By Jim McCarthy Jan 12, 2009 1 comment

Music Makes a Bad Religion

Greg Sandow, whom you should read regularly (Greg, blog more!) if you’re interested in classical music and its struggle to redefine itself, talks about the use of classical music in advertisement:

“I think there’s a new spirit in the air — a new openness to classical music. I first noticed it in commercials…the commercial that really drove this home to me was more recent…This commerical introduced a new sandwich, something we were meant to think was very special, something we should think a lot about. A guy was contemplating it, and on the soundtrack we heard (if my memory is right) one of the Bach cello suites.

Again, somebody’s going to say that’s an insult to Bach. Bach means more — much more — than fast food.”

Greg goes on, quite rightly, to condemn that attitude on the part of the people who know the music and feel disdain for the filthy lucre of actually trying to sell a product and the discussion goes on from there.

So here is an industry called Classical Music, which is struggling to find a commercial success model since the Rockefellers and Carnegies stopped funding the genteel, if not necessarily wealthy, lifestyles of classical music’s elite and since American society became less of a monoculture.

I repeat, they’re looking for a new commercial success model, but it’s too crass for words for many of them to consider actual commerce.

Why?  Why is a sandwich an insult to Bach?  Didn’t he probably like sandwiches?  Everybody likes sandwiches, don’t they?

If someone told you that the work you’re doing today would be used 300 years from now to sell sandwiches, how would you feel about that?  I’d feel pretty good about that.

And I have no problem with sandwiches.  If you think you’re too good for sandwiches, well, I’d like to know why you think that.

So must of us probably realize we’re not “too good” for sandwiches, so there’s got to be an explanation for the phenomenon Greg points out.

I suggest that for some, classical music has some of the hallmarks of a religion.  Now, I don’t mean they kneel down in the orchestra pit and pray or sacrifice small animals on a cello, but I mean they revere it as sacred, untouchable and “above” petty concerns like sandwiches.

And I get that.  Obviously, Mozart beats the hell out of a BLT, but still, it’s easy to go from an enthusiast’s passion for works of beauty to the self-indulgent vanity of a zealot.  Well done, Greg Sandow, for warning people away from that tendency.   By the way, it’s not just classical music either.  Even rock music has purists, which is worse because it’s one thing to think Bach’s too good for sandwiches and it’s another to think the Allman Brothers are.

And by the way, Greg’s also right that this trend toward using more classical music in commercials is a good sign for the business.  They don’t put music in those spots because people are going to hate it!

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1 Comment

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    December 8th, 2010

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