding professional scholarly interest in the decline of witchcraft. Western classical music, he argues, exists in the present day as a kind of religion through which ‘extraordinary effects and visions are summoned up by techniques that still seem impervious to rational analysis.’ The genre, as it is currently understood, emerges at around the same historical period as what he describes as the ‘high-point of magical thinking’ in the 16th and 17th centuries. He contends that music ‘remains one of our few approved routes into exercising a magical sensibility, a sense of the supernatural, the transcendent, the ineffable’. This connects up nicely with what I’ve always thought as the most interesting element of Bourdieu’s intellectual project – the relationships between 'the artist' and his/her 'followers'. In The Rules of Art Bourdieu refers to the artist as analagous to the magician in the work of Marcel Mauss. A magician doesn't need to know magic, he contends - that is clearly impossible in a rational, secular universe. He/she does need an audience which believes in magic, though. Revealing the social patterns of cultural preferences and practices is only one step in pulling back the curtain on ‘the cult of culture’. Bourdieu suggests we should be suspicious of things which claim to escape rational analysis - even if we accept that such things can be complex and beautiful - because without such analysis we are left with people who know their secret codes and people who don’t.

It is nice to see our work feeding into these kinds of discussion – so it seems good manners to leave the last word to Bostridge himself.

David Wright : 14 May 2012 15:23 |  Tags: Bourdieu Music Taste Video |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem