Classical and Class

Though I have been a professional musician since my teens and a classical musician for nearly all of that time, and always interested in composition, I never took my own composing seriously until a few years after I moved to Mexico. Musing over this recently I'm wondering if there were not some class issues I was not consciously aware of.

My parents both left school at the Grade 8 level and I was the first in my extended family to attend university--in the 1970s. I think we would be lower-middle-class at best. Of course, as soon as I started considering myself a musician, i.e. artist, I declared myself to be outside the class system. And besides, there are no classes in modern Western democracies, right? Oh how silly of me. Of course there are and I, in all respects other than my expertise as a classical guitarist, was still lower-middle-class. And not just because I was poor (as a classical musician I typically made between $20,000 and $25,000 CDN a year in earnings)--I also had some basic cultural attitudes associated with the lower-middle-class. Both I and my English professor might wear a t-shirt and jeans to class but for him it was inverted snobbery and for me it was just the costume of my class.

All of this got very confused because of the 60s, of course, when the costume and attitudes of the lower-middle-class became universalized. But over the years I succeeded in expunging much of the 60s madness from my mind. And, as I became more thoroughly ensconced in the classical music world, taking positions as chair of the guitar department at the conservatory and sessional lecturer at the university, I became more harmonized with the culture of the international classical music fraternity. Greatly accomplished musicians regarded me as a peer, for example.

But there still was a corner of my consciousness that thought as a member of the lower-middle-class and members of that class might be popular musicians or traditional musicians (like my mother), but they were not composers. Every member of the composing class in Canada that I am aware of comes from an upper-middle-class or higher background. This is possibly true in the US as well, though I haven't done any research.

So, while I composed in small increments throughout my career, I did not regard it as a serious artistic activity. Moving to Mexico seems to have changed my basic attitudes. Here I am a member of the expatriate class and hence truly out of the Mexican class system. This particular enclave is one heavily weighted towards the arts. So these factors together with my inherent interest in composition led me to start composing in a serious way some fifteen years ago. Now I have a substantial body of work and while I am unsure of its real quality I am sure of one thing: I am actually a composer! And, I suspect for the first time in my life, really not in the class system.

Here are some pieces: