Gendering the middle classes: the construction of conductors’ authority in youth classical music groups

Abstract

While many accounts of gendered embodiment focus on transformation, this article examines how normative gendered identifications are reinforced among middle-class young people playing classical music. Drawing on an ethnographic study of young people in youth orchestras and a youth choir in the south of England, it examines how the authority of the male conductor is constructed and experienced. It explores the construction of the charisma on which this gendered authority is based, through embodied craft, sexualization and humour, showing how conductors cultivated this mode of authority, which relied on the embodied intimacy of classical musical practice. As a consequence of these gendered power dynamics, young women talked about their conductors differently from the young men. Despite the discomfort or resistance that some of the young women voiced in private, they approached rehearsals with a willing trust which gave the public appearance of their consent to his authority. Against the ways in which participants emphasized agency and choice in interviews, observations of rehearsals revealed young people's conformity to this gendered authority. This paper therefore contributes to theorizing gender among the middle classes by demonstrating how the affective power of the conductor in youth classical music ensembles produces conformity.Recent work in this journal on gender and embodiment has foregrounded accounts of transformation (Brace-Govan, 2004;Butler and Charles, 2012;Stephens and Delamont, 2014). By contrast, in this article I explore how gendered authority works affectively on and between bodies to reinforce norms of gendered embodiment. These processes are examined in a middle-class setting, classical music rehearsals. I take the choral and orchestral conductor as an exemplar of gendered authority in order to examine how authority is constructed in the male body, and how it is experienced by young, middle-class musicians.The non-linguistic, embodied intimacy of this musical experience allows a shift from discursive to affective accounts. Therefore, the article focuses

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