Volume 66, No. 1

Since 2007, I have lived in North Carolina, where I teach and play the clarinet. The state has a vibrant arts scene, and I have been actively engaged in it. Last summer, I had a brief and uncomfortable interaction with a police officer on my way to an orchestra rehearsal. Parts of downtown Raleigh had been converted into pedestrian zones for an outdoor festival, and I tried to go around what I thought was a parked car but it suddenly blocked me. A uniformed officer emerged from the car asking me what my hurry was. He didn’t wait to hear my answer. But what if I had shared that I was a classical musician with an important symphony rehearsal to attend? Would his frown have turned upside down? Would he instead have offered me a police escort to the rehearsal location?

OK, I jest. I am being truthful in the sense that I have been told that the music I have been trained to play and teach is important, even that it has universal value to all. Believing in its value motivated my persistence within the classical music field, but I also find that its underlying ideology constrains current efforts to promote belonging. My definition of belonging resembles W. E. B. DuBois’ concept of double consciousness: those outside the dominant group may experience limited belonging when they must choose between self-belonging and group acceptance.

Colorblind approaches to justice have often failed or backfired, and music schools can learn from those patterns of unintended consequences. One common mechanism is the elevation of a particular cultural standpoint as universal or superior. When classical music is treated as inherently more valuable than other musics, some benefit while others are marginalized. This raises questions about how institutions shaped by aesthetic norms, misrecognized as natural rather than socially constructed, can meaningfully pursue belonging.

Gloria Ladson-Billings has remarked, “I would have rather had a real Plessy than a fake Brown.” By “Plessy,” she refers to the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that installed the doctrine of “separate but equal,” a ruling now widely regarded as misguided. Yet the reasoning and language of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), and especially its failed implementation, illustrate how universalization can function as cultural dominance, revealing what happens when inequality is framed in ways that sidestep unequal resources and power.

The plaintiffs in Brown were not seeking entry into exclusive White spaces so much as access to a high-quality education. Nevertheless, the Court’s remedy implicitly treated White schools as culturally neutral, and inherently “of quality,” while leaving their specific norms, values, and assumptions uninterrogated. The ruling re-legitimated unequal arrangements by positioning White institutions as the universal standard against which others were measured. By calling for a “real Plessy,” Ladson-Billings is not endorsing separation, but rather insisting on a genuine commitment to equality—one that Brown, in practice, failed to deliver, as evidenced by the persistence and resurgence of school segregation.

These reflections on a “real Plessy” versus a “fake Brown” are relevant to CMS’s questions about belonging. Had the U.S. pursued something closer to a real Plessy, our school system would likely have developed a wider range of music programs rooted in multiple cultural traditions, rather than consolidating most of its resources around the dominant culture. The Brown ruling led to the closure of many Black schools and the loss of positions for Black principals, teachers, staff, and educators who possessed deep, situated knowledge of what their students needed to thrive.

In exchange for minimizing disruption to White schools, desegregation efforts severed educational institutions from that expertise, knowledge that would be invaluable to our belonging work today. This process also resulted in a significant loss of institutional support for cultural practices, musical traditions, and ways of knowing that could have sustained belonging for a wider range of people. In its Brown decisions, the Warren Court underestimated both the depth of the problem and the resistance that would follow.

Within music schools, we must recognize how the normalization of particular knowledge and cultural values as universal has shaped our institutions, serving to center some people while alienating others, including those to whom we now may be seeking to make commitments of belonging. Work of social scientists such as Anna Bull have helped elucidate the internal logics of music schools as social structures. Bull shows how that structure is shaped by the cultural aesthetics of classical music, aesthetics that reflect bourgeois middle- or upper-middle-class values. She identified the standard repertoire as central to this structure, with works treated as objects detached from their original social contexts so that they can be presented as having universal value. Conductors and studio teachers are positioned as the primary authorities on how this repertoire should be performed, and those professors are the most direct conduits to coveted professional positions. The technical demands of the standard repertoire set a high bar, thereby normalizing practices of sorting, exclusion, and boundary-drawing as necessary. Bull argues that classical music depends on its exclusionary practices to assert and maintain its prestige and value. Often unrecognized within the field, high expectations of assimilation intensify the double bind around belonging that I mentioned earlier, in which many students cannot sustain both self-belonging and full institutional acceptance.

Disciplined practice, often beginning at a young age and aimed toward technical skill and perfection, can be understood as an investment in students’ “future selves,” a logic rooted in middle-class norms in which the music being learned is already understood as valuable and as promising a future return. Such training reflects middle-class values not only because it requires disposable income for instruments and private instruction, but also because it reflects a broader middle-class strategy of preserving status through the accumulation of cultural capital.

In short, practices of exclusion common in music schools are inseparable from the classical music aesthetic. My current students program much music outside of the traditional canon, and I support them in that effort. Yet auditions for admission, scholarships, ensemble placement, and concerto competitions remain in place. Audition requirements for professional performance positions have shifted somewhat, but the most challenging pieces remain on audition lists, and both the professional standards and the level of competition remain high.

I am not arguing for segregation, or for the softening of professional standards. I am asking us to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past with shallowly-conceived plans to update our programs and curricula, recognizing that initiatives that appear like progress can function to preserve and hide inequitable arrangements. I am calling for us to challenge our conditioning that involvement in classical music places us on a moral higher ground or affords us special standing in society, while still supporting our aspiring players.

Brown offers important lessons for our field. Anna Bull edited a 2023 volume called Voices for Change that brings together a wide range of perspectives on equity and institutional change in classical music, including accounts of recent or current initiatives that failed to produce their intended goals. Reading these accounts, I was struck by how the high valuation and universalization of classical music, and the middle-class values being understood as universal values, function as the blind spots that reinforce existing systems of inequality.

While reflection on history can delay action, for me, the more pressing question is what we need to understand before proposing interventions around belonging in our field. To conclude, my questions:

• How do we adjust our strategies for fostering belonging if we acknowledge that our institutions are structured around middle-class cultural assumptions that protect status, prestige, and cultural capital?
• How much belonging can a system organized around scarcity, competition, and early investment offer, and to whom?
• And what might change if, instead of treating class as an external problem, we recognized it as central to how music schools define excellence, success, and legitimacy?