Classical music as genre

I’m delighted that my co-authored article with Christina Scharff, ‘Classical music as genre: Hierarchies of value within freelance classical musicians’ discourse’ has been published, open access, by the European Journal of Cultural Studies. Christina and I started thinking about this article as a result of an invitation to the Copenhagen Workshop on Genres in June 2018, hosted by Ana Alacovska and Dave O’Brien. Ana and Dave then invited us to submit an article to a special issue on the sociology of genre. While Christina and I had already written extensively about classical music and inequalities, one of the concerns that I had come across during this work was thinking about how to delineate classical music as an object of study, and how to justify our terminology of ‘classical music’ against the until-recent dominance in musicology of the term ‘Western Art Music’. In my book, Class, Control, and Classical Music, I included a short defence of my use of the term ‘classical music’, as well as drawing on Laudan Nooshin’s critique of the term ‘Western Art Music’. I argued that ‘classical music’ was the vernacular term the young musicians in my study used, and it denotes a recognisable phenomenon within everyday discourse.