Tradition and novelty in concert programming: Bringing the artist back into cultural analysis

Participation in many cultural activity systems, such as art worlds or scientific communities, is highly skewed toward an elite creating a pattern of activity that emphasizes rationality and repeated events. At the same time, the introduction of new works and participants in these systems promotes the opposite, that is, innovation. Rationality and innovative interests are usually approached and analyzed separately, but this article examines a social context in which they are jointly produced—concert music programming. To analyze the dominance of repertory, this paper documents concert programming over a single season and describes a model to illustrate the observed distribution of events. The skewed distribution of programming is then explained through reference to the aesthetic interests of concert artists, that is, composers and performers, and the congruence of a rationalized aesthetic to the recruitment of audiences and administrative rationality.An earlier version was presented at the Social Theory, Politics, and the Arts conference in New York, October 1990.