Was Pierre Bourdieu Right About Taste?

I know what you are thinking, who the heck is Pierre Bourdieu? Some French sociologist of no relevance to us, probably? Well, that's half right. He was indeed a French sociologist, but every time you read someone pontificating about how classical music is just rich people showing off or how it has no "relevance" to modern life or how it is just another way of oppressing victim groups you are getting Pierre Bourdieu at second or third-hand. So let's have a look at what he proposed first-hand. As Wikipedia says, Bourdieu "argues that judgments of taste are related to social position, or more precisely, are themselves acts of social positioning." Further:

For Bourdieu each individual occupies a position in a multidimensional social space; a person is not defined only by social class membership, but by every single kind of capital they can articulate through social relations. That capital includes the value of social networks, which Bourdieu showed could be used to produce or reproduce inequality.

For me, this is rather like trying to understand the individual by examining what shoes he wears and what restaurants he goes to. Or perhaps trying to understand musical aesthetics by doing a rigorous examination of how everyone dresses at a Salzburg Festival concert. Lots of people wear Converse runners, but as far as I can tell they are all individuals. Lots of people wear suits and ties or evening gowns to Salzburg concerts but they too are all individuals. We could do a Venn diagram of the "multidimensional social space" of any particular person attending a concert and come up with, what? Probably a different one for every person. Sure, there are certainly group characteristics, but I think that people like Bourdieu have the causality backwards. In other words, the "social class" does not define the individual supposedly "belonging" to that class; rather the nature or characteristics of the class are determined by the people who comprise it. You read out the nature of the class by looking at the individuals, not the other way around. The idea that the class defines the individual is not only a kind of Marxism, it is deeply bigoted.

I have told this story before, but let me tell it again. I came from a lower class or lower-middle class in Canadian society even though we never thought of it in those terms. We were certainly poor by most standards. Expensive music lessons were out of the question! Also, where we lived there weren't even any expensive music teachers, so no problem. When I applied to the School of Music at the University of Victoria in 1971, I was so out of touch that I didn't even know I was supposed to audition on my instrument (I had taken up the classical guitar about a year earlier, before that I played electric bass and six-string.) So the conductor of the school orchestra, who happened to be hanging around, dragged me into a practice room and tested my musical aptitude. He played a high note on the piano and asked me to sing it back. Played a low note on the piano and asked me to sing it back. Played two notes separately and asked me to sing the interval. I think he may also have played a triad and asked if it was major or minor. That was it. I passed. This wasn't hard as I had been playing in a rock and blues band for a few years and had even written a bunch of songs. Obviously neither I nor the conductor cared a whit what "social class" I might have been in. It was the same all through my years at university. There were obviously students from social classes both high and low. But all that ceased to exist at the door. All that anyone cared about was: could you play your instrument? If a performer, that is. Otherwise, could you deliver the goods in whatever area you were in?

When you move from the professional musician part of the culture to the audience/media part, things can get rather fuzzy. For one thing, most of the patrons are, of course, wealthy (though people contribute at all levels), and as well, people writing about music may or may not be musicians themselves, so they may get deceived to a greater or lesser extent by all this social class stuff. But the reality is that classical music is pretty much ruled by its own internal standards. You can prove this for yourself by just looking at the backgrounds of composers. They rarely come from any sort of elevated social class. Beethoven: drunkard father, lower middle class. Mozart, father was a violin teacher, again, lower middle class. Sibelius' father was a doctor, but he died of typhus when the composer was three years old, leaving a mountain of debts. Stravinsky's father was a bass in the opera and his family did descend from minor Polish nobility, but they were not wealthy. Bach, of course, came from a very long line of organists and church musicians but he himself had to go to work as an ordinary church musician from age seventeen. Philip Glass' father owned a record store and he had to work as a plumber and taxi driver until well into his forties. I could go on and on, but it seems perfectly clear that musical ability may have something to do with genetics, but nothing to do with social class. What about musical taste, which is what Bourdieu is talking about? For that we need to take a closer look at his theory.

[Bourdieu] advances the bold claim that all cultural symbols and practices, from artistic tastes, style in dress, and eating habits to religion, science and philosophy—even language itself—embody interests and function to enhance social distinctions. The struggle for social distinction, whatever its symbolic form, is for Bourdieu a fundamental dimension of all social life. 

Swartz, David. Culture and Power (p. 6). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

(I am quoting from this secondary source because Bourdieu's original prose is often rather dense.) In relating the anecdote about my audition for university I was making the point that this incident and, in fact, my whole career at university was a powerful instance of how an educational institution can overrule social class. This is a fundamental reason for having institutions of higher education. Bourdieu however sees it differently.

Bourdieu maintains that the educational system—more than the family, church, or business firm—has become the institution most responsible for the transmission of social inequality in modern societies.

Swartz, David. Culture and Power (p. 190). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

Why does he think this?

The education system, Bourdieu argues in Reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977:177–219), performs three central functions. It first of all performs the “function of conserving, inculcating and consecrating” a cultural heritage. This is its “internal” and most “essential function.” Schooling provides not just the transmission of technical knowledge and skills, but also socialization into a particular cultural tradition. Analogous to the Catholic Church, the school is “an institution specially contrived to conserve, transmit and inculcate the cultural canons of a society” (Bourdieu 1971c:178). It performs a cultural reproduction function.

Swartz, David. Culture and Power (pp. 190-191). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

Yes, it is quite true that there are essential practices (what Bourdieu encompasses in his concept of habitus) that socialize students into a particular cultural tradition. You could describe these practices as virtues as they include things like honesty (thou shalt not copy other's work), truth-seeking, disciplined practice (thou shalt practice scales and arpeggios until they are easy and automatic), perception and understanding of aesthetic quality (what is a well-shaped phrase?, for example) and so on. Some of this is taught directly, but much by example. Bourdieu might call these "underlying nexuses that reinforce social-class relations" but that probably says more about the cultural tradition of Marxism that his work tends to follow. To be fair to Bourdieu, he is much less doctrinaire than other sociologists.

Bourdieu differs, however, from other reproduction theorists in that he does not see education as directly determined by the state, the economy, or social classes. In contrast to both functional and Marxist theories, Bourdieu argues that “relative autonomy” rather than close correspondence characterizes the relationship between the education system and the labor market.

Swartz, David. Culture and Power (p. 191). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

Unlike Bourdieu, I didn't come to a theory of practice by studying Algerian peasants or the French educational system. But I am pretty familiar with the educational system of classical music. While the majority of music teachers might be inculcating uncritical adherence to a simple canon, the real peaks of the profession, from which the fundamental criteria of quality flow, are based on a deeper aesthetic understanding. Let me illustrate with a couple of examples. My best grasp of the technique of classical guitar playing came from three sources: the first was private study with José Tomas in Spain. Tomas was one of a small group of players that were all taught directly by Andrés Segovia. The group included Alirio Diaz from Venezuela, Oscar Ghiglia from Italy, John Williams from England and José Tomas from Spain. Except for Tomas, they all had exceptional careers as performers and Ghiglia also excelled as a teacher. Tomas, while an excellent performer, specialized more in teaching and was Segovia's assistant at the famous master classes in Santiago de Compostella where a whole generation of young guitarists learned their trade. I studied with Tomas in Spain and later on with Ghiglia in Banff, Alberta where he gave an excellent master class. The other source of my understanding came later when I was in two master classes taught by Pepe Romero, one in Canada and the other at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Pepe came from a different tradition. Though the Wikipedia biography acknowledges no teachers, I believe Pepe's father studied with Daniel Fortea, a student of Francisco Tárrega, the founder of modern classical guitar technique. So of the two major schools of guitar playing, that coming from Tárrega and that coming from Segovia, I was lucky enough to have studied with masters in both traditions. There is a third important school of guitar technique, that coming from the pedagogy of the Uruguayan Abel Carlevaro, that I was able to observe in a master class he gave in Toronto in the 1970s. I say "technique" but there is always an expressive palette, what you might call a set of aesthetic practices, that are both enabled and suggested by the technique. Let me just hint here that there really is no suggestion of the malevolent influence of "social class" in any of this.

One more example: you might think that this delightfully egalitarian scenario is just because of the guitar being a lowly, plebian instrument. But another example might confirm my theory. The great violinist Paul Kling proposed to me once that every great violinist in the 20th century was either a Russian from the Caucasus, or studied with one! You can research that for yourself.

Now compare Bourdieu's view:

An important theme in Bourdieu’s work on education is his assertion that academic selection is shaped by class-based self-selection. Whether students stay in school or drop out, and the course of study they pursue, Bourdieu argues, depends on their practical expectations of the likelihood that people of their social class will succeed academically. Bourdieu believes there is generally a high correlation between subjective hopes and objective chances. A child’s ambitions and expectations with regard to education and career are the structurally determined products of parental and other reference-group educational experience and cultural life. Working-class youth do not aspire to high levels of educational attainment because, according to Bourdieu, they have internalized and resigned themselves to the limited opportunities for school success that exist for those without much cultural capital.

Swartz, David. Culture and Power (p. 197). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

Bourdieu is apparently an expert mind-reader if he knows what all those children's ambitions and expectations are. It is claimed that he is an empirical sociologist, but all I see is mind-reading. I am pretty much a counter-example. I came from a "working-class" family and hated high school. But I had intellectual and cultural curiosity (perhaps that was why I hated high school) and after high school, while working at menial jobs for two years, I continued to pursue cultural interests such as classical music and Japanese art. One evening I was hanging out with some friends who had gone to university and one of them said "you are definitely university material." After that, I started thinking about it and eventually applied and was accepted. So it seems that a bit of curiosity and a modicum of intelligence trumps all of Bourdieu's "class-based self-selection." I would add to this the example of a friend of mine and likely the smartest person I have ever met. He was permanently expelled from the British Columbia school system in Grade 7 for being difficult (intellectually difficult, not physically!) and worked at menial jobs for several years. He also was a novitiate in a monastery, but did not take the vows. During this time he also began to educate himself by learning Italian, Latin and Hebrew. Partly with my encouragement he applied to university and was accepted. He did a double honours major in Greek and Latin, followed by a Masters in Philosophy, a Doctorate in Philosophy and an MBA. After that he entered the professional world first as a corporate loans officer at a bank and then as the chief administrator at one of the largest hospitals in Canada. He came from a lower middle class environment and left home at age sixteen.

I think the problem is often the use of mass statistics which really tell you absolutely nothing about exceptional people. And all the people that have significant amounts of cultural capital are exceptional.

From my own experience the idea that someone's musical taste might be the product of their social class is a questionable one. Yes, the environment you grow up in certainly has an influence. But in today's world where literally every culture is at your fingertips, I think this is less and less true. Sadly, the seductive lies of Marxism, that there are Dark Forces (capitalism, social class, racism, sexism) oppressing you, is always an easy sell for politicians who always have a plan to help you. Oddly, in the long run their plans never seem to work out as the only real beneficiaries are the politicians and their minions.

For our envoi here is Maki Namekawa playing two piano etudes by that very downtown composer, Philip Glass: