Escape from the Gigue Zone

May 16, 2010

(photo of William Boyce by our staff photographer)

It’s a balmy Saturday morning in Georgetown. The infamous summer Potomac heat and humidity has yet to descend on the District of Columbia. I have a few hours to be a flaneur, walk along the river, dip into a bookstore and sit on a Dean & Deluca patio, studying the shapes and faces of passersby, most of them in their twenties and thirties, who are also out enjoying the spring weather.

Here in upscale Georgetown, Dean & Deluca, now like everything else in this country a huge corporate juggernaut, has nabbed some very choice real estate, and their store features not only a food counter and pricey wine store, but also an outdoor patio with metal tables and chairs. Inside the big store you’ll see DINKS in their business suits (or in their multicolored cycling outfits) shopping for dinner. The success of high-end deli stores like D&D is in their providing a kind of wholesome, “organic,” no-mess, no-fuss fast food for active business people who have neither the time nor inclination to cook their own. It’s not a bad idea—Market Hall, in the Rockridge district of Oakland, near where I live, also provides this, and I enjoy taking advantage of an easy solution to dinner now and then.

But today I am going to discover that the sonic environment is so over-the-top cheerful as to chase me away.

I order a cappucino, take a chair at an empty table in the outdoor patio, and try to read about Flaubert’s technique of mixing “dynamic” and “habitual” detail in a terrific book called “How Fiction Works” by James Wood. But I can tell very quickly that this plan is not going to be a success. The problem is THE MUSIC—aggressively chipper, over-amplifed Baroque music coming out of some dozen loudspeakers placed discreetly all over the cobblestone alley.

We need a musical Jacques Derrida to decode the way in which ambient music is selectively used in our culture to achieve the desired mood in targeted consumers. We need to know why it is that certain kinds of music are appropriate for precision environments where money is to exchange hands—how the choice of that music unlocks the urge to consume. Why does a given social gathering point—a store or a restaurant or any other kind of place where people congregate and become potential spenders—fit with a given style of music? Or even a given tempo, as in mm=120 for all Gap and Banana Republic stores?

What are the subliminal signals in the music that result in the choice of, for instance, the pounding, throbbing techno that invariably announces that you’ve stumbled into a fashion store; or the boozy Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra crooning that is the sonic carpet of every steak and chops restaurant in the country; or the quiet, regretful melancholy of Joni Mitchell and Kenny Rogers ballads in fern bars; or the feisty Bonnie Raitt and K.D. Laing songs that always seem to be playing in alternative coffee houses or vegan restaurants; or, as in my experience today, the Prozac-happy tooting of Baroque tumpets and flutes in bookstores and organic food stores like Dean & Deluca?

Interesting thought. But first I have to get up and move out of the Gigue Zone here or I’m liable to flip my wig. Someone has turned up the amplifier to a mindlessly high volume, but I seem to be the only one who finds what sounds like a William Boyce symphony truly irritating. No one else seems to mind, although I note that most people who are trying to hold a conversation are shouting to be heard.

What does the choice of this music mean? Telemann, Boyce, and various trio sonatas by composers I don’t recognize: in this particular case it’s definitely a choice by the owners of Dean & Deluca. They play only Baroque music, and I suspect it’s because they’ve been told by their marketing consultants that Baroque music (instrumental please—under no circumstances are we talking vocal) is code for “culture,” “disposable income,” and “taste.” If the Baroque music subliminally reminds you that you have these qualities, perhaps you actually deserve that $75 bottle of Caymus Merlot. After all…hmmm…you’ve earned it, right?

PBS, particularly in the era before it was seriously challenged by cable TV, just loved Baroque trumpets to death. The more of them the better—it went along with British-made tele-dramas, reworkings of Jane Austin or Dickens or Evelyn Waugh, programs that were inevitably hosted by someone speaking in a burnished BBC baritone. Was it Purcell in the background? Or some lesser bewigged court composer from seventeenth or eighteenth century London? Jeremiah Clarke? Or maybe it was “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” by G.F. Handel that gave PBS its air of good breeding?

The background Baroque music—you hear it (perhaps at a lower volume) in good bookstores as well—signifies that you are in a zone of like-minded educated people. (This is not a comment on Baroque music, but rather on the use of it by commercial forces—so hang fire, you Corelli cats.)

When I was a kid Dave Brubeck also signified a kind of educated hipness that went along with Joan Miró paintings, Black Label Scotch and books by Sartre and Camus. But to my knowledge “Take Five” never got dragged down into flogging filter cigarettes or Edsels.

Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” probably in a performance by Ann Sophie-Mutter, has been on occasion successfully employed to sell sleek, expensive German cars on American television.

Really, we should not complain. A few harmless trumpet voluntaries while one orders a half pound of Asiago is nowhere near as invasive as, say, having to listen to Three 6 Mafia at full volume in the Macy’s dressing room while you’re trying on some clothes. And furthermore, as you squeeze into that new shirt or pair of pants and peer into the mirror while “It’s Hard Out There for a Pimp” blares away from a speaker in the ceiling, just remember that you’re probably also being watched by the store’s internal security camera. Hard out there, and even harder in here.

Comments (11)

Paul
May 16, 2010

Hurrah for calling a spade a spade - rather like your comments after the Thursday NSO performance when you again warned of a certain crisis in "classical" music (serious music? formal music? concert music?) of expecting the form to be one particular harmless thing or another, rather than a baseline for expression which can take as many forms as anything literary - political, confrontational, erotic, sacrilegious, whatever. You well point out that when people open their wallets more - merely owing to an atmosphere that evokes, to them, an upper-class classiness that they covet - behind the curtain you'll only find manipulative "captains of industry" exploiting the nouveau riche who need to believe that their lives rival the best of anything they see on teevee.

Lucy
May 17, 2010

Tee hee! What bothers me is actually not the random baroque music (aka trumpet/wind concerto) per se, but rather the decision to play one movement from the piece at hand. Just enough time to start enjoying it (or hating it if it's a trumpet concerto--I guess the system has its merits) before... POOF... it disappears into another movement from another completely random, corporate-approved piece of classical music. Pete's coffee does this, as did the Halloween Superstore I visited in NYC on Thursday. And bad (bland/poorly performed) baroque music, just like bad new music, is particularly terrible because it gives the rest of a very intriguing, often adventurous genre a bad rep.

(As a side note, most classical music stations do little better. And vocal music on the airwaves? Please! They won't even do symphonies with choral bits unless it's a bombastic military holiday and they'd like some Beethoven to go with their fireworks.)

But, as we all know, it's hard out there for a pimp!

Richard Friedman
May 17, 2010

One place I was in started playing the Vivaldi Piccolo concerto. One of my favorites, actually. When the first Nonesuch recording came out in the mid 60's, it was played a lot at the Cafe Figaro in Greenwich Village, where I hung out most of the time. I bought the recording and learned to whistle the piccolo part. It's really hard, especially at the speed the Saar Chamber Orch, Karl Ristenpart cond., played it at. I don't think I can do it anymore, altho I've tried. So at this place I started whistling it as best I could. I recommend that as a "getting back" strategy.

We were in a very famous Japanese restaurant in Berkeley not too long ago. It was very noisy, and they sound system was blaring bad Afro-Cuban music. I asked the guy at the door why they were playing Afro-Cuban music in a Japanese restaurant? He didn't even know it was on. I suggested that at least they play some Japanese music. He thought that was a good idea, but they didn't have any. I told him that the music was making me want to leave. So he turned it off. On the way out he thanked me for the suggestion!

I wrote a blog entry a while back about a famous Spanish tapas place on Valencia St. in San Francisco that I went to, but the R&B music blasting over the system ruined it for me. Now Spain has some exceptionally good indigenous music, and not just Flamenco! So why this music from Detroit? Clearly, it was for the benefit of the staff and not the customers.

There's one Ethiopian place in Berkeley where they actually play Ethiopian music. Someone in Addis Ababa sends them tapes off the radio! It's like a welcomed garnish!

I once asked Carl Stone, who lives near Tokyo, to bring some Japanese pop music CDs next time he visits. He did, and we went to my fav local sushi joint in Oakland (now closed) and presented the owner with the CDs, hopefully to replace the terrible Japanese musak he was playing (on repeat). He did, and for a few hours we were treated to some remarkable nightclub music courtesy of Carl. A week later they were back to the old crap. Someone stole the CDs.

Wouldn't it be nice if ethnic restaurants played music of that culture! Or do they think it would scare customers away. A French restaurant wouldn't consider including franks and beans on the menu, but they will play the worst US pop music on the sound system. I don't get it.

Don't get me started!

Mixed Meters
May 17, 2010

As an long-time observer of the decidedly downscale Starbucks, I've noticed much more classical muzak there lately. One large annoyance is that the tracks are played without pause. The last beat of each cut becomes the upbeat of the next. Also every classical set includes one thing by Yo-Yo Ma.

The most annoying in-store classical music I've ever experienced was not Starbucks. These tracks were carefully selected to have identical tempos. All were fast movements of baroque and classical pieces. After several fast cuts from one stream of Alberti insipidity to another I wanted to scream "Play an adagio". In no sense was this intended for people who appreciate classical music; there was nothing expensive to purchase. It was a rhythm track, pure and simple.

allbetsareoff
May 17, 2010

At one time, a local Victoria's Secret store went on a Vivaldi binge. [Insert Red Priest-girl's school innuendos.]

mopwringer
May 17, 2010

Just a couple of blocks down from Dean & Deluca, you'll find Dixie Liquors, the gateway to Georgetown. No Dinks, no Caymus, no Baroque. Instead...truants, pork rinds, Gram Parsons.

BethDiane
May 18, 2010

Part of the problem is indeed the use of fast movements all the time. Baroque music as a whole is not relentlessly cheerful; it's actually meant to be expressive and moving, and most multi-movement pieces usually have a largo, or a grave, or an adagio. It's just that anything that grabs your attention like that probably isn't good for business, so they stick with the allegros.

RM
May 20, 2010

My favorite background music experience was at a Korean pizza place on Wilshire ("Mr. Pizza"). The music had a sort of afro-pop-reggae-samba-mishmash percussion underpinning, some quasi-impressionist harmonies in the middle played by strings and winds, and on top a female vocalise that sounded eerily like the Theramin music from original Star Trek television series. It sounded disturbingly familiar, like something I should know intimately. After a few minutes of listening to this uncomfortably subdued lounge lizard music, I realized it was a severely mangled arrangement of Ravel's Ondine from "Gaspard de la Nuit". This was followed by a similarly mangled arrangement of Debussy's Afternoon of a Fawn and then Ravel's Bolero. The latter didn't really bother me so much because its entire existence has consisted of such popular mangling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnzbHc8CjOk

Nick
May 24, 2010

What about the Baroque hits they play in the Port Authority Bus Terminal in NYC? The bus terminal is the saddest, dingiest of public spaces in New York, and yet the hyper-chipper Baroque is piped in through out the building. Which audience is the PA trying to sell to? All the hipsters know the bus to IKEA is free...

rt
May 26, 2010

I was once in a local, somewhat upscale grocery store when they started playing the Sacrificial Dance from the Rite of Spring! I couldn't helping laughing after a few measures convinced me I was indeed hearing what I thought I was.

I did in fact push my buggy a little faster down the aisles as the music reached its climax, and the thought did cross my mind that smashing my buggy into the canned goods would be an appropriate "final cadence" to the last few measures, but I resisted.

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Hell Mouth is a blog about music (mostly contemporary), literature (mostly good), politics (mostly pernicious) and culture (mostly American). It is written by John Adams with the help of several “friends” who live in the redwoods of coastal Northern California.