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Back 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.
Who – apart from the obvious tech-brocracy – is to blame? A lot of it starts with cinema and TV and the commodification of the classical as readymade signifier and gratifier of pseudo-emotions: those feelings we’re manipulated into having whether we actually want them or not.
In the aftermath of the Oscar nominations last week, examples are legion: but think of the way that Max Richter’s track On the Nature of Daylight has been put through the cinematic wringer, most recently in Hamnet. Richter is responsible for the film’s entire score, for which he has been Oscar-nominated. But in the final scene, it’s not his new music you hear. Instead On the Nature of Daylight is whipped out yet again for maximum chills. By now, it has become its own genre of sentimental underscore, as music supervisors and directors insist on using the same piece over and over again. Richter himself isn’t to blame for how this muted processional of apparently innocent string chords and slow-motion melodic elaboration has become the go-to cliche for moments of serious contemplation or emotional intensity on screen, from Arrival to The Innocents, Shutter Island and many more.
But the stunning thing about Richter’s music is how empty it is. Composed as part of an anti-Iraq war protest album in 2003, On the Nature of Daylight has nothing obviously expressive about it, nothing protesting, nothing controversial, nothing even particularly complex. That’s the genius of its generosity to us as listeners and to Hollywood’s film-makers: it’s slow, it sounds serious, so it can be filled with whatever grandiloquent storytelling we like. The music can take it because it’s just earnest enough to suggest its own emotional orbit, yet sufficiently denuded of content that it never insists on dictating its own expressive terms.
But pieces of music have half-lives before they’re exhausted. Richter’s piece is getting perilously close to the stage when, instead of the alchemy of music, image and emotion, you hear the chords and immediately know the director is trying to make you feel those feels: hear Richter, get those tear-ducts going.
Cautionary tales abound: Barber’s Adagio, once a soul-stirring accompaniment to a key scene in Platoon, now a hackneyed hand-me-down of melancholy. Debussy’s Girl With the Flaxen Hair, a classical has-been whose use means the director heard a compilation of classical music one time and just, you know, really clicked with that slow piano piece. Mozart’s Lacrimosa from his Requiem is now so shopworn a sound of gothic intensity, featured everywhere from The Traitors to Elizabeth, that it’s virtually unlistenable outside the concert hall.
And where cinema leads, tube stations follow, as classical slides down the escalators of taste towards the trivial. How to save it? That’s an endless project – but maybe we could start with directors being less lazy when it comes to using their classical needle-drops, and commission more original composition.
Talking of which: what should win the best score Oscar? Bugonia, from Jerskin Fendrix, obviously. No cliches, pure wonder. Coming to a tube station near you hopefully never.
Art is always political … it’s clear as Glass
The Kennedy Center is becoming a litany of lost voices in Washington: Philip Glass joins artists from Renée Fleming to Lin-Manuel Miranda in withdrawing their work from Washington’s very partisan temple of the arts. The world premiere of the 88-year-old composer’s new symphony had been scheduled there in June. Glass said: “Symphony No 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony”.
The Center’s counter that “we have no place for politics in the arts, and those calling for boycotts based on politics are making the wrong decision”, is a magnificent absurdism. But Glass’s cancellation may speak even louder than his symphony could have done, because he, and all artists in the US, are waking up to a reality that decades of complacency in western democracies have masked: art is always political, but especially classical music in its industries and institutions; the money that concert halls and symphony orchestras and opera houses need to function; the places the cash comes from, and the structures of power that the business of the art form embodies, from the grassroots up.
This week Tom has been listening to: the forensic chaos and empathy of Vladimir Jurowski’s new recording of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony with the London Philharmonic. You should too. (Apple Classical | Spotify)
