Opera and Theatre

         In high school, I participated in a time-intensive drama program. During the fall of my Junior and Senior year, my theatre group and I traveled to New York City to see various performances. Because of these trips, I have had the opportunity to see the following musicals and plays: Hair, Bye Bye Birdie, Wicked, Monty Python, Phantom of the Opera, August Osage County, Ragtime, Oleanna, In the Heights, Chorus Line, Avenue Q, and more. We also had the opportunity to dress up and go to the Metropolitan Opera to see Madame Butterfly one year, and Princess Turandot the next year. Madame Butterfly was the first opera I had ever seen and I thought it was very boring. I almost fell asleep in my seat. The next year, however, when I watched Princess Turandot, I loved it! Because I knew what to expect and I had seen an opera before, the opera really appealed to me. My parents have also been very supportive of my love for the arts. For my birthday, my parents flew me to New York City to see a play and my mother and I would go on "mother-daughter dates" to see local productions. Due to this upbringing, I possess cultural capital that others my age might not have.

             When I arrived at Harvard for pre-orientation, I started hanging out with a group of girls who seemed nice. Unfortunately, as soon as we started chatting, I realized there was a disconnect between them and me. The other girls discussed Cosmopolitan, MTV, and current singers and rockstars. They knew the lyrics of all the top songs and the current gossip of today's socialites. They obviously did not have the cultural capital that I did; none of them followed the arts or knew anything about theater. Their conversations were interesting but because I did not share the same interests as them, I had a difficult time interacting with them. This disconnect was not just with theater versus pop music. As Gans observed, people who like one object will tend to like other objects with a similar aesthetic. Unfortunately, this meant that the other girls had more and more in common and I discovered that for every similarity they shared, I liked something very different from them. Their taste culture involved tabloids and pop culture, my taste culture contains the fine arts and creative expression. Gans noted that the main difference that separates taste publics and taste cultures from other taste publics and taste cultures is socioeconomic class. As I learned with these girls, there was a reason we preferred different interests. It turns out that these girls all came from a different social background than I did and did not have the experience and opportunities of my class advantage.

          Another observation I noticed while interacting with these girls was that low status individuals are the most culturally exclusive. Bryson claimed in his findings that musical tolerance increases with one's education level and I agree with this statement. Most of the girls I was talking with were athletes and had been recruited here, not accepted due to academics. While we talked about our musical interests, most of them choose country, rap, and pop. While I prefer to listen to latino music and other more obscure genres, I will also listen to those genres as well. However, when I told them what music I like to listen to,  the girls laughed and revealed that they hated broadway music and latino music and would never listen to those. I found it interesting that my experience with these girls, whom I am no longer friends with, aligns very accurately with Bryson's findings. He described this access to the knowledge of a broad range of musical genres as being an "omnivore" and considers this openness to be its own form of cultural capital.