Once again, we find ourselves hurtling towards revision season. Spurred on by distant dreams of May Balls and garden parties, we lock in, hit the library and study hard. Everyone has different strategies for surviving this ritual sacrifice of our mental state. For most, headphones play a crucial part, blocking out distractions while allowing us to take the edge off with some music.

Preferences for study tunes vary. I walked into a revision space last Easter to find someone hard at work to the ‘Underground Theme’ from the Super Mario Bros soundtrack … to each their own. Many – like a recent contributor to this section, who blasts out essays to film scores and Tchaikovsky ballets – find themselves turning to classical music, a genre they might not otherwise listen to. But how does this association of the genre with studying shape our engagement with it, and the very industry it supports?

“The selling point is that people don’t even need to pay attention to it”

The high demand for easy listening classical music is evident in the copious supply of it. The BBC, for example, recently launched a new radio stream called Radio 3 Unwind, filled with ambient synths, soft piano tones, and more reverb than a bass drum in a French Cathedral. Spotify is the true bastion of this sub-genre, though, its algorithm serving up playlist after generic playlist of ‘Calming Classical’, ‘Peaceful Piano’, and ‘Music for Concentration’, providing hours of uneventful music curated to recede into the subconscious of its listeners. This trend has helped launch some of the most successful composing careers of this century – figures like Max Richter and Ludovico Einaudi have reached millions with music that strikes the perfect balance of being nice but not interesting. I’m always amused by the anecdote that Richter’s project “Sleep”, an 8-hour composition literally intended to put its audience to sleep, was inspired by his own wife dozing off while listening to his concerts virtually from other time zones, which hardly feels like a ringing endorsement for the music. A few decades ago, classical music tried to find a popular audience through pseudoscience about Mozart making babies smarter; now, the selling point is that people don’t even need to pay attention to it.

Taking a historical view of the genre, this is a somewhat curious development. Back in Tchaikovsky’s day, the only way to hear a full ballet was to go to the ballet and watch the ballet, which is perhaps a sub-optimal location for completing academic work. In such environments, generally speaking, it was supposed that audiences would at least be paying some attention to the music being performed. Music had its quiet, sustained, and gentle moments, of course, but almost invariably within a larger whole featuring a range of moods to maintain interest across its duration, in stark contrast to the hours of almost identical music populating today’s study playlists. The emergence of background listening habits is clearly linked with recent technological developments, such as the streaming services that give us access to all this material, and the headphones which allow us private, portable listening experiences. There is only a point in creating music to accompany more cognitively demanding activities if it is physically possible for people to listen to it whilst doing so. Given that this is the case, the recent proliferation of such music is perhaps unsurprising.

“The pieces chosen for this playlist represent but one tiny sliver of these musicians’ work”

What is more interesting than music created specifically for these new listening habits is how classical music from before the recording age is being selectively co-opted for this purpose. Taking a look at the snappily named ‘Classical Study Music for Focus’ playlist on Spotify, we find the usual suspects of modern background classical like Richter, Einaudi, and Radio 3 Unwind stalwart Ólafur Arnalds. Their music is intermingled, however, with that of bygone figures of the classical repertoire, including J.S. Bach, Dmitri Shostakovich, and even Franz Liszt. Taking only the pieces chosen for this playlist – lyrical second movements, rolling andantes, lullabies, romances – you’d be forgiven for imagining these musicians to be the Richters of their day. Of course, anyone familiar with Bach’s haunting depictions of death in works like Komm, süsser Tod and the St. John Passion, Shostakovich’s violent scenes of war and conflict in the 7th and 11th symphonies, and pretty much anything by Liszt knows otherwise. The pieces chosen for this playlist represent but one tiny sliver of these musicians’ work.

If one were being cynical, it might be suggested that the packaging of classical music for background listening is predicated on passing this rich and varied repertoire through the filter of what is most easily ignored. On the other hand, going through flashcards is hardly the time for contemplating the horrors of the Bolshevik revolution. I just advocate, then, for people to dig a little deeper into the music of those composers they study too, listen to the odd finale, attend a live concert, pay attention to it, and realise that classical music is, in fact, often not very relaxing or easy to tune out.

Want to share your thoughts on this article? Send us a letter to letters@varsity.co.uk or by using this form