Few art forms on earth are more indebted to class privilege than Western classical music. For most of its history, it has relied on monarchs, aristocrats, and wealthy patrons even to exist. We have Haydn because of a prince, Mozart and Beethoven because of a baron, Stravinsky and Copland because of an heiress, and Wagner because of a king. We have an entire genre largely because, at Versailles in the seventeenth century, the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully was willing to indulge his employer, Louis XIV, by writing operas that glorified the splendors of the throne. Philanthropists, corporations, and trusts have displaced the kings and barons of yore, but as givers of grants and commissions, they might as well wear a crown.
Today, the genre is grappling with what, on the surface, might seem like an entirely different aspect of its legacy: the historical lack of diversity in its orchestras and ensembles. The truth is that these legacies could hardly be more intertwined: Economic discrimination has produced diversity dramas of all sorts. Yet you’d never know this from recent attempts by critics to wrestle with the genre’s representation problems without so much as a passing reference to class.
It’s a baffling omission, and one that seems even more egregious when we note just how formative class politics have been for the genre’s institutions and spaces—particularly in the United States. Prior to the Gilded Age, classical music in this country enjoyed a comparatively democratic existence, performed alongside jugglers and vaudeville tunes in raucous theaters filled with every stratum of society. Italian opera was performed in accessible English. Sex workers solicited business in the balconies. Beer was served.
Yet by the mid-nineteenth century, all of that began to change, and in ways that are still very much with us today. Seeking heightened status by associating with the Continental elite, New York’s newly wealthy industrialists began to prefer their operas in their original and “sophisticated” European languages and with fewer interruptions from the lower-class rabble. This led them to build theaters of their own, where they could conspicuously consume their superior morality and taste well away from the riffraff. The original Metropolitan Opera, finished in 1883, was such a place, founded largely because the older Academy of Music—with its mere 18 luxury boxes—couldn’t satisfy the degree of public preening demanded by New York’s nouveaux riche. By contrast, the new Met had 122 boxes, arranged, as historian Joseph Horowitz has written, in a “diamond horseshoe [that] invited bejeweled boxholders to admire one another.”
The effect of these new temples of culture was to consolidate mid- and late-century notions of class and status, giving the wealthy a place where they could come to understand themselves as such. But they also allowed for the cultivation of an aesthetic and its accompanying rituals that were just as essential for hardening class boundaries. Formal dress codes and arcane concert rituals—no clapping between movements, no shifting in your seat—helped to further alienate the working class, while also disciplining the audience’s bodies, turning what might have been a space of unguarded leisure into one of corporal policing. The related aesthetic of listening to difficult masterworks in focused silence, emphasizing stern contemplation and delayed gratification over the more immediate pleasures of popular music, itself had disciplinary connotations—not least for those who might have come to the concert hall after a long working day.
To be sure, historians have made much of the importance of “middle-class” music-making outside of the concert hall, beginning in the Victorian era. Yet those domestic pursuits were often—and in some ways continue to be—undertaken in the name of a disciplinary moral betterment that was no less infused with class implications.
As for the musicians who have professionally performed classical music over time, they have tended to be people with access to expensive training offered by expensive conservatories that enable them to get the most out of expensive instruments, and all after having had the family means and disposition to be exposed to the music in the first place.
Today, the more vibrant strands of the genre have done a bit to distance themselves from this historical baggage. The “new music” scene, in particular, has thrived beyond the hallowed halls of Gilded Age propriety, gleefully juxtaposing Steve Reich with Radiohead and claiming, at least, to care little about ill-timed sneezes and people showing up to concerts in shorts.
Yet for the most part, classical music’s elite history and rituals are still very much with us. Go to Carnegie Hall, and you’ll still see fur coats, pay $50 for a seat with an obstructed view in the stratosphere, and get scowls for clapping at the wrong time. Go to the movies, and you’ll still find that Vivaldi, played by a string quartet in black tie, is rich people’s preferred cocktail party music. Conservatory training and instruments still cost a fortune. And most music history courses and classical radio ads alike still frame classical music in covertly, if not overtly, elite terms.
The point is that there are myriad class-related hurdles—material, psychological, and associative—that have prevented families of limited means from pursuing, or even wanting to pursue, this music. And of course, a disproportionate number of these families are Black. When we add in the fact that the top one percent now own a greater percentage of wealth than they did even in the Gilded Age, when many of our highbrow associations with classical music were formed, and when we consider that Black wealth continues to plummet as a share of the overall pie, it becomes clear that any discussion of diversity in classical music that neglects class issues is hugely problematic.
One of the reasons class forms such a blind spot in these discussions is that classical music’s leaders, critics, and spokespeople are likely to be members of the privileged set themselves. This is what Adolph Reed meant when he asserted that identity politics is a form of class politics that is unaware of itself as such. But the problem is as much sloppy thinking as it is bias.
