Event Description
Drexel University's School of Education is proud to host our first Global Education Colloquium of 2017 on Tuesday, February 7th, 2017.The Colloquium will be hosted at One Drexel Plaza (3001 Market St. Philadelphia, PA 19104) room 004 and online.
How cultural, Capital Emerged in Gilded Age America: Musical Purification and Cross-Class Inclusion at the New York Philharmonic
Shamus Khan, Columbia University
This presentation uses a new database of subscribers to the New York
Philharmonic to explore how high culture was constituted as cultural
capital in late nineteenth-century America. Our database has information
on who subscribed to the Philharmonic between 1880 and 1910 the key
period of institutionalization of high culture in the United States, and
in the city of New York in particular. In analyzing these data we seek
to understand how culture became a resource for elite status in that
era. We find support for the classic account of purification and
exclusiveness of high culture, 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 we also find that the orchestra
opened up to a new group of subscribers who did not share the social
practices, occupational background, or residential choices of more elite
patrons. These new members hailed from the professional, managerial and
intellectual middle class that was then forming in U.S. cities. The
rise of that educated class paved a specific way to the emergence of
cultural capital, as it made possible to share elite culture beyond the
ranks of the elite alone. We further show that the inclusion of these
new members was segregated, by which we mean that they did not mingle
with elites inside the concert hall. Thus, greater distinctiveness and
greater inclusiveness happened together at the Philharmonic, enabling
elite culture to remain distinctive while it also acquired broader
social currency.
Dr. Shamus Khan is a professor of sociology at Columbia University,
where he is the director of the graduate program. He writes on culture,
inequality, and elites. He is the author of, Privilege: The Making of an
Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (Princeton), The Practice of
Research (Oxford, with Dana Fisher), the forthcoming Exceptional: The
Astors, the New York Elite, and the story of American Inequality
(Princeton) and Approaches to Ethnography: Modes of Representation and
Analysis in Participant Observation (Oxford). He directs the working
group on the political influence of economic elites at the Russell Sage
Foundation, is the series editor of “The Middle Range” at Columbia
University Press, and the editor of the journal Public Culture. He
writes regularly for the popular press such as the New Yorker, the New
York Times, and serving as a columnist for Time Magazine.
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