TY - JOUR
T1 - How cultural capital emerged in gilded age america
T2 - Musical purification and cross-class inclusion at the New York Philharmonic
AU - Accominotti, Fabien
AU - Storer, Adam
AU - Khan, Shamus R.
N1 - Funding Information:
and culture in the city. . . . Approbation from this audience is applause indeed” (April 6, 1902). 11 “Subscribers to the New York Philharmonic, 1842–Present,” supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholarly Communications program (grant no. 31200640). While subscriber and seating information was available for almost every season after 1950, there are significant gaps in the data in earlier periods. Thus the Philharmonic archive does not retain any substantial data on subscribers prior to season 1882–83 and between seasons 1906–7 and 1950–51. Our subscriber data are available for download at the Philharmonic website: http://archives.nyphil.org.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
PY - 2018/5/1
Y1 - 2018/5/1
N2 - This article uses a new database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to explore how high culture became a form of socially valuable capital in late-19th-century America. The authors find support for the classic account of high culture’s purification and exclusiveness, showing how over the long Gilded Age the social elite of New York attended the Philharmonic both increasingly and in more socially patterned ways. Yet they also find that the orchestra opened up to a new group of subscribers hailing from an emerging professional, managerial, and intellectual middle class. Importantly, the inclusion of this new audience was segregated: they did not mingle with elites in the concert hall. This segregated inclusion paved a specific way for the constitution of cultural capital. It meant that greater purity and greater inclusiveness happened together, enabling elite cultural participation to remain distinctivewhile elite tastes acquired broader social currency.
AB - This article uses a new database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to explore how high culture became a form of socially valuable capital in late-19th-century America. The authors find support for the classic account of high culture’s purification and exclusiveness, showing how over the long Gilded Age the social elite of New York attended the Philharmonic both increasingly and in more socially patterned ways. Yet they also find that the orchestra opened up to a new group of subscribers hailing from an emerging professional, managerial, and intellectual middle class. Importantly, the inclusion of this new audience was segregated: they did not mingle with elites in the concert hall. This segregated inclusion paved a specific way for the constitution of cultural capital. It meant that greater purity and greater inclusiveness happened together, enabling elite cultural participation to remain distinctivewhile elite tastes acquired broader social currency.
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U2 - 10.1086/696938
DO - 10.1086/696938
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85048260986
SN - 0002-9602
VL - 123
SP - 1743
EP - 1783
JO - American Journal of Sociology
JF - American Journal of Sociology
IS - 6
ER -