Leisure and Musical Genres: Some Remarks on the Sociology of Cultural Legitimacy

Abstract

It has been argued that the system of musical genres, with all its implicit or explicit hierarchies, is a mirror of the system of social classes: the poor get poor music, the rich get the rich hours of humanity, and between the two stand the middle classes, indulging in what Pierre Bourdieu called the ”cultural good will”. Yet that picture is not fully accurate. Many years before postmodernism and the fading of cultural hierarchies that it supposedly brought, the situation was already to some extent that of a domination of the omnivorous kind, the people who consume different kinds of generic products (Peterson). When in 1913 the Futurist poet Marinetti said ”A bas le tango et Parsifal!”, he was not pointing to a cultural opposition between social classes, but to a convergence of genres in the practices of the elite. And for a sociology of leisure, there is no reason to say that this or that side of the generic divide is more legitimate than the other, even if both do not have the same influence and prestige. In Western societies at least, we need different kinds of music to make the same people happy or, at least, to let them play the game of trying to be happy. We also need different types of music to make them live through the multiple experiences of sadness and despair. This, rather than some kind of inner, technical logic, is probably the reason why there are different kinds of music in the first place. And this is why it can be argued that the system of musical genres cannot be described without looking at the kind of leisure activities in which every one of them plays a part.