Interlopers in the Realm of High Culture

"Music Moms" and the Performance of Asian Difference

In 2002, as part of a series of articles about summer camps, the New York Times reported on the Perlman Music Program—a prestigious six-week instructional program led by the renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman. Tellingly, the article focused less on the teenagers who attend the camp and more on the efforts and ambitions of their parents, the "music moms" who enroll their children in advanced programs of music study. As the reporters note, "'Music moms' seasons are far longer than those of soccer moms. Their financial payoffs are far smaller and more elusive than those of tennis moms. But they are every bit as competitive, protective, ambitious and self-sacrificing." The ethos of self-sacrifice emerges clearly in a comment offered by one of the article's featured mothers, Mrs. Kim, who bluntly states: "First priority is Yoonjee." For this mother, such prioritization has meant living apart from her husband, a South Korean diplomat whose work required him to return to Seoul, so that her daughter, Yoon-jee, could continue her piano studies at the Juilliard School's Pre-College Division. As the New York Times article makes clear, from the initial decision to enroll their children in music lessons to the continued labor of driving back and forth to music lessons, rehearsals, and performances, "music moms" like Mrs. Kim play an integral role in the realm of classical musical training.

To understand the broad context of Western classical music making, an examination of the "music moms" who facilitate, organize, and support their children's musical pursuits is critical. Variations of the "stage mom" exist in many different realms, from competitive sports to beauty pageants. Yet, while such figures as the "soccer mom" typically bring to mind the image of a white, middle-class, suburban parent, this chapter reveals how the traits of sacrifice, pushiness, and determination embodied in the "music mom" have increasingly become associated with being Asian. This chapter asks: What new meanings and significations have emerged alongside the racialization of this character? How has classical music training come to emblematize particular race and class notions about "Asian" parenting in the U.S. public imagination? And how do Asian parents themselves mobilize the multiple meanings contained in music to engage with and challenge their racial construction in the United States?

The contemporary racialization of the "music mom" is, at first glance, not necessarily surprising in light of the increasingly visible presence of Asians and Asian Americans in classical music since the 1960s and 1970s. In the following decades, Asians and Asian Americans constituted anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of the student population at leading U.S. music schools and departments, with numbers often higher at the pre-college level. Indeed, by the 2000s, Asians and Asian Americans made up more than half of the student body at highly regarded music programs, such as Juilliard Pre-College; the two largest groups represented are students of Chinese and Korean descent studying the violin or piano. We can trace the growing participation of Asian and Asian Americans in classical music over the past few decades to multiple, overlapping contexts: the historical deployment of Western classical music in East Asia; the economic ascension of East Asian nations; and the wave of educated and professional Asian immigrants who have arrived in the wake of changes in U.S. immigration policies in 1965.

Still, socioeconomic and demographic shifts tell only part of the story. To contextualize the narratives placed on and mobilized by Asians and Asian Americans involved in classical music, this chapter draws from a range of sources—U.S. media representations, oral interviews conducted with Asian parents (primarily Chinese and Korean immigrant mothers) at Juilliard Pre-College, attendance at meetings held for Juilliard parents, and countless informal conversations with parents and musicians. Within the confluence emerging from these accounts, racialized discourses about Asians and Asian Americans—as disciplined, hard-working, family-oriented, imitative, and zealous embracers of Western culture—map unevenly onto beliefs that classical music connotes an "international" or "universal" language, a site of transcendent beauty, the unique cultural property of the West, and a cultural system through which the power of the West is enacted and authorized. As the media accounts I analyze in this chapter underscore, this complex and sometimes contradictory set of racial and musical discourses arises out of the colonial contexts through which classical music was institutionalized in East Asia and the imbalanced relations of power that have historically framed U.S. understandings of Asian and Asian American participation in this field of high culture.

Given these power dynamics, when Chinese and Korean immigrant parents enter conversations about their involvement in and affinity for Western classical music, they do so on unequal footing—in a new country, a new language, and through a cultural framework established and reworked through long-standing claims of Western superiority. Many of my interviewees articulated feeling that their actions are often misunderstood, hesitated to acknowledge the racism they encountered in their everyday lives, and expressed ambivalence at times about what it means to parent well in the U.S. context. They generalized broadly about characteristics that distinguished "Asians" from "Americans" and the ways in which these traits translated well into achievement in classical music and beyond. Still, while the emphasis my interviewees placed on possessing such characteristics as diligence, pushiness, and discipline can appear, on the surface, to reproduce stereotypical beliefs about their racial difference, this chapter suggests a more complex relationship between cultural practices and narratives. In what follows, I demonstrate how Asian parents choose from and reformulate available cultural narratives to claim alternate ascriptions of their race and class positioning in the United States.

To better understand the alignment between race, class, and cultural hierarchies, this chapter draws on Pierre Bourdieu's articulation of culture as a multidimensional field wherein groups and individuals compete to gain various forms of capital and extends his analysis to consider the transnational circulation of cultural capital. Participating in a global cultural economy historically structured by Western dominance, Asian parents understand Western cultural norms and capital as yielding the highest forms of recognition on an international stage. At the same time, the decline in popular attention paid to classical...