It is a truism that, for the student, the early summer is a bad time to be alive. Recalcitrant naval-gazing and exaggerated tremulousness in abundance, examinations season is spawning ground for excessively self-depleted academic pietism. How one wishes those third years would shut up about their awful ‘fear’. Ritalin, caffeine, cavalier biblioholism. Suffice it to say, it seems that this state of being is apparently well accompanied — or maybe alleviated — by switching on the wireless.

Classic FM’s recasting of selected tokens of ‘art-music’ canon as populist kitsch should be familiar to anyone who has lived in Britain for any length of time and hails from the echelons of the middle-middle-class or above. Assuming, that is, that one has not been rendered deaf by a childhood periodically punctuated by RAF air-shows.

Patently, Classic FM is not a exemplar piece of cultural capital. Small wonder, with such luminary disc jockeys as Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and David Mellor on its books. But besides its being the radiophonic equivalent of Osborne and Little flock wallpaper, there is something threatening about the station. What it exemplifies is a generalised ‘Mozart effect’. It is the self-perpetuating misconception that music is not merely to be appreciated; rather, listening to classical music is good for you.

Listenership predicated on the hope of mental betterment is plainly absurd. It is string quartets taken as brain-pills. Even the developers of the Weimarish notion of music as social exchange—that is, Gebrauchsmusik (‘music for use’)—did not arrogantly extend the musical transaction to the realm of subconscious psychological improvement.

That it is expected for this music to be imbibed subconsciously is almost a given. No-one who listens to Classic FM really listens to it, in the proper sense. One merely allows it to fill up the gaping silence which, ostensibly, is too mundane to be left alone; or too fearsome to be confronted. Indeed, this is the function of most radiophonic broadcasts—to distract us from the awkward blank actuality of the car interior, or the computationally-enhanced workstation. Radio stations, and particularly commercial ones, are variously flavoured bath salts, fizzing and bubbling and saturating the spaces into which they are poured. Air, like water, is expanded and frothed through their addition; to escape from a room steeped in Radio 2 is like trying to fight one’s way through air-turned-custard.

Moreover, the so-called Mozart effect is almost certainly horseshit besides. There is no evidence for its efficacy on children, and amongst adults its efficaciousness is negligible if not absent. Reliance on the Mozart effect is a disease of ignorant snob: one who knows nothing, nor seeks to know anything of the music being listened to; and is of the simultaneously held belief that such music is superior in its potential for intellectual betterment.

Classic FM is like Stalinist architecture. Its perceived virtues are bigness and monumentality. It is unashamedly populist and kitsch. It is designed to psychologically improve—and render docile—the demographic to which it is aimed. Its broadcasts are not to be critiqued, or subjected to interpretation, or even to be addressed in any intellectual sense at all; any intellectuality is removed to be replaced with psychic driving. It is defined by what it is not—it is not Heart, or Capital, or Radio 1 or 2. What it is, is empty, vacuous, patronising, terrifying. Out with authoritarian radio.  Appreciate silence instead.

 

(Photo by ABC Archives via Flickr/CreativeCommons)