listen: life with classical music • 61

discovery

Like many foLks who live in large metropolitan areas, I have a long commute into town. I look forward to these trips, which permit me to disconnect from the daily barrage of calls and email. Toronto hasn’t changed much since when I was growing up here, but now with almost a million more people looking to get around, the city’s transit system is stretched to the limit. All told, the system provides upwards of five hundred million rides a year.

One day, above the din of buses, subways, light-rail transit vehicles and snack purchases, I heard the faint strains of a string orchestra. You’ll forgive me if I’m not intimately familiar with all five hundred Vivaldi concertos, but I suspect it was one of the maestro’s many masterpieces. Having had some recent deal-ings with the Canadian Music Centre (CMC), I thought, “Here is a unique opportunity to

bring classical music to a wider audience, and wouldn’t it be great if commuters could hear some Canadian classical music on their way to and from work?” I took my concerns public, addressing the Toronto Transit Commission’s public-relations spokesman directly, Brad Ross, copying Toronto’s infamous mayor, Rob Ford. (See our full Twitter exchange on the next page.)

“The goal of the program, don’t forget, is to deter loitering, not encourage listening.” I discovered that similar initiatives exist in Seattle, Minneapolis, Portland and Atlanta, as well as London (England, not Ontario). In an article for BlogTO.com, “Why the TTC is playing classical music in the subway,” Chris Bates says the answer is to deter “nefarious youths.” Bates notes that a 1998 community safety audit, conducted in the wake of a fatal stabbing, suggested that “piping in Bach,

No LoiteringClassical music as deterrent to vagrancy

By Menon Dwarka

Illustrations by Yarek Waszul

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listen: life with classical music • 63

in the station • discovery

62 • fall 2014

Sibelius, Schumann, and others would repel gangs.” Bates’s article also noted that the Montreal–based company Stingray360, which specializes in “sensorial marketing solutions,” both provided the music feed and covered the licensing requirements for about fourteen thousand five hundred dollars per year. That’s about forty dollars a day for the service. Not per station, but system-wide.

How could a publicly funded institution create systems specifically designed to ward off entire sections of the public? How could these systems identify and target individuals prone to certain kinds of antisocial behavior, while remaining invisible — or inaudible — to others? I can’t speak for Stingray 360 (they did not reply to Listen’s requests for comment), but an in-depth look at how music has been used in public spaces might prove illuminating.

We tend to forget that indoor space beyond the walls of our homes has been curated for

some specific effect, whether it’s to project power, a sense of welcome, or, for the right price, some otherwise unattainable cool. Lighting fixtures, furniture and decor are the more obvious considerations, but the acoustic environment we inhabit has also been engineered to project a particular effect, and can impact our perception of a space’s

function: take the long reverb times of a cathedral versus the stifling deadness of solitary confinement. With the addition of recorded music, interiors can be filled at will with any mood-enhancing soundwaves, which change over time to reflect a narrative of evolving feelings.

You’ve probably heard the term Muzak, a brand so successful that its name came to stand for all “canned” music. Its origin is compelling: after his career as the United States Army’s Chief Signal Officer, Major General George O. Squier turned his attention to transmitting music over wires. Beaten to the punch by radio, Squier formed a company in 1934 that focused on providing music for commercial spaces, the name of which was inspired by the industrial giant of the day, Kodak. Muzak’s fortunes really took off once it claimed to produce happier and more efficient workers through a patented process known as Stimulus

Progression. Musical selections were organized in fifteen-minute blocks that propelled workers through a sense of increasing tempos and dynamics, but as Ethan Trex notes in his article “Muzak History: The Background Story on Background Music,” the science behind Stimulus Progression was dubious (though its putative effects certainly aided Muzak in selling subscriptions to its service and pushed it down the road to franchisement). Although Muzak has since shifted its focus to licensing the original versions of popular songs, its legacy of anemic instrumental versions of top-forty radio hits has cast a pall over the company’s reputation. Instead of offering deeply moving orchestrations or dance-inducing beats, Muzak once willfully removed these elements from their songs. Rock guitarist / frontman / general knucklehead Ted Nugent offered to buy Muzak in 1989 for ten million dollars just to shut it down, and artist George Maciunas, in a coy double-slap, used to ask hotel staff to turn down the Philip Glass when ever he encountered Muzak in the lobby.

Another approach to music for public spaces has been ambient music, with Brian Eno as the genre’s progenitor and most articulate spokesman. Here Eno explains the genre in a 1982 interview with Trouser Press:

“Most music chooses its own position in terms of your listening to it. Muzak wants to be back there. Punk wants to be up front. Classical wants to be another place. I wanted to make something you could slip in and out of. You could [be paying] attention or you could choose not to be — in my mind, anyway. Ambient music allows many different types of attention.”

This approach would seem to be at odds with the stated goals of public transit programs. With ambient music, there is ac-commodation — the choice of easily ignoring it without feeling pushed away.

In her recent book Extremely Loud: Sound as a Weapon (The New Press), journalist Juliette Volcler gives an historical account of the use of music and noise in various fraught arenas including Fallujah, Gaza, Zuccotti Park, and Guantánamo. Very loud sounds over pro-tracted periods of time can be used to disperse crowds or break down prisoners, but these tactics have never been used to pinpoint an individual in a crowd, quite possibly since the technology to do so does not exist. In the case of public transit, administrators aren’t playing music at volumes that makes everyone flee the station, and they aren’t targeting individuals and subjecting them to high-volume torture. Rather, they are trying to identify segments of the population (in this case, young people) who are causing trouble and choosing the genre of music (in this case, classical) that is most likely to cause them to disperse.

So why would classical music cause our er-rant youth to voluntarily leave a public space? Well, for one thing, we seem to avoid classical music as a society. Just under three percent of albums sold in 2013 were categorized as classical. In 1992, only about four percent of American adults reported performing or practicing classical music at least once in the previous year. Phillip Lucas noted in a 2009 article for The Seattle Times (“Businesses us-ing music to deter crime and loitering”) that when people hear music they like, dopamine production is stimulated, whereas music they dislike suppresses dopamine production and sours their mood, causing them to avoid the music. The mood-altering method is believed to be derived from Muzak’s Stimulus Progression concept (which, as we have already stated, is suspect) and is now being used by the police and security entities as a sort of reverse psychology.

Despite what the rate of classical music sales might imply, young people don’t hate instru-

mental orchestral music on principle — take video game soundtracks as an example. Video games continue to outsell almost all other media; their revenues already surpassed that of the movie industry in the late 2000s. The video game market is certainly youth dominated, and there are many parents who worry about the long-term effects of the exposure to violence on their children, but these games also expose young people to orchestral music over long (sometimes very long) periods of time.

So why is it that young people can sit through hours of video gaming with orches-tral scores churning away in the background, but might feel compelled to vacate a bus terminal after hearing a few minutes of Vivaldi or Haydn?

If we continue to go by Muzak’s findings, consumers tend to stay longer in an environ-ment in which they find the background music complimentary to the vibe of the store. There seems to be consensus about the appropriateness of dance music being played in fashionable boutiques and classic rock in family-oriented chain restaurants. Can we then assume the converse — that when music and place don’t jibe, the public is likely to disperse? Under this assumption, running for the bus to the strains of Vivaldi doesn’t make that much sense. Loitering to Lizst? Hanging around to Haydn? It seems comical, almost the height of ridiculousness, except that it costs the public money and aims to alienate our kids.

There have been attempts to make these crowd dispersal efforts part of a more holistic approach, using environmental design with

“upgrades like better lighting, improved traffic flow or trimmed shrubbery in public areas,” as noted by Jacqueline Helfgott, chair of the criminal justice department at Seattle University. By converting these public spaces into inhabited, curated ones, they are less likely to invite vandalism.

What’s most disturbing is the classical music community’s seeming lack of interest in the use of their music for such a heinous purpose, at a time when classical musicians are fighting for the public perception of their livelihood. Could you imagine Glenn Lowry, the director of MoMa, keeping silent about a publicly funded institution that used modern-ist art to drive away “certain” people?

The certain people in question are overwhelmingly the young and the poor who take public transit, for whom the purchase of rush tickets is out of reach for a family on an already tight budget.

Who gains from this broadcast of classical music? Certainly not the dead composers whose intellectual property has fallen into the public domain. Nor the performers, whose work has been bought without the recompense of royalties. Can the classical music lover, or indeed any music lover for that matter, really hear what’s going on over the noise of commuter traffic? The poor are subtly and sinisterly made to feel unwelcome in these public, publicly financed spaces. Yet anyone who equates culture with our loftiest goals and noblest ideals are surely the biggest losers here. These initiatives imply that classical music is not only not worth listening to, but that it can also be used as a punishment, and they perpetuate unfavorable assumptions about its audiences and purposes. It would appear that the only beneficiaries of these initiatives are politicians and flacks who would claim they have a solution to what they insist is a problem, along with the purveyors of music services. Contributing this time, capital and manpower to programs that engage kids in youth orchestras, chamber music programs or private study after school would seem, for my money, a better investment.