Asian American Identity and Classical Music as Cultural Capital

This week I read a fascinating paper by Grace Wang “Interlopers in the Realm of High Culture: ‘Music moms’ and the Performance of Asian and Asian American Identities,” about the role Asian and Asian American parents play in their children’s participation in classical music. 

Wang conducted interviews with Chinese and Korean parents at the Juilliard Pre-College program, where she found Asian immigrants had brought their positive view of Western art music and all the attributes of its cultural capital with them. They felt this cultural capital was needed, in part, to counteract the racist structures experienced by Asian Americans. One of the parents of an Asian American pianist that Wang interviewed asserted, “... they have so many difficulties living in America. Being minorities, they have to be somebody” (G. Wang 898). With this informant in mind, Wang argues that the belief that Western art music is cultural capital partially stems from Asians in America feeling the need to prove their social status due to the way they are negatively perceived by Americans because of language barriers and racist preconceptions.

They viewed participation in classical music as a way to enhance upward social mobility and distinction. Wang even found that many parents viewed amassing the cultural capital of Western art music as one way to measure socioeconomic gains, and broadly linked the growing popularity of classical music among Chinese and Koreans with the “economic ascension of East Asian nations” (G. Wang 895). 

I found this paper interesting for a couple reasons. For me it raised the question of whether Asian American musicians viewed classical music as a form of cultural capital or whether that association was primarily driven by perceptions brought over by immigrant parents from Asia. Doing another layer down, how do the musicians themselves perceive classical music and why do they play? And in a broader societal context does the general American public ascribe the types of positive attributes (or cultural capital) that Asian immigrants associate with classical music? 

Wang, Grace. “Interlopers in the Realm of High Culture: ‘Music moms’ and the Performance of Asian and Asian American Identities.” American Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 4, Dec. 2009, pp. 881–903.