Abstract
This chapter is the first of four that portray the musical life stories of the choirboys and the significant characters in their lives. We begin looking at the role of music in making young masculinities with the seldom-heard vantage point of mothers’ stories of their sons’ early lives. I examine the mothers’ involvement in their children’s music education against the backdrop of current sociological debates about intensive mothering practices and the concerted cultivation involved in middle-class parenting. Using feminist rereadings of Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts, I focus on the dispositions that are fostered in early childhood through the mothers’ musical practices that I refer to as their musical mothering, which form the foundation of the boys’ musical habitus.
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- 1.
Mackinlay’s (2009a) auto-ethnographic research of how music becomes mothering also uses the term musical mothering to ‘make visible the musical worlds of mothers and children and make known the power of maternal song in creating places of excitement, empowerment, love and peace in the home for mothers and children’ (p. 717). Mackinlay’s focus differs from this study considerably in that the subject of her enquiry is women’s experiences of music in relation to their child and individual experiences of motherhood, whereas I am more interested in the child’s experience of music and the mother’s integral role in this from both individual and sociocultural points of view (also see Mackinlay, 2009b; Mackinlay & Baker, 2005).
- 2.
This term is distinct from the classical genre of music, which spans the approximate period of 1750–1820. The boys’ musical tastes include a range of Western art music genres, including Baroque, Romantic music and contemporary art music, particularly Benjamin Britten’s choral works.
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Hall, C. (2018). Capitalising on Musical Mothering. In: Masculinity, Class and Music Education. Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50255-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50255-1_5
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