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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
I am officially gone from
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.
No one young enough to be doing street crime REMEMBERS that movie.
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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.
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.