Createquity tweeted a piece on Pacific Standard covering a study investigating the way musical taste reflects class divisions.
Despite the claim music streaming services are helping to dissolve genre labels, the study found “even among people who expressed liking for several different types of music, Veenstra found a clear delineation between “highbrow” genres enjoyed by educated, upper-class people, and “lowbrow” ones favored by others.”
(My emphasis)
To a large extent, this divide falls along educational lines.
“In regard to highbrow tastes, appreciation for classical, choral, jazz, opera, and world/international music was especially common among people possessing higher educational credentials,” Veenstra notes. “For example, the odds of postgraduates claiming to like classical music in my sample was more than three times as high as the odds of people with less than a high school diploma claiming the same.”
In a mirror image of those results, “the odds of disliking classical music was more than eight times as high for the least educated respondents as for the best-educated ones,” he adds.
Whether this reflects differences in upbringing, culture, a preference for simplicity vs. complexity in entertainment, or an instinctive identification with what “people like us” listen to remains an open question. Perhaps it’s a mix of all of the above.
The title of this post notwithstanding, post-graduate education obviously is not the simple answer. It is more a matter of correlation than causation.
I wonder how and when this shift happened. I know within the last two generations there are people who will recall parents or grandparents who would regularly listen to classical music or opera either on the radio or records. Most of these people held blue collar social status.
I wrote about a similar dividing shift in the appreciation of Shakespeare and drama about six months ago (based, I just noticed, on another Pacific Standard piece). I wonder if the shift in musical taste followed the same general arc.
I am not sure if musical taste division would easily parallel the division in theater. According to the musical survey results, lowbrow music is viewed as falling into the categories of “country, disco, easy listening, golden oldies, heavy metal and rap.”
At one time enjoyment of many of the songs that currently comprise the easy listening and golden oldies categories were viewed as a mark of culture and sophistication whereas rock (now currently in the highbrow category) was viewed as vulgar and low class.
Some of the results may be characteristic to Canada where the survey was conducted. I was surprised to see reggae identified as in the highbrow category given its associations with drug and beach culture. In Canada it may be more strongly identified as world music.
Interesting post. Would like to read the piece in PC directly but the link appears to be dead.
Sorry about that. I fixed it. Though I can’t really see what the difference between the working and non-working link was.
This quote from the Times article was illuminating: “If Spotify is right about our increasing willingness to try new stuff — and critics who follow the pop charts said it may be — the trend could upend how we think about music.
Until recently, because of the narrowcasting ethos of terrestrial radio, music was fiercely segregated by genre. In an era less bound by those niches and instead dominated by an online free-for-all, we may discover new artists more quickly than in the past — though, on the other side of the coin, we may also develop less fierce attachments to certain artists, flitting, as my children do, between anything and everything. For better or worse, streaming services may turn us into cultural nomads.”
One interesting sort of ‘case study’ perspective might be from fields like ceramics/pottery where I do my work. The issue there is that the audience for ceramics/pottery has very few genre orienting opportunities. The majority of an audience’s experience will come without any systematic or consistent program for them to focus on and build an understanding. One benefit of genres is that it gives a focus of values and practices that become the basis for differentiating qualities. In music these standards have been solidified until now by the cultural isolation of different genres, from music dedicated venues to narrowcasting radio stations, etc. In pottery in our culture (as opposed to say, in Japan or England) there has never been a place in either practice or valuation that focuses what particular potters do for an audience, much less for the potters themselves.
In some ways this has been incredibly freeing, but at the same time it has exposed a limitation in the depth of understanding an audience is capable of. If every potter is inventing their own direction and not under the auspices of particular genres it actually IS a free for all. Quality as measured by one potter’s work will be potentially unrelated to quality as measured by another. And its not that this is not working for artists and audiences, but it does set up parameters for the field that are much different from the institutionalized practices and standards available to fields with recognized genre affiliations.
For instance, shows for potters will have organizing principles as loosely defined as simply a particular function, a particular surface treatment, a particular firing practice, interpretations of a traditional form, a lineage of influences, a decorative motif, or any randomly contingent and arbitrary aggregating theme… It would be similar to grouping music that has guitars in it or is played by four people. If you move beyond genres you are significantly unmoored from unifying principles. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the benefits are different from what we may have been used to. The life of a nomad will be something very different from that of one who plants and harvests specific crops in specific fields….
This is a very interesting question for me and I have been wondering if others in my particular branch of the arts field will come to see it as an issue. In the meantime I am curious how things like music are coming to embrace a loosening of their genre boundaries. There’s something to learn there, obviously.
Ah, interesting. I hadn’t really thought of pottery in the US as a sort of genre free discipline.
What impact does that have on audiences? You talk about a limitation in the depth of understanding an audience is capable of. I wondered if that manifests itself as people liking what looks interesting, but doesn’t necessarily require skill to execute or does lack of familiarity open the door to inquiry? I could see people feeling less intimidated by pottery than by other types of visual art.
I also didn’t know if lack of knowledge might translate into an environment where people hear X’s work is the hottest fashion and therefore anything that doesn’t resemble X is automatically discounted as being any good.
You are spot on. Pottery seems to have fewer pretensions than some other types of visual arts- except where old fashioned gatekeeping still matters. Then you have what you describe in that last paragraph where things like reputation matter more than the work itself and this particular audience sees who made the work before it sees much of anything specific about the work itself. Some collectors are educated about pots, but it seems the majority are more interested in the names of the artists they collect….. The idea of quality rather than an understanding of that quality itself.
On the other end of the spectrum, however, the audience often really doesn’t know what its looking at beyond basic function and the immediacy of what it likes. The difficulty most potters have to deal with is that the folks attracted to this niche typically have very little education in the visuals of form, and that the eye is more often drawn to the obvious surface details and give those priority. What you end up with quite often is that blue tends to sell well regardless of whether its on mediocre or highly skilled work (there’s actually quite a bit of resentment among professional potters that the quality they have earned over decades of practice and improvement is so easily trumped by a flash of blue on some beginner’s misshapen lump), and that decorative imagery gets people’s attention on plain simple shapes more than sophisticated or nuanced shapes themselves without obvious imagistic surfaces. Potters seem to be turning with increasing frequency to using the form as a canvas for easily accessible decoration than paying attention to the form itself as a potential for expression. It seems more a dumbing down to me than much of an advance for the field…… The ideals of form are almost too obscure for the short cuts of visual distraction at the surface. In my mind, if its all about the decoration why is the pot even necessary? Why make something three dimensional when that aspect is wholly subservient to the two dimensional surface? (The problem is that most potters are woeful 2D artists and the ‘drawings’ are eye catching mostly because of their crude unexpected appearance on these surfaces. They would never count as quality on a piece of paper or canvas, so you actually end up with the worst of two art forms, neglected form and remedial drawing……)
This seems to be one of the obvious consequences in the free-for-all melee of a field without recognized categories that would guide any sense of quality and standards. The truth is also that the potters themselves, and the limited audience who actually do dig deeper and become educated about specific issues of pottery still suffer from a lack of agreement on which things matter. Maybe I shouldn’t have said ‘suffer’, because it seems to work for those potters and that audience. The disappointment I have is that it tends to diminish the curiosity to see beyond the particular flavor of values in question. Rather than striving for an understanding that is bigger than one’s own take on things most potters seem to settle very early into a pattern of values that closely mirrors the perspective they might have had as beginners. Not only do many potters not see much incentive to stretch beyond what they knew in remedial circumstances but the audience doesn’t know any better for the most part itself. Because the marketplace is even happier with highly decorated blue pots many potters have few ambitions beyond making those sorts of pots. Take a look at the internet crafts market on etsy to get a sense of this…..
Without the minimal orientation from established genres the most one can say about quality is often simply what appeals. Quality ends up a visceral first impression rather than an earned standard. And since I am mostly inclined to a postmodern rejection of objective standards I am not lamenting this outcome for its disorientation. Rather, what we seem to have traded for is an emotional valuation rather than an intellectual one, and an obvious immediate affinity rather than an earned and sophisticated one. That is my regret……
Imagine it as the difference between groups of people playing different games each with its own rules and standards and everyone simply playing by their own rules. That sense of grouping is how an orientation of genres works. What is happening in pottery is that every artist has their own game and no one else really knows much about what they are playing at….