Social Class

Abstract

Distinctions of social class were very strong in the Europe of earlier centuries. Musicians were considered to be in the lower classes of people who worked with their hands (or voices). People in these lower classes were not welcome in the new type of universities pioneered in nineteenth-century Germany. So musicians went to conservatories and the youth of the upper classes went to universities or received private academic instruction. The decline of conservatories in the United States has led to aspiring musicians attending universities instead of conservatories. In the process they receive an amateur curriculum developed originally for European dilettantes.