Using Classical Music As a Form of Social Control 721
cyberfringe writes "Classical music is being used increasingly in Great Britain as a tool for social control and a deterrent to bad behavior. One school district subjects badly behaving children to hours of Mozart in special detention. Unsurprisingly, some of these youth now find classical music unbearable. Recorded classical music is blared through speakers at bus stops, outside stores, train stations and elsewhere to drive away loitering youth. Apparently it works. Detentions are down, graffiti is reduced, and naughty youth flee because they find classical music repugnant."
Re:A Clockwork Orange (Score:5, Informative)
They're probably repelling people by playing it really loudly and with horrible quality. Classical music has a lot of high notes and when played poorly it's a lot like listening to nails on a chalkboard.
Re:A Clockwork Orange (Score:3, Informative)
"Maybe they should use some music whose artists aren't several hundred years dead, then perhaps the artists could have a very interesting discussion as to the use of their music..."
Case study: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,672177,00.html [spiegel.de]
Re:A Clockwork Orange (Score:5, Informative)
You are aware that A Clockwork Orange [imdb.com] was fiction, aren't you? It was a movie and not a documentary.
Don't forget that Alex DeLarge actually liked Ludwig Von. He was appalled by what was done in order to let people dislike his music.
Look at Venezuela (Score:3, Informative)
Compare this to what they do in Venezuela... teaching classical music to poor kids from the ghettos.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Sistema [wikipedia.org]
Re:A Clockwork Orange (Score:5, Informative)
Rather indicated by use of the term "blared". It's probably only a question of time before before such speakers start attracting the same kind of destruction as speed cameras.
Re:A Clockwork Orange (Score:3, Informative)
"They seem to loathe [the music]," said the proud railway guy. "It's pretty uncool to be seen hanging around somewhere when Mozart is playing."
. It is a shame of course but there are some other things officialdom in UK (and I would believe not only there) does to people: blasting with high energy light or using high pitched noise apparently to drive all under 20 (this including toddlers) away. I am not sure if I should believe this article but nothing is impossible these days and technology offers 'solutions' to problems that only twisted mind of a public servant or perverted sadist would consider acceptable.
I have another idea (not mine actually) why don't we equalize [wikipedia.org] everybody to t he level of a moron that deploys such things?
Re:What's that? A "war against youth"? (Score:5, Informative)
You may have such a stance because you do not know what horror is the young generation in the United Kingdom.
I do, as I lived there, in one of the worst places regarding this (Liverpool) for about 4 years. Kids there do not care about anything, and as they know they have immunity, they will get into gangs just to do all sorts of vandalism.
As an example, I know that if a kid commits a crime, the most that can happen to them is to get an "Asbo" (anti social behaviour order). I know some of them get a bracelet "asbo" for each crime. What is the result? the kids brag about who has more bracelets, because he is more "evil" or whatnot.
In the time I lived there, a colleague of mine was hit by a paintball pellet in the eye while riding his bike from his Univ. office to his home; my flatmate was attacked by a van with kids shooting paintball pellets; another friend was thrown a car at him; another friend was walking at the street when some guys approached, took their glasses from his face and threw them (breaking them of course) to the ground. All this "just because". Oh yeah, and a Spanish friend was attacked and got his leg broken in 2 places.
You see, the problem with this is that if any of these friends tried to defend themselves, according to English law, they would be attacking/harassing minors. And, because in addition we are foreigners (mainly PhD students) we would in addition be thrown out of the country.
So yeah, in effect kids in the UK are pretty evil. But I agree with some of your posts in that the problem is not youths themselves but the general system who has forged them like that.
What I saw while living there is that parents do not care about their children and their education. The government should make parents directly accountable for their kids actions: If your kid killed another kid then it is YOU who pays for the crime. If a kid robbed, then it is YOU who pay for the crime, as an adult. That way parents can continue to have the "freedom" of raising their kids as they want, but if the kids mess up, they will get the consequences.
Re:It's a sin! (Score:1, Informative)
Uh. People started doing this in my hometown in the US more than 15 years ago. This isn't an exclusively British phenomenon.
Re:classical music is defective (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, and when Tchaikovsky wrote 1812 he intended the canons to be about as loud as the triangle.
Anyway, if you do not like wide dynamic range in a recording, you can get a player that has integrated compressor or get an external compressor. It is much easier to compress than to expand, meaning that while I have an expander (dbx 3BX-DS) I cannot restore the dynamic range back to original if I have a crappy compressed CD.
While we will never know how Mozart intended his compositions to sound (unless someone invents a time machine, goes back in time and asks him) I prefer higher dynamic range over lower. Yes, when you are listening to music as a background while doing something else it may be better to compress the dynamic range and play a a consistent, but low level, but if you are listening to music not as a background, wide dynamic range is much better.
Tricking me into cranking up the volume with quiet parts just so that you can hurt my ears with other parts is childish.
See, the quiet parts are supposed to be quiet. You have to set the volume so that the quiet parts can be heard, but not be loud, then your ears won't hurt when the loud part comes. The dynamic range of human hearing is 120dB, the theoretical CD dynamic range is 96dB, tape and records have lower dynamic range and CDs usually are recorded with lower dynamic range too, so it shouldn't hurt your ears.
Re:What's that? A "war against youth"? (Score:3, Informative)
The moment they threw stuff over everybody's cars. The moment they intruded into my garden and pissed all over it. The moment they ripped an ornament from its base and deposited it in a gutter fifty metres down the road.
Re:What's that? A "war against youth"? (Score:1, Informative)
Since the breakdown of "family" life in the UK for the past 15 years. Lot of kids in the UK especially major urban areas are mouthy, disrespectful and aggresive. Not going to get into a debate about why they are like that or whose fault it is - they just are. The country has gone to s****.
Re:It'll stop in a few years (Score:1, Informative)
because haning out somewhere "cooler" usually costs money
Hardly new (Score:3, Informative)
PS: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It'll stop in a few years (Score:1, Informative)
I would love to come up with some insightful, scathing comment, but as per usual, the slashdot captcha magic-8-balls-up the reason for me: employer.
In the UK, we aren't anti-youth, it's just that our class divisions are manifested differently to other countries' class divisions. When people appear to be anti-youth, they are really being anti-poor people. They victimise the youth of poor people because they are the least likely to fight back.
And who do these divisions benefit? The ones sitting on the capital, of course (who probably have a kid with a mod point they are itching to use on a dissenting AC).
Re:A Clockwork Orange (Score:4, Informative)
He was appalled only by what was done to him. The aversion therapy twisted his love of the music into revulsion, even though he still wanted to love it.
Otherwise, Alex enjoyed the pain and suffering of any other human for any reason whatsoever.
The remaining offenders are more skillful (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hardly new (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I'll call bull on that, sorry (Score:3, Informative)
Just a quick note - Mozart never published the "Lick Me In the Arse" piece while he was alive. He widow sent a manuscript to a publisher, which "cleaned up" the lyrics prior to publishing. And the "Lick Me In the Arse Nice and Clean" piece is no longer believed to have been written by Mozart. A quick trip to Wikipedia would have revealed this. Sort of undercuts your argument a bit. Mozart may have been rebellious in certain ways, but it was hard to be so egregious and be successful in an era when you required patronage and support from the upper echelons of society to make it as an artist.
Re:Moral doesn't mean what you think it means (Score:3, Informative)
This is nonsense, at least with respect to New York. I live in New York and have for years, so I can speak with some authority about it.
We used to have groups of "feral youth" back in the 90s, when I recall friends of mine getting mugged and beaten up. But then a funny thing happened. The cops started taking this shit seriously. I was in college (around '99 or '00) when two friends who went to Dartmouth College were walking through Riverdale (the nice northern part of the Bronx) to one of their apartments, and they were jumped and mugged by 5 or 6 14 or 15 year old kids, beaten in their faces and their wallets stolen. And they called a friend and they called the cops. The friend pulled up with his car, and they chased down those fucking kids with the cops on the phone, and the cops showed up in a few minutes and caught the kids (or at least a few of them, who ratted the rest out).
Those kids all went to jail and did several years in juvenile detention. Five years earlier, the cops would just not have cared.
And in recent years I haven't seen this kind of shit any more. Because we enforce laws of public order in New York now. Maybe not in the ghetto of the South Bronx, or in parts of Brooklyn, but by and large, the parts of New York that a regular person would frequent are safe from this sort of crime these days.
And no, I don't live in a gated community. Nobody in New York does, though we do have doormen in our apartment buildings. I live in downtown Manhattan, and have lived either here or the Upper West Side of Manhattan for years now.
We all share this city, that's why we take public order fucking seriously here. We basically don't have drive-by shootings (wouldn't really make sense to drive-by an apartment building and shoot anyway), and shooting murders are so rare now that there's usually an article in the newspaper when they happen in Manhattan.
Seriously - the island of Manhattan, the heart of New York City, had 58 murders in 2009. NYC as a whole had something like 460 murders (half of those apparently in Brooklyn). This is with a population of something like 8.5 million! Back around 1990 that number was well over 2000 every year. Violent crime in general has dropped a similar amount here.
So yeah, back in 1990, we did have bands of feral youth wandering around, killing and maiming and stealing with impunity. This just isn't the case any more.
Re:What's that? A "war against youth"? (Score:5, Informative)
Hmmm
You appear to be placing the blame for the problem on the current Labour Government, this IMHO is generalising things. We have spent more time in the last 30 years under a right wing government (the Conservative Party) than we have under the Labour Party. It is should also be noted that these problems existed under the Conservative Government.
The Anti-Social Behaviour Order legislation (commonly referred to as an ASBO) was first put before parliament by the Labour Government in December 1997 (approx 7 months after coming to power), it became law in July 1998 (approx 14 months after coming to power). One of the reasons for the legislation was to tackle such unruly behaviour by children, behaviour that whilst annoying, was previously not deemed as serious enough to warrant a police investigation / prosecution.
There are many reason why certain areas of the country experience these problems, from poverty to lack of parental control, but I believe that the lack of urban recreation areas has certainly contributed to the problem. Under the Conservative Government recreational land was sold off for housing, this policy continued under the current Labour Government.
I was brought up on a large council estate (for you Americans, read public housing) on the outskirts of a large northern england city. Whilst both my estate, and the city in general were poor, we at least had decent recreational land, 3 football pitches, 2 rugby pitches, 2 sand pits, running tracks and a cricket pitch. I recently revisited the area. Now there is only 1 remaining football pitch, the rest has been turned into housing (and housing that is far more densely concentrated than the old council estate ever was).
TLDR / Executive Summary
Both sides of the political spectrum in the UK have contributed to the problem, so it is unfair to place the blame on only one side.