Your recent report concerning the weaponization of “classical music” by the 7-Eleven store on Main Street was a depressing comment on the state of current culture. The use of Beethoven’s Septet to repel undesirables is somewhat amusing and ironic if you consider the fact that it was a kind of “pop” music in its day, and that Beethoven, hearing it constantly in the cafes of Vienna, grew to hate it and all it stood for. It repelled him also.
But to take a profound and historically important work like the Third Symphony and turn it into a contemporary form of deterrent noise pollution is like demolishing Michelangelo’s Pieta in order to hurl its rubble at the objects of your scorn. Of course, you couldn’t physically destroy a Beethoven composition in this way. That would require the burning of all scores and recordings, as well as the massacre of all the people in the world who have the work memorized — people like Michael Tilson Thomas of the San Francisco Symphony. But you can diminish it to the point that it seems to become nothing more than a mere scrap floating in the great sewer of irritating sound that surrounds us.
Only Mega-Goliaths could come up with this method for dealing with an urgent social issue. A culture in which art has become a form of assault (and we are all now assaulted by music nearly all the time in nearly all our public spaces) is truly debased.
— Russell Burnham, Chico