How Cultural Capital Emerged in Gilded Age America: Musical Purification and Cross-Class Inclusion at the New York Philharmonic - Incite at Columbia University
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Work
How Cultural Capital Emerged in Gilded Age America: Musical Purification and Cross-Class Inclusion at the New York Philharmonic
- Published May 1, 2018
- Authors Fabien Accominotti Shamus R. Khan Adam Storer
- Category Paper
- Forum American Journal of Sociology
- Link doi.org
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 distinctive while elite tastes acquired broader social currency.
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go to Subscribers to the New York Philharmonic, 1842–Present
Subscribers to the New York Philharmonic, 1842–PresentStudying social status in New York City through the Philharmonic's subscriber database. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
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