Persuasive arguments have been made for the existence of pedagogical discourses that invoke gender as a factor in the ascription of quality to musical compositions, and previous research has shown that some music teachers ascribe "maleness" to the characteristics that they regard as markers of high quality. Drawing upon Lucy Green's…

This article applies Bourdieu's notion of "cultural capital" to historical, documentary research which investigates the construction of a scholastic canon within England's A-level music examinations. A digest of the ways in which this canon evolved between 1951 and 1986 is presented in support of the idea that examiners' responses to…