“You Have to Be the Best, but You Also Have to Be the Worst": Interpellation in Graduate Classical Music Lessons

John Mirsky, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Why do individuals of the same social position, inculcated with many of the same norms and interpellated by the same institutions, experience and interact with the world differently? This article investigates this question in the empirical case of the graduate music performance professors and students aimed at professorship. In doing so, this paper advances theories of interpellation by putting in conversation Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus and interactionist focuses on “the situation” through interrogating dynamics of the music lesson at graduate-level music conservatories, a dyadic situation characterized by only two social actors. Drawing on 37 semi-structured interviews with professors and graduate students in the field of music, this paper demonstrates that interactions in feedback-providing sessions (lessons, conversations, and juries) are structured by the dispositions the student and professor have developed over their experiences in the field. Experiences with previous music teachers and parents found to be especially important. Most broadly, the study highlights the case of classical musical actors as a key yet understudied site for sociological analysis.

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 Presented in Session 154. Aesthetics, Materiality, and Ideology