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Tablatures of musical tastes in contemporary France: distinction without intolerance

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09548963.2012.641776

1469-3690

Hervé Glevarec, Michel Pinet,

Music History and Culture

Abstract In France, the social-stratification model based on Bourdieu's Distinction is still one of the main theoretical models used to analyse cultural tastes. The distinction model asserts a hierarchical classification of tastes and genre and an aesthetic judgment based on rejection. In the musical field, Richard A. Peterson challenged the model showing the eclectism and the mix of classical and popular genres among the tastes of elite. Changes in taste judgements in multicultural societies problematise the understanding and representation of the structuration of tastes. In reference to the 2008 statistical survey on French cultural practices and tastes, this article challenges conventional understandings of the taste patterns informing music consumption in contemporary France. In doing this, the article utilises a 'tablature of tastes' model which infers the incommensurability of musical genres and taste judgments no longer based on "rejections/dislikes" but rather on "openness/tolerance" or "indifference/ignorance". Our analysis tests the "tablatures" of musical likes, dislikes and indifferences hypothesis within the French population through a factor and classification analysis method. Six classes of musical taste emerge with a limited share of dislikes and a strong age differentiation. It confirms a major transformation in judgments of taste in the musical field. Keywords: distinctionmusictasteaesthetic judgmenttablature Acknowledgements We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and Andy Bennett for his final read-through. Notes In the French context the two genres electronic music and r'n'b need to be precised; in French use, the first term does not refer to an avant garde computer-synthesised music but to electro music or techno (included Air, Daft punk, Garnier, Guetta…); the second, r'n'b does not mean rhythm and blues or black music but included what could be called "pop" in an American way (in this survey r'n'b is therefore associated with "international variety"). "Moreover, although the proportion of service class respondents who specify classical music and opera among the genres they listen to most often is considerably higher than in the overall population (i.e. 0.31 and 0.18, respectively), a large majority of the service class respondents did not specify classical music (about 0.69). These basic features radically eliminate any attempt to map the distribution of musical taste in terms of biunivocal social homology: highbrow music is no more music of the upper-class than pop music the music of the lower class. In this context, it is also significant that none of the eight musical genres could be unambiguously described as typical of lower class taste" (Coulangeon & Lemel, 2007 Coulangeon, P. and Lemel, Y. 2007. Is "distinction" really outdated? Questioning the meaning of the omnivorization of musical taste in contemporary France. Poetics, 35(2–3): 93–111. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], pp. 98–99) Bourdieu's use of the "column" to describe the social space of taste is valid on a holistic axis but incomplete because it does not account for the horizontal axis that governs, according to Bourdieu, the internal opposition of each social subspace (popular, upper middle-class and dominant) between cultural and economic capitals. Although the representation of the social spaces is both vertically and horizontally oriented, by the volume and distribution of cultural and economic capitals, the hierarchized articulation of cultural genres (musical genres in this case) does not change. The horizontal axis, i.e. "variations in the dominant taste", does not constitute an alternative hierarchy to the "legitimate principal of domination" (sic), to the top-bottom hierarchy, dominants-dominated, and superior-inferior categories. John Sonnett proposed to replace Peterson's reversed pyramid with a parabola that is more suitable for describing the distribution of American musical tastes among omnivores and univores, to make way for the indecisive/indifferents: the aggregate distribution of musical boundaries might be better described as a parabola, with (decisive) omnivores and univores occupying the two ends, and indecisives (and quasi-omnivores and -univores) occupying the middle (Sonnett, 2004 Sonnett, J. 2004. Musical boundaries: Intersections of form and content. Poetics, 32(3–4): 247–64. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Department of Research, Planning and Statistics (DEPS) of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. The 2008 survey on cultural practices and tastes covered a sample of 5,000 individuals representative of the population 15 years and over residing in metropolitan France. General results have been published by Olivier Donnat. (Donnat, 2009 Donnat, O. 2009. Les pratiques culturelles des Français à l'ère numérique. Enquête 2008, Paris: La Découverte/ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. [Google Scholar]) "Which musical genres do you listen to most often?" is the question on tastes based on a list of musical genres; "in this list, are there any musical genres that you never listen to because you know you dislike them?" constitutes the question on inappetence or dislike. If its three first axes cumulate 31 per cent of the explications, they clearly detach from all of the following axes. The classification presented further on, based on the first ten axes, will allow us to restore the explanatory power of all the secondary dimensions. These 10 axes account for two-thirds of the explanatory power – with the following 10 axes being considered as noise and thus not very easy to interpret. Eminem, Beyoncé, Céline Dion, Robbie Williams, Bob Sinclair, Snoop Dogg(y) and French singers Bénabar, Renaud, Yannick Noah, Patrick Bruel, Diam's, Mylène Farmer and Manu Chao. Its inertia represents 38 per cent of the total inertia. Therefore, a test value of 12, i.e. much higher than 2, means that the item in question has a very significant concentration within the class as compared to its concentration within the population. In the French survey, hard rock means heavy metal and is separated from the rock genre. The vocabulary associated with heavy metal that tends to replace that of hard rock shows a stabilisation of this genre's recognition and its distinction from rock. See Hein (2003) Hein, F. 2003. Hard rock, heavy metal, metal… Histoire, cultures et pratiquants, Paris: Mélanie Séteun/Irma. [Google Scholar].