Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Concentration of Cultural Capital
This brief article, Pierre Bourdieu, Tim Geithner, and Cultural Capital, is well worth a read. It is precisely the same sort of social concentration in the mainstream new music world which concerns me; the fact that the kinds of composers who are invited to the Cabrillo Festival these days, for example, overlaps so much with those who study at, say, Juilliard or already get play in the major orchestra circuit probably also means that the range of ideas exchanged is necessarily going to be limited, and that kind of limitation does not readily lend itself to the outside-the-box thinking that can often lead to the musically exciting.
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2 comments:
To be fair all the puny art movements have set up their own elistist concentration, ready to move into place at the collapse of those in power or given any rat hole to fill. The outcome no matter who wins will be the same lack of breath of ideas because any 'elite' can never look past the worse member of its self ordained concerns. Instead of ideas we have more and more people pretending that others elistist concentrations don't even exist. All groups are the same. Minimalist, Sound artists, Microsoundist, lowercase, ambient , fluxist, are as bad as the shadows behind the Cabrillo Festival
Daniel,
a very nice analogy.
for me, the question always returns to pluralism in the nuanced Jamesian sense, and what James knew is that real pluralism is hard to do, but i think we've come to see how easy the semblance of pluralism is, and easily flabby pluralism is coopted by systems of power of all stripes.
always nice to read your thoughts.
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