To my great surprise, I recently learned that Britain uses classical music playing in public areas as a way to discourage anti-social youths from congregating in bus stops, supermarkets, metro, etc.: Music to deter yobs by, BBC News Magazine
How did classical music earn a reputation like this? An article criticizing the practice says,
Classical music has thus been seized upon by Transport for London and a host of other business and government leaders, not as a positive moralising force, but rather as a marker of space: a kind of “aural fence” or sonic wall, signalling “inclusion to some and exclusion to others” through its culturally conditioned associations: white, old, rich, elite.
But... why? One does not to be white to listen to music, or compose and perform it. At least, I'm not aware there are any racial differences in hearing. Old? Hearing range declines with age, so young people can, theoretically, have a better experience. Rich? Symphony and opera tickets are cheaper than pop/rock/hip-trip-trap-squaredance-hop performances. Moreover, there is a history of working classes appropriating "luxury" practices - say, Burberry and football hooligans. I doubt that Aston Martin expo would be expected to have this repulsive effect on troublemakers - but music does?
What is the history of these social labels?
So while there is a perception that classical music (Western art music) and opera have been classist and inaccessible for some time, this is actually a fairly recent development. Some might place the beginnings of this in the mid-nineteenth century (specifically with opera) as the crystallization of socioeconomic classes also included the ability for some of those classes to identify certain pleasure activities as representative of class post-the Industrial Revolution but the way in which most people may recognize this stereotype really evolved in the mid-twentieth century with the focus on the cultural terminology of the "highbrow," "middlebrow," and "lowbrow." Discussions around twentieth-century modernism and modernist aesthetics necessitated these kinds of structural distinctions, relegating certain types of art into one category and other types into another. One's ability to enjoy and partake in certain types of art usually reflected their social status (this is a very Anglocentric reading of the middlebrow, btw) and the middlebrow was this weird in-between space that often had high aspirations for highbrow culture (luxury culture if you will) but in more professional middle class avenues. Events such as the Festival of Britain in 1951 (Lew, Tonic to the Nation: Making English Music in the Festival of Britain, 2017) or Leonard Bernstein's Harvard Lectures tried to straddle this fence but the rise and prominence of popular musics in the 1950s and 1960s coupled with the more modernist musical movements of the same period (the so-called Ivory Tower-ing of classical music through composers such as Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez) shifted the notion of who had access to classical music and in what capacity.
The classical music of the late 1950s and onward became, in a sense, more isolated in regard to performance leading to another shift where instead of orchestras performing "new" (meaning current) music en masse, they were performing music of previous eras (this also has to do with the rise of both the Historically Informed Performance Practice movement and the Early Music revival which were happening concurrently where composers, conductors, and performers sought to perform music from the 12th-18th centuries as closely as possible to the ways in which they would have been performed in their time: tuning, period instruments, tempi, etc [Wilson, The Art of Re-enchantment: Making Early Music in the Modern Age, 2014]). The performance of classical music then moved outside of the more public, middlebrow space into the sole domain of the highbrow, requiring a certain kind of elitism in order to gain access. To attend classical music concerts meant one had an insider knowledge that could only be attained through time (here equalling wealth) which led to the creation of a marketplace that favored that wealth. Opera's history is a little bit tricker as opera always been the place where social classes clashed (Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History, 1995) but just as the delineation between highbrow and middlebrow pushed the less affluent away from classical music, it did the same for opera as well, it just took a little longer.
It is in the last seventy years or so that classical music and opera have really received this luxury status the way we understand it now. Advertising of course played a huge part in that and I welcome anyone who knows about the history of advertising to weigh in on that as that is a huge part of this story. Basically in the twentieth century, we told people that only certain people had access to classical music and it became the norm. The idea that this has always been the way in which Western art music has functioned over the last thousand years is historically inaccurate. There's also a really recent history in sound studies about music and deterrence (in regard to the article you mentioned about using classical music to sonically block the homeless or "troubled youth," as it were; Cusick, "Music as Torture/Music as Weapon," 2005; Hirsch, "Weaponizing Classical Music: Crime Prevention and Symbolic Power in the Age of Repetition," 2007), though it seems the jury is out as to whether or not it works. My personal hope is that we can change this perception, only time will tell.
[I have a PhD in Musicology, specializing in mid-twentieth century opera and reception, and am an Assistant Professor of Musicology]