Locating Classical Music in Culture

Abstract

This chapter reframes existing research on classical music by putting it into dialogue with sociological understandings of class and gender to outline what a social analysis of classical music should look like. This also lays the foundations for theorizing more widely how music might be analysed in relation to class, an urgent theoretical intervention at a time of increasing economic inequality within many nation-states. It asks, 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? The chapter argues for understanding music and inequality through a multi-scalar approach that examines how sociocultural discourses and practices can be traced within musical practices, and how such practices can then be heard in the aesthetic that they create.