Masculinity, Class and Music Education

Boys Performing Middle-Class Masculinities through Music

Clare Hall

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781137502544
• eBook ISBN: 9781137502551
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a provocative sociological examination of masculinity, class and music education within the context of a unique and fascinating culture: the classical musical world of choirboys. The myriad cultural meanings embodied in the 'boy voice' are unravelled through compelling musical narratives of young choirboys, their mothers, and their teachers. The book investigates how boys negotiate dominant gender-class discourses and the various pedagogies involved in producing middle-class masculinities during primary school and early years contexts. Drawing on the theoretical resources of Bourdieu to develop the concept of 'musical habitus', the continued symbolic distinction of the choirboy is analysed in order to better understand how culture is simultaneously reproduced and evolving through music. This interdisciplinary work at the juncture of pedagogy and culture will appeal to social science researchers, educators and arts practitioners interested in the sociocultural dynamicsof music.

© The Author(s) 2018

Clare HallMasculinity, Class and Music EducationPalgrave Studies in Gender and Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50255-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Making Masculinities Through Music

Clare Hall¹

(1)

Monash University, Frankston, VIC, Australia

Clare Hall

End Abstract

This book is about the interaction between masculinity, class and music education through the vantage point of choirboys’ musical life stories. Across history the choirboy and his voice have been the subject of either persecution or hagiography, but why is he so perplexing and intriguing? Responding to this question reveals the complexities of the human voice and how what a singer communicates—gender, age, culture, social position, emotions, musicality—is mediated by the traditions, values and symbols associated with a particular culture. The choirboy, as a potent metaphor for a highly valued form of masculinity, is a persistent historical figure predating the early Christian church that continues today. The strength of his survival motivates me to pursue how symbolic meanings are reproduced and potentially changed through this unique form of music education and how music is a sociocultural space in which children learn to become a particular kind of some-body.

The musical bodies in this book are presented as inherently gendered and classed ones—a subject of rare concern in regards to young peoples’ music participation. I have come to this focus through personal experiences as a music educator, musician and musical mother which are interwoven into the fabric of this book. As a school music teacher and choral conductor, I encountered significant and consistent gendered differences in children’s music participation in my ten years of work across all sectors in Australia. While it may be argued that Australian gender relations are influenced by conservative structures compared to other former British colonies because of the mythologisation of the working-class male hero, the influence of gender on children’s music participation is a pervasive issue across cultures. Learning about localised instances of why social categories of difference are or are not a ‘problem’ for participation in the arts can teach us how social differences might be reduced rather than produced by music, and by extension lead to greater inclusion rather than exclusion. This book’s particular focus on the intersection between gender and class adds to the growing repertoire of case studies of in/exclusionary practices in music and education as matters of social justice (Burnard, Hofvander Trulsson, & Söderman, 2015; Benedict, Schmidt, Spruce, & Woodford, 2015; Wright, 2010).

Looking at my own musical life story, it is strongly punctuated by instances where gendered encounters with music functioned as a regulating force and limited access to certain ways of being as a young music student: as a teenage singer with an enthusiasm for jazz, I was intimidated and repelled by the male domination of our local jazz scene; as an aspiring young conductor, I was inducted into the masculine world of conducting with few female mentors or role models to lead the way; and as a young orchestral musician, I failed to understand why, and still do, in professional orchestras men continue to outnumber women in Australia (a situation I suspect is mirrored around the globe¹), yet in secondary school music performance gendered participation is relatively equal, while music composition studies continue to be male dominated Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA). These are a few examples of how music as a sociocultural practice is structured by durable gender divides, despite decades of feminist critique and intervention.

As a school and community music educator, I am driven by a commitment to promote equality in and through music, and as a choral educator my attention turned towards the role of gender in young peoples’ singing. To put it simply, why don’t boys sing as much as girls? The persistent supposition that “big boys don’t cry (or sing)” (Koza, 1994, p. 48) presents a troubling view of singing that continues to have much relevance. Boys are far less involved in singing than girls, at least in certain cultures and contexts such as school music, and the possible reasons why are outlined in the next chapter. This deficit view that promotes male vocality as unmasculine is converse to the continuing tradition of boys and men singing together in choir as a masculine cultural practice and which represents an interesting point of cultural tension. What makes singing ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’? Does the voice have a gender and how do we know it when we hear it? What is the gender of the boy voice? These questions are pursued in Chaps. 2 and 3.

More troubling than young people’s participation rates in music are the discourses around particular musicalities that normalise certain perceptions, such as some people, usually females, are more ‘naturally’ inclined to sing. This antagonises my constructivist beliefs that musicians are mostly ‘made’ not born, and it concerns me that not only do many boys miss out on the great pleasures of singing because of such cultural narratives, but girls’ and boys’ ‘natures’ are essentialised as being one thing or another that justifies particular gendered norms in musical relations. The way gender continues to play out at the intersection between music and education is something that requires much more sustained analysis and intervention if we are to develop understandings about how musicians are made, beyond issues of musicianship and identity. This book questions the role of two key institutions—the family and the choir—and in Chaps. 5 and 8 the stories of the main interlocutors of these institutions—the mother and the music teacher—are analysed in terms of the part they play in normalising particular kinds of subject positions in the lives of the young singers in this study.

Notwithstanding the major influence that teachers, vocal pedagogy, the voice change, peers, schooling and parenting have on boys’ singing—which all have their respective bodies of scholarship—the greatest single ‘problem’ with boys’ singing is understood as one to do with masculinity, which I expand in the next chapter. The lack of substantive research in prepubescent male vocality suggests a tacit approval of the commonplace perception that singing is relatively unproblematic for boys (and girls) in the early years compared to the adolescent years when the voice change can have a negative impact on the psychosocial experience of singing. This book, however, illustrates the complexities of musical masculinities and the ‘gendering’ of the boy voice that occurs in early life, first from an historical perspective and then from the lived experiences of young male singers. We know ‘big boys do cry’ and that singing does occupy a central role in the lives of many males and so I aim to understand what makes the boys in this book, who are accomplished and committed choristers different from the vast majority of young boys who choose to do other things with their time. Rarely do we hear from children about their experiences of negotiating gender in their early life. This book presents children’s narratives in an attempt to convey the participants’ stories as told, as much as possible.

Early gender research in music and education has focused predominantly on girls’ and women’s issues from feminist perspectives (Conway, 2000; Green, 1993; Koza, 1993; Lamb, Dolloff, & Wieland Howe, 2002). The work of Julia Koza (1993, 1994) was a critical turning point in bringing masculinity and boys into the conversation. She argued that the ‘missing males’ in singing was a symptom of ‘androcentricism’ in music education, which has historically promoted misogyny and homophobia through the subordination of ‘femininity’ in music. Against the backdrop of rapid developments in the gender and sexual diversity of the popular music field, we need to question whether anything has fundamentally changed in more than 20 years for young people’s gendered experience of formal music education.

Feminist research has raised important concerns about the choral profession’s long-standing preoccupation with male vocal issues, which is regarded to be to the detriment of attention and valuing of girls’ voices (Koza, 1993; O’Toole, 1998). This has reinforced the notion that “boys who sing are special, while girls who sing are ordinary” (O’Toole, 1998, p. 9). I take heed of these concerns and do not aim to contribute to the ‘poor boys’ discourse, nor do I, in the words of Biddle and Jarman-Ivens (2007), aim to “remarginalise the feminine” by focusing on ‘malekind’. Rather, my ‘emancipatory’ intent derives from the proposition that it continues to be unusual for females to be described as doing masculinity or males as doing femininity beyond the confines of academia (Halberstam, 2012). “The pull of those gender divisions that were supposed to wither away remains strong, as does the gender binary that supposedly depends upon reproductive function” (Halberstam, 2012, p. 37). While the “radical malleability” of gender (Biddle & Jarman-Ivens, 2007, p. 14) and the liberation of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ from the reproductive body have been the subject of much contemporary gender and queer research in music (Gould, 2012; Halberstam, 2007; Peraino, 2007; Whiteley & Rycenga, 2006), it is important to identify the conditions that make change or fluidity possible, at the same time as those that maintain firm boundaries around deep-rooted divisions, particularly in the field of education as a critical space providing those conditions. It is therefore pertinent to unpack how gender constructions within this musical field of the boy choir are contingent on “particular musical, historical and cultural contexts” (Dibben, 2002, p. 121).

This brings me to the second theme of this book: social class. This is about the way gender intervenes in the cultural practices of this musical field, and how the lives lived within it intersect with other categories of social difference: age, ethnicity and social class. Chapters 4–7 build the argument that the most potent axis of difference for this kind of musical subjectivity is the gender–class intersection. While class-based intersections have been a long preoccupation of educational sociology, recent interest in the sociology of music and education presents compelling fresh debates about the significance of social class and the specific forms of power and hierarchy at play in musical contexts (Bull, 2014; Rimmer, 2010).

Aligned to arguments about the gendered conservatism of formal music teaching and learning are growing debates about the cultural reproduction of class-based distinctions via the music educator (Wright, 2010) and parents’ investments in their children’s music education because of these distinctions (Cho, 2015a; Savage, 2015b). An education in the most culturally sanctioned forms of music has long been a means for the bourgeois and ruling classes to distance themselves from the uneducated. It has taken many decades to dismantle the taken-for-grantedness of European art music’s historical superior legitimacy and prestige, and echoes of this past are still heard loudly in music classrooms around the world (Burnard, 2012). This is because music teachers—typically white and middle class themselves and often products of a music education structured by conventional Western hierarchies of knowledge—can be resistant to developing the kinds of self-reflexivity required to trouble how they oppress or liberate certain social or cultural groups through music (Wright, 2008). Middle-class families support this through intensive parenting practices that enable their children to ‘feel at home’ with the field, such as formal music tuition in iconic instruments of Western culture, piano and violin (Bennett, Emmison, & Frow, 1999). Music learning offers fertile ground for the study of how aspirational, and often transnational, families use their children’s musical capacities for social mobility (Hofvander Trulsson, 2015). Yet studies of class,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Making Masculinities Through Music
• 2. Gendering the Boy Voice
• 3. Venerating Angels
• 4. Thinking About Masculinity, Class and Music with Bourdieu
• 5. Capitalising on Musical Mothering
• 6. Becoming Choirboys
• 7. Vocalising Gender and Class
• 8. Practising Virtuosity
• 9. Conclusion
• Back Matter