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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.'"
Maybe they got a 'Händel' on crime.
[...]has shown early signs of success, though the numbers are so small as to be statistically insignificant [...]
In other words, no significant effect of the music on crime statistics has been measured. Or am I missing something?
The first and foremost advantage is to have a pleasant wait for your train. I would love to have classical music at my train stations.
If it can act as a deterrent for inamical people, I take it as a bonus.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and Strauss - The Gangbusters
"When all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail."
This isn't a particularly new idea. I know that certain shopping centres here in the UK have been using it for quite some time.
I've got mixed feelings. It's certainly unpleasant to have large groups of feral youths hanging around shopping centres and in principle, something that encourages them to be elsewhere without much fuss is a good thing. On the other hand... it just shifts the problem around. I'd rather have the gang of feral youths stood menacingly inside the brightly lit CCTV-infested shopping centre than in the unlit, unguarded car park outside.
At least using music for this is better than some of the alternatives. I know that one idea that was briefly used was high pitched noise emitters - the theory being that with young people generally being able to hear higher ranges than adults, only they would be irritated by the noise. I objected to this one very strongly indeed - the noise was outright painful (my hearing is odd - I'm bad at sorting conversation from background noise, but seem to have retained my ability to hear very high ranges) and it was indiscriminate. It was offensive to the "good kid" going shopping for their parents as it was to the feral youth looking for his next mugging victim. I seem to remember that particular trick had to be pulled due to legal reasons.
I guess I also have some gut concerns about whether this impinges on rights such as freedom of assembly. I guess if it's being used on private property, then it's fine. On subways... that seems a bit more morally dubious.
And as for the choice of music... I don't think classical music lovers should be particularly offended. Though as somebody who is relatively fond of classical music, I will admit that taken out of place, it can be intrusive. Anybody reading this who commutes through London's Victoria Station will be aware that every few weeks they have some opera singer (and supporting instrumentation) there, collecting money for a cancer research charity. I know it's for a good cause and I shouldn't whinge but... when you're waiting for a delayed train and just want to get home after a long day, the singing, while perfectly "cultured", due to its volume and pitch, can be as intrusive and offensive as blazingly loud gangsta rap would be.
Just moves the crime so its haydn somewhere else.
Since when do the real numbers matter? What really matters is that some politician has shown to "Fight against Crime" (note the capital letters, those are important).
People demand that action is taken against the nuisances and crime. Whether the action actually works is really not so important, as the results of pretty much every election around the world show.
A feeling of safety is far more emotional than rational. So, go away with your statistics, and leave us emotional non-rational people alone.
And obviously, in about a year from now, we demand Action against Crime. Again.
...subway.. elevator.. is there a real difference?
"His name was James Damore."
Clearly the Ludovico Technique is required to make this subway program actually work.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
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I woke up. The pain and sickness all over me like an animal. Then I realized what it was. The music coming up from the floor was our old friend, Ludwig Van, and the dreaded Ninth Symphony.
They can't do that because they would have to pay for every time they played any of the songs. One of the advantages of using Bach, Handel and Mozart is that no one is collecting royalties on their music and you can find royalty free performances. So they can play the music 24/7 without having to pay anyone for that performance.
I'm 38 years old. Definitely not a troublemaker. I have a legitimate reason to be waiting at train stations.
And I hate Handel and Mozart. Why should I be subjected to it?
Also, I can clearly hear those high pitched "mosquito" tones that are meant to disperse young people. Again, why should I be subjected to it?
And what about law abiding young people?
all this means is that anyone witnessing a crime there will feel like they're watching a Clockwork Orange.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Playing classical music that is no longer protected by copyright and performed for the purpose of free redistribution/public performance keeps the IP lawyers away. They can't stand to hear anything that cannot be used as the basis of a lawsuit. Interestingly enough, keeping the lawyers off the streets may reduce crime more than keeping rowdy teens away.
We may be on to something here... what can we play in public places to keep bank execs away? Anyone have audio transcripts of Congressional inquiries into the subprime mortgage crisis? I'd like to play that loudly on my phone the next time I'm standing in line at the bank... if everyone did that, it would be better than a sea of Guy Fawkes masks.
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".
It will work for awhile. But once everyone starts doing it everywhere, a new strain of harpsichord-loving crack dealer will emerge and be more difficult to eradicate. They'll try changing the music to polka, which will work for awhile. The city needs to decide who the people are and talk to them. Otherwise these effects are like a bright kitchen light on cockroaches, it doesn't get to the root of the city's problems. Who knows, maybe these kids are like the hippies whom city elders wanted off the lawns and parks in 1966. Maybe there's a Steve Jobs or Wozniak milling around under the streetlights. I know a lot of really nice high school kids who'd probably leave if you played classical music at them... which was always the problem with that soap, it killed the good bacteria and let staph grow in its place.
Gently reply
They'll probably still need the same number of security people. But reduced crime is a benefit in itself. More people willing to ride the subway means more revenue. More tourism maybe, fewer people in jail soaking up tax dollars, etc.
Hopefully, over time, this will attract a better class of muggers.
Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore
Galloping through the sward
Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore
And his horse Concorde
He steals from the rich
And gives to the poor
Mr. Moore, Mr. Moore, Mr. Moore
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.
They could, as an alternative, start playing avant-modern classical, like Penderecki, Webern, Xenakis. The subway station with the least crime is the one with no patrons at all.
There's plenty of classical music with emotional depth less than http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABWyXKT5qt4, and plenty of rock with highly layered complexity.
I think a lot of it has to do with identity; teens are typically looking for something to distinguish themselves from their parents yet associate with their peers. A musical style which is not like previous music styles is an ideal medium to do so, especially if their parents hate it. This has been the case for many generations, including what we now call "classical music".
As a nice side effect, this produces a constant stream of musical (re)-invention with the occasional masterpiece that every person could enjoy.
The rest will be forgotten just like all mediocre musicians/composers/artists in times of classical music.
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Rock/Rap are variants that have stemmed from minimalist music.
...no. There is certainly rock music out there that incorporates elements of minimalist music, but rock came directly from blues, which came from a combination of jazz, folk and Christian gospel music.
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.
More people willing to ride the subway means more revenue.
What about the people (of all ages) less willing to ride the subway because of the irritating music?
That is not totally true. They need to pay the people who performed/made for the recording. Sure the royalties are not as base. In addition many have some blanket deals for music in public places, these are quite affordable no matter what music you play.
There are a lot of public domain performances. Duke University, for example, places a lot of performances of classical pieces by their orchestras into the public domain, as do several state orchestras around the world.
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Your proposition is interesting, but wrong.
For instance, there's absolutely no influence on Chuck Berry's Johnny B Goode (1958) or Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel (1956) from Terry Riley's In C (1964) or Steve Reich's Come Out (1965). You're right that minimalism influenced a lot of later bands, but there's a clear tradition (as far as anyone can tell, developed mostly by African-Americans) in both rock and rap music stemming from blues that has little if anything to do with the minimalist composers.
The biggest barrier to classical music influencing kids is not the complexity of the emotional content, it's that there are frequently no words (which prevents a lot of people from thinking they understand it) and that popular culture has put a big effort into making it seem like classical music is only for dorks and old people. This is why I like introducing kids to heavy metal versions of Vivaldi.
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But I do not care for classical music, so when I go to the station I will put in my ear buds and be rachmaninoff.
Silence is a state of mime.
I would be interested in heavy metal versions of Vivaldi, too. Links, please?
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9ETgswXg1E
Possibly the nadir of Western civilization.
Yes the music is in the public domain, but not the performance.
The article says that
'Metro Transit bought the recordings for $150 from a company that offers the dead composers among "royalty-free" selections.'
I take that to mean it is a public domain performance, too.
No one young enough to be doing street crime REMEMBERS that movie.
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Love in a subway is something very different from love in an elevator.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWx_GyTLGmQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdp2hEsc2kg
There are plenty of others. Actually, Vivaldi really lends itself to rocking out - he's all about a pounding along to a strong beat. Although not quite as much of a star musician as Beethoven, what with his crazy hair, deafness, and syphilis.
I am officially gone from
Could you please list these rock and hip-hop songs that are vastly rhythmically, emotionally, and tonally more sophisticated than any of the popular Bach, Mozart, Handel, and Beethoven era works (which covers roughly 125 years, and includes many works that are generally considered crowning achievements of Western civilization)? I have no idea what you mean about your Radiohead/Magic Flute comparison, but writing such nonsense as "Jimi Hendrix throws more sophisticated chords into a single song than you'll hear in the whole of Don Giovanni" suggests you have never listened to any of Mozart's operas. Never.
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).
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Intentionally leaving out 3/4 and 6/8, because those are too common. Oh, and also leaving out the more "proggy" bands like Tool and Dream Theater, because then this would be too easy.
Money by Pink Floyd (7/4)
Four Sticks by Led Zeppelin (5/4)
Spoonman by Soundgarden (7/4)
Silhouette by Thrice (4/4 and 7/4)
Words in the Water and Hold Fast Hope bu Thrice (5/4)
Before the Lobotomy (middle section in 7/8)
March of the Pigs by Nine Inch Nails (29/8)
Time Like These by Foo Fighters (main riff in 7/8)
Paranoid Android by Radiohead (sections in 7/4)
Pyramid Song by Radiohead (16/8, piano plays in groups in 3-3-4-3-3)
Idiotique by Radiohead (6/4 drums, 4/4 vocals)
Everything In It's Right Place by Radiohead (10/4)
15 Step by Radiohead (5/4)
2+2=5 by Radiohead (7/8)
Are there a ton? No. But are there really THAT many songs in the classical realm that aren't 4/4, 3/4, 6/8 either?
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.
In Japan they've been playing music in the Toyoko subway for some time now. They also have a theme for each station and the music plays to announce the departure of the trains. A rider on the train can know what station they are at by the music. The Takadanobaba station plays the theme to Tetsuwan Atom (Astroboy) since that is where Tezuka set Atom's birthplace.
Clearly a huge chunk of rock/pop is three-chord-trick blues-derivative in 4-4, but even if that's 95%, the remaining 5% is significant.
Thanks for making my point and countering your own. Can we reduce or describe classical compositions in the same manner? Probably not. Classical compositions reach a complexity that is simply not describable nor reducible the way modern pop/rock is.
Well, we'd have to do some kind of survey. But my instinct is that 90% of classical music is 4/4, 3/4 ditties using conventional chord progressions in exactly the same way as 90% of pop music is. We can find exceptions on both sides, but they don't represent the mainstream on either side. Pachabel's Canon is no more sophisticated than A Whiter Shade of Pale although I suppose it has the distinction of doing it first.
You are deluding yourself. Hendrix's chordal structures are no different than any other blues artists' chordal structures. Blues is merely a simplification of Jazz. His structures are NOT complex by any stretch of the imagination... (root, 3rd, 5th, or root, minor 3rd, 5th... a diminshed 7th now and again... and precious little else) ... To suggest that Hendrix's music is more complex or richer than Bach's is patently ridiculous, on its face.
I'll maintain that it's more harmonically complex than the popular Mozart works (you'll note I'm backing away from Bach as an example). He's introducing 9ths and diminished 4ths and many more "odd" intervals. I don't want to get into a "Hendrix was special" argument though. You're right, he was just playing blues well. *Lots* of blues musicians use more complex chords than Mozart's market allowed him.
A six string guitar is a very simple instrument, compared to, say, a piano or an orchestra. The guitar is actually quite limited... because of its construction, most songs will be composed in the major keys of G, D, E, or A, or their relative minors.
But complex compared to a 4 stringed violin, or a monophonic flute, so I don't really see your point. Good guitarists play in any key, by virtue of not using open strings. Crap guitarists can fake it with a capo. Creative rockers experiment with alternative tunings. Rock music is made on pianos too. And in groups ranging from two people to a full orchestra.
12/8? I don't think so. Perhaps I exaggerated a bit... but a counter-example doesn't make your point. So the majority is 4/4, with a minimum of songs in 3/4, and 5/4. And that's it. 3 signatures. But my point is made once you agreed that the vast majority is 4/4. Being that there are some counter-examples of pop songs in the other two signatures does not support the argument that modern pop/rock is richer or more musically complex than classical.Â
This is silly. The vast majority of classical music is in 4/4 or 3/4 too. You're talking as if the classical canon is full of wacky time signatures. The popular classical pieces we're talking about certainly aren't. The 7/8, 5/4, 9/8 songs are outliers in classical music just as they are in rock. And that the case because the audiences can't tap their foot to them.
12/8 is the standard "slow blues" signature (Fleetwood Mac's "Need your love so bad" and hundreds of similar songs).
Further, your infatuation with Radiohead likely has more to do with production than composition... Personally, I feel I can reduce Radiohead to its core: what makes Radiohead original is the drummer. And even moreso... the drummers obsession with constantly banging the cymbals. [...] From my perspective, IMHO, Radiohead's "sound" is merely the evolution or resurgence of the popularity of the "sound" of Liverpool/Manchester movements, like Oasis and Blur...
I dunno what Radiohead album you've been listening to. We can agree they have a good drummer though :)
I studied classical music quite seriously in my college days, and still write and perform a fair amount of it.
My point was that popular music almost universally includes vocals as the musical focus, whereas classical music does not. Many casual listeners of most musical genres focus solely on the words because that's what they understand best, and because symphonies and sonatas and most classic dance pieces don't have words, there's nothing for these listeners to relate to. In addition, these listeners often speak or understand only English, which means that if they're listening to most of the vocal classical repertoire, they again don't understand the words and thus don't enjoy it.
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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.
"Ma'am, can you tell us when your purse was snatched?"
"Yes officer, it was just before the 'Alle Menschen werden Brüder' chorale in the fourth movement."
(Please note this is a response to multiple children of this parent posting, not the parent post itself.)
Normally I don't bother to respond to the uninformed commentary that often gets posted on Slashdot, but I couldn't help myself. Here we have multiple people passing off elementary amounts of music theory they've absorbed from somewhere as evidence they have an informed opinion supporting their notion that "populist" classical music is not as "complex" as some rock or rap music (which they haven't offered any examples of).
First of all, we have more than one person claiming that "complex" chords used in rock (infrequently at that) are more "sophisticated" than what was used in classical music of the 18th and 19th centuries. One poster states "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." Sevenths are more than "possibly occasional" in Mozart's work: they're pretty fundamental to some progressions. (And dominant seventh chords -- among the most commonly used and "traditional" -- contain augmented fourths.) If someone can't hear that, they're not arguing intelligently, and I would infer they don't really understand what they're listening to. (If they were to say "Hendrix was more baldly obvious about throwing these intervals into his chords", then yes, I would agree.)
Furthermore, to stick with Mozart, consider his String Quartet in Eb, K428. The opening measures feature, yes, a prominent augmented fourth, and further chromatic harmony. (There are more examples where that came from. Some of Mozart's "Haydn quartets" were sent back by the engraver, who thought they were "riddled with errors" because of the dissonances, whole-tone progressions, and such Mozart employed at times.) Of course, Mozart's aim wasn't to create something stark-sounding that didn't resolve, as that would fundamentally not have fit with the overall form he was trying to create.
Ah, yes, musical form, something completely missing from this discussion of "complexity", where people are claiming Mozart, Beethoven, et al. are not "complex" as some random favourites of theirs. Classical music from roughly the time of Haydn on carries a significant component of its dramatic message in its form, that is, how the music is developed over time. A decision made by a composer at one point will potentially have dramatic ramifications minutes later as the piece unfolds. This is rather different from pop music, where typically very simple elements are repeated over and over again, or in the case of some "progressive rock", somewhat simple elements are baldly juxtaposed "with the subtlety of a blowtorch" (to borrow a phrase of a critic mocking Emerson, Lake, and Palmer which I particularly liked -- the phrase, that is). An understanding of form and musical development is much more significant in appreciating the music than the simple recognition of "a few conventional harmonic structures" (misleading as that statement is). (I would also hazard a guess that these posters are not very familiar with 20th/21st century composition that grew out of the classical tradition, but that's another topic.)
Similarly, there are many dissonant progressions in a lot of Baroque music, as the understanding and application of harmony was different in that time, because those composers' idea of musical form was in turn different. Bach was less concerned about resultant harmonic effects than he was with counterpoint.
Ah, yes, counterpoint, something else missing from this discussion. Counterpoint is the art of creating multiple melodies that sound simultaneously. If anyone on here seriously can find a rock song that can compete with Bach's "Art of the Fugue" in terms of complexity (and perhaps more importantly, skill of execution at that level of complexity), and has the ability to convincingly detail their argument, I will eat my socks. Part of the marvel of Bach is what he did with counterpoint while