Classical music is a big hit on the London Underground

The Barbican can pack in 2,000 people for a concert. Almost 3,000 classical-music fans can squeeze into the Royal Festival Hall. And Brixton Undergroundstation? 30,000 pass through it every day - and all get a loud blast of theclassical stuff whether they like it or not.
Quietly, steadily and, if not secretly, then certainly stealthily, LondonUnderground is rolling out a compulsory classical diet. And it's joining agrowing group of local authorities, transport companies and evensupermarkets across the country. The idea? If we are all stressed out, weneed calming down. And if we are antisocial yobs looking to cause somebother and steal Travelcards, we need moving on. Somehow classical musicseems to fit the bill in both cases.
Perhaps this is why Brixton is already well used to it, as I discover whilethe blast of Schubert's Unfinished is throbbing through the ticket office ona Tuesday lunchtime. The station first got plugged in more than four and ahalf years ago, a test site to see whether the embryonic scheme deservedexpansion. Clearly it seemed to do the job; as of the beginning of this year40 stations have now been equipped with the necessary kit, and they rangefrom the positively genteel (West Brompton) to the Wild East of the DistrictLine - Dagenham, Upton Park - alongside more mixed South London spots suchas Balham and Morden.
Perhaps this tuneful invasion really is as unremarkable as Transport forLondon protests. “It wasn't really a big policy, but we rolled it out whenit was expedient to do so,” says Richard Parry, TFL's director of strategyand service development. He's armed with statistics from satisfied punters,who, he says, feel happier. Less stressed. And, yes, calmer. “Our researchsays that 80 per cent plus say it makes them feel more relaxed, and 85 percent plus that the music improves the general environment of the station.”The research Parry refers to was conducted by TFL in 2006, when commuterswere questioned at five stations across the network.

Somewhere along the line, however, the official narrative changed. When thefirst Underground station (Elm Park, on the District Line) got hooked up toclassical, this was a story about crowd control. “We can't claim it was anoriginal idea,” Parry concedes. “We knew it was tried in differentenvironments. One we looked at was the Tyne and Wear metro.” The back storythere, widely reported at the time, was of vandalism down, problem teenspushed off to bother someone else.
Brixton is certainly an unthreatening place, despite its reputation. “There'sso much crime around and I think it's receded,” says a local resident, LisaMartin. “People aren't really hanging around as much as they used to, 'cosclassical music's not really their vibe, is it? It's a psychological thing,isn't it?”
Well, perhaps. With the scheme now being extended to middle-class oases suchas West Hampstead, the official line now from TFL is that this is nothing todo with crime or psychological pressure and everything to do with“environment”, “ambience” and “care”. It's also about another C-word -control.
“We want to give people a greater feeling that someone is in control, makingthings secure and safe,” Parry says. “It's certainly not there as a bigdeterrent.” Hence station selection is not based on levels of crime, butsimply limited to those sites that are not too central (too many people, toomuch confusion) and do not have an interchange (for the same reason). Parryalso confirms that the music is played only in ticket halls rather than intrains (where we couldn't escape) or platforms (where we need to listen forimportant information). It's the same argument that he uses to avoid theaccusation of creating a Big-Brother-style network where our eardrums aremonopolised by a loudspeaker.
But if it's trying to show control, it's slightly surprising to find out thatTFL doesn't actually have anything to do with the mechanics of the operationat all. When it co-opted the system that the Tyneside metro was using, itasked Metronet, then in charge of the District Line, to find a subcontractorwho could supply the technology. What it came up with, installed andcompiled by an agency called Broadchart, now plays itself; the only controlthat station staff have is how loudly they play it.
“People are always saying: ‘Who chose the music?'” grins Mervin Russell, thestation supervisor at Brixton, “and we have to say: ‘It's not us, it justcomes on automatically at 4.30 in the morning.'” At midnight, apparently, itswitches off. Faintly spooky? I thought so, if only because Metronet is nowin administration, but its commissioned iMix still pipes through itsstations like a creepy memento mori.
Surprise number two: the 40-hour tracklist. OK, the use of rights-freerecordings means no Modernists - still in copyright - so no Ligeti, noStockhausen, no Adès. But hang around long enough and you'll find an obscureRimsky-Korsakov suite, Antar, the Meditation from Berlioz's La Mort deCléopâtre, and a slice of Haydn's practically unknown opera, La fedeltapremiata. I think you'd struggle to hear any of these on Classic FM even ifyou stayed tuned in for 400 hours.
But the naysayers have a point. What does it matter what's playing when theintention is just to make a relaxing background vibe? “It's nice for musicto transport, to take you somewhere else,” one middle-aged male commutertells me, ignoring the apocalyptic fury of Verdi's Requiem thundering aroundhim. The other leitmotif from my straw poll is that if classical music doesmake anyone think beyond a fuzzy sensation, then it's a vague associationwith film music. “I find it cinematic rather than calming,” says JamesKhoury, who says he's “getting into classical music”, but, no, he wouldn'ttry to buy any of the music he heard on the Underground “because I wouldn'thave a clue what it was”.
One stubbly thirtysomething in jeans and an overcoat bucks the trend. He knowswhat's playing - a movement from Beethoven's Seventh - and he doesn't thinkthat this explosive masterpiece is the auditory equivalent of Temazepam. Apity, then, that this is Tom Service, classical-music critic for TheGuardian, whom I bump into by coincidence on his way home. “What thisreveals to us is the tragedy of listening,” he says. “We are now so inuredto classical-music effects that we can't hear this as fiery music, we simplyhear the effect of the classical brand.”
That's music to the ears of Graham Sheffield, artistic director of theBarbican, chairman of the Royal Philharmonic Society and now spearheadingHear Here, a campaign to encourage better listening to the sounds around us.“It's real music that one wants to hear, not aural pap. It may have aninstant impact but after a while people will cease to notice it's there.”
They're both right, in a sense. Isn't it degrading to the composers flung intothis jumble to simply be labelled “classical music”, prescribed in a bigenough, noisy enough dose to make us all worry less about signal failures?But, again, perhaps functional music does have a valid place, particularlywhen its audience seems so mollified by it.
Listening in Brixton station to Wagner's overture to Rienzi - a rarity thatsomehow crept on to Metronet's iPod - I find it hard to sign up to thecynics' camp. As Sheffield points out, there is always an audience who'llgive classical their full concentration. “The commonly held view is thatpeople can't listen any more. I was in the Royal Festival Hall listening toDaniel Barenboim. For 25 minutes, in the slow movement of a Beethoven sonatayou could feel 2,500 people really listening, not a single cough.” Are those2,500 more hurt by Berlioz on the Bakerloo than the degree by which the 80per cent are cheered up by it?
Maybe the two worlds could meet. The Barbican and the RPS could adapt the listof Tube classics, perhaps bringing in the LSO's live recordings to give alocal connection. Electronic display boards could tell us more about themusic that we were hearing. “It would be nice if they changed the list everyso often,” says Russell wistfully, perhaps thinking about the number oftimes he has heard Schubert's Unfinished, unfinished. Then his eyes flickback to the delays board, and his hand reaches for the volume knob.