To Örebro University

Bourdieu-inspired approaches have been the most influential in sociological research on music in many Western and Northern European nations, since the publication of Distinction in 1979. Cultural capital, particularly, was popularised in Anglophone countries through work on popular music aesthetics (Frith 2002) and notions of ‘subcultural capital’ (Thornton 1995) during the 1990s, whilst, more recently, habitus and cultural capital’s explanatory force in relation to music, have most obviously been indebted to large-scale projects around cultural capital and social exclusion (Bennett et al. 2008; Bihagen and Katz-Gerro 2000; Savage et al. 2015). In the Nordic countries, too, questions of music education and gentrification have also taken up Bourdieu’s concepts to explain the acquisition, deployment and institutionalisation of music taste (Burnard et al. 2015; Dyndahl et al. 2017). 

A number of scholars have challenged Bourdieu’s formulation and the way in which his work has been taken up in relation to music specifically (see Prior 2013; Rimmer 2012). The question is how to locate a discussion of social inequalities of music whilst carrying out meaningful social research which takes into account material practices of music listening (DeNora 2003) in relation to (unevenly) globally dispersed, technological change.

This presentation outlines how a range of quantitative and qualitative sociological methods may help to reveal more complex, intersecting forms of inequalities and notions of aesthetic experience than are currently offered by Bourdieusian frameworks. It also seeks to offer insights from postcolonial and posthumanist-feminist theorising as a means of rethinking the linear value-hierarchy between hexis/doxa, subject/object and material/cultural which work to reinscribe simplistic notions of hierarchically determined taste. Through this, the presentation aims to raise some implications for sociologically grounded studies of music education, specifically around notions of value and musical development which take account of Bourdieusian insights but are not limited to their frameworks.