ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author works from her own personal experiences of musical academisation, gained by longitudinal participation in the same field as investigated in the Musical Gentrification project. The theoretical tools employed are the sociological concepts of routinisation and musical agency. Combining the two, and inserting herself as the agent, the author’s ambition is to show actual workings of the forms of hegemonic power that contribute to the reinforcement of the hierarchies found within the Musical Gentrification project regarding social class, taste and gender. This is done by constructing memory-based narratives relating episodes which highlight nodal points of identity such as gender, sexuality, social class and ethnicity, and viewing these narratives against the larger findings of the project and against a sociological theoretical framework. Towards the end of the chapter, the author reflects on the potential for musical agency and musical gentrification, when combined or connected as a conceptual pair, to work as a means for investigating and understanding individual routes or trajectories of music education and musical Bildung processes as well as music-related paths of social mobility.
