IF you happen to be in Los Angeles County, as I will be in about two weeks, and are looking for an inexpensive evening of classical music, you would be hard pressed to find a cheaper option than the free nightly concerts that occur on the corner of 7th and South Alvarado St. You can embrace a bit of miserly pride in attending one of these concerts, being only an eight minute drive from the famed Walt Disney Concert Hall, home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic which would have certainly set you back at least thirty or forty bucks. This underground venue is not one of the hip genre-bending concert hall/bar/nightclubs that have popped up in most major cities over the last decade or so. Rather, this concert is held in the fully operational Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro station.

Last month, LA Metro began pumping in a recurring playlist of classical music as a way to deter unhoused people from loitering in the stations at night. This pilot program, which comes complete with original lighting design in the form of two massive floodlights on either end of the platform, uses piano sonatas by Mozart, symphonies by Beethoven, and concertos by Vivaldi to drive away the poor and, in the words of the Metro, “reduce crime.” And to take the point of the Metro seriously for just a moment, there has been a staggering number of deaths, twenty-one at present count, in LA Metro stations so far this year. These deaths were not random stabbings or robberies gone wrong against commuters by loiters, but rather a series of skyrocketing fentanyl overdoes by the people the Metro is attempting to remove. This move by LA Metro is part of a larger effort across the country to visually clean up their cities, also known as crime reduction. This is not exclusive to big cities like LA, New York, and Chicago, but smaller ones, like here in Bloomington, IN, where the city cleared out a dozen or so tents occupied by unhoused people in the dead of winter last year.

But the narrative that a major US city is using classical music as a tool to extinguish the existence of poor people seems like a metaphor too on the nose to even need to mention. It feels too grand a fable of our staggering wealth inequality. It caricatures the worst elements and cultural assumptions of classical music and uses it as a weapon. If I were go on with the narrative and tell you that there is an unhoused man named Mo The Last Black Panther who has lugged a full-sized, DJ-style speaker down into the station to drown out the classical with old-school rap, it would seem like an aural metaphor stretched to its ultimate limits.

But I will state the seemingly obvious: beyond the fact that classical music is by and large royalty free and cheap for the city to play in public spaces, there is a deeper, structural reason for this choice of music. By using our cultural associations with classical music; vast wealth, whiteness, inaccessibility, the Metro hopes to drive away people who see themselves as living outside that world. By manipulating those cultural associations into action creates a space in which some, commuters, are welcomed while others, the poor, are not. The wager here is that LA Metro hopes that classical music will act as a dog whistle against the poor; a sonic realization of the social classes. In turn, this creates, by design, a stark physical divide along racial, ethnic, and socio-economic lines. The fact that the music is also being played at an average volume of 83 decibels (point of comparison: the CDC puts gas-powered lawnmowers at 80–85 decibels) also forces the commuters to hightail it out of the station.

USING music in general as a type of deterrent or irritant is nothing new. The F.B.I. and A.T.F. famously blasted, night and day, Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walkin’” at David Koresh and the Branch Dravidians in Waco, TX nearly thirty years ago. The military used the obnoxiously bouncy theme song from the children’s T.V. show Barney & Friends as a torture tool at Guantanamo Bay. Sixty years ago, shopping malls would play Mitch Miller, of Sing Along With Mitch fame, as a way keep teens from loitering at the food court or parking lot.

But the use of classical music specifically as a way to rid areas of the poor or people of color is a somewhat recent phenomenon. The musicologist Lily E. Hirsch, author of “Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment,” traces this history back to the late 1980s, when a string of 7-Eleven convenience stores in the U.S. and Canada began playing Mozart and Bach to deter teens from hanging around the stores at night. The policy seemed to work. Teenagers stopped loitering outside of the stores, and at its peak, some one hundred and fifty 7-Elevens were using this new method. The news of the seemingly successful 7-Eleven experiment began to spread. It also began to envelope new populations of undesirables, away from teenage hoodlums and towards the poor and homeless. Subway stations in the UK, parks in Hartford, Connecticut, and storefronts in West Palm Beach all implemented the new tactic. The police department in West Palm Beach stated that calls for service declined from 119 to 83 over a five month period after implementing the program in so-called “troubled areas.” Eventually, the people who were being driven away by the music simply took action and ripped out the speakers.

Police 1, a news website created by the private law enforcement consulting company Lexipol, wrote an article in 2018 about the use of classical music as a successful tactic to reduce crime. The article cites the 7-Eleven and the British subway testimonials, but then begins to wax poetic about outdated ideas concerning the very stuff of classical music. Not only will the class and racial associations with classical music make homeless people feel uncomfortable and unwelcomed in a given space, but the music itself, the A-flats and quarter notes and arpeggios of Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms has the power to heal these people. “Research has suggested the positive impact various music genres can have on your mood — from releasing stress to improving sleep quality.” I would just add that I personally find it difficult to believe that those 83 decibel strains of Vivaldi in the LA Metro will have any effect on the sleep quality of a person who is also being simultaneously blasted with floodlights. The article goes on. “Mental health professionals have even utilized music’s power on the brain in therapy.”

The shamanistic, mystical powers of classical music’s wave frequencies have long been used to prove everything from better test scores to greater attention spans to, I don’t know, fewer cavities. The Mozart Effect, the theory that babies who listen to classical music either in the womb or in infancy are more likely to do generally better in life, proved so convincing in the 1990s that then Georgia governor Zell Miller added $105,000 a year to the state budget so that each child in the state would have a CD of classical music. The whole theory has, from the beginning, a kind of neo-eugentics flavor to it. There is nothing inherent in the sonic output of Mozart that leads to higher IQ’s than the sonic output of Willie Nelson, Run DMC, Charlie Parker, Megan Thee Stallion, or Bruce Springsteen. There is, however, a series of sociological questions that should be addressed. Which families play Mozart to their infants? Are those people of a higher socioeconomic status? Could that, maybe, possibly, help out with the test scores more so than the Piano Concerto K. 488 in A Major? I’ll leave it to the shop owner in Boston who was asked by the L.A. Times why he plays classical music outside his store. The shop owner replied “classical music soothes the savage beast.”

Police 1 video demonstration of the Classical Music Method at work in San Francisco

The phrase “reduce crime” comes up all the time when looking up these tactics of deploying classical music as a weapon. But crime actually didn’t go down in most if not all of these cases. Not robberies or murders or sexual assaults. But then again, the sight of the poor and the homeless, an ever-increasing occurrence in a county that continues to chip away at a social safety net, is, to some, a kind of crime in and of itself. The sight of homeless people around a store has the potential to hurt a business’s bottom line, so the solution is to move the problem out of sight. Perhaps underground.

And even though I take serious issue with the idea that classical music can cure diseases or increase test scores, I know that it can, at best, move, inspire, transform, and delight a listener. I even believe that in the rare instance, it can encourage a listener reassess the world around them and some of their core beliefs. But when I last checked, playing classical music cannot make access to SNAP more accessible or give out food at a soup kitchen or build more affordable housing or hand out clean needles or offer drug treatment or provide blankets in the cold or eliminate the need to kick homeless folks out of shelters at 6am. The LA Metro has weaponized classical music, not even in the service of a solution, but as a needlessly cruel tourniquet.

ON the first of this month, a young black man named Jordan Neely boarded an F train in Manhattan and began demanding food and water from his fellow passengers. After a few moments, a twenty-four-year-old commuter named Daniel Penny put Neely into a choke hold and killed him. The news of Neely’s murder was almost immediately thrown into the ongoing bi-partisan concern over public safety and crime. New York City mayor Eric Adams said that we cannot “say what a passenger should or should not do in a situation like that,” while Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, said, “There’s consequences for behavior.” Who’s behavior the governor was referring to was never made clear.

The talking point that emerged was that it was Neely, not Penny, who was the criminal. That it was Neely’s presence on the F train that made riders uneasy and not Penny’s death grip that was the crime. Florida Governor Ron DeStantis posted a link to a crowd sourced fund for Penny’s legal fees, which at this writing has brought in over two million dollars, and wrote “We must defeat the Soros-Funded DAs, stop the Left’s pro-criminal agenda, and take back the streets for law abiding citizens. We stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny. Let’s show this Marine… America’s got his back.”

We have confused discomfort for violence and uneasiness for crime. As uncomfortable as one may feel being on a subway, bus, coffee shop, or library with a mentally ill person, their presence alone is not criminal. The American poet and activist Nikki Giovanni in “Allowables,” a poem about the death of a harmless spider, writes in the end of the poem “I don’t think I’m allowed to kill something because I am afraid.”

Politicians have given us easy solutions to this problem, most of which revolve around us not having to see the problem anymore. They lock people up for low level crimes like loitering or play classical music in hopes that unhoused people will scatter away. These are, of course, band-aids to a moral wound. The question remains if we, as a society, are willing to embrace the occasional discomfort so that people who are living through circumstances, far more dire and difficult than our own, can have the chance to live?

The Sound of Music

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