What makes the arts different from sports? (Snobbery in Classical Music, part 3 of ?)

A few weeks ago, I posted a response to an article in the New York Times which asked, “Why Not a College Degree in Sports?” I had no problem with the idea itself, since a sports program could be structured in a way that introduces students to the humanities. I did quibble over Roger Pielke, Jr.’s misconceptions of Victorian culture. Recently, the Times published a response from the President of The Juilliard School, Joseph W. Polisi, which serves as the basis for another installment in my series on snobbery.

Thanks to Eric Saylor for this
splendid image of Elgar playing golf.

As I also did, Polisi attacks Pielke’s assumption that sports are for the masses while the arts are for high society. He points out that buying tickets to a sporting event can cost more than attending an opera, which is a casual conflation of money and class. (The two are related, but they’re not exactly the same issue.)

But if Polisi is willing to admit that this imagined class barrier between sports and the arts doesn’t actually exist, doesn’t that work in favor of Pielke’s point? I think they’re talking past each other. Both are arguing against the perception that “arts = highbrow, sports = lowbrow.” Polisi probably wants to assure people that the arts are for everyone, whereas Pielke’s original article hinges on whether sports deserve a higher cultural status.

What did the Victorians think of music and sport?

I awoke yesterday morning to find that two different people had sent me links to the same New York Times article: “Why Not a College Degree in Sports?” In it, Roger Pielke, Jr. argues that college sports have a lot in common with the performing arts—they require specialized skills and training, and people pay to see the students perform—so it should be possible to earn a degree in basketball, just as someone can currently get a bachelor’s degree in viola performance (like I did).

I’m not opposed to the idea. There is a lot of overlap between athletes and musicians, between the psychological pressure of performing in the moment and the need to maintain physical health. Just as I had to take several classes in music theory and history, Pielke cites a proposed curriculum of “sports history, sports law, sports finance.” The sports history aspect is most appealing to me, as that can become a student’s entre into the humanities—pretty much any human endeavor reveals something about the society in which it developed, so I can envision classes like “Politics and the Modern Olympic Games,” or “Ancient Precursors to Soccer: Global Perspectives.”

The proposed sports degree does enter into the ongoing debate about what the “true” purpose of higher education should be. Is college supposed to train you for a career in a specific field, or provide you with a broader knowledge base? Few sports majors would become professional athletes, just like few performance majors are be able to support themselves purely by playing. Yet such a program could help develop the skills to find alternative jobs within the field—and, ideally in my view, intellectual skills that they could apply to other fields, as well.

But that debate is not really in the purview of this blog. This statement, however, is:

And beyond such economic disparities, class distinctions of 19th-century England still shape thinking about sport: Classical music is valued by high society, while sport is for the masses.

The second half of the sentence is a cliché. The sentence as a whole is inaccurate.