Western classical music has been celebrated for its capacity to enlighten, to move, and as proponents of the Mozart effect suggest, improve listeners’ mental capacity. However, over the past 30 years in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, classical music has also come to function not just as art or entertainment but as a sonic weapon. It has been used as a means of dispelling and deterring so-called “loiterers” by making certain public and privately owned public spaces, including shopping malls, bus stations, shop fronts, and car parks undesirable to occupy.
The origins of such practice began in 1985 when a branch manager of a 7-Eleven convenience store in British Colombia, Canada began broadcasting classical and easy listening music into the store’s parking lot to prevent local teenagers from congregating. Since then, classical music has been used as a deterrent on public transport systems in Portland, Oregon, in library foyers to deter smokers and loiterers in Canada, and in train stations of northeast England, where the broadcasting of music by the composer Frederick Delius targeted what was described as “low level antisocial behavior”.
Ted Crow/Washington PostIn such cases, the weaponization of Western music can be recognized as an audio-affective technology of what Neil Smith (1996,1998) called “the revanchist city”, resonating with the spatial logics of urban revanchism–drawing comparisons with the mixture of militarism and moralism that characterized the bourgeois, reactionary revanchists of late-19th century Paris. In this context, it becomes a means to affectively police the boundaries of public space, guarding against unwanted and threatening populations. There is also, however, an apparent tension in the audio-affective functioning of Western classical music as a deterrent. Although classical music is thought to improve the undesirable behavior attributed to loitering because of its capacity to soothe and calm, it also drives away and inhibits loiterers by generating negative affections (i.e., sensations of irritation, alienation, and annoyance). While affect has been posited as a site of freedom by comparison to the predictability of social determinisms, weaponized classical music exemplifies how musical affect can reproduce social stratification.
Learn more in “To soothe or remove? Affect, revanchism, and the weaponized use of classical music” by Marie Thompson (Communication and the public II/4 [December 2017], 272–283). Find this journal in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature.
Listen to Frederick Delius’ On hearing the first cuckoo in Spring below.
