Omnivores

I’ve been involved in a very lively, enormously stimulating e-mail discussion

of some the problems facing orchestras. One subject that came up is the supposed

hierarchy of art — high art at the top, popular art far lower down. Along with

this usually goes the idea that art, by its very nature, is something spiritual

and sublime, far removed from everyday life. And then, of course, it’s easy to

say that high art, existing in its own lofty sphere, is the only real art.

I’d challenged that idea, suggesting among other things that it’s a fairly

recent invention, going back no later than the first few decades of the 19th

century. And I got wonderful support from Paul DiMaggio, a professor of

sociology at Princeton, and research director of Princeton’s Center for Arts and

Cultural Policy Studies. Paul can talk about these issues with an authority I

don’t have, and he also presents data that everybody in classical music ought to

know about, if we’re hoping to find a new audience. Who, after all, is the

audience we’re trying to attract? What kind of people are they? A lot is known

about this, and Paul gives us some of the really crucial information. Note

especially the third and fourth paragraphs. (And thanks, Paul, for letting me

post this here.)

The hierarchical view of art established in the early 19th century was

well suited to the way people lived back then, with a small, stable

inter-marrying upper class capable of enforcing their definition of art.

It was also natural that the emerging commercial middle class, when it

became large enough to sustain concerts, would draw from the ideas of the

upper class — and would actually elaborate on those ideas and in some ways

make them even more restrictive — to solve its own problems of identity and

status (e.g., why it was not just richer but also more virtuous than the

lower middle classes and simple trades people, how to tell the difference

between art and fashion, etc., and so on). So the heyday of classical music

was marked by an alliance between urban upper classes that were relatively

stable and tightly connected and urban middle classes that served and relied

upon those upper classes and their approval for their livelihoods and senses

of selves. Classical music, and the stories they told themselves about it

and what their ability to appreciate it said about them, was an important

part of this.

The late-20th early 21st-century crisis, I think, reflects the dissolution

of the way of living to which both the organization of classical music (in

the U.S. at least) and the stories people told about it were tailored.

Instead of fixed, well-defined upper classes, we have international

overlapping networks of elites; and instead of urban commercial middle

classes, we have even larger networks of highly educated and self-confident

professionals, who have many other bases of identity (including viewing

themselves as too "un-snobby" to like classical music). Research (both

research at Princeton and research by folks elsewhere) has shown, first,

that it’s almost impossible to find a college-educated American who will

espouse the hierarchical view of culture that dominated discourse about

music c. 1900 and was common even in the 1950s; and, second, that the kinds

of upper-middle-class people who use culture as a basis for identity and

status (people with more of what sociologists call "cultural capital" than

money) now tend to be "omnivores" who like and can talk intelligently about

many kinds of music. Omniverousness fits the way we live now, with middle

class people participating in far-flung, cross-national networks that put

them into contact with many different kinds of people — it makes sense to

know enough cultures so that you can operate in all of these interlocking

networks. The current form of organization and traditional narratives about

classical music fit this new kind of social structure really poorly.

In other words, the problem isn’t just getting the music and the internal

organizational dynamics right, but it’s aligning the music and the stories

we tell about it with the way people live their lives and they way they use

music and the other arts to understand themselves and

construct their identities.