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Mozart and Bach Handel Subway Station Crime
Hugh Pickens writes "The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that transit officials have started to get a handel on subway crime when they started playing Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and Strauss at the Lake Street light-rail station after neighborhood residents complained about the station becoming a haven for rowdy teens and vagrants. 'If it encourages some people to wander away because it's not their favorite type of music, I guess that's OK,' says Acting Transit Police Chief A.J. Olson. The program is modeled after one is Portland that has shown early signs of success, though the numbers are so small as to be statistically insignificant and even supporters of the music haven't reached a consensus on whether such environmental changes actually deter crime or just push it down the block. Not everyone is sold on using 'lovely lovely Ludwig Van' as a deterrent. 'Classical music lovers hate the fact that urban planners use classical music to disperse youth,' says Minneapolis City Council Member Gary Schiff. 'Does it chase crime away?' adds Olson. 'It's hard to measure. But I do think it makes it a more pleasant place to wait for a train.'"
Yeah - a couple of years ago I was on a Malaysia Airlines flight out of Mumbai. We were still on the ground when all of a sudden the PA system went: "This is an emergency. Oxygen masks will drop from the compartment above your head. Please place one over your face and ensure that the is securely fastened before assisting other passengers and children". The next thing that happened was the PA playing "The Girl from Ipanema". My only thought was that in a genuine emergency the last thing I will hear while "going down" is a piece of elevator music. How thoughtfully ironic!!!
Meus subcriptio est nocens Latin quoniam bardus populus reputo is sanus callidus
It is probably very cheap since the music is public domain and the speakers is probably already in place. For scientific purposes they should not only compare the classical music with not music but also with a music perceived as crime inducing, such as gangsta rap.
When asked why, the answer is almost always: "It's 2014".
Every train station I've seen, including simple platforms, has most of the equipment for this anyway. In this case you've just got music playing the whole time and some kind of ducker to quash the music when the announcements play.
They may not know for sure if it's working yet, but this seems like one of the least complicated or expensive options to try out. It certainly beats hiring more security, the presence of which only makes things seem worse.
Rock/Rap are variants that have stemmed from minalist music. Their appeal musically (when you ignore the words) is a more primal emotion. Clasical period music was designed to express more complex set of emotions.
Teens in general are just full of primal emotions so they are attracted by rock and rap, when they get older and their primal forces cool down they start to enjoy classical music as it begins to reach them emotionally.
Now when kids are exposed to the music it gets their brain working as it exercises those emotions that are not much in practice. So they will leave as some how the exersize is too much for them to handle, or they will try to embrace it and giving more work to the brain and temporary quelling those primal urges.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Patronising, over-general and wrong, in my opinion.
Some rock and hip-hop is indeed very basic and primal, and good luck to 'em. The Stooges can get the juices flowing as effectively as Wagner (presumably this tube station isn't playing Ride Of The Valkyries in an attempt to calm teenagers down...).
Some rock and hip-hop is vastly more rhythmically, emotionally and tonally sophisticated than any of the popular Bach, Mozart, Handel, Beethoven era works. The post-Kid-A Radiohead albums would have many people scurrying back to The Magic Flute for something less emotionally and technically challenging. Jimi Hendrix throws more sophisticated chords into a single song than you'll hear in the whole of Don Giovanni.
I'm old enough to have "cooled down" into classical music by now. I think there are probably 20th century composers I could enjoy -- Shostakovich perhaps. But when I listen to the big names, I find it all a bit pedestrian; hemmed in to a few conventional harmonic structures and a fixed sonic palette.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9ETgswXg1E
Possibly the nadir of Western civilization.
Obviously this conversation isn't doesn't merit my trawling through 50 years of post-rock'n'roll music finding the good stuff.
I attended a Welsh National Opera performance of Don Giovanni late last year, and I enjoyed it. But, it's the pop music of it's time and it is decidedly populist in its ambitions. Simple story. Nice tunes. Harmonious backing in straight major and minor chords. Job done.
Hendrix habitually threw 7ths, 9ths, augmented 4ths into his chords; intervals which (apart from possibly the occasional 7th) Mozart's audiences would never have tolerated.
I was careful to limit my claim to the "popular Bach, Mozart, Handel and Beethoven works", because I'm sure there were works of greater sophistication written in that period and maybe by those people. But their popular works are popular because they're populist. And what makes them populist is that they are unchallenging.
Some rock and hip-hop is vastly more rhythmically, emotionally and tonally sophisticated than any of the popular Bach, Mozart, Handel, Beethoven era works. The post-Kid-A Radiohead albums would have many people scurrying back to The Magic Flute for something less emotionally and technically challenging. Jimi Hendrix throws more sophisticated chords into a single song than you'll hear in the whole of Don Giovanni.
Clearly, you haven't been listening closely enough. Of the entire catalog of rock/pop, close to 90% of it is in the Major keys of G, D, E, or A (pretty much in that order) and 100% uses progressions based on fifths, and exclusively with either ionian modes or a pentatonic scale, and rhythmically is always between 100bpm and 120bpm or multiples or derivitives of tempos in Moderato. In fact, I believe it is quite possible to reduce every single rock/pop song since to either one of David Bowie's offerings or that of Creedence Clearwater Revival. Thus, not more sophisticated, complex nor muscially richer than the classical compositions. Just try reducing Beethoven's works to that of Mozart's, or Mozart's to Bach's... certainly related, but not reducible.
btw, Hendrix is merely an exceptional blues guitar player. The Blues technically is reducable to one of two modes of Jazz, thus Jazz will be richer and more sophisticated than Blues, and you mention no Jazz artists.
And to suggest Kid Rock is a composer... is absurd. He's an entertainer and a businessman, recently a philanthropist... but I have serious doubts he will even achieve any footnote in history (no offense, Kid... you are loved).
The Admin and the Engineer
I read about a clever piece of work by some town officials in a German town to drive away teens hanging around a certain area at night (drinking and harrassing people).
What they did was install a light usually used by dermatologists which highlights unclean skin -- pimples and the like.
The teens stayed away.
Augmented 4th? When a guitarist does it, it's called an 11th. And it's almost always augmented. Otherwise it's a sus4.
Adding the seventh to a perfect cadence has been quite common since the 16th century, so I would hardly call that novel. Ninths and major sevenths are a fairly common occurrence in baroque music, though primarily as a passing dissonance for dramatic effect. The same could be said for 11th's and 13th's, too.
I don't think you are consistent by comparing "popular" classical works with the likes of Hendrix. If you take the whole of popular music today, you have maybe 80% of them using the same four or five chords (or two chords in some godforsaken cases). Most musicians are not Hendrix, and Hendrix is hardly "unchallenging."
So let's not pretend that Romantic music with its wild variations in tone and volume, and Classical music with its deceptive cadences and Neapolitan chords are anywhere near as boring and monotonous as the vast majority of crap that passes for "popular" music these days. You can either compare accessible music of both time periods, or cutting-edge brain-melting bad-ass-shit from both time periods.