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Musical Gentrification

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.

Petter Dyndahl, Professor of Musicology, Music Education and General


­Education, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences.

Sidsel Karlsen, Professor of Music Education, Norwegian Academy of Music.

Ruth Wright, Professor of Music Education, Western University, Canada.


ISME Global Perspectives in Music Education Series
Senior Editor: Margaret Barrett

Leadership and Musician Development in Higher Music Education


Edited by Dawn Bennett, Jennifer Rowley and Patrick Schmidt

Leadership in Pedagogy and Curriculum in Higher Music Education


Edited by Jennifer Rowley, Dawn Bennett and Patrick Schmidt

Teaching and Evaluating Music Performance at University


Beyond the Conservatory Model
Edited by John Encarnacao and Diana Blom

Musical Gentrification
Popular Music, Distinction and Social Mobility
Edited by Petter Dyndahl, Sidsel Karlsen and Ruth Wright
Musical Gentrification
Popular Music, Distinction and Social
Mobility

Edited by
Petter Dyndahl, Sidsel Karlsen
and Ruth Wright
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Petter Dyndahl, Sidsel Karlsen and
Ruth Wright individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Petter Dyndahl, Sidsel Karlsen and Ruth Wright to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-­in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-0-367-34335-4 (hbk)


ISBN: 978-0-429-32507-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
Contents

List of illustrations vii


List of contributors viii
Acknowledgements ix

1 Musical gentrification and socio-­cultural diversities: an


analytical approach towards popular music expansion in
egalitarian societies 1
P etter D ynda h l , S idsel K arlsen and R ut h W rig h t

2 Musical gentrification: strategy for social positioning in late


modern culture 12
P etter D ynda h l

3 Exploring the phenomenon of musical gentrification:


methods and methodologies 34
S idsel K arlsen , M ariko Hara , S tian V estby , P etter
D ynda h l , S iw G raabr æ k N ielsen and O dd S k å rberg

4 Musical gentrification and the (un)democratisation of


culture: symbolic violence in country music discourse 50
S tian V estby

5 Musical gentrification, parenting and children’s media


music 66
I ngeborg L unde V estad and P etter D ynda h l

6 Gentrification, hegemony, activism and anarchy: how these


concepts may inform the field of higher popular music
education 80
R ut h W rig h t
vi   Contents
7 Changing rhythms, ideas and status in jazz: the case of the
Norwegian jazz forum in the 1960s 95
O dd S k å rberg and S idsel K arlsen

8 Musical gentrification and “genderfication” in higher music


education 109
S iw G raabr æ k N ielsen

9 Musical agency meets musical gentrification: exploring the


workings of hegemonic power in (popular) music
academisation 125
S idsel K arlsen

10 Enclosure and abjection in American school music 139


V incent C . B ates

11 Musical pathways of migrant musicians: connecting,


re-­connecting and dis-­connecting 154
M ariko Hara

Afterword: taste and distinction after Bourdieu 172


N ick  P rior

Index 178
Illustrations

Figures
8.1 The number of male- and female-­authored theses in Western
classical music from 1928–2012 116
8.2 The number of male- and female-­authored theses in popular
music from 1974–2012 117
8.3 The number of male- and female-­authored theses in music and
media from 1967–2012 117

Table
8.1 Chi square tests of the relationships between gender and music
genre or gender and research topics 115
Contributors

Vincent C. Bates
Associate Professor of Teacher Education, Weber State University, USA

Petter Dyndahl
Professor of Musicology, Music Education and General Education, Inland
Norway University of Applied Sciences

Mariko Hara
Researcher, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences

Sidsel Karlsen
Professor of Music Education, Norwegian Academy of Music

Siw Graabræk Nielsen


Professor of Music Education, Norwegian Academy of Music

Nick Prior
Professor of Cultural Sociology, The University of Edinburgh, UK

Odd Skårberg
Professor of Music, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences

Ingeborg Lunde Vestad


Professor of Music Education, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences

Stian Vestby
Associate Professor of Music, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences

Ruth Wright
Professor of Music Education, Western University, Canada
Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Musical Gentrification and Socio-­Cultural


Diversities project, funded by The Research Council of Norway from its
FRIPRO scheme for independent research projects (project no. 222827).
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 con-
texts, 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 soci-
etal 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 rel-
ative political stability, the dominant social democracy ideology underpinning
and enabling the welfare state and, not least, the extremely advantageous eco-
nomic 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
2   Petter Dyndahl et al.
­ ourishing as a nation-­state has been the substantial educational explosion that
fl
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 seem-
ingly, 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 insti-
tution (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 back-
ground and cultural interests. As for music schooling beyond compulsory educa-
tion, 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 insti-
tutionalised 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 some-
what 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
Popular music expansion   3
e­ ducation, 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 cul-
tural development. However, as we will argue throughout the rest of this chapter
and book, such an understanding may also be viewed as quite simplistic. Build-
ing on a conflict-­oriented perspective, also as regards relatively egalitarian soci-
eties, we believe, with Bourdieu, that the social significance of music and culture
is still constituted in and through differences and inequalities. Thus, when influ-
ential 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 aca-
demic 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 geo-
graphical understanding of the neighbourhood into the idea of “symbolic neigh-
bourhoods”, 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
4   Petter Dyndahl et al.
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 rel-
atively 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 con-
tribute 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 meta-
phorical 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 meta-
phors that are not incommensurable—or completely out of tune—with their
source, which is neither the case with cultural capital nor with musical gentrifi-
cation. 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 con-
sidered 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
Popular music expansion   5
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 under-
standing are essential and general conditions of generating any concept what-
ever” (Kant, 1819, §6). In the ongoing conceptualisation of musical gentrification
all three of these acts or operations have been, and still are, effective: the com-
parison of different mental images to one another is necessary to create the meta-
phor; 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 gen-
trification 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 evid-
ence that musical gentrification has developed from being a metaphor to becom-
ing a concept lies perhaps in the fact that it adds fresh content and new
dimensions precisely to Bourdieu’s concept of capital, within a recontextualisa-
tion 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 pro-
fessors 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 simultan-
eously 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,
6   Petter Dyndahl et al.
its strong Bourdieusian foundation was visible through its conceptualisations
and focus of inquiry, and the links to music sociology, particularly the contribu-
tions 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 involv-
ing all the senior researchers in a diachronic exploration of how the phenom-
enon 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 richness of perspectives and findings can be
viewed throughout this book.
Throughout the funding period, the project members were active in dissemi-
nating their work in a wide range of arenas. Quite early on, in June 2013, the
project’s home institution, HUC, successfully hosted the International Sympo-
sium on the Sociology of Music Education, which provided fertile ground for
discussions and for bringing the ideas behind the Musical Gentrification project
to the attention of international scholars. The collaborative work with the visit-
ing researchers of the project, Dr Ylva Hofvander Trulsson of Lund University
in Sweden and Professor Ruth Wright of Western University in Canada, fur-
thered this important process of internationalisation. The list of publications (see
Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, n.d.c) shows that the project
members over the years have delivered a large number of contributions, most of
them to scientific journals, books and conferences, but also in various popular
dissemination formats. The latter has in particular been the work of Vestby,
whose PhD thesis, entitled Folkelige og distingverte fellesskap: Gentrifisering av
countrykultur i Norge—en festivalstudie (Popular and distinguished com-
munities: Gentrification of country music culture in Norway—a festival study;
see Vestby, 2017), was not only successfully defended in 2017; it also attracted
huge interest from Norwegian national media and led to numerous public
appearances of different kinds.
Although the concept of musical gentrification, as utilised in the above-­
mentioned project description, was originally coined by Dyndahl (see above), he
and all the researchers involved in the Musical Gentrification project have con-
tinued to expand its potential meanings and areas of applicability. One important
manifestation of this development was Dyndahl’s keynote address at the
Research in Music Education (RIME) conference in 2019. Another was the
award of a second Research Council of Norway grant in 2017 for a four-­year
follow-­up project in which new areas of musical gentrification will be explored.
Popular music expansion   7
This research project, named “The social dynamics of musical upbringing and
schooling in the Norwegian welfare state” (DYNAMUS), will investigate
music’s impact on social change and inclusion/exclusion in children’s media-­
musical realities, compulsory-­school music education and extracurricular music
education (see Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, n.d.a).1 In a
similar way that working with the concept of musical gentrification has spurred
the primary researchers involved to seek out new challenges, we hope that this
book will inspire music scholars internationally to employ this theoretical tool
and expand on its potential.

Scope and structure of the book


The chapters in this book draw largely on the Norwegian perspective, with
useful external perspectives from European and North American authors, but the
issues with which they deal are global and international. The concept of musical
gentrification from which the research project birthing this book arose, and in
which it is operationalised, is similarly global in applicability. The studies
reported on in this book, and the amplifying perspectives provided by others,
speak to matters of the utmost importance relating to “the politics of culture and
aesthetics, for music education and research and for people’s agency in society,
culture, education and their personal lives” (Dyndahl, this volume). These are
weighty matters indeed, particularly when viewed against the current socio-­
political landscape of decreasing social and political agency, the death of culture
in education and the increasingly bleak outlook experienced by many, especially
the young, when regarding their personal futures in an increasing number of
countries.
The book presents new and intriguing theoretical and methodological con-
cepts and insights into the fields of culture, music, education and sociology to
name but some. The concept of musical gentrification provides an important lens
through which to analyse and reveal the operations of hegemony in many
spheres including those of class, taste, generation, ethnicity, gender and sexual-
ity. Moreover, it reveals the exclusionary and marginalising effects of these
operations in fields throughout society such as the academy, contemporary
popular culture and the professional lives of musicians. The methodologies
developed to operationalise this concept and to conduct the scholarly reflexivity
advocated by Bourdieu and intensified in this work are vital to the development
of new languages of description within the fields of sociology and cultural
studies to name but a few. They may prove to be a vital link in the continuing
work to expose and resist hegemony and social polarisation wherever it occurs.
In Chapter 2 Dyndahl expands on the concept of musical gentrification to
further consider its explanatory power in relation to the symbolic economy, in
which music plays such an important role, as identified by Bourdieu. He demon-
strates how musical gentrification may enable a more nuanced understanding of
social positioning in the late modern cultural world, providing fascinating insight
into the workings of hegemony in and through contemporary popular culture.
8   Petter Dyndahl et al.
This perspective allows the enactment of exclusion and marginalisation within
purportedly inclusive popular culture practices, moreover, these practices are the
very ones the excluded population may originally have claimed as their own. He
makes important observations for music education concerning the alienation
from and suspicion of education that may consequently result.
Karlsen, Hara, Vestby, Dyndahl, Nielsen and Skårberg, in Chapter 3, provide
further insight into the methods and methodologies used to operationalise the
musical gentrification concept in the three different empirical research studies
that formed the Musical Gentrification project. Applying the concept in both
quantitative and ethnographic methodologies within the scope of what Karlsen
et al. define as “middle range theory … a form of sociological theorising which
is slightly less abstract and in itself closer to the empirical world” than sociologi-
cal grand theory such as that of Bourdieu, on which their work draws, the
researchers show the flexibility and applicability of this concept to a range of
current topics. These include the academisation of popular music, and the work-
ings of musical gentrification in two very different fields: a Norwegian country
music festival and migrant musicians labouring to build new careers as musi-
cians in their new country. They also demonstrate important new developments
in reflexive methodology and multiple layers of researcher reflexivity, including
that termed by Bourdieu “epistemic reflexivity” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992).
Chapter 4 presents empirical detail from one of the two sub-­studies originat-
ing from the Musical Gentrification project. Here, Vestby discusses his research
into musical gentrification and the workings of symbolic violence within country
music. In particular, he considers “what types of country music represent whom
and the consequences of these relationships”. His conclusion concerning the
inescapability of class cultural domination gives great credence to the enduring
applicability of Bourdieu’s macro-­theoretical work as a sociological explanatory
framework and the importance of its continued operationalisation and adaptation
to new empirical fields such as that represented in this book.
Ingeborg Lunde Vestad and Dyndahl in Chapter 5 apply a micro-­level socio-
logical analysis to a conversation between the parents of two young girls, as they
discuss the music their children listen to—their “musical parenting” as these
authors term it. The authors here demonstrate the micro-­analytical use of the
concepts of aesthetic cosmopolitanism, cultural omnivorousness and musical
gentrification observing “a series of micro-­moments of gentrification” granting
increased status to what would previously have been termed lowbrow music.
The issues of gentrification, hegemony, activism and anarchy are considered
in relation to higher education in popular music in Chapter 6. Wright suggests
that the findings of the Musical Gentrification project indicate the need to con-
tinue to understand and address how inequality, exploitation and suffering may
be reflected in societal engagement with music, and in this instance in particular
with popular music in higher music education. Given the Musical Gentrification
project’s demonstration of the apparent ability of hegemony to co-­opt and mutate
even anti-­hegemonic projects, she suggests that anarchic non-­systemic projects
of resistance may be one possible future avenue.
Popular music expansion   9
Chapter 7 sees Skårberg and Karlsen considering the ways in which musical
gentrification can be seen to have operated on and in jazz in Norway during the
1960s and 1970s, elevating it from an entertainment genre to the status of art
music. The corresponding exclusionary features demonstrate well the displacing
effects of musical gentrification.
Chapter 8 explores a concept termed “genderfication” in higher music educa-
tion in Norway by the author Nielsen. Drawing on the Musical Gentrification
project’s quantitative study of all graduate theses written in music between 1912
and 2012 she conducts a macro analysis showing the strongly gendered nature of
popular music scholarship in this country. Extending Bourdieu’s work on mas-
culine domination, she considers the intertwining effects of genderfication and
gentrification on popular culture.
Chapter 9 takes this further by exploring in a very personal, moving and
effective chapter the workings of the hierarchisation of class, taste, gender and
sexuality at a micro level in the life of the author as a musician and scholar.
Employing theoretical tools of routinisation and musical agency Karlsen illus-
trates the mechanics of hegemony as experienced through the enforcement of the
forms of hierarchisation detected in the musical gentrification project in her
own life.
Chapter 10 contributes a North American perspective to the evolving debate
in the book by considering the effects of class, power and culture on the lives of
poor rural Americans through the lens of enclosure and abjection in American
school music. In this chapter, Vincent Bates considers the complex ways in
which country music has been enclosed, included in and excluded from the
music classrooms of North America and brings a useful international perspective
to the book, demonstrating parallel yet somewhat different phenomena as com-
pared to those in Norway.
The final chapter of the book considers data from another of the sub-­projects
of the Musical Gentrification project. Through an examination of the lives of
musicians with immigrant backgrounds in Norway, using the concept of
musical pathways, Hara discusses the gentrifying effects of state funding on
these professional musicians’ practices. The chapter casts light on how funding
allows the assimilation and gentrification of musics of the less powerful, some-
times resulting in stereotyping of music and musicians and the pigeonholing of
performers.
As a concluding reflection, professor Nick Prior, whose own academic work
is deeply connected to popular music, cultural theory and Bourdieu, shares his
ideas about how the book expands on its Bourdieusian heritage and comprises a
significant contribution, both with respect to how it (mostly) reports from a spe-
cific geographical, cultural and socio-­economic location—Norway—but also in
terms of introducing a new theoretical concept—precise enough to capture a
very tangible phenomenon in contemporary culture, but still open enough to
invite new interpretations and modes of use. As editors, we would very much
like to encourage such lines of action and call for further explorations of the
potentials of the concept of musical gentrification.
10   Petter Dyndahl et al.
Note
1 This new project was first led by Karlsen, but since her move to NMH in August 2018,
the project management has been conducted by Dyndahl.

References
Bjørnsen, E. (2012). Inkluderende kulturskole. Utredning av kulturskoletilbudet i
­storbyene [The inclusive school of music and performing arts: An investigation of the
availability of culture schools in the cities]. Kristiansand: Agderforskning.
Bourdieu, P. (2011). The forms of capital. In I. Szeman & T. Kaposy (Eds.), Cultural
theory: An anthology (pp. 81–93). Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell.
Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. J. D. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Chicago,
IL: Chicago University Press.
Dyndahl, P. (2013). Musical gentrification, socio-­cultural diversities, and the account-
ability of academics. In P. Dyndahl (Ed.), Intersection and interplay. Contributions to
the cultural study of music in performance, education, and society (Perspectives in
music and music education, no. 9) (pp. 173–188). Lund: Malmö Academy of Music,
Lund University.
Dyndahl, P., Karlsen, S., Skårberg, O., & Nielsen, S. G. (2014). Cultural omnivorousness
and musical gentrification: An outline of a sociological framework and its applications
for music education research. Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education,
13(1), 40–69.
Glass, R. (1963). Introduction to London: Aspects of change. London, UK: Centre for
Urban Studies and MacGibbon and Kee.
Gustavsen, K., & Hjelmbrekke, S. (2009). Kulturskole for alle? Pilotundersøkelse om
kulturskoletilbudet [Schools of music and performing arts for all? A pilot study on the
availability of culture schools]. Bø: Telemarksforskning.
Halnon, K. B., & Cohen, B. (2006). Muscles, motorcycles and tattoos: Gentrification in a
new frontier. Journal of Consumer Culture, 6, 33–56.
Hansen, M. N. (2011). Finnes det en talentreserve? Betydningen av klassebakgrunn og
karakterer for oppnådd utdanning [Does a talent reservoir exist? The significance of
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Hjellbrekke, J., & Korsnes, O. (2014). Intergenerasjonell mobilitet og sirkulasjon i norske
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i et egalitært samfunn (pp. 54–76). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
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Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. (n.d.b). Musical gentrification: About the
project. Retrieved from https://eng.inn.no/project-­sites/musical-­gentrification/about-­
the-project
Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. (n.d.c). Musical gentrification: Publica-
tion, dissemination and communication. Retrieved from https://eng.inn.no/project-­sites/
musical-­gentrification/publication-­dissemination-and-­communication
Kant, I. (1819). Logic. London: Simpkin and Marshall.
Kleppe, B. (2013). Kultur møter kulturmøter. Kulturskolebruk blant innvandrere [Culture
meets cultural meetings: The attendance of culture schools among immigrants]. Bø:
Telemarksforskning.
Popular music expansion   11
The Merriam-­Webster.com Dictionary. Retrieved December 7, 2019, from www.
merriam-­webster.com/dictionary/gentry
The Merriam-­Webster.com Thesaurus. Retrieved December 7, 2019 from www.merriam-­
webster.com/thesaurus/gentry
Peterson, R. A., & Kern, R. M. (1996). Changing highbrow taste: From snob to omnivore.
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­Manchester: Manchester University Press.
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komparativ sosiologisk studie [The middle class culture in Norway: A comparative
sociological study]. Oslo: Scandinavian Academic Press.
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no
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year. Retrieved December 10, 2019 from www.ssb.no
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geneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40.
Vestby, S. (2017). Folkelige og distingverte fellesskap: Gentrifisering av countrykultur i
Norge—en festivalstudie [Popular and distinguished communities: Gentrification of
country music culture in Norway—a festival study] (Doctoral dissertation). Inland
Norway University of Applied Sciences, Hamar.
2 Musical gentrification
Strategy for social positioning in late
modern culture
Petter Dyndahl

Introduction

The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile—in a word, natural—


enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affir-
mation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated,
refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to
the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, con-
sciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating
social differences.
(Bourdieu, 1984, p. 7)

This chapter rests on the premise that there exists a symbolic economy next to
the material one. Within the symbolic, or cultural, economy, Bourdieu (1984,
p. 18ff.) asserted, based upon his comprehensive empirical research on the state
of French culture and society in the 1960s, that music represents one of the most
important negotiations of the social world. This argument has been reinforced by
similar studies conducted four decades later in Denmark (Faber, Prieur, Rosen-
lund & Skjøtt-Larsen, 2012) and in the United Kingdom, indicating that “music
is the most clearly separated of all our cultural fields…. It is the most divided,
contentious, cultural field of any that we examine and is central to our concern
with probing contemporary cultural dynamics and tensions” (Bennett et al.,
2009, p. 75). However, among musicians, fans, music educators and even
researchers, there is a prevalent, self-­sufficient conception that music and music
education are invariably of benefit to both self-­realisation and social inclusion.1
Critical of this view, Hesmondhalgh (2008) argued that such an assumption must
rest on an overly optimistic—though paradoxical—understanding. This implies
that music, on the one hand, is considered crucial for beneficial social and indi-
vidual development, while on the other hand, it is seen as totally unaffected by
disadvantageous factors:

The dominant conception rightly emphasises the social nature of music and
of self-­identity, but if music is as imbricated with social processes as
the dominant conception suggests, then it is hard to see how people’s
Strategy for social positioning   13
engagement with music can be so consistently positive in their effects, when
we live in societies that are marked by inequality, exploitation and
suffering.
(Hesmondhalgh, 2008, p. 334)

If music and music education are so essential for the individual and the com-
munity as indicated by their cultural significance, they cannot only have positive
outcomes but must necessarily also be connected to undesirable social and
historical processes, which is the perception pursued in this chapter.
However, the ways in which music’s social functions are reflected culturally
are likely to change over time. Nowadays, rather than consuming only high
culture, members of the privileged and dominant classes tend to consume much
of what would have previously been dismissed as low culture. This seems to be
a global phenomenon, although it is led by the Western world. Still, it has been
most clearly expressed in the Nordic countries, at least regarding the variety of
fields within which it unfolds. For example, there has been a strong tendency in
Scandinavia from the 1970s onwards to expand the repertoires and resources of
music as an educational subject or an academic field as well as an area for
support and funding from cultural authorities, organisations and institutions.
Herein, many popular music genres have gained considerable educational,
curricular and institutional status. In this context, the objective of this current
piece of writing is to discuss these phenomena in light of the concept of musical
gentrification. First, however, there is a need to locate the term in relation to
comparable concepts. Accordingly, since popular culture now seems to be attrac-
tive for most social groups and classes worldwide, it makes sense to start with a
musical sociological contribution that is particularly concerned with the global
prevalence popular music has gained in today’s society.

Aesthetic cosmopolitanism and the process of pop-­rockisation


The global proliferation of popular culture is reflected in Regev’s (2013) concept
of aesthetic cosmopolitanism. Using this expression, Regev discussed what he
described as the global pop-­rockisation of music in terms of the exponential
growth of pop-­rock styles and the hybrid tendency within pop-­rock music to
merge and fuse with other styles and genres. This was paired with a general
trend among musicians and producers to adopt and implement creative practices
associated with pop-­rock, thus making pop-­rock aesthetics a dominant global
force in today’s music. Building on Hebdige’s (1990, p. 20) statement that, in
late modernity, “everybody is more or less cosmopolitan”, Regev developed the
notion of aesthetic cosmopolitanism. Pop-­rock is a prime instance in the sense
that this extensive and diversified field of popular music forms a common ground
in which different social groupings around the world increasingly share aesthetic
perceptions, expressive forms and cultural practices. Hence, aesthetic cosmopol-
itanism points at the gradual formation of the world culture into a single inter-
connected entity:
14   Petter Dyndahl
While in the past national cultural uniqueness was organised around the
principle of striving towards totally different expressive forms and stylistic
elements, with expressive isomorphism it becomes organised around prox-
imity, similitude, and overlap of art forms and stylistic elements between
nations.
(Regev, 2013, p. 11f.)
As a description of the contemporary status, aesthetic cosmopolitanism and the
pervasive pop-­rockisation of music cultures obviously dominate the music
market and the media, but this can also be witnessed in cultural policies, public
rituals and educational institutions.
Theoretically, Regev built primarily on Latour (2005) and his actor-­network
theory, which implies that everything in the social and natural worlds exists in
constantly shifting networks of relationship, leaving nothing outside. Regev
applied this approach to what he denoted as sonic embodiment and materiality,
which can be understood as a material presence of music anchored in and with
resonance in the body. In this respect, Regev (2013, p. 177) emphasised in par-
ticular the concept of actants,2 or objects that mediate “new ways of experiencing
the body, new styles of consciousness and modes of embodiment, new designs of
the public musical sphere”. This has relevance to the perception of recording, pro-
duction and playback technologies in addition to the sound of musical instru-
ments. Other important building blocks include institutionalised patterns of
cultural value, indicating what art forms, stylistic elements and aesthetic idioms
should be adopted in order to count as candidates for recognition, participation
and parity in the innovative frontiers of world culture. Expressive isomorphism is
the process through which national and/or ethnic uniqueness is standardised so
that the expressive cultures of various different nations, or of prominent social
sectors within them, come to consist of similar—although not identical—­
expressive forms, stylistic elements and aesthetic idioms (Regev, 2013, p. 9ff.).
However, it is important, in this context, to recognise that these processes not
only comprise different cultures but also various music forms, genres and styles
that are increasingly inclined to relate to popular music idioms and aesthetics.
The notions of institutionalised patterns of cultural value and expressive iso-
morphism together provide a conceptual framework for a general sociological
understanding of aesthetic cosmopolitanism, which may be seen in accordance
with Bourdieu’s dual understanding of the social role of culture. This, according
to Regev’s (2013) interpretation, is
a theory of distinction and cultural capital … and a theory of the fields of
art…. The theory of distinction outlines the role of cultural capital in the
production and maintenance of inequality, superiority, and prestige. The
theory of the cultural field delineates the social dynamic of struggles and
changes in fields of cultural production, whereby new forms and styles gain
legitimacy and recognition, while the old ones either decline or retain their
dominant, consecrated position.
(p. 12)
Strategy for social positioning   15
However, Regev argued that Bourdieu’s own work seemed to be limited to older
types of cultural capital based on traditional high art and its institutional fields.
Correspondingly, Bourdieu lacked a nuanced apparatus to interpret fine distinc-
tions and trends within popular culture, including changes in its status, according
to Regev. While this is true from a contemporary viewpoint, based on Bourdieu’s
theoretical universe, one can examine whether his concepts might still work to
construe the new meanings of popular music. At least, substantial attempts to
update and provide renewed vigour to the Bourdieusian terminology have
been made.

Distinctions in the field of music


Bourdieu’s (2011) concept of cultural capital has proven highly productive in
interpreting distinctions and relations between high and low culture since the
1960s, but it has also served as a general conceptual tool to analyse the economy
of symbolic goods. Cultural capital appears in the various guises of embodied,
objectified or institutionalised properties which gain value when they are
exchanged or converted into other forms of capital, for example, economic and
social ones. Although these relationships have changed and continue to change
throughout history, Bourdieu’s division of capital into different forms points to a
prevailing cultural circuit that connects institutions, specific cultural artefacts
and individual agents in particular ways. This means that cultural capital should
be designated in terms of objects and practices that are approved by the educa-
tion system, which may then be brought into play by privileged classes as a
strategy of inheritance by the next generation. In this sense, the sociology of
culture is inextricable from the sociology of education, and vice versa. For
example, higher music education and research was for a long time almost exclu-
sively occupied by highbrow art. One might say that it thus fulfilled the require-
ments of Western arts and education institutions as well as their users and
audiences. Low culture, of which popular music was a part, had maintained a
certain autonomy from cultural and educational policies, and it was instead
managed by the commercial market and the media.
The composition of economic, social and cultural capital tells us about taste,
lifestyle and value dispositions. But in addition, the accumulation of capital
determines the status of individuals and groups in a social space. The social
space is divided into social fields, such as business, academia and arts com-
munities (Bourdieu, 1993). The field is a dynamic network of relationships
between social agents battling for power over a territory that is also their
common ground. Thus, a cultural field is an area where agents, groups and insti-
tutions fight for influence and hegemony over cultural capital that they value
based on different interests. What characterises the different social fields is that
they have developed their own field-­specific forms of capital, which are applic-
able to the particular field in question. In his time, Bourdieu (1984, p. 7) pointed
out the contradiction between the “lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile enjoy-
ment” and “the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished
16   Petter Dyndahl
p­ leasures” to define the social significance of art and culture, including music.
Although such contradictions can change through the years, within a conflictive
theoretical perspective like Bourdieu’s, the social significance of art and culture
will still be constituted by differences. It is the totality of various forms of music;
ways of perceiving and ascribing meaning to the music; and music in its materi-
ality, organisation and institutions, which together constitute the field of music,
with its diversities, differences and contradictions (Østerberg & Bjørnerem,
2017). However, not just any area can be a field. A field is a social system that
requires specialists, institutions and acknowledged value hierarchies. This allows
one to speak of a cultural field, an educational field and a music field as well as
about specific fields subsumed under existing ones, such as the fields of classical
music and/or popular music.
However, to update and refine the picture further, both highbrow and lowbrow
cultural forms can now be detected on the micro or sub-­level, among other
places in the complex contemporary music field. Regarding popular music, Frith
(1996) argued that we make sense of and respond to this music much in the same
way as art music. When listening to it, we make aesthetic assessments of whether
it is good or bad, but we also make use of our musical experiences to construct
ourselves socially:

What I want to suggest, in other words, is not that social groups agree on
values which are then expressed in their cultural activities … but that they
only get to know themselves as groups … through cultural activity, through
aesthetic judgement. Making music isn’t a way of expressing ideas, it is a
way of living them.
(Frith, 1996, p. 111, emphasis in original)

The social construction and positioning within the field of popular culture is pre-
cisely what Thornton (1995) aimed to capture by introducing the notion of sub-
cultural capital. She claimed that limited attention has been paid to these in-­field
distinctive processes and asserted that:

High culture is generally conceived in terms of aesthetic values, hierarchies


and canons, while popular culture is portrayed as a curiously flat folk
culture.… consumers of popular culture have been depicted as discerning,
with definite likes and dislikes, but these tastes are rarely charted systemati-
cally as ranked standards.
(Thornton, 1995, p. 8)

Based on her study of social and cultural distinctions within the British dance
music club scene, Thornton argued that it is possible to observe subspecies of
capital operating in the terrain of youth culture and in other groups on the edge
of the traditional high/low dichotomy. She also stated that “hipness” is a high-­
status form of subcultural capital that can be converted into a variety of popular
culture roles and occupations.
Strategy for social positioning   17
At the individual level, people seem to have a remarkable ability to under-
stand and accept their place in the social structure, both regarding the social
space and cultural (sub)field. From Bourdieu’s point of view, this is not about
rational insights but rather embodied social structures—as they are regulated by
social class, gender, ethnicity, age and so on—which are continuously repro-
duced through habits, preferences and tastes developed during a formative period
in life, such as growing up in a specific environment.3 The idea of habitus
expresses this composition of individual lifestyles, values, dispositions and
expectations, which are strongly associated with and conditioned by particular
social groups. For Bourdieu (1990), habitus is seen as an incorporated system of
distinctive perception and evaluation of socially situated properties and
practices:

For a habitus structured according to the very structures of the social world
in which it functions, each property (a pattern of speech, a way of dressing,
a bodily hexis, an educational title, a dwelling-­place, etc.) is perceived in its
relations to other properties, therefore in its positional, distinctive value, and
it is through this distinctive distance, this difference, this distinction, which
is observed only by the seasoned observer, that the homologous position of
the bearer of this property in the space of social positions shows itself. All
of this is exactly encapsulated in the expression “that looks” (“ça fait …”:
“that looks petty-­bourgeois”, “that looks yuppie”, “that looks intellectual”,
etc.) which serves to locate a position in social space through a stance taken
in symbolic space.
(p. 113)

Obviously, this can be applied to music as well: “that looks” may well be
replaced with “that sounds” (“that sounds posh”, “that sounds redneck”, “that
sounds middle-­of-the-­road”, “that sounds hipster”, “that sounds geek”, etc.), still
serving to locate positions in social space through stances taken in symbolic—in
this case, sonic—space.

The omnivorisation of musical taste


In the wake of Bourdieu, there have been a number of sociological studies that
have attempted to investigate whether the distribution of high and low capital
has changed over time in terms of form and content. An important contribution
was made by Peterson and his collaborators, who reported that openness to
diversity was beginning to replace exclusive preference for high culture as a
means of class distinction, based on two sociological studies conducted in 1982
and 1992, which focused on cultural consumption and taste in the US (Peterson,
1992; Peterson & Kern 1996; Peterson & Simkus, 1992). The new element was
that from a certain point in time—which coincided with late modernity, accord-
ing to Regev—what would previously have been dismissed as low culture could
also accumulate high cultural capital. Peterson labelled the phenomenon of
18   Petter Dyndahl
expanded taste as cultural omnivorousness, and suggested that middle-­to-upper-­
class taste did not necessarily assume an elitist form, but high status since then
has become associated with a preference for, and participation in, a broad range
of cultural genres and practices. This corresponds well with the widespread
notion that in late or postmodern culture, an aptitude for sampling and (re)mixing
cultural forms is encouraged.
Furthermore, in the 1990s, Peterson argued that an omnivorous taste was
replacing the highbrow one as a central criterion for classifying elitist cultural
habits and styles of consumption. In many ways, it seemed like an open-­minded
and inclusive attitude towards cultural consumption across social hierarchies had
spread within the privileged classes and thus also to cultural and educational
institutions:

Dominant status groups have regularly defined popular culture in ways that
fit their own interests and have worked to render harmless subordinate
status-­group cultures…. One recurrent strategy is to define popular culture
as brutish and something to be suppressed or avoided … another is to gen-
trify elements of popular culture and incorporate them into the dominant
status-­group culture…. Our data suggest a major shift from the former
strategy to the latter strategy of status group politics.
(Peterson & Kern, 1996, p. 906)

Furthermore, in the title of his 1992 article, “Understanding Audience Segmen-


tation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore”, Peterson indicated that
omnivorous consumption was matched by a correspondingly univorous cultural
diet among those with little education and low cultural capital, thus turning
Bourdieu’s hierarchical model—with the “univore snob” at the pyramid’s top—
upside-­down. However, the omnivore–univore thesis has been criticised because
the cultural univore appears to be a category which is close to impossible to
locate empirically (e.g., Atkinson, 2011; Purhonen, Gronow, & Rahkonen,
2010). Nevertheless, many sociologists still seem to find the notion of omnivo-
rousness fruitful, but they leave the univore “slob” (Peterson, 1992, p. 252) to
dwindle more or less into oblivion.
However, no one can be omnivorous in a literal sense. In that connection,
Bryson (1996) pointed out that omnivorous cultural consumers demonstrate lim-
itations in their preferences. Peterson (2005) also later realised this fact:

At its root, omnivorousness refers to choosing a large number of distinctive


tastes or activities. Strictly “omni” means “all,” but in practice as operation-
alized, a respondent may choose considerably fewer than all the choices
available within a survey questionnaire or interview protocol and still be
counted as an omnivore. In its earliest formulation, omnivorousness was
contrasted with highbrow snobbery and to be counted as an omnivore one
had to like classical music and opera…. The focus was on those who parti-
cipated in and had a taste for the fine arts who also consumed all sorts of
Strategy for social positioning   19
non-­elite goods and activities … or at least showed an openness to appreci-
ating all … this confounds the omnivorousness of tastes with the taste for
highbrow forms, and, following the lead of Bryson (1996) and others since,
it seems wisest not to bind breadth and brow-­level together by definition,
but to see omnivorousness as a measure of the breadth of taste and cultural
consumption, allowing its link to status to be definitionally open.
(p. 263f.)

Moreover, in a comprehensive study of the organisation of cultural practices in


the UK, which replicated Bourdieu’s (1984) methodology and research design
from Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Bennett et al.
(2009, p. 92) complicated the impression that knowing about and participating in
a wide repertoire of cultural practices itself represents a new badge of distinc-
tion. First, their research showed that although “many people range across
genres”, there are still certain genre boundaries that cannot easily be crossed. For
instance, heavy metal and country music are genres that are intensely disliked by
many people who are otherwise open-­minded in their musical tastes. Besides,
although van Eijck (2001) found that members from higher status groups tended
to be more omnivorous than those from lower groups, he concluded that these
new omnivores represented only a specific fraction of the higher status groups.
He denoted this group as the new middle class, who realise that in today’s
society, being eclectic in musical preference is often regarded as a status symbol.
Second, according to Bennett et al.’s (2009) study, the demographic variable
that divides the different levels of omnivorousness seems to be age rather than
class; younger respondents reported liking more musical genres than older parti-
cipants. However, Reeves (2016) argued that the age-­period-cohort effects on
the rise of the omnivore remain an understudied area in cultural sociology. He
proposed that Bourdieu’s account of the habitus suggests that it can be usefully
framed as a class-­based cohort effect that is responsive to age and period effects.
Third, the omnivores might not be as voracious as thought at first glance, but
instead they concentrate their patterns of cultural consumption around “cognate
musical forms” (Bennett et al., 2009, p. 77), such as opera, classical music and
jazz (in other words, musics without a direct musical genre kinship). Neverthe-
less, the preferred forms possess somewhat similar cultural status in their respec-
tive fields and within the social space of lifestyles that provide hierarchies of
high and low culture. Vestby (2017) refined this concept further into culturally
related music genres, which distinguishes between being musical omnivores
with culturally related orientations and musical omnivores with cultural trans-
boundary orientations, rather than between univores and omnivores.4
Fourth and finally, Bennett et al. (2009) found that a preference for classical
music still seems to be strongly associated with elite groups of society. However,
a few music education scholars (e.g., Jorgensen, 2003; Nielsen, 2010) have sug-
gested that classical music is marginalised nowadays. Notwithstanding, accord-
ing to Bennett et al. (2009, p. 93), although elite group members also exhibit
clear omnivorous tendencies in their musical tastes, what above all differentiates
20   Petter Dyndahl
them from the other participants is that their musical interests, regardless of
genre, are expressed through a certain knowledgeable and educated “limited
enthusiasm” rather than through passionate connoisseurship or devoted fandom.
Consequently, as indicated above, even though what one is engaged in no
longer seems to be so crucial, it is still of great importance how one exercises
one’s commitment. These clarifications elaborate on the concept of cultural
omnivorousness in an important manner. It is still the distanced, aestheticising
and intertextual approach to works and practices of art that constitutes the appro-
priate dominant class mode of cultural consumption, analogous to the distin-
guished behaviour described by Bourdieu (1984), which thereby contributes to
the consecration of new forms and styles and, in turn, makes it possible to accu-
mulate cultural capital. However, since the elite’s cultural consumption now
includes a wider range of styles and genres than it did previously, distinctions
between what provides high and low capital must be expressed in more subtle
ways. For example, in order to be distinguished, one should exhibit a selective,
aesthetic approach to vernacular and popular cultural forms and not indulge in
consumption for the sake of consumption (Peterson & Kern, 1996). Thus, one
should appear to be inclusive and exclusive at the same time, which is a chal-
lenging task indeed.

Musical gentrification
As quoted in the previous section, Peterson and Kern (1996) used the verb gen-
trify to illustrate how elements of popular culture have been incorporated into
the dominant status-­group culture. Also, Halnon and Cohen (2006) applied gen-
trification as a metaphor for how low culture has been included in the dominant
culture, demonstrating how gentrification processes are applicable to symbolic
neighbourhoods in popular culture. They delineated how three symbolic neigh-
bourhoods of lower-­class masculinity—i.e., muscles, motorcycles and tattoos—
have been transformed from lower to middle-­class distinction. In addition, they
showed how cultural objects and expressions are not only incorporated but also
changed and adapted to new purposes and contexts. Thus, properties and prac-
tices are made more exclusive, a process that tends to make them impracticable
for the original possessors of the culture being gentrified.
However, to start from the beginning, Glass (1963) was the very first to
employ the term gentrification for academic purposes when she examined how
middle-­class residents began to settle in low-­income and working-­class areas in
London, thereby raising both the standard and the status of the properties and
the neighbourhood. Simultaneously, many of the original residents were forced
to move out: “Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on
rapidly until all or most of the original working-­class occupiers are displaced
and the whole social character of the district is changed” (Glass, 1963, p. xviii).
The term gentrification originates from the word gentry, which in late medieval
English denoted the wellborn and well-­bred social class of the landed aristo-
cracy or the minor aristocracy, whose income emanated from extensive
Strategy for social positioning   21
l­ andholdings. However, when used in colloquial language and political dis-
course today, gentrification seems to mean urban renewal, which may involve
mainly positive associations, such as the stabilisation of declining areas,
increased property values, reduced vacancy rates, a better social mix, improved
prospects for further development and rehabilitation of property using both
private and public funding (Atkinson & Bridge, 2005, p. 5). In this sense, gen-
trification tends to be identical with the revitalisation of a neighbourhood.
However, one should bear in mind that gentrification is also a process by which
higher-­income households tend to displace lower-­income ones, thereby chang-
ing the specific nature of the local community. For this reason, Marcuse (1985)
underscored that it is crucial not to omit or forget that displacement is at the
core of gentrification. Actually, a number of different types of displacement,
abandonment or marginalisation can be identified, such as physical displace-
ment when one is forced to leave home by the new owners, economic displace-
ment when buying or renting property becomes unaffordable, exclusionary
displacement or abandonment when the total number of homes is reduced
because smaller flats are merged into larger ones and lastly, cultural marginali-
sation or displacement when one feels alienated from an altered neighbourhood
that once was familiar. Hence, just as the above-­discussed notion of cultural
omnivorousness can be interpreted as consisting of both inclusionary and exclu-
sionary elements, it seems obvious that the concept of gentrification also com-
prises attractive as well as repelling forces.
Much like urban gentrification, musical gentrification is predisposed to
involve processes of both inclusion and exclusion. The idea implies a symbolic
relocation from the field of urban studies to that of the cultural and sociological
study of music. Thus, the metaphor may serve to illustrate and examine
analogous tendencies to the above in various socio-­cultural fields of music,
where musics that originally held lower social, cultural and aesthetic status
become objects of socio-­aesthetic interest and symbolic investment from cultural
agents who possess higher status, partly as a result of the ubiquitous processes of
aesthetic cosmopolitanism and cultural omnivorousness described above.
Musical gentrification occurs in different domains. Obvious examples are when
vernacular and popular musics are invaded by artists, educators and researchers,
with aestheticisation, institutionalisation and academisation as results. As part of
these processes, what characterises the original musical traditions and cultures—
now being gentrified—may be disturbed, and some of the social and cultural ties
to the musical cultures in question can be weakened or even broken for some of
the earlier cultural practitioners. With this basis, musical gentrification has been
defined 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 … these processes strongly contribute to changing the
22   Petter Dyndahl
c­ haracteristics of particular musical communities as well as the musics,
practices, and cultures that are subjected to gentrification.
(Dyndahl, Karlsen, Skårberg & Nielsen, 2014, p. 54)

The relationship between musical gentrification and cultural omnivorousness


may seem intimate, as gentrification can be said to provide necessary arenas or
social fields within which omnivorousness may be exercised according to the
need to accumulate and exchange cultural capital in a new and differentiated, but
still distinguished, manner. Furthermore, in relation to one of sociology’s funda-
mental dichotomies—the complementary opposites of structure and agency—at
first glance, the two concepts should be placed on either side. Omnivorousness is
related to agency, and gentrification is most adjacent to structure. However, in
line with Bourdieu’s social theory, these two aspects are always interlinked and
should be understood by means of their mutually dependent relationship. Thus,
Bourdieu aimed to overcome the structure/agency dichotomy, and the notion of
habitus is central to those aims.
However, in their explanation of the emergence of cultural omnivorousness,
Peterson and Kern (1996) seemed to lean more toward Becker’s (1982) concept
of art worlds than toward structural and power-­related circumstances construct-
ing and regulating the subject. They argued that during the latter half of the
twentieth century

[i]t became increasingly obvious that the quality of art did not inhere in the
work itself, but in the evaluations made by the art world … and that expres-
sions of all sorts from around the world are open to aesthetic appropriation
(Becker, 1982). This is the aesthetic basis of the shift from the elitist exclu-
sive snob to the elitist inclusive omnivore.
(Peterson & Kern, 1996, p. 905)

Additionally, when describing the structural changes that led to the omnivorous
expansion of cultural consumption, Peterson and Kern (1996, p. 905) mostly
focused on rising standards of living, social class mobility, geographical migra-
tion, broader education and the more accessible presentation of the arts via
media. These are all plausible explanations, but they lack some of Bourdieu’s
conflicting views on society, according to which contradictions and opposites are
seen as meaning-­making, indicating—as mentioned above—that the social
significance of art and culture is constituted of differences.5 Bourdieu and Wac-
quant (1992) argued for the implementation of a radical doubt, claiming that
constructing a qualified understanding should, first and foremost, involve break-
ing with prevailing perceptions. Thus, according to the Bourdieusian approach,
powerful symbolic hierarchies are established, and societal symbolic power is
able to exercise its effect by means of differences. By way of example, the forms
of capital—both economic and cultural—are defined as scarce resources that
individuals, groups and classes fight for, which constitutes the very dynamics of
society. Moreover, these dynamics are relationally organised in the sense that
Strategy for social positioning   23
high or low positions in society are always defined in relation to each other; for
someone to have high status, someone else must have low. In order for a life-
style to be interpreted as distinguished or highbrow, another must be regarded as
ordinary or lowbrow. The basis for such distinctive valuations is that different
social classes possess their respective “systems of classification” (Bourdieu &
Wacquant, 1992, p. 7), which are embodied in habitus. Habitus is thus strongly
regulated by structural conditions. That being said, habitus also holds an
enabling, agentic capacity, which opens the way for a practical concept of
strategy, and this practical sense might be regarded as Bourdieu’s (1977) expres-
sion of agency.6 Through a practical sense of how the power relations within an
interaction are symbolically configured, agents can adapt their contributions
­strategically in order to position themselves—or their ideas, arguments, aesthetic
preferences, etc.—favourably within the discourse. In this context, it is relevant
to point out that Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) attributed a certain relative auto-
nomy to social fields such as art and education.
Furthermore, it should be noted that when applying the two dimensions of
capital volume (high/low) and capital composition (economic/cultural) in order
to make the connections between social positions and lifestyles visible within
the spatial framework of the diagrams of Distinction, Bourdieu (1984, p. 122f.)
also implied a third axis, namely a “time-­dimension referring to trajectories: the
social agents’ history of stability or mobility related to the system of social posi-
tions” (Prieur & Savage, 2011, p. 572). This could imply that in late modern
society, with the prospect of lifelong education and shifting profession, with the
evolution of a normative mindset emphasising changing rather than staying
values, with increasing globalisation and migration and with the rapid develop-
ment of media and technology, the formative period of habitus may be signifi-
cantly extended beyond childhood, thereby refining the practical sense to
sophistication, not least when it comes to symbolic domains like the dynamic
field of music.
The notion of musical gentrification implies ambitions to incorporate the
above complex insights (i.e., linking structure and agency as well as diachronic
and synchronic perspectives) in an overall concept. However, this does not mean
that the concept can encompass anything that has been labelled cultural omnivo-
rousness and/or aesthetic cosmopolitanism. On the contrary, the concept of
musical gentrification may provide a more specific angle to power relations and
historical dimensions concerning social differentiation within the fields of music
and its policies, education and research. As stated in the above precursory defini-
tion, what is included and excluded, as well as the changes that the gentrification
imposes on the music and its practices, are essential dimensions of the concept.
Moreover, musical gentrification is particularly associated with the changes in
the systems of classification, which imply that time-­honoured hegemonies are
set aside, while new, subtle distinctions—apparently disturbing the traditional
balance between high and low culture—gain momentum. Compared with the
concepts of aesthetic cosmopolitanism and cultural omnivorousness, the process
of change will be of greatest focus for musical gentrification. What dispositions
24   Petter Dyndahl
are expressed in the search for types of music that can accumulate new cultural
capital? How is this practical sense developed? How is it implemented strategi-
cally? These questions also refer to agents—individuals and/or institutions—
who assume the role of musical gentrifiers as well as the symbolic power they
exert. A substantial portion of the research that has thus far been carried out
within this conceptual framework has been concerned with Norwegian music
academia and how the disposition as gentrifier has been performed by various
agents within this field.
In the Norwegian academic context, Hansen, Andersen, Flemmen and Ljung-
gren (2014) argued that professors and other academic staff members in effect
influence not only what are legitimate research objects or legitimate educational
content but also who and what should be admitted to high-­status rank outside of
academia. As such, they argued that professors in particular, represent a kind of
cultural academic elite who exert the power to define and introduce new phe-
nomena and objects of interest within their own fields, in academia and beyond.
By putting capital at the centre, Ljunggren (2014) claimed that for something to
function as cultural capital, it must be legitimised somewhere; someone must
vouch for its quality. Again, the cultural elite in academia, the professors, will
have the greatest classification power over what should count as legitimate cul-
tural capital. They also have the power to influence what should be researched
and how to define and control the contents of education and to regulate access to
high positions in academia. In this way, they manage the academic institutions’
systems of classification, which Regev (2013) denoted as institutionalised pat-
terns of cultural value.
Within the arts, the power of definition might work even more strongly. For
instance, Hovden and Knapskog (2014, p. 56) maintained that being a recog-
nised arts professor implies that one is

clearly better placed than others to influence what types of art and which
artistic artefacts are acknowledged (or at least presented) as valuable and
their chance of being seen and produced, that is, to be cultural tastemakers
and gatekeepers, tastekeepers.

With respect to music academia and higher music education, this means that
music professors may act as tastekeepers, and in some cases as gentrifiers, with
regards to how musical gentrification is enacted in legitimate ways within their
field and to which musical genres and styles are considered appropriate for ele-
vation and institutionalisation in academia (see Dyndahl, 2015a). This is how the
symbolic economy works in society and culture as a whole and, on a smaller
scale, in the university. This is also one way in which the gentrification of
popular music takes place as processes of academisation and institutionalisation.
Strategy for social positioning   25
The gentrification of popular music in higher music
education and research
In an academic context, it would probably be most common to think that the
expansion of popular music genres and styles in higher music education would
be initiated from below; from the budding academics—the students—who
experience that their music tastes and interests are not appreciated in academia.
To some extent, there was some pressure from a minor fraction of Scandinavian
music students from the 1970s onwards. However, in line with the arguments
stated in the previous paragraph, it is interesting to note that younger professors
or professors-­to-be contributed greatly to opening the academic doors for jazz,
popular music, folk and vernacular music in the Nordic countries, seeing them-
selves as activists against the conservative establishment of higher music educa-
tion and research (Dyndahl, 2015a). Although it may at first glance appear as
somewhat surprising that an activist base that aims to better understand and help
to improve situations of inequality, marginalisation and oppression might also
serve as a power base from which to achieve and maintain a new academic hege-
mony, it is nevertheless a striking example of one of the paradoxes of musical
gentrification: whoever has developed a practical sense of what is possible to
gentrify at a given time within a given social field will also be able to reap the
benefits in the form of cultural capital.
However, it is important to emphasise that this should not be seen as a delib-
erate, cynical action but as the symbolic, economic logic that the university as an
institution and its individual agents are subject to (Bourdieu, 1988), which is
embodied in habitus, and the disposition to evolve a practical sense or strategic
action ability. Also worth remembering is that the outcome of musical gentrifica-
tion is just as paradoxical as the idea, and that power—according to Foucault
(2001)—is not only repressive but also productive:

This form of power that applies itself to immediate everyday life categorizes
the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own
identity, imposes a law of truth on him that he must recognize and others
have to recognize in him. It is a form of power that makes individuals sub-
jects. There are two meanings of the word “subject”: subject to someone
else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience
or self-­knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power that subjugates
and makes subject to.
(p. 331)

When music academia gradually opened up to students with backgrounds from


jazz, rock and the like, it also welcomed groups and communities who had long
been marginalised or excluded from higher music education and legitimate
culture. And when some of these students eventually entered postgraduate pro-
grammes, they were likely to follow their research interests in the direction of
jazz and popular music, ensuring that popular music gained a foothold in higher
music education and research.
26   Petter Dyndahl
However, all such efforts cannot necessarily be described as musical gentrifi-
cation. Obviously, a general expansion or replacement of systems of classifica-
tion has been initiated, but as this process gains momentum, we can speak about
a certain normalisation of popular music’s presence in terms of what Regev
(2013) called expressive isomorphism. Yet, many major and minor battles have
been and are still being fought in many institutions as well as in many fields or
sub-­fields. Musical gentrification, however, is primarily associated with actions
“that are socially distinguished from the commonplace, which we might think of
as a type of marking that creates a magical boundary between insiders and out-
siders, often sanctioned by an actual enclosure” (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 102, empha-
sis in original). The effect becomes somewhat less when everyone has become a
cultural omnivore or aesthetic cosmopolitan.
Thus, from the perspectives provided by the research project Musical Gentri-
fication and Socio-­Cultural Diversities,7 it was most interesting to examine how
the gentrification of various popular musical genres and styles has taken place in
Norwegian higher music education (i.e., which genres have been institutional-
ised and which have not [or have but only to a minor extent] and the role of gen-
trifiers in these processes) (Dyndahl, Karlsen, Nielsen & Skårberg, 2017).
However, to get close enough to the empirical material to be able to discuss it in
terms of musical gentrification, the research group explored when, how, why and
what kind of popular music has been included in Norwegian higher education
and research by examining the entire corpus of master’s theses and doctoral dis-
sertations approved in any academic discipline of music throughout the century
from 1912 to 2012. The results of the study indicated, in short, that after the first
entrance of a thesis focusing on popular music occurred in 1974, an ever-­
increasing proportion of theses have been related to popular music, reaching
about 40 per cent of the total amount by the end of the investigated period. With
this outcome, one could believe that higher music education is democratised
once and for all, and that all kinds of music are now included in Norwegian
higher music education. Certainly, in comparison to the overall dominant
­position Western classical music had previously, an inclusive expansion has
obviously taken place.
However, in the same way as urban gentrification is exercised by people with
higher status than those who originally inhabited the neighbourhoods that
become objects of new attraction, and therefore tend to expel the original resi-
dents, musical gentrification also has exclusionary or marginalising effects. This
is expressed in several ways. First of all, not all popular music styles are attrac-
tive enough to be gentrified. Instead, new, academic genre hierarchies within
popular music appear to have arisen. Esteemed forms of jazz, rock and pop are
thus very well represented in the overall academic picture. At the opposite end
of the scale we find, for example, punk rock, country music and Scandinavian
dance band music. The latter is not represented in the material whatsoever. Not-
withstanding this fact, this is a widespread music genre and cultural practice,
especially in Norway and Sweden, but it is often interpreted as a stereotype of
working-­class and/or rural culture and lifestyle and has been kept outside of
Strategy for social positioning   27
music education, music research and the media in general. Master’s students and
potential music researchers apparently do not wish to be associated with musics
that render such unquestionable low cultural affiliation (see also Dyndahl, 2016).
However, as previously stated, musical gentrification is not just about what is
included or excluded. Equally important is how it is done. By using sufficiently
sophisticated theory and conceptual apparatuses, it seems that almost any
music—with a few exceptions—can be lifted up to legitimate culture and
provide opportunities for reaping benefits, in this case, academic capital. In this
way, one can also say that gentrification changes the music that is exposed to it,
just as the former working-­class homes and neighbourhoods are transformed by
middle- and upper-­class habitus in urban gentrification. In other words, this
serves as an example of academics’ efforts to accumulate cultural capital accord-
ing to the structural norms and values set or constantly reset within dynamic
systems of classification (see also Dyndahl, 2015a, 2019, p. 22f.). Regarding the
individual and institutional roles of gentrifiers, the results materialise differences
in and between academic institutions and educational programmes (Dyndahl,
Karlsen, Nielsen & Skårberg, 2018) as well as gender differences when it comes
to power and significance for the musical gentrification (see Nielsen and
Dyndahl, in press).8
All in all, a field has emerged that has gradually opened itself up to other
musics, music practices and music cultures than those stemming from the
Western art music tradition, and some of these instances are now implemented
within an academic domain of relatively high status. In this respect, the gentrifi-
cation of popular music in higher Norwegian music education and research has
contributed to changing the system of classification in this particular field.

Conclusion
Based on the previous sections, the concept of musical gentrification may now
be described as holding the potential to address both the destabilisation and
restabilisation of social positions as well as systems of classification in educa-
tion, culture and society. First, musical gentrification denotes processes for
incorporation of popular culture elements into the dominant status-­group culture.
Second, these processes tend to be strategically selective in the sense that there
will be something and someone marginalised, omitted or excluded. Third, the
gentrified musical objects and expressions are not only included but are also
changed and adapted to the new purposes and contexts. This may involve alter-
ations that are so extensive that some of the social and cultural ties to the musical
cultures in question can be weakened or broken for the first-­hand cultural practi-
tioners. Thus, musical gentrification presupposes differences as a dynamic force
of power in society and culture, maintaining and redefining hierarchies of hege-
mony. However, although power makes individuals subject to someone else by
control and suppression, it may also afford empowerment. In this context,
musical gentrification is executed by gentrifiers, who have developed an agentic
disposition or practical strategy to sense what is capable of gentrification at a
28   Petter Dyndahl
given time within a given social field and who will thus be able to benefit
from it.
Disposition is a key concept in Bourdieu’s work. It can be conceived as a
sense of the game or—more precisely—as a skill that is partly conscious and
rational but that is also partly an intuitive, practical mastery of social fields and
systems of classification which appears to be spontaneously expressed. However,
the dispositions are conditioned responses to the social world formed over years,
and it follows that the individual habitus is always a mix of multiple engage-
ments in the social world throughout the person’s life.9 Further, since the social
fields are put into practice through the agency of the individuals, no social field
or system of classification can be completely stable, but instead it is possible to
adapt or alter them according to specific initiatives and interests. In other words,
the concept of the practical sense holds the potential to connect the poles of the
dichotomy between structure and agency.
The practical sense is rooted in habitus, which is formed throughout a per-
son’s life. Thus, “referring to trajectories: the social agents’ history of stability
or mobility related to the system of social positions” (Prieur & Savage, 2011,
p. 572) is necessary to see in light of the characteristics of late modern develop-
ment of society and culture. Sociologists like Bauman (2000) and Beck, Giddens
and Lash (1994) argued that in late modernity, a liquid or reflexive modernisa-
tion process is occurring. This means that while in classical or high modernity,
the concept of modernity was defined in opposition to traditionalism, in late
modernity the concept tends to be more or less self-­referring. This is one of the
reasons why both highbrow and lowbrow cultural forms can now be detected on
a sub-­level or more specific level within social space (Frith, 1996; Thornton,
1995) than what Bourdieu (1984) maintained with his opposition between high
and low culture to denote the consecrated classical versus the vulgar popular
culture. This adds a historical basis for justifying the notion of musical gentrifi-
cation as a concept that may hold the potential to address new distinctions and
consecrations within the field of popular music (i.e., between its different genres,
styles and modes of expression rather than between the popular and traditional
cultural systems of classification and sets of values).
Notwithstanding, although musical gentrification can operate as a nuanced
conceptual device for popular genres, subgenres, styles and sub-­styles, it is prim-
arily a cultural sociological concept. Its strength lies therefore in saying some-
thing relevant about music’s social and cultural significance and not in
expounding the ontologies of music or investigating in-­depth sophisticated ways
of interacting aesthetically with musical matters and materials. However, Frith’s
(1996) demand to understand popular music in its composite socio-­cultural and
aesthetic whole implies an ontological approach to music, emphasising precisely
that music is both an aesthetic and a socio-­cultural matter. But to pursue this
further, the concept of musical gentrification must be complemented by other
theoretical contributions. Prior (2013), in this regard, asked whether Bourdieu-
sian claims about social stratification and music consumption are still relevant
and whether they are sophisticated enough to deal with the specific ways that
Strategy for social positioning   29
people interact with musical forms. Thus, he called for developing “something
like a ‘post-­Bourdieusian’ sociology more faithful to music’s material prop-
erties” (Prior, 2013, p. 181), pointing out theoretical contributions from DeNora
(1999, 2000, 2004), Hennion (1999, 2007, 2008) and Born (2010). Nevertheless,
considered from the theoretical perspective constituted by musical gentrification,
such contributions must not be incompatible with the concept’s specific socio-
logical approach, which aims to see social and institutional structures as well as
cultural and individual agencies in context. Here, Regev’s (2013, p. 177) pro-
posal to develop the actor-­network theory to a notion of sonic embodiment and
material presence represents an interesting outline, illuminating actants as
material-­semiotic elements that mediate “new ways of experiencing the body,
new styles of consciousness and modes of embodiment, new designs of the
public musical sphere”. Another idea could be to develop a discursive approach
that might capture discourses in music as well as discourses on music, as
­Folkestad (2017) advocated. This would enable the understanding that music
itself might be regarded as a discourse, as musical discursive actions and activ-
ities, including the formation of musical identities. That way, both Frith’s dual
perspective on music and Bourdieu’s interconnection between structure and
agency could be consolidated.
However, such contributions to the development of theory are beyond the
scope of this chapter, which has attempted to address the significance of the
concept of musical gentrification for the understanding of social positioning in
late modern culture. In sum, this has explained that what seems like inclusive
and democratising tendencies may in subtle ways mean that inclusion takes place
only in specific forms and under certain conditions, through which some groups
and classes gain higher status and power while others are still marginalised or
excluded. Furthermore, this time they could be excluded by means of what was
originally their own culture, which due to the processes of musical gentrification,
has changed in character and been adopted by a new audience. This may lead to
particular classes and groups experiencing school and education as less relevant,
leading to suspicion of social groups and cultural institutions that have deprived
or closed access to one’s culture. Ultimately, this might create a breeding ground
for contempt for the cultural elite (Ljunggren, 2014) and a rejection of know-
ledge, education and research that could threaten the knowledge society and the
welfare state. Therefore, it is hoped that the insights provided by the concept of
musical gentrification may have implications for the politics of culture and aes-
thetics, for music education and research and for people’s agency in society,
culture, education and their personal lives.

Notes
1 Of course, there are music education scholars who oppose such a view, such as Philpott
(2012) and Boeskov (2019), but they are relatively few.
2 Latour borrowed the notion of actants from Greimas (1983), for whom it referred to
integral structural elements around which narratives, such as storytelling, revolve.
30   Petter Dyndahl
3 For a further discussion on the significance of parenting for the formation of habitus,
see Vestad and Dyndahl, this volume.
4 See also Vestby, this volume.
5 This is probably where Bourdieu exhibits the closest kinship with Saussure and Derrida
(see Dyndahl, 2015b, p. 33ff.).
6 For an idiosyncratic perspective on the relationship between musical gentrification and
agency, see Karlsen, this volume.
7 For more details about the research project and the research group, see the opening
chapter of this volume.
8 For a detailed discussion of gender-­related issues concerning musical gentrification, see
Nielsen, this volume.
9 Lahire (2003, p. 329) emphasised that dispositions are not just general and homogen-
eous by nature, but “that social agents have developed a broad array of dispositions,
each of which owes its availability, composition, and force to the socialization process
in which it was acquired”.

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Norway University of Applied Sciences, Elverum, Norway.
3 Exploring the phenomenon of
musical gentrification
Methods and methodologies
Sidsel Karlsen, Mariko Hara, Stian Vestby, Petter
Dyndahl, Siw Graabræk Nielsen and Odd Skårberg

Introduction
One of the main characteristics of research and of scientific conduct, whether it
is theoretically or empirically inclined, is rigour connected to the definition of
concepts and to the materialisation of such concepts into philosophical or empir-
ical realities. Even though a particular concept might be adequately defined, its
operationalisation might occur in different ways due to dissimilarities in theoret-
ical or material contextualisations. As for the concept central to this book,
namely musical gentrification, it is coined by the research group, by which it is
developed, in the following way:

we refer to musical gentrification as complex processes with both inclusion-


ary and exclusionary outcomes, by which musics, musical practices, and
musical cultures of relatively lower status are made to be objects of acquisi-
tion by subjects who inhabit higher or more powerful positions.
(Dyndahl, Karlsen, Skårberg, & Nielsen, 2014, p. 54;
see also Dyndahl, this volume)

Furthermore, it is situated within a sociological frame, drawing on grand and


middle-­range theory borrowed from contributors such as Bourdieu (1984, 1990,
1986/2011) and Peterson (1992; see also Peterson & Kern, 1996; Peterson &
Simkus, 1992). Still, as such, the definition carries little information about what,
in each particular case, would count as, say, a process, inclusion or exclusion.
Nor does it establish an exact frame for conceptualising what might constitute a
musical genre, practice or culture. These concepts, which are all necessary for
coining the central one, need to be worked out in relation to particular projects,
cases and contexts in order to grasp, and be able to scientifically explore, the
phenomenon of musical gentrification.
In this chapter, we aim to show how musical gentrification has been opera-
tionalised in three different, but interlinked research projects using similar, but
not quite identical, theoretical frameworks, and investigating the phenomenon in
vastly different contexts and through a variety of methodological approaches and
types of data. In the first example, musical gentrification is explored in music
academia and higher music education through a quantitative approach in which
Methods and methodologies   35
the data are comprised of a large number of academic theses. The second
example shows how ethnography can be used for approaching the phenomenon
of musical gentrification in a data-­rich and somewhat unruly field, namely a
country music festival. Third, the focus is moved towards how an ethnographic
design might aid the researcher in exploring signs and patterns of musical gentri-
fication in the stories and observed conduct of musicians with immigrant back-
grounds related to the efforts of creating a professional career in their new
country of domicile. Each of these examples or cases comes with a rich meth-
odological description of links between theory and approaches, data and assump-
tions, and a case-­specific account of what, in this particular research project,
came to be defined as the actual signs that processes of musical gentrification
had indeed taken place. However, before delving into the specificities of the
three examples, the topic of operationalisation will be explored from a more
general point of view.

From middle-­range theory to methodological tools:


challenges of operationalisation
According to Søndergaard (2005), researchers who work with “complex-­
sensitive types of thinking—e.g. cultural analytical, narrative, discourse analyt-
ical, constructionist or poststructuralist theories and methods” (p. 235, our
translation) are often left to themselves when it comes to finding strategies and
constructing tools for analysing their empirical material. In other words, “the
researcher [has] to find her/his own way: poststructuralist-­inspired empirical
analysis is not something that can be acquired as a sort of technique” (Sønder-
gaard, 2002, p. 187). This task is not an easy one, and requires both thorough
knowledge of the theories that make up the theoretical framework of the research
project at hand, as well as rigorous understanding of how “theoretical concepts
can be ‘translated’ into the practical researcher reality and thereby function as
useful instruments in the methods-­related work” (Karlsen, 2011, p. 162, our
translation). Such work, and its related challenges, is also central to researchers
working within the field of sociology, whether they operate on the basis of so-­
called grand theory (Mills, 1959), or build their frameworks from contributions
developed within the middle-­range theoretical sphere (Merton, 1968).
Reinvigorating the structure/agency debate, Martin and Dennis (2010,
pp. 5–9) claim that working with sociological grand theory from an empirical
angle is next to pointless, among other things, because it is practically imposs-
ible to demonstrate the existence of social structures. Rather, they find “[t]he
proper focus of sociological attention” (p. 15) to be that of “the human world of
everyday experience, a world which is neither ‘macro’ nor ‘micro’ and [which]
cannot be captured analytically by the dualism of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ (or by
attempts to ‘link’ them)” (p. 15). Despite this critique, several scholars, also
within the field of cultural sociology, continue to strive to explore the connec-
tions between the macro structural level and the micro-­level everyday actions of
individuals or groups of people. Some of these researchers do so through a
36   Sidsel Karlsen et al.
Bourdieusian framework (see Bennett et al., 2009; Faber, Prieur, Rosenlund &
Skjøtt-Larsen, 2012), which is also partly underlying the Musical Gentrification
project around which much of this book is built, and some even aim to replicate
the methodology and the means of empirical operationalisation originally uti-
lised for collecting the data on which Bourdieu’s seminal work, Distinction: A
Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), was based. Pondering the chal-
lenges of such operationalisation, Bennett et al. (2009) point to how, for
example, a questionnaire meant to map the cultural tastes of a large number of
participants in the UK might function so as to measure only the engagement with
so-­called legitimate culture, mainly due to the researchers being situated in the
middle class and taking their own understanding of culture as a point of depar-
ture for developing categories. Engaging in qualitative interview work later on in
the project, these same researchers discovered that individuals who, based on the
questionnaire results, seemed “culturally disengaged [were] not to be seen as
‘socially excluded’ or somehow devoid of social interaction of various kinds”
(Bennett et al., 2009, p. 59). Rather, they were busy participating in a myriad of
more informal cultural and social activities that the questionnaire did not tap
into. While giving the more general reminder that triangulation of methods
might be needed in order to have valid results from sociological research, this
example also shows how researcher reflexivity constitutes a significant premise
for sound operationalisation of theoretical concepts. If “cultural taste” is under-
stood as an individual’s total range of preferences for, and engagement with,
various cultural artefacts and expressions, researchers need to be well aware of
their own cultural habitus in order to be able to look beyond their own immediate
and often limited understanding when aiming to map such taste. Similar experi-
ences with researcher bias were reported by Faber et al. (2012) who aimed to
conduct a Bourdieu-­inspired study of social and cultural differentiation in one
particular town in Denmark. They write:

Many of the questions, which we had taken great care to formulate in a


neutral and non-­value-laden way in the survey, still missed the target. It
cannot be denied that the questions were conceived in an academic context,
and that we, as researchers, enquired from a specific position in social
space.
(p. 69, our translation)

As with the UK study (Bennett et al., 2009), the Danish researchers found this
phenomenon to influence, in particular and in a negative way, the data collection
among the participants categorised as belonging to “the lower [social] classes”
(Faber et al., 2012, p. 69).
The Danish and UK researchers’ grappling with finding suitable methodo-
logical solutions within the field of cultural sociology might be understood as
struggles to operationalise grand theory—a highly abstract theorising of the
organisation of the social world—which is one possible way of characterising
Bourdieu’s work (Walther, 2014, p. 7). In their case, the operationalisation
Methods and methodologies   37
c­ onsisted of one step mainly, namely, the translation from theoretical concepts
and into practical research tools, as already mentioned above. In the context of
our project, this process of translation has contained yet another step, since we
have mainly been occupied with utilising, and also constructing, what might be
viewed as middle-­range theory; in other words a form of sociological theorising
which is slightly less abstract and in itself closer to the empirical world. Since
Bourdieu’s work still forms a backdrop for our project, the first step has con-
sisted of a translation (or perhaps rather a bridging) of grand theory concepts,
such as “cultural capital”, “habitus” and “social class” (Bourdieu, 1984) into the
middle-­range theoretical notions of “cultural omnivorousness” (Peterson, 1992;
Peterson & Kern, 1996) and “musical gentrification” (Dyndahl et al., 2014).
­Secondly, our next step has been to operationalise musical gentrification so that
it makes sense and can be used for the purpose of collecting, producing and
­constructing research data of various kinds and in various social and cultural
contexts. As Søndergaard (2002) reminds us, there is no one way to go about
such processes, and prescriptive models or universal techniques for how to do it
simply do not exist. Rather, researchers must find their own way through this
theoretical-­empirical landscape—learning as they go, and also from each other,
in and through collaborative efforts. This calls for even more complex layers of
researcher reflexivity than exemplified above, and also for developing reflexive
methodologies (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2000). In the following, we will exem-
plify three such processes and attempts, all characterised by individual as well as
collective learning, by explaining the routes of operationalisation connected to
each of the three Musical Gentrification sub-­projects: one conducted by four
senior researchers (Petter Dyndahl, Sidsel Karlsen, Siw Graabræk Nielsen and
Odd Skårberg), one PhD project (conducted by Stian Vestby), and finally one
sub-­project conducted by a postdoctoral researcher (Mariko Hara).

Musical gentrification and academisation: a quantitative


approach
In the context of the senior researcher sub-­project, the process of musical gentri-
fication was explored as one happening within Norwegian music academia and
higher music education, and further characterised by this field’s uptake of
various forms of popular music. Since the wish was to map this phenomenon
historically and trace its development diachronically, some form of register data
was considered necessary. The data sources that were seen as most suitable were
written and published academic works, in other words master’s and doctoral
theses produced within music academia in Norway. With respect to hegemony,
Western classical music and the scholars writing about it were understood as
inhabiting historically the most powerful positions of this field, and popular
music and its proponents and writers were considered the main challengers, the
ones to gradually contest the music academia status quo. The research interest
not only covered the process of dominance contestation per se, it was also
­directed towards the patterns of inclusion/exclusion that happened due to the
38   Sidsel Karlsen et al.
g­ entrification itself. In other words: which popular music styles and genres
“made it” into music academia, and which did not?
As a consequence of the above, in this particular sub-­project, the phenom-
enon of “musical practice” was operationalised as “writing academic texts about
music”. One could of course argue that popular music would also enter music
academia in other ways, through being taught, played and practiced by teachers
and students who were involved in the educational programmes offered within
this particular part of academia. However, for mapping this development accu-
rately and to have a full overview of how it happened in a national perspective,
the researchers would have to interview an infinite number of people, and rely
on their memories of events that occurred within a time-­span of over 40 years.
They would also have to consider the fact that the process happened in different
ways and at different speed in various parts of the country. Hence, for the inves-
tigation of the full national scope of academia musical gentrification, the thesis
data was considered the most appropriate.1
Working with register data first requires that a register exists. This was not
the situation with the music academia theses, so one of the first challenges faced
by the group of researchers was to establish one. This part of the work was
guided by questions like “how to map relevant educational programmes?”, “how
and where to receive knowledge about relevant theses?”, “how to set up the
register?”, and “what categories of information to include?”
The selection of educational programmes was made on the background of
the research group members’ professional knowledge and experience, both
regarding what existed historically and in a contemporary perspective, and also
which programmes could be understood as belonging to the field of music
academia. Programmes within in all ten different music conservatoires, univer-
sities and university colleges were included, spanning the fields of musicology,
ethnomusicology, music education, music therapy, music technology and
music performance, as well as their respective subdivisions (see Dyndahl,
Karlsen, Nielsen, & Skårberg, 2017). Some of these institutions and pro-
grammes had kept lists of published theses throughout their years of existence,
others had not. Consequently, having an overview of the total span of works
required extensive efforts from the researchers involved, digging into library
catalogues, making calls to librarians and other people who would possess
information about the local theses produced, and working in libraries all over
the country, going through microfiche versions and physically existing copies
of theses, to register and in other ways map them. All in all, 1,695 theses were
detected and catalogued, and they were categorised according to a range of
different variables such as year of publication, publishing institution, study
programme affiliation, author and supervisor gender, scientific discipline and
musical style/genre, before the data was inserted into SPSS2 and analysed sta-
tistically. The latter category was the one that caused the most trouble and
which proved to be the most difficult to operationalise, especially the part of it
that was most pertinent to the investigation, namely the categorisation of
popular music.
Methods and methodologies   39
Since both inclusion and exclusion of popular music was on the research
agenda, the researchers involved had to work from an abductive (Alvesson &
Sköldberg, 2000) point of view, categorising what existed in the data and at the
same time imagining what “could have been”, in order to have an overview of
what was left out. This demanded a deductive point of departure, considering the
many discussions on categorisations of musical genres and styles within the field
of musicology (see Dyndahl et al., 2017, pp. 441–443), and at the same time, the
work had to be performed inductively, navigating quite fuzzy borders of classifi-
cation and also interpreting authors’ not-­always-clear-­cut descriptions of the
musical genres and styles present in their thesis.
Following the observations of Brackett (2016), the researchers found that it was
not enough to focus on “what constitutes the contents of a musical category” (p.
6); the emphasis also needed to be “on how a particular idea of a category emerges
and stabilizes momentarily (if at all) in the course of being accepted across a range
of discourses and institutions” (p. 6), especially since the data and phenomenon
explored stretched out in time and spanned several decades. In the end, the
researcher team settled for the following set of popular music categories:

early jazz; mainstream jazz; modern/contemporary jazz; Tin Pan Alley/


musical; traditional and cabaret songs; folk/singer-­songwriter; country
music; Scandinavian dance band music; blues; rock and roll; rock; hard
rock/prog rock; punk rock; heavy metal/black metal; pop; alternative pop/
rock; funk; hip-­hop; contemporary R&B; electronic dance music; world
music; “rhythmic music” and a residual category, designated as
miscellaneous.
(Dyndahl et al., 2017, p. 443)

Reaching the point where the (qualitative) descriptions of musics in the 1,695
theses could be converted into and analysed as statistical data required substan-
tial and multi-­layered processes of hermeneutical work, which should serve as a
reminder that clear-­cut distinctions between qualitative and quantitative research
rarely exist.
As is evident from the above, the research group engaged in extensive discus-
sions in order to build up the thesis register as well as the spectrum of generic
and stylistic categories, and in this work, they drew both on prior generic know-
ledge of the musical fields in question, acquired through professional experience,
and a range of tools borrowed from the musicological discipline. In this way,
they implemented what Bourdieu calls a “reflexive sociology” (Bourdieu &
Wacquant, 1992). An important methodological point in this regard, is that the
researchers in a field are also agents within the exact same field. Consequently, a
thorough study of the academic field must therefore be made part of the actual
research and thus a part of the researchers’ self-­reflection. Bourdieu and Wac-
quant’s (1992) notion of “epistemic reflexivity” locates this hermeneutic insight
and responsibility with the researchers, who inevitably will impregnate the
research object with their pre-­understanding in a social and cultural context.
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for anything except a dog-fight, but they flops down in their chairs
at the front of the stage and acts like they meant business.
Scenery recovers his sawed-off shotgun and sets down on the
corner of the stage, where he can watch them disgrunted husbands.
Me and Dirty follows Magpie to a place he’s got partitioned off for
a dressing-room. Through the curtain we can hear Yaller Rock
County beginning to come in. Me and Dirty are just sober enough to
kinda be indifferent to death or taxation.
Magpie gives us our costumes, which consists of cowhide pants
with a tail tied on, and a jigger made like a cap, with yearlin’ calf
horns sticking out the side. He also gives us each a little whistle
made of a willer.
“Where’s the shirt?” asks Dirty.
“Fauns don’t wear shirts.”
“What do you wear, Magpie?”
Magpie holds up a mountain-lion skin and a breech-clout. Dirty
looks things over and then says to Magpie:
“If you escape, Magpie, will yuh do me a favor? In my cabin—in a
old trunk, is a suit of clothes. I paid sixteen dollars for it the year
Bryan run for free silver, but I never wore it. Will yuh see that they
lays me out in it? Lawd knows I don’t want to be buried in a outfit
like this.”
From outside we hears “Fog-horn” Foster’s voice—
“We-e-e-ll, come on, you mockin’-birds!”
“The house must be full,” opines Magpie, fastening his lionskin.
“Full of hootch and ⸺” sighs Dirty, sliding into his cow skins.
“I’m goin’ to die like a ⸺ cow, I know that.”
“My gosh!” grunts Magpie. “I’ve plumb forgot we ain’t got no
announcer since the judge quit. Ike, will you do the announcin’?”
“Then I won’t have to dance?”
“Sure you’ll have to dance, but all you’ve got to do, Ike, is to tell
’em what is comin’ next. The first thing on the program is a solo
dance, which is knowed as ‘The Gatherin’ Storm,’ by Mrs. Smith; and
then she gets assisted by the five ‘Raindrops,’ consistin’ of Mrs. Holt,
Mrs. Tilton, Mrs. Steele, Mrs. Gonyer and Mrs. Wheeler. Mrs. Smith is
doin’ the solo in place of the departed champeen dancer of the
world. Will yuh do this for me, Ike?”
“Do it for Magpie,” urges Dirty. “Do anythin’ to get it over.”

I went on to the stage, and I got the shock of my life. Them


females are out there, and I’m a danged liar if they ain’t undressed
about as much as possible. I takes one look and staggers for the
curtain. I hears one of them women bust out in a “haw! haw!” as I
went past, but I never stopped to think that I wasn’t wearing any
more than the law allows.
I steps out through the curtain and looks around. Never did the
old hall hold as many folks. Fog-horn Foster and Half-Mile Smith are
settin’ in the front row, across the aisle from each other. They stares
at me for a moment; then both gets up like they was walking in their
sleep, steps for the aisle and bumps together.
Fog-horn hit Half-Mile and Half-Mile hit the floor, after which Fog-
Horn went right on up the aisle. Half-Mile got up, looks at me again,
and follers Fog-Horn, but he ain’t tryin’ to catch Fog-Horn—he’s tryin’
to go past him.
“My ⸺” gasps “Cinch” Culler, lookin’ wild-like around. “Won’t
somebody please hold me? I won’t be responsible⸺”
“Ladies and gents,” says I. “I’m out here to let yuh know what’s
comin’ off.”
“Wait a minute,” says Abe Mudgett, standing up. “I’ve got my two
sisters here with me, and if anything more’s comin’ off⸺”
“Set down!” squeaks Scenery, waving his shotgun at Abe, and Abe
sets down.
“Now,” says I, “I’m out here to announce that the first thing on
the program is Mrs. Smith. She’s goin’ to imitate a storm comin’ up,
and then Mrs. Holt, Mrs. Tilton, Mrs. Wheeler, Mrs. Steele and Mrs.
Gonyer are goin’ to show yuh what raindrops look like. This here
⸺”
“Haw! Haw! Haw!” roars Pete Gonyer, but his laugh don’t show
that he’s tickled so awful much.
“Haw! Haw! Haw! Mrs. Smith is goin’ to imitate— Haw! Haw!
Haw!”
“Haw! Haw!” howls Wick. “My wife looks as much like a storm as
yours does like a raindrop, Pete.”
“My wife,” states the judge, standing up, “my wife ain’t goin’ to do
no ⸺ fool thing of the kind. I’ll show her⸺”
“Set down!” yelps Scenery. “Set down, you old Blackstone blatter!
This is once when you don’t hand down no decisions.”
“Git off the stage and let ’er rain!” howls Telescope Tolliver. “I’ll
see it through if I have to wear a slicker.”
“Ready for us to play?” asks Bill Thatcher, kicking Frenchy to wake
him up.
“Use your own judgment, Bill,” says I. “I’ve done all I can, and
now I’m goin’ to let nature take her course.”
I starts to step back through the curtain, when “Polecat” Perkins
yells—
“Ike, I was wrong—you’re only half-cow.”
I gets back inside. Them women are all scared plumb stiff, but
Mrs. Smith wheezes—
“Ladies, we’ve made our bluff—let ’er go!”
Just then Bill Thatcher’s instrument begins to wail and wail,
shutting off all chances for Frenchy Deschamps to be heard.
“Sweet Marie!” howls Mrs. Smith. “Gee cripes, don’t he never
learn a new tune?”
I ducks out of sight and the curtain slides back.

If Mrs. Smith knew anything about dancing she forgot every step.
She trots out on the stage and starts something like Kid Carson used
to call “shadow-boxing.” Then she turns around about three times,
stubs her toe and falls down. Standing in a line across the stage is
the rest of them females, with their hands up in the air like they was
being held up by somebody with a gun.
“A-arabellie!” wails Wick. “My ⸺, woman, git out of sight!”
Mrs. Smith gets to her feet and yelps back at Wick:
“Git out of sight yourself—if you don’t like it! I’ll teach you to flirt
with a dancer. Start the music over again, Bill.”
“Em-m-m-i-lee!” shrieks Sam Holt. “Ain’tcha got no modesty? Go
put on your shoes and socks!”
Bill Thatcher starts squealing on his instrument again, and Mrs.
Smith starts doing some fancy steps.
Wow! Here comes Judge Steele, Art Wheeler, Pete Gonyer,
Testament Tilton, Wick Smith and Sam Holt, climbing right over the
top of folks.
“Git ba-a-a-ck!” squeaks Seenery, waving his shotgun. “Stop it!
Whoa, Blaze!”
“Look at the wild man!” howls somebody, and here comes Magpie
across the stage hopping high and handsome.
“Stop ’em, Scenery!” whoops Magpie. “Dog-gone ’em, they can’t
bust up my show!”
Man, I’ll tell all my grandchildren this tale. Them outraged
husbands came up on that stage, while Yaller Rock County yelled
itself hoarse and made bets on whether it would be an odd or even
number of deaths. Magpie hit Pete in the neck and Pete lit with one
leg on each side of Bill Thatcher’s head. Wick Smith got hold of his
wife and them two started a tug of war.
Me and old Sam Holt got to waltzing around and around, which
wasn’t a-tall pleasant, being as I’m barefooted and Sam ain’t. I seen
Mrs. Wheeler and Art locked in mortal combat, and just then I hears
Dirty Shirt Jones yelp—
“Heavy, heavy hangs over your head—”
I whirls just in time to see what’s coming, but I can’t escape. Dirty
Shirt has turned the atmosphere loose. Them four he-sheep—four
ungentlemanly woollies, with corkscrew horns, are buck-jumping
across that stage, seeking what they may hit. I swung around to
meet the attack, and I reckon the leading sheep hit him a dead
center, ’cause I felt the shock plumb to me.
Maybe it hit Sam a little low, because it knocked all four of our
feet off the floor, and the next in line picked us in the air and stood
us on our heads.
I seen Wick Smith, braced against the edge of the stage, trying to
pull his wife over the edge, the same of which is a invitation to a
sheep, and the old ram accepted right on the spot. Mrs. Smith
grunted audibly and shot into Wick’s arms. Scenery Sims starts to
skip across the stage, but a ram outsmarted him, and I seen
Scenery turn over gracefully in the air and shoot, regardless, with
both barrels of that sawed-off shotgun.
Them load of shot hived up in the chandelier, the same of which
cut off our visible supply of light.
I heard the crashing of glass, and I figures that the hallway is too
crowded for some of the audience. I lays still, being wise, until the
noise subsides, and the crowd has escaped. Then I moves slowly to
my hands and knees. I feels a hand feeling of my legs, and then a
hand taps gently on my horned cap.
“I—I thought,” whispers old Sam’s voice kinda quavering-like, “I—
I thought they was all old ones, but a sheep’s a sheep to me.”
Bam! Something landed on my head, and I seen more bright
lights than there is in a million dollars worth of skyrockets. Then
things kinda clear up, and I hears old Sam saying to himself:
“Well, I killed one of the ⸺ things. If I go carefully⸺”
I can dimly see old Sam sneaking for the front of the stage. I’m
mad. I got up and sneaked right after him. No man can mistake me
for a sheep and get away with it. I jumps for old Sam’s back, and
just then he seems to kinda drop away from me. I reckon he forgot
about the five-feet drop from the stage, and I know danged well I
did. I reckon I sort of lit on my head and shoulders on top of
somebody. There comes a squeak from Bill Thatcher’s instrument,
and then all is quiet.

I wriggled loose and starts to get up, but a strong hand grabs me
by the ankle, yanks me off my feet, and I hit my head on a chair. I
kinda remember being dragged down them stairs, and then I feels
my carcass being dragged over rough ground. It was a long, hard
trip, and I reckon I lost about all the skin on the upper half of my
body. Finally I bumps over a step, gets yanked inside on to a carpet,
and then I hears a voice very dimly—
“Sweetheart, I brought thee home.”
Then a light is lit, and I sees Mrs. Smith putting the chimney on a
lamp. Without turning she says—
“I reckon you’ll confine your love to me after this, eh?”
Then she turns and looks at me, setting there on the floor with
my back propped up against a chair. I looks around. Just inside the
door, sitting on the floor, is Wick. Mrs. Smith looks at me and then at
him. Then she wipes her lips and stares at Wick.
“Sweetheart, eh?” grunts Wick, getting to his feet. “Arabellie, ain’t
you got no shame? Dancin’ up there without nothing on to speak of,
and then you has the gall to bring your sweetheart home with yuh.”
“Did—did—didn’t I—bring you home, Wicksie?”
“You—know—danged—well—you—didn’t. I always knowed you
was kinda sweet on Ike Harper.”
“On that!” She actually yelped, and pointed her finger at me.
“Sweet on him?”
I gets to my feet, but my legs ain’t very strong. I says:
“Lemme a-alone. I don’t want no man’s wife’s love—especially one
what hauls me home by the ankle. When I git married I want a
clingin’ vine—not a pile driver.”
I never did have much sense. A feller in my condition ought to
keep his mouth shut and sneak away soft-like. I turns my head
toward the door, and just then the weight of the world hit me from
behind, and it was a lucky thing for that house that the door was
open.
I landed on my hands and knees in the yard, with all the wind
knocked out of my system. Wick has got some rose-bushes in his
yard. Like a animal wounded unto death, I reckon I tried to crawl
around on my hands and knees to find a spot to die in.
All to once I sees one of them ⸺ sheep. It’s only a short
distance from me. I know if I move it’s going to hit me sure as ⸺
so I remains still. I’ll bet that me and the sheep never moved a
muscle for fifteen minutes.
Then all at once the sheep spoke.
“For ⸺’s sake, if you’re goin’ to butt—butt and have it over
with!”
I got to my feet.
“Get up, Dirty Shirt Jones,” says I. “What kind of a way is that to
act?”
Dirty weaves to his feet and stumbles over to me.
“Ike, thank the Lord, we’re alive!”
“Don’t presume too much. Medical science says that a man can
live after losin’ a certain amount of skin, but I’m bettin’ I’ve passed
that certain limit. Let’s sneak home and save what life we’ve got
left.”
We sneaked around the Mint Hall and Wick’s store, and at the
corner we stumbles into somebody.
“Who goes there?” asks Dirty.
“Go ⸺!” wails Magpie Simpkins. “Help me, will yuh? I wrastled
all the way down here with one of them ⸺ sheep and now I’m
afraid to let loose.”
“You and your ⸺ atmosphere!” groans Dirty.
“I’m settin’ on it,” wails Magpie, “I’ve got a kink in my neck. Will
yuh hold it down until I can get up?”
Just then a voice from under him starts singing very soft and low

“There’s a la-a-a-nd that is fairer than this⸺”
Magpie gets to his feet and takes a deep breath.
“Testament,” says he, “what made yuh blat like a sheep?”
But Testament’s mind is not dwelling on sheep—not the kind of
sheep that Magpie meant.
Then the three of us starts limping toward home.
“Mebbe,” says Magpie, kinda painful-like, “mebbe we progressed
too fast. Piperock don’t appreciate it, gents, but this night the old
town jumped ahead at least fifty years.”
“Jumpin’,” says Dirty, reflective-like, “Jumpin’ don’t hurt nobody,
but, holy hen-hawks, it sure does hurt to jump that far and light so
hard.”
We pilgrims along, everybody trying hard to make their legs track.
Finally Magpie says—
“Personally, I think that interpretive dancin’ has anythin’ skinned I
ever seen.”
“Me too,” says I, “and parts I never have seen.”

Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the April 30, 1922 issue
of Adventure Magazine.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOO MUCH
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