Musical Gentrification

Popular Music, Distinction and Social Mobility

Petter Dyndahl, Sidsel Karlsen, Ruth Wright, Petter Dyndahl, Sidsel Karlsen, Ruth Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000174748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Musical Gentrification is an exploration of the role of popular music in processes of socio-cultural inclusion and exclusion in a variety of contexts. Twelve chapters by international scholars reveal how cultural objects of relatively lower status, in this case popular musics, are made objects of acquisition by subjects or institutions of higher social status, thereby playing an important role in social elevation, mobility and distinction. The phenomenon of musical gentrification is approached from a variety of angles: theoretically, methodologically and with reference to a number of key issues in popular music, from class, gender and ethnicity to cultural consumption, activism, hegemony and musical agency. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, empirical examples and ethnographic data, this is a valuable study for scholars and researchers of Music Education, Ethnomusicology, Cultural Studies and Cultural Sociology.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1 Musical gentrification and socio-cultural diversities

An analytical approach towards popular music expansion in egalitarian societies

Petter Dyndahl, Sidsel Karlsen and Ruth Wright

Background and broader ecology: how and why musical gentrification?

The aim of this book is to explore the role of music with regard to social dynamics and processes of cultural inclusion and exclusion through the concept of musical gentrification. Our investigation of these phenomena pays special attention to the expanding role that popular music plays, and has played, in the listening habits of people of all kinds as well as in a variety of educational contexts, and the function that this expansion may have in creating paths of social mobility or distinction in societies which deem themselves egalitarian. Most of our cases, or chapters, are set in Norway, and can be linked to one particular research project (see more on this below), conducted by an international group of researchers between 2013 and 2017. As such, Norway can be seen to provide a particularly interesting site of investigation with respect to the topics at hand, for reasons that are connected both to the country’s historical development as well as to its contemporary political, economic and socio-cultural situation. Thus, in the following, we will aim to unpack some of this ecology in order to provide the reader with the material needed to form an understanding of the societal backdrop pertaining to most of the examples, occurrences and experiences rendered throughout this book. Since the major part of Norway’s industrial development and consequent economic growth has happened in the period that stretches from the end of World War II until today, this will constitute our era of interest.

From the beginning of the post-war period, Norway has been endowed with some extraordinarily beneficial conditions for society-building which have allowed for positive social change, favourable growth and development, enhancement of social mobility and a minimum of social inequalities. Several factors have contributed in this regard, among them a decades-long period of relative political stability, the dominant social democracy ideology underpinning and enabling the welfare state and, not least, the extremely advantageous economic situation following from the discovery of oil and natural gas in the North Sea in the late 1960s. One of the most evident consequences of Norway’s flourishing as a nation-state has been the substantial educational explosion that has taken place over the past 70 years, not only in science and technology but also in the humanities and the arts. Given that compulsory school education has been ensured for all citizens, and also that higher education is overall free of charge, the steeper and more traditional social hierarchies have, at least seemingly, been evened out. However, as sociological research conducted during the last decade has shown, upward social mobility in Norway is currently decreasing and patterns of social reproduction have once more gained a strong hold, not least with respect to participation in higher education and entrance into the more prestigious professions (see Hansen, 2011; Hjellbrekke & Korsnes, 2014).

Art, culture and creativity, including music, is a mandatory area of knowledge in Norwegian kindergarten teacher education. Music is hence supposed to be already a part of Norwegians’ day-to-day activities in kindergarten, which is accessible to a large part of the population, since, in 2019, 91.8 per cent of the children between one and five years of age attended this form of day-care institution (Statistics Norway, 2019a). In schools, the music subject is compulsory in Norwegian primary and lower secondary education. Thus, it is the place where all children presumably attend music education, regardless of their social background and cultural interests. As for music schooling beyond compulsory education, there exists a wide-ranging availability of upper-secondary-school programmes in music, dance and drama. Furthermore, at the tertiary level, several universities and university colleges offer musicology programmes and various forms of musician and music teacher education. In addition to the institutionalised musical socialisation and education happening within kindergartens and schools, including higher education, Norwegian society is expected to provide easy access to extracurricular or leisure time music and arts education for children and youth. The country’s current legislation maintains that each municipality is required to provide its inhabitants with low-fee music and arts schools targeting this particular group. Consequently, in 2018, 13.2 per cent of the 6–15-year-olds in Norway attended municipality-run schools of music and performing arts (Statistics Norway, 2019b). However, in addition to the somewhat limited participation in the first place, research has shown that these schools have a skewed recruitment basis, both in terms of the students’ socio-economic (Gustavsen & Hjelmbrekke, 2009) and ethnic (Bjørnsen, 2012; Kleppe, 2013) backgrounds.

Despite such inequalities and diversities, the Norwegian public, media and even some research reports (e.g., Sakslid, Skarpenes, & Hestholm, 2018) tend to praise what are perceived as minor economic and social differences, pervasive middle-class values and a set of common cultural references, based among other things on the so-called “extended notion of culture” which encompasses a wide range of activities that span both traditional high and low culture, as well as sports and amateur activities within many different areas. Another factor that contributes to this picture is, as mentioned at the outset of this chapter, that popular music has gained a far more central position than was previously the case; it is now considered to be “legitimate culture” in Norwegian music education, cultural policy and media, as well as in the public sphere. This may appear as a democratising and inclusive feature of late modern social and cultural development. However, as we will argue throughout the rest of this chapter and book, such an understanding may also be viewed as quite simplistic. Building on a conflict-oriented perspective, also as regards relatively egalitarian societies, we believe, with Bourdieu, that the social significance of music and culture is still constituted in and through differences and inequalities. Thus, when influential voices claim that we share interests and values, it might rather be a signal that the conflicts and contradictions are downplayed and now operate at a more subtle level. This is precisely where the concept of musical gentrification offers a valid lens through which to focus, analyse and discuss contemporary “battles of culture”—not only in Norwegian society—but wherever similar phenomena arise. The remaining chapters of this book will, in various ways, attempt to provide suggestions as to how this can be done.

Musical gentrification: from metaphor to concept

As far as we have ascertained, the first time the term “musical gentrification” was used in a scholarly context was in a chapter published in 2013 (Dyndahl, 2013). However, this occurrence fits into a longer and broader tradition of employing the old class concept of the gentry as a point of departure for academic theorising and analysis. The gentry was originally a social class whose wealth was large enough that they could avoid working with their hands for a living. As described by Strype (1822) and Radulescu and Truelove (2005), from the late medieval period to the Elizabethan era in England, it was ranked just below the nobility and above the yeomanry. Also, during this period, the gentry increased significantly in number and came to be the most important class in society. Transferred to today’s context, the term seems to refer, generally, to the “upper or ruling class” (The Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.d.) or to be used as a synonym for “the highest class in a society” (The Merriam-Webster. com Thesaurus, s.d.). It is within such an understanding that Glass (1963) added the suffix -fication (from the Latin ficare: to make), and coined the concept of gentrification, which refers to the contemporary phenomenon of investment in and renovation of homes and businesses in deteriorating areas, in order to make these neighbourhoods attractive to today’s affluent gentry or middle-to-upper-class people. Correspondingly, these processes often result in the displacement of earlier, usually poorer, residents. By abstracting Glass’ human and urban geographical understanding of the neighbourhood into the idea of “symbolic neighbourhoods”, Halnon and Cohen (2006) later opened the way for a more figurative and metaphorical use of the term. The main source of inspiration for formulating the concept of musical gentrification, however, was Peterson and Kern (1996), who put forward some possible dominant-class ways of relating to popular culture in the following assertion: “One recurrent strategy is to define popular culture as brutish and something to be suppressed or avoided […] another is to gentrify elements of popular culture and incorporate them into the dominant status-group culture” (1996, p. 906, our emphasis). In retrospect, however, one may say that all the above influences can be traced in the first comprehensive attempt to formulate a definition of musical gentrification:

On these grounds, and in the given theoretical context, we refer to musical gentrification as complex processes with both inclusionary and exclusionary outcomes, by which musics, musical practices, and musical cultures of relatively lower status are made to be objects of acquisition by subjects who inhabit higher or more powerful positions. As with the examples borrowed from urban geography and described above, these processes strongly contribute to changing the characteristics of particular musical communities as well as the musics, practices, and cultures that are subjected to gentrification.

(Dyndahl, Karlsen, Skårberg, & Nielsen, 2014, p. 54)

As with Bourdieu’s (2011) concept of cultural capital, one could claim that musical gentrification is, in one way, a metaphor. In the case of Bourdieu, the source domain of the metaphor is the capital concept of the material economy, while the target domain is the symbolic—or cultural—economy, of which he develops an analytical concept. Regarding musical gentrification, the source is urban life and its material and symbolic economies, and the target is the specific field of music within the cultural-economic domain. Tuck and Yang (2012), however, caution against viewing incidents of cultural appropriation in a metaphorical way, since this might potentially gloss over actions and aspects that are materially harmful. Their timely warning is primarily related to decolonisation, and to the troublesome habit of turning the harsh realities of colonialism into metaphors for other, incommensurable problems in society. This can be observed for example in “[t]he easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to ‘decolonize our schools,’ or use ‘decolonizing methods,’ or, ‘decolonize student thinking’ ” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 1), thus indirectly making colonialism more innocent than it is. Notwithstanding this important reminder, as scholars writing within the humanities and the social sciences, it is almost impossible to avoid the use of metaphors as such. The key is, we believe, on the one hand, to use metaphors that are not incommensurable—or completely out of tune—with their source, which is neither the case with cultural capital nor with musical gentrification. On the other hand, we are of the opinion that it is vital to acknowledge the importance of the actual and intentional use of language and metaphor under specific circumstances and with reference to specific phenomena. Metaphors are always metaphors in a context.

The contextual or situated intention behind Bourdieu’s coining of “cultural capital” is based on this concept being more than just a metaphor; to be considered the holder of such capital requires actual knowledge and understanding, as well as the mastery of a variety of codes. A similar intention can be said to be behind the development of the notion of musical gentrification. Our ambition has been to turn the metaphor into a critical, analytical concept; this can perhaps also be understood as the overarching objective of the entire book. According to Kant (1819), in order to create a posteriori concepts, “one must thus be able to compare, reflect and abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are essential and general conditions of generating any concept whatever” (Kant, 1819, §6). In the ongoing conceptualisation of musical gentrification all three of these acts or operations have been, and still are, effective: the comparison of different mental images to one another is necessary to create the metaphor; the reflection on mental imagery and how different representations can be comprehended requires knowledge, skill and awareness; and the abstraction of everything else that deviates from it is essential to the articulation of the concept itself. However, this book’s further interpretation of the concept of musical gentrification will, in addition, pursue the Bourdieusian critique of the Kantian judgement of taste, thereby promoting a distinct critical orientation towards “pure” perceptions of aesthetics, and of music in particular. The foremost evidence that musical gentrification has developed from being a metaphor to becoming a concept lies perhaps in the fact that it adds fresh content and new dimensions precisely to Bourdieu’s concept of capital, within a recontextualisation of time and space.

The musical gentrification project: origins and facts

The research project “Musical gentrification and socio-cultural diversities”, from which most of the chapters in this book originate, commenced in 2013 following a successful grant application to the Research Council of Norway (see Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, n.d.b). It was awarded four years of funding under the council’s scheme for independent open-call projects, FRIPRO. With professor Petter Dyndahl as the project manager, and also as the main thinker behind the ideas underpinning the project as such, the project was located at what was then known as Hedmark University College (HUC; now Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences), and with the Norwegian Academy of Music (NMH) as a partner institution. In addition to Dyndahl (working at HUC), three senior researchers were engaged from the very beginning, namely professors Sidsel Karlsen (HUC, now NMH), Siw Graabræk Nielsen (NMH) and Odd Skårberg (HUC). Within the first year of the project, Stian Vestby was employed as a PhD student, and Mariko Hara as a postdoctoral researcher, both with HUC as their institutional affiliation.

From the onset, the project had a clear sociological ambition; namely, to examine the impact that music has on social change and processes of inclusion and exclusion. Avoiding a simplistic understanding of such processes, it was acknowledged both that music-related inclusion and exclusion may in fact happen at one and the same time, holding some people back while simultaneously helping others’ mobility, and also that inclusion—or the gentrification-related uptake—of some forms of music would require other musics to be tabooed in order to maintain hierarchy or an “order of distinction”. In this sense, its strong Bourdieusian foundation was visible through its conceptualisations and focus of inquiry, and the links to music sociology, particularly the contributions developed by Peterson through the explorations of cultural omnivores/ univores, were also present from the start. What was similarly clear was the division of the main research task into three different sub-projects: one involving all the senior researchers in a diachronic exploration of how the phenomenon of musical gentrification would be manifested through the institutionalisation of popular music in Norwegian music academia, and two sub-projects investigating the same phenomenon synchronically, as present at one particular state-funded country music festival (the PhD project) and as intertwined with the entrepreneurial strategies employed by musicians with immigrant backgrounds (the postdoctoral project) respectively. Although the areas of investigation and some of the methodological strategies and theoretical tools were outlined in the initial project description, the researchers responsible for each sub-project were endowed with both the freedom and the responsibility to map out the more detailed operationalisation and further theorisation of their respective tasks. The resulting r...