In recent years the omnivore thesis has come to take centre stage in debates surrounding cultural taste and its social structural co-ordinates. On the assumption that tastes for music are reflective of people’s tastes in other cultural domains, the matter of musical preference has received substantial attention within omnivore-related empirical research. Yet while the ongoing omnivore debate has seen the concept’s original formulation undergo revision and refinement in light of new findings, a number of substantive and theoretical difficulties continue to receive inadequate attention, especially in respect of music. These difficulties include commonly made assumptions about the sanctity of musical genre categories and hierarchies of cultural legitimacy, the reliability of decontextualized expressions of taste for disclosing real-world cultural practices, and questions about the deployment of cultural capital. This article assesses the implications of these difficulties and goes on to outline the concept of musical habitus, a heuristic theoretical construct with which to think through questions about musical objects’ correlations with actors’ social locations and the contemporary role of music in status competition.

This article explores children's reflections on the value of their participation in In Harmony, a social and music education programme whose approach and philosophy derives from the Venezuelan ‘El Sistema’ (‘The System’) model. More specifically, through an analysis of participating children's accounts (n=111) and an exploration of the key patterns evident within children's attribution of value to their In Harmony participation, the article highlights a series of ways in which the initiative's approach to music and musical learning threaten to undermine its core aims.

This article examines the consequences of shifts in the terms of engagement with the state – since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008 – for small-scale UK arts-based community organisations. Through an engagement with the accounts of key stakeholders from three case study organisations, the article considers the nature and extent of organisational changes in four main respects: the activities undertaken, the people and groups engaged, the income streams accessed and understandings of role or mission. Having outlined the variable fates of each organisation over this period, the article illuminates how the effects of austerity and associated policy shifts have served to mitigate against organisations’ ability to sustain arts-based work with disadvantaged groups, resist neoliberal ‘enterprise’ agendas or maintain a practical commitment to community development aims.

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This article explores the musical lives and music-related activities of a group of young people living on a deprived housing estate in North East England. Through the use of ethnography, I uncover how central aspects of these young people’s taste for, and uses of, their preferred ‘new monkey’ music function in respect of the values inscribed in their community’s past, the problems and challenges facing them in the present, as well as their anticipations of the future. To help think through the complex and sometimes contradictory processes at work within these young musico-cultural lives, I employ and specifically adapt a key Bourdieusian concept to encouraging thinking about such issues in terms of a musical habitus. As an invitation to explore the nexus of personal, social and historical factors that conjoin music’s possibilities with the contexts and conditions of lived practices, the concept of musical habitus reveals substantial explanatory potential.