The Music Industry Sells Classical As Soothing Background Music - Robbing A Great Art of Its Power. - The Washington Post

04/12/2018 The music industry sells classical as soothing background music — robbing a great art of its power.
f its power. - The Washington Post

The Washington Post
All-too-easy
listening
The music industry sells classical
as soothing background music —
robbing a great art of its power.
By Jennifer Gersten
NOVEMBER 30, 2018
  
I
f classical music really sounded
the way it’s described in radio
ads, composers would have
fallen asleep while writing it. “You’ve
found an oasis — a place where you
can get away from all the craziness,”
intones WCLV, a station in Lorain,
Ohio, in a recent promotion. “Take
some time to relax.” “Calming and
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04/12/2018 The music industry sells classical as soothing background music — robbing a great art of its power. - The Washington Post
refreshing,” KBAQ, a Phoenix
station, declares. “Rise above it all,”
the District’s own WETA proclaims.
These stations regularly offer more
raucous selections than these
exhortations suggest, but they are
advertising themselves as musical
sanitariums. The San Francisco-
based station KDFC even offers a
daily “island of sanity,” including
slow pieces by Mozart, Debussy and
Bach, in the interest of tempering
rush hour woes.
Across streaming
Outlook • Perspective
services like
Jennifer Gersten, a doctoral student in
violin performance at Stony Brook University, YouTube and
is an editor at Guernica and the winner of Spotify, countless
the 2018 Rubin Prize for Music Criticism. 
Follow @jenwgersten videos and
Illustration by Johanna Goodman for The playlists suggest a
Washington Post; Orchestra photos by Getty
Images quest for soporific
supremacy. On
YouTube, user
HALIDONMUSIC’s “8 HOURS
Classical Music for Sleeping” is a
favorite, with 3 million views. The
pieces on this playlist — Debussy’s
“Clair de lune” and Ravel’s “Pavane
pour une infante défunte” among
them — reward attention, but their
presentation implies they have all the
artistic heft of NyQuil. The album
“The Most Relaxing Classical Music
in the Universe” has inspired a legion
of imitators, including “The Ultimate
Most Relaxing Classical Music in the
Universe”; the two at least agree
about the inclusion of Beethoven’s
“Für Elise.”
Classical music, considered broadly,

represents an irreducible font of
sounds. The bristling harmonies of
Claudio Monteverdi, cutting yowls of
Leos Janacek and multidimensional
textures of Maryanne Amacher offer
powerful rejoinders to anyone
tempted to assume that all of this
music is the same, or similarly
placid. But popular discussions
promote the notion that it was
invented to address a yawn shortage.
Works like Beethoven’s “Moonlight”
Sonata and Vivaldi’s “The Four
Seasons” are not played to be heard
and felt, but rather as precursors to a
nap.
This is a deeply
Let the works on this playlist, spanning

unsatisfying way to
centuries and styles, lead you to new describe one of our
conclusions about the classical genre.
most storied art
Beyond Musical Sedativ…
forms. Even music
washingtonpost
that is superficially
Peter Grimes: "Storm" calm and slow can
Royal Concertgebouw Orc… contain depth,
Sonata No. 6 In E Major: Al…
tension and
Eugène Ysaÿe, Henning Kr…
difficult themes.
L'Oiseau de feu / 1. Tableau…
Igor Stravinsky, Sydney Sy… The industry sells
Six Melodies for Violin and … classical music as a
John Cage, Patricia Kopatc…
mellow monolith
Percussion Concerto: III. S…
Yi Chen, Evelyn Glennie, Si… when it is in fact
Salome, Op.54, TrV 215 / S… capable of stirring
Richard Strauss, Berliner P…
any and all
emotions, serving
any and all ends — divine and
hellish. The way we talk about
culture, any culture, shapes how we
think about it, so we should not be so
narrow in our choice of language.
A privilege of art is that our

experiences will vary. We are at
liberty to think that a work is
soothing, or that it is boring, or
titillating, or a blight upon the
senses, and then to change our
minds, and then to change our minds
again. Insisting that classical music
is a proxy for a day at the spa
prescribes a proper reaction to this
music before we have even begun to
listen. Art yields its best results when
we engage all our critical faculties,
rather than confining our responses.
Every genre (save perhaps thrash

metal) features works that many
would consider relaxing. Monet’s
impressionist haystacks and the
Home Shopping Network could be
described the same way. Why is
classical music in particular the
poster child for this feeling? One
reason might be advertisers’
desperation about classical’s inability
to draw large crowds. The graying of
the classical music audience is a
perennial concern for arts
organizations and radio stations:
According to a 2015 National
Endowment for the Arts report, a
decade ago 45-to-64-year-olds had
the highest rate of attendance at
classical music performances; by
2012, it was the 65-to-74-year-old
cohort. So marketers are
understandably hunting for concepts
that might get more people to pay
attention, even if those concepts
come at the music’s expense. Selling
classical as a balm for anxiety thus
might seem like a way to lower the
bar of entry for music widely
perceived as inaccessible.
Illustration by Johanna Goodman for The

Washington Post; Orchestra photos by Getty
Images
But the “relaxing” pitch is loaded.

Instead of casting classical music as
multifarious, this language presents
it as a form of self-care, serving the
same function as hundred-dollar
candles and thousand-dollar skin
serums. The drive to simplify this
music as “relaxing,” then, is a cousin
to the related practice of using
classical music as a shorthand for
class privilege. Our culture has long
envisioned classical music as
entertainment for the wealthy:
People with money don their Sunday
best to doze through renditions of
the same 10 symphonies by the same
10 composers who all look the same.
This stereotype persists even as the

landscape of classical and new-music
offerings has become more varied
and open-minded, thanks in part to
enterprising chamber groups like
Eighth Blackbird and the
International Contemporary
Ensemble, which are helping to bring
new voices in classical music to a
broader public. The idea that
classical music is always relaxing
shares a problem with the idea that it
is merely entertainment for the
upper crust: Both seek to put
classical music into a padlocked box,
when a more enlightened view of the
music would come from encouraging
us to to think about it for ourselves.
I am a musician, and I am currently

trying, with mixed results, to render
a listenable account of J.S. Bach’s
second sonata for solo violin. One of
the greatest composers of all time,
Bach is nevertheless a consummate
target of the anti-stress campaign.
It’s true, his “Air on the G String” is
the musical equivalent of cucumber
circles and a massage, and the third
movement of the sonata I am
playing, the Andante, meets some
expectations of how a relaxing work
should sound. It is on the slower side
and features a sweet melody,
characteristics that might even seem
divine on the occasions that I am deft
enough to play it in tune. The fourth
movement, however, comes from a
vastly different sonic world, zipping
through a number of dynamic shifts
and surprising colors. No easy
characterization of this work suffices,
certainly not any offered by classical
music’s misguided promoters.
We should also be
Related
wary of the idea that
I’m a musician who can’t play
music anymore. I feel like I’m classical music is more
letting my heroes down.
spiritually elevated
I used to love playing violin. But than any other genre
mastering it broke my heart.
(“Rise above it all”), as
though angels had
smooched every score. Listening to
Bach is better for you than listening
to Ariana Grande, this thinking goes,
because Bach’s music is somehow
more intellectual, stimulating and
deserving of contemplation. This
attitude, too, fuels the drive to
oversimplify classical music — so it
seems less daunting. But if the
prevailing impression of classical is
that it is hard to comprehend, then
people are going to interact with it at
a remove. Too much energy is wasted
on futile attempts to convince people
that classical music is uniquely worth
our time, and not enough is spent on
encouraging people to come to the
music with few preconceptions and
feel it on their own terms: as
arousing, repulsive, lulling,
everything in between.
Many people admire and appreciate

classical music for its ability to
provide a sense of peace, and that is
nothing to snub. Yet we should think
harder about how the language we
choose shapes how people
experience this art form — especially
those encountering it for the first
time. Music will forever be an object
of worship for its ability to call forth
and defy descriptive language; our
fascination with it stems in part from
how there is never enough to say. If
we push too hard to circumscribe
classical music’s power, we may put
it to sleep forever.

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04/12/2018 The music industry sells classical as soothing background music — robbing a great art of its power.

f its power. - The Washington Post

Classical music, considered broadly,

Let the works on this playlist, spanning

A privilege of art is that our

Every genre (save perhaps thrash

Illustration by Johanna Goodman for The

But the “relaxing” pitch is loaded.

This stereotype persists even as the

I am a musician, and I am currently

Many people admire and appreciate

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