Conclusion

Abstract

This final chapter elaborates the argument central to the book that music education provides an important means through which choirboys acquire a specific kind of middle-class masculinity and inhabit a sociocultural position of distinction. By providing a critical perspective on the elision of music, gender and class, this study offers a fresh way of understanding how certain subject positions are made possible and how social structures are both reproduced or transformed through music. This study of choirboys’ musical lives informed by Bourdieu’s theory of practice brings about a productive intersection of the seldom conversant fields of sociology of education and sociology of music education. This juncture has generated a new conversation about music and education that makes several key theoretical and conceptual contributions to scholarship which this chapter succinctly reasserts.