ABSTRACT
Look around you, though, and these critical generalities get muddied in the complex particulars of empirical life. Consider, for example, how for a season in parts of Britain free instrumental lessons in schools and a flourishing culture of local youth orchestras held out the possibility of breaking the middle-class monopoly on access to the practice of classical music (and its associated autonomist aesthetic). Consider too the game of cultural negotiation required of a schoolkid learning, say, the violin under this initiative, who has to juxtapose a classical musical practicewith its connotations of effeminacy-alongside a youth culture infused by conspicuous mass musical consumption. From this perspective, what is hegemonic and what is emancipatory, what is atrophied and what is vital, may look a little different. Readers will have probably suspected an autobiographical element at work here; but the intention is not to be anecdotal. Rather I want to suggest that the social and cultural mediations acquired by autonomous classical music in the grand sweep of history may be open to redefinition and revaluation, and that this possibility may be prompted by, among other things, personal and local histories that don’t entirely square with the characterizations of autonomy in recent critical accounts.
