The social aesthetics of classical music:how musical practices reproduce classed cultures and inequalities

This chapter builds on Bourdieu’s theorisation of “practice” to explore the articulation between classical music production and the middle classes. Drawing on an ethnography of youth classical music groups in England, it describes the practices of classical music education that are required to create its distinctive aesthetic, building on scholarship on “social aesthetics”. I argue that many of the practices that are required to produce classical music’s aesthetic are normative for the middle classes. This approach shows a way to empirically study the association between class and genre