Towards a wider cultural opening? An analysis on the coverage of articles on music in elite newspapers of five european countries (1960-2010)

Cultural hierarchies vary in time and context. While traditionally cultural hierarchies have been thought to reflect and correspond to social divisions (Bourdieu’s famous idea of homological tastes), for some decades scholarship has pointed towards an opening and widening of traditional highbrow legitimate taste. While these developments are usually studied in relation to direct cultural consumption and taste, little attention has been paid to institutions that contribute in shaping “legitimate taste”. In this article, our goal is to fill that gap by looking at the music coverage of European elite newspapers between 1960 and 2010. We aim to answer the question of whether elite newspapers have experienced a process of cultural opening in the field of music in the aforementioned period