The art of the baroque airline

It is interesting to note how classical music is becoming less of an elite activity, and more part of the rich fabric of our post-modern society where neither today nor yesterday occupies a privileged cultural position.  Through shrewd showmen - and sometimes great artists - like Galway and Pavarotti, and as a result of the constant appropriation of fine tunes by TV programmes and advertisements, people are coming to realise that it is merely inverted snobbery which stops them from enjoying the priceless riches of the standard repertoire.  It is therefore perhaps no surprise that airlines too have begun to use the soothing properties of such music for those crucial moments of take-off and landing.

In earlier times a synthetic muzak was piped in to the passenger cabin, presumably with the hope that it would act as a kind of aurally-administered narcotic.  Instead, of course, its mindless amusicality became like the nervous chatter of those terrified fliers whose manic conversation exposes their fear instead of concealing it.  With time, then, the undifferentiated take-off muzak became a danger signal, gradually producing a Pavlovian response of panic as surely as if a screeching siren had been used.

Recently it would seem that some bright spark in the marketing department, or perhaps some hugely overpaid consultant industrial psychologist, has come up with the idea of using real music - music which is trying to communicate and hence is recognisably different from other musics saying different things in different ways - as a way of circumventing the learned response to the repeated use of the same kind of music.  In itself, this development seems both sensible and praiseworthy.

Of course, unlike muzak, which by definition has no character, using music always implies choosing a particular piece - with all the cultural assumptions that implies and all the associated baggage it entails.   It is therefore interesting to note that the airline music of choice seems to be almost exclusively mid-baroque, with a tendency towards oboe concertos.

There are presumably a number of factors in the latter's favour: the solo instrument's perky sound, the fast-slow-fast structure with the emphasis on jolliness, and the sheer abundance of well-written and pleasing works in this genre.  Well-written but not great: you never hear any Bach as you take off or land.  Because the last thing you want is anything too heavy, too profound, too serious - simply because the moment itself is serious.

Hence my surprise to hear on one occasion as we taxied down the runway, not just classical rather than baroque music, but Mozart - and, moreover, the slow movement of the clarinet concerto.  Nothing perky here, nothing jolly or unserious; just sheer, inexplicable beauty.  So why was I so appalled, no, terrified when I heard this music?  Not just because by relegating it to the role of anodyne background music it tended to debase a work which deserved be listened to for itself.  It was because I understood instinctively that it was the very music that should be played in those last intense moments when the plane was about to crash.  This was music not just to die for, but to die to.

(14.3.92)

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