Cultural omnivorousness and musical gentrification. An outline of a sociological framework and its applications for music education research

Abstract

In this article, we aim to develop a theoretical model to understand what we refer to as ‘musical gentrification’ and to explore how this model might be applied to and inform music education research. We start from a Bourdieusian point of view, elaborating on the connections between social class and cultural capital, and then move on to discuss more recent contributions concerning cultural omnivorousness and musical gentrification. Furthermore, we show, through describing an ongoing research project, how the notion of musical gentrification can be utilised in music education empirical research, and we also discuss its possible applications in future efforts of mapping and understanding the present-day complexity of the culturalmusical landscape.