Auld Lang Syne: a song and its culture

musicology, even in the most prestigious institutions, cannot any longer assume knowledge of the standard repertory among their students. If such repertory is to be taught, this must necessarily be done somewhat along the lines of the ‘middlebrow’ pedagogy of half a century ago and more. The question is: Why bother? At this point Guthrie falters, in a manner slightly surprising for someone employed in a university. ‘Appreciation’, she writes, ‘described a process of acquiring specialist theoretical, historical, and biographical knowledge that would supposedly lead to enhanced musical understanding’ (p. 3). Why ‘supposedly’? Surely it is only Bourdieu’s bourgeois aesthete who would express such scepticism. One can explain to undergraduates in the greatest detail the ideological sleights of hand performed by devotees of aesthetic autonomy; at the same time, a claim to aesthetic autonomy remains an inescapable ideological component of ‘the standard repertory’, as we continue to call it. If cultural hierarchies still exist in Western societies, as Guthrie suggests (pp. 215–16), then educators have a duty not just to explain how these hierarchies find their social support, but also how to negotiate them.