Michele Lamont offers up a survey of literature concerning social and symbolic
boundaries as well as insight into how the privileged and disadvantaged in both the United States and France form and perpetuate these boundaries. Lamont uses an interdisciplinary approach to understanding boundary making and offering a theoretical framework that sheds light on how these boundaries are manifested in academia and society at large. The most interesting examination in the piece The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences was Bourdieus analysis of symbolic class boundaries in the French educational system. This reminds me a lot of Marxs argument that the dominant class have a monopoly on knowledge and what can be known the bourgeois controlling what the proletariat have access to knowing. Hall disagrees with this through empirical research gathered in New York, finding that musical exclusiveness decreases with education, and that the link between involvement in high culture and access to dominant class circles is undemonstrated. While I might agree that exclusiveness may decrease with education, I posit that access to higher art forms such as symphony orchestras remain available only to older whites. Despite having low cost tickets available for those under 35 (most orchestras do), the patronage is still limited to those in the retired age range. The symbolic boundary this sets is one of access to this high art form, only for the rich, despite cost being a non-issue (I have a season pass for $25 which gives me access to all concerts). Young people view the orchestra as having this holier than thou atmosphere and continue to be pushed towards popular music, produced for the everyman. Demographically, too, the crowd is always older (55+) and very, very white. Minorities are told subconsciously by the dominant class that they cannot afford access to these concerts, and therefore patronage is reserved for only those in that dominant class. Im not arguing here that classical music is in fact a higher art form, because that, in and of itself, is giving into the symbolic boundary set up by the white tradition. What I am trying to articulate is that the current state of classical music is artificially limited by symbolic boundaries for whites to enjoy.