In a new weekly column about the world of classical music, Tom Service bemoans Hollywood turning pieces into slop through overuse. Plus: Philip Glass withdraws his symphony from the Kennedy Center
B
ack in 2008, Transport for London came up with a ruse to dispel antisocial behaviour: it piped classical music into supposedly problematic stations in the crime hotspots of south London. I think that was when I realised just how far the association of classical music with relaxing affect instead of real emotion had gone. Once an entire genre has become associated with relaxification, it’s enough for you to hear the sound of an orchestra and think, “This isn’t for me”. Whatever its BPM, classical music will only be a backdrop, the sound of luxury goods, the sound of cultural anaesthetic.
The playlist included the finale of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony – music that is obsessive and wild, the sound of barely controlled hysteria, full of harmonic grind and rhythmic assault. This radical and Dionysian music, that was literally made to push communities of orchestras and listeners to their extremes in the early 19th century, was being reduced to calming and inoffensive aural wallpaper.
Fast forward two decades and where are we? Even further into the place where mood and vibes rule, where a “classical” prompt of an AI music-generator will give you arpeggios, hyper-mic’ed pianos, slow tempos, and a whole smorgasbord of inoffensive and bland slop.
