Working Class Musicology
By Amanda Paruta
(one among many voices)
I’m a working-class person from Buffalo, NY. I attended public institutions from middle school through college. My father earned an associate’s degree in business from a community college; he held a good union job for almost thirty years. My mother, one of seven children in an Irish-Italian Catholic family, worked several odd-jobs and as a secretary during my childhood. She earned a graduate degree just before I started high school. I have two sisters, one helps people, the other helps animals. We’re working-class people, and there was a time I wouldn’t have written about any of this.
I wanted to be an octopus, to be able to squeeze into tight spaces and change my appearance just enough to fit in. I read the New Yorker, have cultivated a personal library of used books, and brew my coffee with an aero press. The coffee is black, my wine is red. I write with a Waterman fountain pen, like Claude Lévi-Strauss, after whom my kitchen cactus is named.1 There were no formally trained musicians in my childhood home, my parents are not academics. We didn’t have a home library when I was a child, but frequented the public library in a neighborhood close by. Little did my parents know that by reducing our television service to basic cable, and needing to take advantage of free public library activities during breaks and weekends, they would end up with a classically trained musician who once aspired to study opera. The middle child that I am, I bamboozled my parents by demanding my own instrument—a $100 viola purchased by my grandparents on eBay, “1-per-minute” private lessons as my mother called them, transportation to and from rehearsals and auditions, and repeated interruptions during Sunday football from practicing and performances (Go Bills). My parents did their best to navigate this upside-down world, but this foreign music was something with which they didn’t identify. In fact, the only symphonic concerts I attended with my parents were after a minor-league baseball game and a screening of The Wizard of Oz. Given America’s current political climate, telling a working-class story seems imperative.
I felt my class for the first time after enrolling in an honors public school. Predominantly funded through property taxes, public education in America is far from equitable, and the process for which this is upheld is inequitable and undemocratic. A complex, bordering incoherent, web of money, political gerrymandering, and racism prevents changes to how education is funded, leaving schools in less affluent neighborhoods without adequate funding, and sometimes leaving neighborhoods entirely without public schools. Even worse, buildings that once housed public schools are now occupied by charter schools, a pernicious trend choking out public schools—where services to disabled students are guaranteed, and those educating children are held to specific certification requirements. In Rich Thanks to Racism: How the Ultra- Wealthy Profit from Racial Injustice, Jim Freeman lays out how the wealthiest Americans are able to manufacture and exploit the nation’s de-investment in the education for their own financial gain through the charter school system (largely by avoiding taxes and inserting their security companies into schools).2 Treating schools as more workforce training camps than enrichment opportunities limits student exposure to the arts, widening the gap between those who can and those who cannot participate in music.
Districts, however, are able to shift funds. My school did cultivate a semblance of diversity within its student body, but I was still the fat girl with working-class parents among the typically shaped children of doctors, engineers, architects, and business owners. Experiencing alienation for the first time, I retreated, allowing my fragility and insecurity to shape my identity. Feeling inferior, I didn’t like being in class and earned mediocre grades. It wasn’t all bad: had it not been for relentless bullying, I might not have been so obsessed with finding love and validation, might not have clung so strongly to the school’s music department—where I found overwhelming love and acceptance—and therefore might not have become a musician at all. A student in another public school is less likely to have a similar, life-changing experience. Recognizing that much of my life was made possible by luck, I find myself battling intrusive, self-conscious thoughts with working-class hauntings.
Until recently, I’ve done whatever I can to be less working class while moving in classical music and academic spaces. Whenever something like “I can’t usually afford that,” “I’ve never had,” “I’ve never been,” “I’ve never heard of,” “I don’t know how to,” “I can’t do XYZ because I work three part-time jobs, have no paid time off, and won’t be able to pay my rent if I go to that conference” slips out, the ground quakes a bit, and whomever I’m talking to becomes perceptively uncomfortable, and the conversation has to quickly be turned elsewhere. Humiliated, I would often attempt humor— simultaneously court jester and charity case. I realize now that academia needs to reinforce a specific power structure wherever possible, and these subtle attacks on my worthiness are simply par for the course. Fostering an inhospitable destabilizing environment allows academia to gatekeep against the poor, reinforce exclusivity, and maintain an intellectual upper class aligning with neoliberal values. No matter the rhetoric— “left-leaning,” un-American, whatnots—institutions of higher learning are no less susceptible to capitalism and the desires of the ruling elite than any other institution. Academia is the way it is because the way it is benefits the elite. Classical music is no different.
(breaking in)
Classical music is endemic to the same elitist, double-edged charitable ecology. Like academia, institutions carrying on Western art traditions were forced to undergo a performative reckoning after the murders of Black and Brown people were finally shoved in front of enough American eyeballs. Some organizations believed their statements, and new organizations formed around these tragedies. Remedying so much of what plagues Black and Brown people in America would pull the working class, including the white working class, away from their pernicious reality. This is why most of these white-savior focused efforts will fail. Chipping away at the elite’s power is unacceptable; American capitalism can only function if there is a subjugated working class, required specific levels of ignorance and interracial tension. As someone without elite means, I sympathize with the working-class instinct to think “why should someone belonging to a minority group get anything just for existing? Life is hard for me too!" This is what the ruling class wants. Writing this essay exposes the pain of being worked against, of being invited into a space to be reminded that I didn’t belong there, to be put in my place like the replaceable worker I am, but the white working class has long enough depended on the strength and intrepid action of non-white peers: If we want change, and I believe that those seeking change outnumber those endeavoring to maintain the status quo, white people must also put in the work.
(the rich are not going to save us; they want us here)
Music is a luxury, poor children don’t get luxuries, that’s what being poor means!
We allow classical music organizers to colonize their communities, using taxpayer dollars to “gift” classical music to people who didn’t ask for it on their own dime. This is closer to theft than gifting.
These poor people should be grateful! It’s beautiful music!
Music funded through government grants, foundations, and corporations is music subsidized by taxpayers. The middle and working classes are saddled with the burden of paying higher income tax rates while the wealthiest Americans pay nothing. Working-class Americans are even less likely to make charitable contributions, as their paychecks cover fewer and fewer of their expenses.
But there are free concerts for the community!
No, there are free concerts because as a non-profit receiving tax-subsidized grants, organizations are required to perform a certain number of free or actually affordable performances. Throwing citizen’s money back in their faces as charity is absurd.
Classical music is changing! Look at their social media accounts!
Orchestras and opera companies clamoring for DEIA spotlights are not levying this critique against the government, they are not calling for equitable childhood music experiences, and they are most certainly not forfeiting mass sums of money necessary to close the gap between schools with flourishing music programs and those without music at all. How could it be that they are seeking diversity, equity, and inclusion if they are not, at the very least, attempting to remedy the system rendering this lack of representation in classical music? Simple: their wealthy, mostly white, mostly elderly donor base would have to pay their fair share of taxes and dismantle their exploitative money grabs in black and brown neighborhoods through democratic processes, such as voting for new schoolboard, city, county, and state officials.
Classical music organizations are seeking to diversify! Look at XYZ, level-one organization!
Expanding administrative staff is hardly a solution. What we are seeing is people of color, too often women of color, hired for the purpose of increasing diversity efforts, people of tasked with solving a problem created by white people. Instead of paying another administrator’s salary, why not create an apprenticeship program for rising conductors, composers, librarians, sound or light engineers, and stage managers? Why not provide funding to the local school district to train the next generation of musicians? While these organizations pat themselves on the back, receiving accolades from mainstream media critics, they maintain the wealthy, white-ruling status quo. The working-class cannot be tricked so easily.
How pessimistic….
Not all hope is lost. Musicians who spent their childhoods and young adult lives within the safety of the middle class now entering the workforce give less and less credence to traditional work models. Young musicians attract massive social media attention, find new ways to collaborate, and challenge the authenticity of the classical music model. Chamber ensemble models with curtailed or no governing boards of trustees provide necessary flexibility for programming concerts featuring underrepresented artists in nontraditional spaces. Removing classical music from the confines of symphony halls—literal monuments of wealth and exclusivity—returns non-profit, publicly funded music directly to the community without the gimmickry of “public service initiatives.” Holding concerts with minimal carbon footprints—digital programs, easy access to public transportation, locations highlighting nature and encouraging land preservation—and supporting local contemporary artists without emphasizing the DEIA conformity of the group are simple, effective strategies for democratizing the musical process. Eliminating governing boards composed of wealthy individuals to whose whims the group is beholden permits free artistic exploration, and a removed pressure for marketing. These groups rely heavily on small donations and grants. In an ideal world, these grants would not have to exist through complex chicanery, and musicking could happen without justification. Art existing for the sake of art, the sake of creativity, of culture left uncommercialized seems improbably, but is certainly not fantastical.
(take action)
Musicologists within institutions, like any academic whose work is funded through public grants or philanthropy used to evade taxes, are beholden to the taxpayers making their research possible, including the working class. If institutions want to fulfill their DEIA promises, they must advocate for change. Musicology should support working-class scholarship by working-class scholars, and be mindful of its diction when offering small grants to unaffiliated and low-income people, starting with the elimination of “low-income.” No one wants to be the face of charity; no one should be forced to wear a scarlet letter of poverty. Musicology should support teaching and student unions, and be more transparent about the harms associated with the classical music industry.
Advocating for a working-class musicology becomes increasingly important as hostility toward the ruling classes increases and new classes emerge. Recognizing that each year the number of people with ivyleague.edu email addresses teetering between destitution and middle-class living increases, there remains a distinction between what Angela McRobbie calls the “risk class” and the working class.3 Those who are entrepreneurial and determined to exist creating art, and their academic counterparts who scramble to secure three or more adjunct contracts per semester, live without the comforts of employer-provided health insurance and other benefits. Their existence within the upper classes, however, is not challenged, and they retain access to power and are more likely to receive greater compensation for their labor. The working-class labors for the same low wages until something like a pandemic rips the rug out from beneath them, and they are left to claw their way back to whatever modicum of stability they had before with whatever debt they were forced into simply to survive. They are not represented within the upper classes, do not have immediate access to power, and do not enjoy a parallel middle-class lifestyle. The risk class is not the working class. Best able to describe the deleterious impact of big philanthropy and complex tax codes regarding charitable giving, the working-class voice would provide much needed depth to musicological pursuits. At risk of contradicting myself, I am not encouraging animosity toward the risk class, but asserting that the risk class cannot speak for the working class, despite the temptation to do so.
In its embryonic stages, classical music was a thing created by a subjugated working-class for the purpose of court entertainment or religious ceremonies. Classical music belonged to a pre-capitalist working-class, and it belongs to the working-class of our late-stage capitalism hellscape. We are the taxpaying majority fueling this art, whether it is through our direct labor, or subsidizing the tax avoidance of the rich through corporate foundations, corporate giving, or corporate lobbying for weak tax codes and enforcement. We, the laborers voting against our own interest; we, the workers who are too tired to participate in the culture we fund; we, the counter-culture artists evading commodification of our craft need not accept the paltry terms dictated by the ruling elite. Tuxedos with tails, silent concert halls holding audiences hostage between twenty and ninety minutes at a time, in dazzling, vapid, gilded establishments. The working-class does not need an invitation to enter these or academic spaces: we own them.
Classical music should be equitable because we already pay for it through our tax code and incentives for charitable giving. Robert Reich argues that such laws are undemocratic,4 however, the redistribution policy between taxpayer dollars and the arts would persist under Reich’s ideal tax code, and be fortified by proper collection from the wealthiest Americans, thus augmenting the musical experience for everyone. School programs would be properly funded, and art could exist within a space void of justification. In this parallel universe of true equity, art would not have to serve as additional training for the workforce, but could exist within an unadvertised and unmanipulated autonomous space. The working-class lens is empathic, critical of power structures with the understanding that this power is weaponized to keep them in their place. Classical music is ours, and the elite would be wise to rid themselves of any contrary illusions. Revolution is near, and I, for one, will not hide my excitement.
Footnotes
[1] In “Mark on the Spade” of Dreamworlds of Alabama, sociologist Allen Shelton describes an image of Lévi-Strauss working in the New York Public Library, writing with a Waterman fountain pen. I often revisit this passage, wondering if, somehow, the brilliance of Lévi-Strauss will seep through my pen onto paper, elucidating the complexities of musical form in everyday life. Unraveling the myth of great autonomous art music taking place within concert halls by analyzing music and social structures honors and betrays Lévi-Strauss’ work. For Shelton, purchasing a fountain pen recreates an image, for me, it scratches an image out, generating an entirely new picture.
[2] Jim Freeman, Rich Thanks to Racism: How the Ultra-Wealthy Profit from Racial Injustice (Ithaca, NY: IRL Press, 2021), 46.
[3] Angela McRobbie, Be Creative (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 58.
[4] Robert Reich, Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 8.
Bibliography
Freeman, Jim. Rich Thanks to Racism: How to Ultra-Wealthy Profit from Racial Injustice. Ithaca, NY: IRL Press, 2021.
McRobbie, Angela. Be Creative. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.
Reich, Rob. Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.
Ritchy, Marianna. “Resisting Usefulness: Music and the Political Imagination.” Current Musicology 108 (November 2021): 26-52. https://doi.org/10.52214/cm.v108i.7799.
Shelton, Allen C. Dreamworlds of Alabama. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.