calimac

This was my harmony instructor's favorite story:

There was a composer who wanted to train his children to love modern music. So when he gave them their milk, he played Schoenberg, and when he took it away, he played Mozart.

So of course you know what happened. When they grew up, they hated milk.

What makes that story funny is that it really is possible to generate dislike of music by aversion therapy. Anthony Burgess put that to use in A Clockwork Orange, and now it appears - this is the reason for this post - that classical music aversion is now actually being practiced in Britain, although it appears that what the authorities think they're doing is using it for pacification control, which is just as creepy.

The story also discusses another phenomenon I've read of before, the use of classical music on sound systems as a non-harmful way of discouraging crowds of adolescents from hanging around. In this case it's not generating aversion but playing on existing aversion. I consider this practice hilarious, as it would have positively attracted me to hang around. And indeed, though I love the music for its own merits, the fact that the louts who made attending school with them so unpleasant preferred other types was an incidental attraction to it for me.

However, one incidental comment in the article irritates me as much as anything it describes. The author, Brendan O'Neill, quotes one practitioner as saying that "the most successful deterrent music included: Pastoral Symphony by Beethoven, Symphony No. 2 by Rachmaninov and Piano Concerto No. 2 by Shostakovich," and then adds, "that last one I can kind of understand."

What a yahoo. This could only be said by someone who'd never heard the work in question. "Ooh, it's modern music: it must be noisy and ugly."

Excuse me, Mr. O'Neill, but this is Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2:

Watch on YouTube