From Cultural Purity to the Cooptation of Culture: Subscribers to the New York Philharmonic in the Gilded Age

Fabien Accominotti (LSE), Shamus Khan (Columbia University), Adam Storer (UC Berkeley)

This paper uses a new database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to explore how cultural participation cemented the status of elites in late nineteenth-century America. Our database has information on who subscribed to the Philharmonic between 1880 and 1910 – by many accounts a key period of elite consolidation in the United States, and in the city of New York in particular. In analyzing these data we seek to understand how culture worked as an elite resource in that period. We partly argue with the classic account of monopolization and exclusiveness of high culture, showing how over the long Gilded Age the social elite of New York attended the Philharmonic both increasingly and in more socially patterned ways. Yet we also find that the orchestra opened up to a new group of subscribers who did not share the social practices, occupational background, or residential choices of more elite patrons. This shift away from exclusiveness was made possible by the willingness of the social elite to increase the profile of concerts through the cooptation of a group of cultured, non-elite subscribers. It was also facilitated by the fact that the two groups would not mingle within the hall. We reflect on the implications of these findings for elite theory and cultural sociology. The paper also makes a methodological contribution by suggesting how spatial analysis can be applied to study the relationships between multiple social spaces.