“Through Sociology, I Finally Found a Label for What I’d Experienced”
An interview with Sociologist Anna Bull
Classical-music education often conforms to a standard model: private lessons, group ensemble rehearsals, and the collegiate conservatory. But what lies behind this educational structure, and how might classical-music training utilize, reflect, and uphold certain social norms?
In this interview, Creatives Care Editorial Director Kamala Schelling sits down with sociologist Anna Bull to discuss the past and present of musical pedagogy—and the impact it may have on those who practice music as either a hobby or a career.
About our guest: Dr. Anna Bull is a lecturer in education and social justice sociology at the University of York. A former musician herself, she now researches class and gender inequalities in classical music education. She considers these questions at length in her 2019 book Class, Control, and Classical Music, which was a joint winner of the 2020 British Sociological Association’s Philip Abrams Award. Dr. Bull is also a co-founder and director of The 1752 Group, a research and campaign group addressing sexual harassment in higher education.
Kamala Schelling: Dr. Bull, please start by introducing yourself and your research. What is your background as a musician, and what kind of research do you do now?
Anna Bull: I grew up playing piano and cello. I studied music at a conservatory in my home country of New Zealand, in a college environment that was very much a “hothouse” in the classical music tradition. I spent several years working as a freelance pianist. But at some point, and for many of the reasons I discuss in my book, I started to feel uncomfortable in the classical music world, despite having a very strong identity as a musician.
I went back to university when I was 26, to study sociology at the University of Cambridge. I had absolutely no intention of writing about music: I wanted to get away from it. I wanted to write about social justice, feminism, and inequalities. But I met a supervisor who had written a lot about the sociology of music, Georgina Born. She herself had a background as a classical musician, and she encouraged me to explore this intersection between these fields. As I started my research, I had an epiphany: sociology provided me with the language to describe the experiences I’d had as a musician. And so I ended up doing my masters and my PhD in what you could call the sociology of classical music.
KS: In your book, you trace a connection between 19th-century ideas of morality and “goodness” and the rise of the music-education ecosystem. Can you give us a brief historical overview? How do these ideas still impact performers today?
AB: When people ask me to summarize my work, I tend to say: “Blame the Victorians!”
In my research, I focused on young people playing classical music in England, where the music-education system is based on conservatoires and exam boards, which are music education organizations that run music exams for children and young people. These institutions were profoundly formative in the lives of the young people in my study, as they had also been in my life. (The British Empire brought these institutions to their colonies around the world, including my home country of New Zealand.) And most of these institutions were set up in the late 19th century, across a period of only about 20 years. So I decided to look at this period of history. I soon realized that a lot of the ideas around morality, gender, and class from that period had stayed with us through these musical institutions and music-education practices. For instance, the idea of middle-class white women being respectable, having to dress and hold their bodies in a certain way as a marker of sexual propriety, implied middle-class respectability. For young women, playing classical music was a way of demonstrating that you were respectable, sexually and morally—that you were a nice girl from a good home.
Another example of the influence of Victorian morality is the notion of classical music exerting a civilizing influence, especially on working-class people and people of color, supposedly instilling in people the kinds of upright morality then associated with the middle class. Expressed more broadly, it’s the idea that classical music is good for you.
What’s remarkable is that even though people don't always explicitly say this, these ideas are still with us today. And they're still really powerful. The way young people—and especially girls—dress is still policed. Parents often think that classical music is going to be good for their children, and that classical music is better than other genres of music. Educational institutions reproduce these ideas, as do teachers and (of course) musicians themselves. We all are unconsciously reproducing these ideas because we haven't actually examined and interrogated them, so it’s for this reason that I attempted to uncover them my book.
KS: Several chapters in your book look at the complex—sometimes even contradictory—nature of the teacher-student relationship. The same person can talk about how their teacher has helped them tap into the best version of themselves (as both a musician and as a person), and then turn and talk about how terrified they are of their teacher’s disapproval or approbation. How do you see the nature of classical-music training impacting students’ mental health?
AB: First of all, I think it's important to say that I see mental health as something that's not just about the individual. In fact, I’d say it’s not even primarily about the individual. You have to look at the wider community and culture that you're in, which influences and shapes your mental health. I absolutely think it’s possible to create a positive culture in musical training, but there are a lot of factors that make it harder to do so: high levels of competition, for one. And another is the hugely powerful “cult” of the strong authority figure.
In fact, when I started doing my doctoral research, I wanted to look at authority: that was my starting point, and then I came later to class and the other issues I considered in the book. But I started with the desire to understand how authority—and particularly the male authority of conductors and teachers—is experienced by those who are under it, and how it functions as a form of power.
I was struck by how my own experiences of authority and power as a young classical musician had been confusing and ridden with ambivalence. This was similar to the experiences of young people in my study, who had both positive and negative encounters. I came to think of charisma and the charisma of authority as a form of power: it can be used to create positive musical and social experiences. But because people don't think of it as being a form of power, they don't always use it as carefully as they need to, and that makes it very dangerous. When you listen to people on the receiving end of charismatic authority, as I did, it starts to look very different. In particular, some of the young women and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in my study found their conductors and teachers terrifying or humiliating at times. Most worryingly, they thought that these experiences of fear or distress from an authority figure were totally normal and acceptable. This is because they are normalized within many cultures of classical music.
On the positive side, some music-education organizations in the UK are trying to create a more inclusive and positive culture, a space where people who are different in some way—be it their gender identity, race, sexuality, disability, or something else—can feel included in classical music. Charisma, carefully wielded, can bring a group together, so I’m not suggesting that charisma is necessarily bad, but rather that you've got to use it very carefully. But too often charisma and authority are not used carefully, and this means that they reinforce the gendered (and classed and racialized) structures of power that we experience in wider society, where middle-class white men are more likely to have power than other groups of people.
KS: In your book, you also discuss the incredibly intense patterns of self-critique you witnessed among the young students you interviewed. Where do you think these pressures come from? Is this self-critique something artists bring to their craft, or is it something that the music-training process instills in young people?
AB: I think it's important to see that this self-criticism is part of a wider cultural phenomenon. We live in a culture where young people—and particularly girls and women—are subject to constant scrutiny and critique from society. Classical music mirrors, or perhaps magnifies, these trends. But in classical music this perfectionism and self-critique is given institutional legitimacy: by this I mean that in musical circles, perfectionism is not only an acceptable way to be, it's the way you should be.
I think it’s also about the music itself, about the way that we conceive of beauty and the aesthetic ideals of classical music. In some other genres, you can make a mistake and turn it into an expressive gesture. In classical music, there’s no room for errors.
I talk about classical music being a pedagogy of correction because the main focus of lessons is correcting or being corrected. Lessons—particularly when you're younger and just starting off—consist of the teacher correcting the pupil. And self-correction is what you're supposed to be doing in your own practice: the ideal is that you're correcting mistakes all the time. So this pattern of correction is deeply ingrained. And that kind of mentality affects the way you experience the world and the way you experience yourself.
So instead of simply accepting this self-correction as “normal,” we have to start explicitly changing these conventions. We need to be thinking about what's important in music. Is it technical perfection that really makes a good performance? Or should we be prioritizing expressivity and creativity? What does a good performance look like beyond sheer perfectionism?
KS: I have told many people that, as a teenager, I felt like I derived much (if not most) of my value as a person from being a classical musician. The concept of “value” surfaces throughout your book, in a variety of contexts. Can you talk us through some of the ways that “value” emerges from this particular musical practice?
AB: You know, I had exactly the same experience when I was young: feeling valued and valuable—maybe even feeling a sense of superiority—because of being a classical musician. It was the same with many of the young people in my research, some of whom even spoke explicitly about deriving a sense of value through their identity as classical musicians. This value comes from various sources, but it is clearly visible in the opportunities classical music offers, including playing in big concert halls or grand venues, taking part in summer courses, sometimes even getting scholarships to attend expensive schools. There’s even an interesting phenomenon where secondary-school students know that their peers don’t value classical music, but that’s more than offset by the sense of value they get from wider society—and especially parents and adults—approving of their musical practice.
There’s also an economic value involved in being a classical musician. If you’re carrying a violin case, that immediately tells the world that huge resources have been invested in you: years and years of lessons, which obviously come at a cost, plus the hours, days, and weeks of time and effort your parents have pumped into making sure you practice. This gives you legitimacy and status within mainstream education institutions.
Let’s be very clear: young people should feel valued and valuable! What’s concerning about this idea is that some people are valued more than others and some genres of music are valued more than others. If classical music makes you feel that you're important, then the flip side is that people who don’t play classical music may be seen as less valuable. And it might make you feel like if you quit classical music, you’ll not only be wasting the resources that have poured into you, but you will actually lose value as a person. That’s a huge amount of pressure.
KS: We recently talked to a physical therapist about injuries in the arts: how they occur, the sense of being “at fault” if you get injured, and how potentially career-ending injuries can also damage one’s sense of identity. In one chapter of your book, you talk about how Classical musicians are taught to (strive to) “transcend” the body. Can you explain this mentality? And how might it play into the epidemic of performance injuries we see across the classical-music world?
AB: I was so struck by this contradiction in my research: In musical performance, the body has to be present to make sound—we spend so much of our time as musicians disciplining our bodies. And yet, for a successful performance, there’s this idea that the body has to be kind of transcended or effaced, so that the music seems to be coming from outside us, or the composer’s spirit can seem to be coming through us. I think that's why performers tend to wear black, to make the body less visible.
(I think it’s worth mentioning that this creates a double whammy for women, because our bodies are always seen as being on display. So it's harder for us to efface or transcend our bodies because our bodies are constantly being objectified.)
So how does this feed into performance-related injuries? Firstly, if you're transcending the body, then you can't talk about the body. You can't talk about the injuries. It also means that you may not be paying attention to your body and what it’s telling you. Your body is there to be disciplined, not to be nourished or cherished. We've also got to talk about the instruments and the performance conventions. A lot of classical instruments and repertoire are really bad for your body. I still have “cello shoulder”—one shoulder is always rising above the other—that I’m trying to correct.
So we have technically difficult instruments and technically difficult repertoire, and the performance conventions of fidelity to the score means that you're not allowed to make adjustments or adaptations. Which also leads to profound ableism in classical music, since if you've got a differently abled body, or a body that is disabled by society, there’s no room to adapt classical instruments or repertoire for your own body and needs.
KS: If any professional musicians are reading this, there’s a good chance that they are teachers themselves. Based on your research, what advice would you give someone who is helping train young musicians?
AB: My main recommendation is: reflect on your own education. Ask yourself: what do I want to keep from my own training as a musician, and what do I want to let go of? There's a risk that if you haven't done this kind of reflective work, you’re simply doing things the way that you were taught, rather than considering other options.
One of the music teachers in my study was also a trained youth worker, and she brought a lot of youth-work skills into her teaching practice. It's remarkable what a big difference it can make to bring classical-music training together with a wider set of skills around, for instance, holding a safe space for students. Unfortunately, this kind of training remains rare in music circles.
Sometimes when I present my research— particularly the material about teachers bullying their pupils or pupils crying during lessons—people will approach me afterwards and say, “I had that experience, but I think it’s just because I wasn't a very good player.” These experiences have been very normalized in classical music, which means that musicians are probably bringing these experiences with them when they start teaching others.
So I think the first task for teachers is to do some difficult reflection work, and to think about what you want to bring to your teaching. And through doing this, to know that you have a choice. It’s hard: When I was teaching, I didn't know how to do things differently. I felt like in order to be taken seriously, I had to do things the way that I'd been taught. But actually, once you start experimenting, then you're opening up space for change.
I've recently carried out some research with teenagers in London who are learning how to play classical instruments. In this workshop, we found that the genre conventions of classical music actually contradict the principle of “youth voice”: that kids should have a say in decisions that affect them. These young people told me that in their classical music training, they were being told what was correct and what was incorrect, and they didn’t often get a chance to have a say about how the music should sound or what repertoire they should play. This is a big challenge for teachers: how can we give pupils more of a voice in their musical training? Should teachers invite pupils to offer their own interpretations of a piece of music, even if this contradicts “correct” or “tasteful” interpretations of a particular composer’s work? Should teachers ask students what repertoires they want to learn? And ask them to come up with their own goals in learning music? I think the answer is yes to all these questions, and my colleagues and I even produced a toolkit for teachers wanting to incorporate these ideas into their work.
This can feel like it’s flying in the face of the way we think about music, which generally prizes fidelity to the score. It can also feel like it’s deviating from a pedagogical route that's going to give students institutional legitimacy and recognition. Change isn’t easy or straightforward. But I do think even small experiments around doing things differently can have a big impact on students’ experiences.
KS: We also hope that providers will be reading this interview. Is there anything you’d like mental-health professionals to know about working with musicians, of any age?
AB: I think one important thing to keep in mind is the myth or ideology around music—and particularly classical music—in our culture, and the idea that music’s power is always good. As soon as you tell somebody you're a musician, the response is typically, “Oh, how wonderful!” Therapists need to park those myths and recognize that music’s power can be positive, but it can also be negative or even damaging. So if you’re a therapist, the first thing you can do is be sure to examine your own value judgments around music.
I feel like the word ideology could have been invented for classical music. Through sociology, I finally found a label for what I'd experienced, the notion that there are certain ideas that you believe so strongly and that you would never question. And these ideologies are made even more powerful by the fact that music is often quite a closed world.
As a therapist, it’s important to recognize how deeply rooted these ideas are, and to understand how long it might take for musicians to be in a place where they feel able to question (or even articulate) them. For me, this work took a good 10 years. When I was in my 30s writing my PhD, which turned into this book, I was still sitting there thinking, “Oh my God, what did I just write? Am I really allowed to write this?”
KS: You were a musician yourself. Now you’re writing about the sociology of music. If you could go back and tell young Anna something you’ve learned through your research, what would it be?
AB: Have the courage to ask the questions that it feels like you're not allowed to ask. As you move through the world, you’re going to feel all kinds of doubts and fears, you’ll witness contradictions and things that confuse you. They're really hard to articulate, because it feels like nobody's talking about them. So find a way to express what you’re feeling. Trust your instincts. Those instincts will eventually lead you down a really wonderful and rewarding path as a researcher!
