I know I’m supposed to be writing about black licorice, but, like most of my life’s pursuits, I find that just seconds after I commit myself, I begin flailing wildly, looking for a way out. Plus, I am really annoyed by this news segment that I read today concerning classical music and teens in England…
Here’s a little snippet from reason.com:
‘In January it was revealed that West Park School, in Derby in the midlands of England, was “subjecting” (its words) badly behaved children to Mozart and others. In “special detentions,” the children are forced to endure two hours of classical music both as a relaxant (the headmaster claims it calms them down) and as a deterrent against future bad behavior (apparently the number of disruptive pupils has fallen by 60 per cent since the detentions were introduced.)’
First of all, Mozart is not going to make people calmer, fetuses smarter, or plants grow faster. I don’t care what the research says. Forcing people, animals or plants to listen to sappy classical music only reinforces the stereotype that all classical music is snobby and sappy. Even the term ‘classical music’ makes me want to hurl! It makes me think of gilded furniture and little violet candies. In reality, I listen to a lot of ‘classical’ music that has more in common with avant garde noise than it does with little girls and ballet recitals.
Fact: Shostakovich was a bad ass!
Fact: Glenn Gould was a bad ass!
Fact: Max Richter and Steve Reich are not dead and your grandmother would hate their music.
The problem is that there is so much stigma around ‘classical music’ that whenever I ask someone what kind of music they like (a question I mostly avoid) and they say, unhelpfully, ‘everything’, I know they are not talking about classical music. Everything means everything but classical music.
And now, thanks to England, a country which excels at creepy, bizarre, and fantastic methods for policing the populace, a new generation of kids will grow up avoiding any music that gets played in a symphony hall because they associate it with punishment. And not only in schools…apparently they’ve found that it stops teens from loitering if you blast Beethoven through the speakers at bus stops, railways and corners where graffiti is a problem. Didn’t they see A Clockwork Orange? Does this punishment not seem a little Fascist to them?
Ironically, last year I was at a very tony symphony in Berlin where a rare production of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s “Requiem für einen jungen Dichter” was performed. The usual box holders were there, and about 10 minutes into this wild, noise explosion, about half of them left. It would have been an evening more suited to the tastes of punks in Kreuzberg than the penthouse dwellers from the west. But the punks would never be caught dead at Berlin Philharmonie because they think classical music is for the elderly and child geniuses.
I wish I could get all of these teachers and principles in a room and edify them with some John Zorn. Or switch the Mozart out and replace it with Stockhausen. That would keep them calm, I’m sure.
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