CHAPTER ELEVEN

Relax, feel good, chill out: The affective distribution of classical music

Freya Jarman

In the 20 years since it started broadcasting, Classic FM – the first (and still the only) apparent alternative in the UK to BBC Radio 3 for classical music radio – has changed its schedule, programmes and line-up of presenters on several occasions, as would any other radio station over such a period of time. One programme that has been a staple of the daily schedule amidst the various changes is Smooth Classics. In the early days of the station, its full name was Smooth Classics at Seven, as it was aired at 7 p.m. each weekday. In 2008, the station extended the programme by an hour, and it became Smooth Classics at Six. By 2012, it had been set back in the schedule, so that listeners must now wait until 10 p.m. for their regular dose of what the station claims is ‘the world’s most relaxing classical music’. Whether listeners’ relaxation habits have changed at all, as either a cause or an effect of the scheduling changes, is rather by the wayside; what is obvious from the persistence of the programme in the schedule is that Classic FM is committed to providing a slot (and a long one – it currently runs to four hours of airtime) dedicated to music chosen for the sole purpose of facilitating ‘relaxation’ in its listeners. Marius Carboni (2011) frames Classic FM in a context of changing business models for classical music in the UK in the last decades of the twentieth century. For Carboni, the major turning points in classical music marketing are the campaign surrounding Nigel Kennedy’s recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in 1989 and the use of Luciano Pavarotti’s recording of ‘Nessun dorma’ as a theme for the 1990 FIFA World Cup. These, Carboni argues, are the beginnings of a shift in the world of classical music marketing towards an increased use of strategies drawn from popular music marketing experience. Thus, his thesis comparing the scope, aims, and business models of Radio 3 and Classic FM implies that the emergence of the latter station in 1992 can be considered as part of this broader move towards popularization, and he identifies Classic FM as being ‘overtly populist’ (Carboni 2011: 173) in its approach to classical music broadcasting. For reasons I will come to explore, it may not be appropriate to draw a direct comparison between the two stations, but for now the comparison serves to illustrate a paradigm that is at the heart of this chapter: at the same time as a shift towards strategies drawn from popular music marketing, there has been an increased focus on the distribution of classical music along the lines of a logic of affect, in which reception and consumption have become at least as central as composers and ‘the music itself’ to the circulation and formation of canons. By ‘affect’, in this chapter I mean affective states in the broadest sense, which include not only emotions but also moods. As Vladimir Konečni summarizes (2010: 712–13), these two concepts can be distinguished on several bases: duration (moods are longer in duration than emotions); time pattern (moods have a more gradual onset, or are more continuous than emotions); intensity (moods tend to be of lower intensity); and cause (emotions are more likely to be caused by a particular event). States such as ‘relaxation’ are not, then, easily identifiable as emotions, although they clearly have moods associated with them, and it is this sense in which I take ‘affect’. As my central object of interest, I take the phenomena of classical music discourses, circulation, consumption, and marketing particularly in the last two decades, insofar as they are held together by an emphasis on this affective logic.

Certainly, this is not an exclusively late-twentieth-century phenomenon; it is not as if music programmers have not previously used the logic of emotion to govern their programming decisions. Rachel Cowgill, writing about concert programming for Armistice Day in the 1920s (which itself is unlikely to be the earliest date at which this phenomenon is found), offers an example of how affective responses to music helped shape programming decisions for an Armistice Day National Concert at Queen’s Hall in 1927, to be broadcast by the BBC, by referencing a draft programme including the programmers’ annotations:

(Cowgill 2011: 83)

Altogether, this programme and others in the same period seem to have been designed to construct a communal response considered appropriate by and for ‘the nation’, and while the more recent developments on classical music radio have not been so overtly concerned with national-cultural politics, they are nonetheless at least as prescriptive, affectively speaking. In this chapter, it is this apparent focus on the listener’s response, the implicitly attendant relationship between listener and programmer, and what that all means for longer-held or more dominant discourses around the listener and composer in classical music that are of interest.

In order to explain the collective phenomena with which I am concerned, I will look in some detail at the place of Classic FM in the contemporary classical music market, and its comparability to BBC Radio 3. Many of the arguments about the current ‘state’ of classical music (see, for instance, Johnson [2002] or Kramer [2009]) tend to greater or lesser extents to mirror the logic of arguments over the differences between these two radio stations and their respective merits; it is therefore worth spending time on a problematic comparison precisely because the two stations stand in as proxies for deeper questions about classical music and its place in the contemporary cultural world. For the moment, though, the very fact that the argument is waged over two radio stations is of note, as radio has played a particular role in the formation of affective connections among listeners. The organization of music according to affective function is ideally suited to a radio environment, as Jo Tacchi suggests when she writes that ‘Radio possesses certain “mood”-generating qualities’, that ‘radio sound is particularly open to sensory creativity’, or that ‘radio sound helps to establish affective rhythms in the home’ (2003: 282). Susan Douglas describes radio as ‘arguably the most important electronic invention of the century’ (1999: 9), one that ‘has played a central role […] in constructing us as a new entity: the mass-mediated human, whose sense of space and time, whose emotional repertoires and deepest motivations cannot be extricated from what has emanated through the airwaves’ (ibid.: 5). Douglas situates the role of the radio historically in the wake of the newspaper and its place in forming the ‘imagined communities’ of which Benedict Anderson writes (1983): ‘Reading the newspaper may have been a crucial first step in cultivating this sense of national communion,’ Douglas writes. ‘But radio broadcasting did this on entirely new geographic, temporal, and cognitive levels’ (1999: 23–4). And Tacchi again implies the subject-networking capacity of radio when she argues that ‘Radio sound can be seen to mediate between individuals in the home and the wider world […]. Households and domestic relationships are embedded in a larger social and meaningful world’ (2003: 281).

Built into the very nature of radio is this sense of mediation, the connection between the individual solitary listener and an imagined community audience of other solitary listeners, for while the early days of the wireless might have seen families and friends listening as a communal activity, the increased portability of radios and the installation of radios in cars (from as early as the 1930s, commercially speaking, and before that on an amateur basis) brought with it greater potential for radio listening as a solitary activity.¹ Susan Douglas writes of listeners having a particularly intimate relationship to the radio. In this intimate relationship, the radio is not just a facilitator of connections within imagined communities but is an agent, a proxy for those communities; the radio itself is figured as ‘company’ as shorthand for its role as the tool. Solitary listening does not, then, imply solitude as such, as the notion of other listeners is very importantly part of that listening:

Most of us know that feeling, driving alone at night on a road or highway, surrounded by darkness, listening to the radio. […] There we were alone, yet through this device we were tied by the most gossamer connections to an imagined community of people we sensed loved the same music we did, and to a DJ who often spoke to us in the most intimate, confidential, and inclusive tones. (Douglas 1999: 22)

The commentary of the radio presenter in particular is constantly geared towards the recognition (and hence production) of an audience. The most commonplace of phrases such as ‘Good morning’ or ‘How are you today?’ suggest this. But so do those whose purpose is, on a surface level, about signposting the sequence of events but in which the audience is implicitly acknowledged; is the meaning ‘We’ll bring you that later in the programme’, emphasizing content, or ‘We’ll bring you that later in the programme’, emphasizing the listener and the relationship between listener and DJ? The balance of the solitary and the multiple is then further complicated by the question of whether the ‘you’ in any of these examples is single or plural, and that ambiguity is at the heart of (English-language) radio’s complexity as a medium. As Andrew Crisell describes it, this is the ‘paradox about radio – although its audiences may be counted in the millions the medium addresses itself very much to the individual’ (1986: 13). The most obvious and explicit production of audiences, and of connections among listeners, is found in those areas where direct listener participation is sought, such as in the phone-in or request show. Carol Fleming summarizes, ‘For those who call in, it is their five minutes of fame, while for others it is a reminder that although they may listen alone, they are part of a wider listening community’ (2010: 138). For caller or listener, there is a necessary imagination of others; for the ‘five minutes of fame’ to work, the caller must imagine the audience, while for other individuals in the audience the reality of other listeners’ existence is writ large on the soundwaves.

When other listeners are imagined, radio also becomes for a single listener a way of listening in to what others are also listening to; at that moment, the listener is drawn into a network across which multiple subjectivities are connected, and we must consider the implication of this for subjectivity at all. Susan Douglas turns to Sherry Turkle’s work on computers as ‘second selves’ to help understand the work done by radio for subjectivity by virtue of both its mediatory role and the ‘intimate’ relationships it fosters with its listeners:

Turkle explores the profoundly intimate relationships people forge with their computers until the machines become “second selves” that alleviate loneliness but make no unreasonable or threatening demands for intimacy. The computer fulfils the “desire for fusion” with something outside of and bigger than oneself. Turkle suggests that, while providing a sense of community and of technical mastery, the computer undermines our confidence in the distinctiveness and importance of human intelligence. […] Turkle’s work prompts us to ask how radio […] set the stage for this new twentieth-century relationship between the self and unseen others. […] Radio, by cultivating different modes of listening, also fostered people’s tendency to feel fragmented into many selves, which were called forth in rapid succession, or sometimes all at the same time. (Douglas 1999: 10–11)

Anahid Kassabian (2013) also turns to computing in her attempt at a wide-reaching theorization of subjectivity in the face of changes in listening habits over the course of the twentieth century. Kassabian’s model of subjectivity makes reference to the structures of ‘distributed computing’; as opposed to parallel computing, where multiple computers access a shared memory, in distributed computing multiple computers have autonomous memory and processing power, but are brought together in a network. This may be with the purpose of achieving a single, common goal, for example by distributing the labour of problem-solving among multiple users, or it might be to enable the sharing of resources and communication among users. What Kassabian terms ‘distributed subjectivity’, then, is designed to suggest the concurrence of both locally autonomous and continually networked subjects, formations of collective-but-individual, individual-but-not-fully-autonomous subjectivity. At the most obvious level, this model is opposed to the (impossibly) autonomous ‘Enlightenment’ subject. Indeed, many models of subjectivity accept that the notion of a fully autonomous subject is idealistic, and Kassabian’s sits in a long line of models trying to account both for the mythical nature of the ‘Enlightenment subject’ and for the weight of its legacy, its ‘force in absentia’ (Kassabian 2013).

Kassabian’s model is particularly pertinent to the present discussion, however, because of how central music is to it. She writes:

• Distributed subjectivity is constructed in and through our responses to acts of culture – speech, music, television, etc. – in ways very similar to how we once theorized individual subjects were formed, but in a different way.

• Music has a very privileged place in this formation; it is ubiquitous musics that bond and bind the field of distribution together. They are, in a sense, the channels of distribution. They put in place the experience of the network avant la lettre, as it were, creating the experience of distribution from the materials of broadcasting, that is, from the cables of Muzak and the airwaves of radio. (Kassabian 2013)

The focus here is on the place of music in keeping open the ‘channels’ through which subjectivity is distributed, and even more specifically she identifies what she calls ‘ubiquitous music’ as being at the heart of these channels, partly because of the affective logic on which their function is founded. Again drawn from computing – from ‘ubiquitous computing’, an idea of ‘the seamless integration of information and entertainment computing into everyday environments’ (Kassabian 2013) – the term ‘ubiquitous musics’ describes the phenomenon that incorporates all kinds of music that is not chosen by the listener, that helps construct the space in which it is heard, and that is additional and often secondary to some other activity. This includes, for instance, music in audiovisual media such as films and games, as well as Muzak in shopping malls or elevators, or the music played in Starbucks to construct a ‘feel good’ atmosphere and a global space (that is, a space where the ‘welcoming’ ‘global family’ is used to mitigate against any accusations of westernizing colonization founded on Starbucks’ global presence as a brand²). In this space of ubiquitous musics, Kassabian further argues that affect plays an important role; the converse is also argued, that for the flow and circulation of affects, ubiquitous musics are an important fuel. This has to do also with how listening happens in relation to ubiquitous music, for its ‘background’ nature tends to detract from the level of conscious attention afforded to it; listening in the supermarket, the coffee shop, or the cinema is very different from listening in the concert hall. But the fact that the music is additional or even secondary to some other activity, the fact that this is rarely focused listening, does not mean that it is entirely inattentive, or that it has no effect on the listener. There is much evidence to suggest that listening without conscious attention still allows for considerable perception on the part of the listener. We can turn to everyday moments to illustrate this easily, and ask how it is that we can be paying no conscious attention to another conversation, but suddenly be aware of it the very moment our name is spoken, or think about those occasions in a pub when our ears prick up to a favourite song, as if we were listening to the music despite paying more attention to a conversation. Work in psychology demonstrates that a complex mode of listening is occurring in such situations, as in tests for selective attention in listening. Anne Treisman, for instance, played subjects two speech tracks simultaneously – one in each ear – and asked them to ‘shadow’ one track, to filter their listening to focus on one track only. In the results, Treisman notes that subjects were able to derive a meaningful message that alternated between ears, and suggests that the ‘rejected’ message may be being analysed and perceived on some level, through occasional sampling or monitoring. At the same time, the subjects in this test were almost all completely unaware that the speech they were following in fact switched ears midway through, an indicator of the fact that audio inputs from separate ears are ultimately made sense of as a single unit within the brain; this fact we can also already determine from the preconscious ‘monitoring’. Listening without conscious attention, then, is not the same as listening without perception. There is also evidence to suggest that affect is processed on a pre-attentive level (see Kitayama 1990), implying a foundation for Kassabian’s suggestions that listening to ubiquitous musics – listening with low levels of attention – is a kind of listening that facilitates the circulation of affect, and that ubiquitous musics are made sense of affectively at least as much as anything else; when music operates in the layer just before consciousness, it provides a fertile ground for affective responses. Moreover, as I have noted, Kassabian argues that it is in affective listening, in the act of participating aurally in an established (albeit fluctuating) culture of meaning and affective production, that connections are made among subjects and across a field of distributed subjectivity. The notion of distributed subjectivity is not limited to specific moments at which subjects are drawn into specific networks, but can instead be understood as a generalized model of subjectivity in which we can say that particular systems do offer particularly rich sites for the distribution of subjectivities. In the case of radio, it is not the case that listeners’ subjectivities are proportionally more distributed when they are listening than when they are not, or that they are more distributed when participating in a phone-in than when they simply listen; but we can say that radio, and the concept of radio, are channels through which subjectivities become distributed, and that the acts of (ubiquitously) listening to radio or participating in a phone-in are places of entry into a field of subject-distribution.

Radio, then, is a particularly well-suited and interesting medium to be considering as the gravitational centre for this affectively-driven distribution of classical music. But radio here must be considered alongside other agents (technological or otherwise) that have worked to enable the formation of distributed subjectivity, and so I will come later to two areas in which affectively organized classical music is given especially fertile ground. The first of these is the compilation CD industry, in which Classic FM again finds itself a major brand; the station has established a profitable sideline with its own record label, on which are found titles such as Smooth Classics for Rough Days, Music for Bathtime, Relax, Feel Good, Ultimate Chillout and so on. The second are various technological developments that have changed some of the interfaces for music listening. Of these, two are of particular interest: Spotify, which actively encourages the sharing of music using Web 2.0 technology; and Moodagent, which profiles individual tracks according to their ‘mood’, and enables users to organize playlists (on smartphones, personal computers, or through Spotify) according to mood-based parameters. I will argue that these technologies, which have overtly come together in recent software developments, enhance the possibilities for the distribution of subjectivities. Ultimately, I am arguing that the combination of these elements – the packaging and distribution of classical music according to affect, and the possibilities for distributed subjectivities through new technologies – works to reconfigure not only the general cultural function and place of classical music, but also the roles therein of composer, performer, listener, listening as a practice and ‘music’. In order to service that argument, it is worth turning now to a detailed comparison between Classic FM and Radio 3, because the value-laden differences to be found can be reimported usefully to the question of the implications of affective logic for the circulation of classical music.

Although Classic FM is the only FM alternative to Radio 3 in terms of classical music listening, the comparison between the two stations may not be an entirely valid one, because although they are the only two radio stations on which classical music is reliably played in the UK, their styles and contents are so fundamentally different that it is hard to imagine them as direct competitors. The BBC itself recognizes both the competition and the complementarity between the two stations. In a review of its service on Radio 3, Radio 4 and Radio 7, the BBC Trust wrote: ‘Evidence from our consultation, both from individuals and organisations, suggests that these stations are complementary in their propositions’ (BBC Trust 2011: 5). Some proportion of regular Radio 3 listeners bemoan recent changes to the programming schedule in terms of an increasing likeness to Classic FM, and it is clear that these listeners are eager to see a distinct separation maintained between the two stations. As BBC forum user Pajandrum wrote in August 2011, ‘Dreadful. Now R3 is indistinguishable from CFM. What happened to the heritage of Glock and Drummond, and adventurous broadcasting which stretched the listenership. Now we just get walltowall [sic.] 4Seasons [sic.], Bolero and Sabre Dance. Jeez …’ (Pajandrum 2011). Larger-scale ethnographic data help make more detailed sense of comments like this. In a quantitative and qualitative survey conducted on behalf of the BBC Trust, which informed the BBC’s own review document mentioned above, the authors of a report on the findings wrote that, ‘Compared to its key competitor, Classic FM, Radio 3 was perceived as more intellectual but also more inaccessible. Whilst this intellectualism was regarded as a strength for core audiences, it did reduce the station’s ability to engage lighter and potential new listeners’ (Optimisa 2010: 9). In response to having ‘heard concerns that Radio 3’s attempt to be more accessible has led to reductions in the levels of quality and distinctiveness’, the BBC Trust comment:

We acknowledge that the editorial policy pursued by BBC management has evolved the nature of programming in peak-time listening slots. However, we have found no compelling evidence that this has resulted in a reduction of Radio 3’s quality and distinctiveness. Both the approval levels for the station as a whole and the appreciation scores for individual programmes are either steady or improving. In addition, Radio 3 continues to demonstrate its commitment to high-quality music and arts through such features as its wide range of music; the broadcasting of full-length pieces; its focus on live performances and support of UK orchestras. We believe Radio 3 should continue to look for ways to be more accessible and welcoming. (BBC Trust 2011: 5–6 [original emphasis])

However, they go on:

While we support this approach, we do not regard the maximisation of reach as a primary goal for the station and recognise that the nature of Radio 3’s output – so long as it remains true to its core values – means that there is a natural limit to its overall audience. The station’s distinctiveness and exploration of a wide range of music, which we applaud, inevitably means that its overall appeal will be limited. (ibid.: 6)

There are, moreover, numerous examples of Radio 3 spokespeople denying the validity of any comparison between the two stations (see, for instance, Midgley (1998) or Sherwin (1999) for a very small sample). And Classic FM’s co-founder Michael Bukht (a.k.a. Michael Barry, erstwhile celebrity chef) did not, apparently, see much of the audience for the new station coming from Radio 3’s listenership, but instead ‘always maintained that Classic FM and Radio 3 were not rivals, and that his audience would largely come from elsewhere, not least because he needed a larger listening public than could be taken from Radio 3’ (Inglis 2011).

Nonetheless, Radio 3 thus displays a real tension in its aims, walking a very careful line between satisfying its core audience on the one hand and, on the other, attracting potential listeners who ‘might appreciate the station’s offer but who are discouraged from listening by their perception that it can at times be inaccessible and daunting’.³ Meanwhile, the core audience in question has built up around particular notions of value and of what constitutes appropriate listening behaviour. By the time Radio 3’s precursor, The Third Programme, first aired in 1946 it had been heralded for some time by declarations of its ‘more highbrow’ aims (The Times 1945), and of its intentions to satisfy ‘the serious-minded’ or ‘exacting’ listener (The Times 1946a), the ‘hungry sheep who of late have looked up and not been fed’ (The Times 1946b). On its debut in September 1946, its head G. R. Barnes made a very clear call to his intended audience:

The Third Programme is for the alert and receptive listener, the listener who is willing to make an effort to select his programme in advance and then meet the performer half-way by giving it his whole attention. The Third Programme is not planned for continuous listening night after night. (Barnes 1946)

On the other hand, a commitment to populism and large audience numbers was built into Classic FM’s approach from the start, as the Guardianreport in its obituary for Michael Bukht:

Bukht was not a musician, but was determined to apply the formula of popular music stations to the classical world, giving the audience what he reckoned were the essentials of companionship. He thought that an audience did not like to be challenged all the time, just some of it, and there was a time in the day for this: the evening. Commuters needed the time, the weather, the news – all interspersed with movements of music, though not usually whole works (again, except for the evenings). […] When commercial stations had come to London in 1973, he was programme director of Capital Radio, and he applied the popular principles he had honed there to the more sober presentation of classical music, delivered until then primarily on Radio 3. (Inglis 2011)

What is expressed in such comments as Pajandrum’s, what the BBC itself declares in its own Service Review, and what is built into the very fabric of each station, is something fundamental about the extent to which the stations are expected by critics and listeners to be speaking to different listenerships, and how that difference is realized through programming content and stylistic decisions.

However founded the anxieties may be among Radio 3’s ‘core’ listeners, significant differences between the two stations do remain, and they appear at every turn. In terms of musical content, we can point to differences in the choice of composers, genres and playlist specifics. Classic FM’s definition of ‘contemporary’, for instance, extends to the film music of Hans Zimmer, the popular choral efforts of Karl Jenkins, or the ‘minimalist’ contemplations of Ludovico Einaudi; Radio 3, meanwhile, will turn to John Cage, Morton Feldman or Meredith Monk for its late twentieth-century composers. Classic FM’s music is notably more diatonic, on average, where Radio 3 is comfortable giving airtime to atonality. Even the scope of what constitutes ‘classical music’ tells a story of the different ideological missions of each station, for Classic FM’s boundaries stretch out in the direction of film music (especially in their Saturday Night at the Movies programme) and orchestral arrangements of popular songs (on the station’s album Songs Without Words), thereby prioritizing familiarity and pre-existing popularity. Radio 3 moves outside of its classical centre into regular slots for jazz (Jazz on 3, Jazz Line-up and Jazz Library) and world music (World Routes and Late Junction), suggesting – alongside its more avant-garde ‘contemporary’ composers – a comfort with variety and novelty. Within their soundworld, Classic FM overwhelmingly chooses to play extracts from full works or, secondarily, short single-movement works such as piano miniatures; Radio 3, meanwhile, apparently remains committed to a mission implied when The Third was first aired, and G. R. Barnes proudly announced that even ‘operas can be given in full and symphony concerts need not be built to fit into a schedule’ (Barnes 1946). That is to say, throughout the day on Radio 3 one can reliably find full symphonies, full operas and lengthy orchestral tone poems on the playlist, while Classic FM signifies the rarity of such features by dedicating a single daily programme – The Full Works – to the purpose of playing them. In terms of the packaging of the content, the stations differ wildly in the function of programmes, the level of musical understanding to which programmes are pitched, and the style of presentation. Classic FM’s A to Z of Classical Music, presented by former Blur bass player Alex James, takes a much more light-hearted tone in its ostensibly educational mission than does Radio 3’s Discovering Music; the latter, while recently much-reduced in terms of airtime, still features detailed musical analysis and talk, for instance, of the ‘internal workings’ of a piece about to be played in a lunchtime or evening concert slot. Also found on Radio 3 is the CD review programme Building a Library, a weekly slot of 30–45 minutes comparing a range of recordings of a single piece of music, whose presence in the schedule suggests a certain expectation of dedication and knowledge from the listener. These different approaches to the musical education of listeners extend even to the commentaries around individual pieces played. One contributor (StradiVarious) to an ABRSM forum discussion about the relative merits of the stations, humorously sums up the style of introduction found on Classic FM: ‘On Radio 3 we’d get a delightfully painted miniature of the time when the piece was composed; Classic FM would say “Here’s a little tune that Vivaldi wrote for his girlfriend, Gloria!”’ (ABRSM 2011). Meanwhile, another user (Seer_Green) complains of the lengthy introductions found on Radio 3: ‘sometimes, I just want to hear the music, rather than get 10 minute academic introduction to it (by which time, I’m afraid I’ve lost interest!)’ (ibid.). Radio 3 is also far more likely to allow silence, either from within the studio as the presenter allows time after the end of a piece before speaking, or in between movements of a multi-movement work played in full (which, as I have noted, is itself far more likely to occur on Radio 3). Each of these differences in its own way suggests an explanation for Classic FM’s significantly higher listener numbers. However careful we might want to be about judgements regarding the accessibility and consequent popularity of atonal music, or jazz, or (in one case on Radio 3) Tibetan goat-herd yodelling (see Robodoc’s comment at ABRSM 2011), Classic FM’s choice of content and packaging – its commitment to familiarity, predictability, and diatonicism, and to undemanding presentation – is certainly taken up by a higher number of listeners than Radio 3 enjoys. In the last 13 years, they peaked between 2002 and 2003 at just fewer than 7 million listeners, while Radio 3 during the same period pitched to between 2 and 2.2 million. The BBC station has enjoyed rather more stability over the period in terms of numbers, but Classic FM’s trough at just over 5 million and Radio 3’s peak at around 2.3 million is nonetheless compelling evidence that the former has dominated the classical music broadcasting world for some time.⁴ To this larger audience, Classic FM not only brings a somewhat different body of musical work from that promulgated by Radio 3, but does so using means that are highly fertile ground for the generation of distributed subjectivities formed by way of affective logic.

The first area of Classic FM’s approach to broadcasting in which this fertile ground is located is its use of listener participation. The daytime Requests show is perhaps the most striking example of this, especially when compared to Radio 3’s single ‘Your Call’ slot on the Breakfast Show (6.30–9 a.m. weekdays). Listeners’ written contacts, through emails or letters, are found frequently enough on Radio 3, but the addition in August 2011 of a regular phone-in slot (albeit from a single listener a day) was greeted with some anxiety from regular listeners. Guardian radio critic Elisabeth Mahoney described it as representing ‘everything traditionalists don’t want Radio 3 to be about: non-expert chat about well-known pieces’ (2011); and those ‘traditionalists’ have their own voice on for3.org, the Friends of Radio 3 website, where one news item compares the new feature to a previous attempt at Radio 3 phone-ins in the 1970s, which yielded listener complaints of ‘trivial pieces, banal chat, boring homely patter’, and describes ‘Your Call’ as ‘simply the latest manifestation of Radio 3’s intellectual slide’ (FoR3 2011). Classic FM, meanwhile, not only offers a two-hour slot daily specifically for requests, but also encourages listener participation at other times of the day, through the ‘Kid’s Call’ feature at a school-friendly 4.15 p.m., through competitions, and through the annual Hall of Fame, voted for by listeners and announced over the Easter weekend, and which in turn services the contents of the daily Hall of Fame Hour show (weekdays 9–10 a.m.) throughout the rest of the year. None of this is to suggest that Radio 3 listeners do not also engage in some imagination of themselves as part of a listening community, and indeed the existence of a group such as Friends of Radio 3 suggests precisely the opposite. It does, however, suggest several other important things: Classic FM articulates its own imagination that such a community exists, or can be imagined to do so by its listenership; the idea of listener participation is important to Classic FM’s identity as a ‘welcoming’ and ‘inclusive’ station, and its relative absence on Radio 3 may be part of its identity as ‘stuffy’ and ‘exclusionary’ among non-listeners; and perhaps most crucially for the present chapter, listener participation implies an anti-intellectual populism that is bound up also with listening as additional to activity (‘celebrating a special occasion, working hard in the office, or enjoying some well deserved time off’), or musical content as secondary to the emotional response of the listener. In short, the response on for3.org criticizing ‘Your Call’ implicitly equates the affective response of the caller with banality and triviality.

The second category that so effectively facilitates the formation of distributed subjectivities is that of the use-value of Classic FM’s music. The station’s programmes are designed to fit around areas of the listener’s day, as titles such as Classic FM Drive suggest. The Requests show also announces itself as being functional, as the website describes: ‘Whether you’re celebrating a special occasion, working hard in the office, or enjoying some well deserved time off, let Jamie [Crick] know and you could have your favourite piece of classical music featured on Classic FM Requests’ (www.classicfm.co.uk). The programmes themselves, then, are on some level built with listening as an additional activity in mind. Moreover, technical elements contribute to the physical usability of Classic FM as a station for secondary listening, as they use far more dynamic range compression than do Radio 3, and use it quite consistently throughout the day, while Radio 3 apparently removes much or all of it (at least, what it can, given that there will be some compression present on the recordings) in the evenings as a service to their ‘attentive’ listeners.⁵ This makes Classic FM far the more suitable station to have on in a car, for example, or indeed for most background functions, as the listener does not have to adjust the volume control constantly in order to account for the wide dynamic range of much of the music played on either station (or, instead, having inappropriately loud or quiet dynamics at one end of the range or the other). Furthermore, what this combination of programming identity and technical detail means is that Classic FM is, over Radio 3, the station of choice for anyone seeking classical music as a soundtrack to their lives, whereas Radio 3 asks more attention of its listeners, inviting more active engagement in the act of listening. Peculiarly, the decision to compress the dynamic range on Classic FM has a split result in terms of affect. On the one hand, it makes the station far more suitable for use as an addition to activity, such that some part of the work being done by the programme contents is in the pre-attentive space where affects thrive; on the other, the reduction of dynamic range brings with it a reduction of the physical effects of dynamics on the listener, for whom affective responses to classical music may be based in no small part on changes in dynamic range.

We must acknowledge, then, that there is not simply a binary opposition between Classic FM as affectively governed and Radio 3 as devoid of affective impulse. Rather, each clearly facilitates some affective work in the distribution of their music, and each facilitates the distribution of subjectivities in their way, for as Kassabian argues, affective work is part of what holds open the ‘channels’ of distribution. However, the stations are separated by the constellations they form between affect, attention and music. Radio 3 privileges attention to musical content and to ideas of the value of that content over affect, while Classic FM privileges affective spaces, in part by inviting reduced attention. Sara Ahmed, in the introduction to her Cultural Politics of Emotion, argues that we cannot simply articulate an opposition between thought and emotion, in which the former is afforded higher value than the latter, but that different kinds of emotion accrue different meanings and values. She summarizes: ‘The hierarchy between emotion and thought/reason gets displaced […] into a hierarchy between emotions: some emotions are ‘elevated’ as signs of cultivation, whilst others remain ‘lower’ as signs of weakness’ (2004: 3). Nonetheless, this is a hierarchy that relies on a fundamental privileging of the ‘rational’ over certain identified ‘problems’ with emotionality:

To be emotional is to have one’s judgement affected: it is to be reactive rather than active, dependent rather than autonomous. Feminist philosophers have shown us how the subordination of emotions also works to subordinate the feminine and the body […]. Emotions are associated with women, who are represented as ‘closer’ to nature, ruled by appetite, and less able to transcend the body through thought, will and judgement. (ibid.: 3)

Ahmed goes on to make a connection between this association and ideas of prehistory, of the primitive, and points to evolutionary explanations for certain preconscious emotional responses such as, in Darwin’s words, ‘the bristling of the hair under the influence of extreme terror’ (quoted in Ahmed 2004: 3). Ahmed explains: ‘The Darwinian model of emotions suggests that emotions are not only ‘beneath’ but ‘behind’ the man/human, as a sign of an earlier and more primitive time’ (ibid.: 3). We have here a matrix of associations among affect, preconsciousness, attention, the bodily, the feminine, the primitive, and music. Classic FM’s organization of that matrix results in a system where pre-attentively processed affects are expected, and where certain ‘soft’ states such as relaxation are given priority; when compared to Radio 3’s emphasis on more attentive listening practices and on more rationally processed emotions, it is not surprising that this is the station that is discursively valorized. Such valorization can be and is articulated along the lines of musical value and appropriate listening practices, but what I am suggesting here is that the different productions and circulations of affect are also part of the story (and, appropriately, a part of the story that no doubt precedes the storyteller’s consciousness).

The sense that Classic FM is distributing music for function, and along lines of affective logic at the same time, is further exacerbated off-air by the increasing number of (increasingly repetitive) compilation CDs found on Classic FM’s own record label, where most collections are named according to some activity or emotional function anticipated in the user. Among their releases are several titles including the word ‘relax’ (Relax More, Relax and Escape, Time to Relax, several called simply Relax), others implying relaxation while not explicitly using the word (Smooth Classics: Do Not Disturb, Smooth Classics for Rough Days, Feel Good), a few tapping into the 1990s Ibiza rave culture of ‘chillout trance’ music and thereby implying the relevance of the collections to a comparatively youthful audience (Chillout, The Ultimate Piano Chillout Album, Classical Chillout 50), and a host of titles identifying their intended listening context (Music for Driving, Music for Studying, Music for Bathtime, Music for Fitness, Classic FM at the Movies, Music for Dinner Parties). On the whole, then, these are positive affects being marketed, alongside music to facilitate and support certain activities. These are, however, two rather distinct categories; one is about music as function, as secondary to an activity, while the other is organized purely and explicitly along lines of affect. Both types of music are productive of affective connections and are entry points into networks of subjectivity distribution; functional music encourages lower-attention listening, while affectively organized music foregrounds its own affective work. However, this latter category is of particular interest precisely because it removes the premise of a primary or additional activity to listening. John Sloboda argues that ‘In many of the functional niches for self-chosen music, emotions are not the primary intended outcome’. (I am taking here the purchase and playing of a compilation CD as self-choice, and indeed the decision to tune in and remain tuned in to a particular show on a particular station, such as Smooth Classics.) ‘Rather,’ he continues:

outcomes such as task completion are primary (e.g. getting the housework done). However, emotions and affective states in general can be secondary or intermediary outcomes. If I find housework boring and demotivating, then I may be able to get through the housework more successfully if I use music to help me feel more cheerful. (Sloboda 2010: 509)

What Classic FM’s compilations do, on the other hand, is precisely to situate affective states as the primary intended outcome. (This might also explain the vocative tense in many of the compilation titles: Relax! Feel good! Chill out!) This is, arguably, one step further along a line described by Timothy de Waal Malefyt in relation to emotions in advertising. Writing of what he calls a ‘new reign of emotional over rational marketing approaches’ (2007: 323), de Waal Malefyt argues that advertising strategies ‘no longer [follow] a rational choice model of consumer decision making […] but rather embraces an emotive sensory model based on markets’ notions of consumers’ experience and emotions with brands’ (ibid.: 321). Thus, marketers seek an emotionally driven decision in their favour by the consumer, who is bombarded with too many varieties of any given product type to make a rational decision. In this way, the advertising of goods has taken place across a more emotionally oriented terrain than was previously true: ‘embodiment [of emotions and sensations] has become the new consumer territory in which advertisers and marketers cultivate the private production and consumption of goods’ (ibid.: 336). And yet, at the heart of it all, advertisers and marketers are seeking to drive the consumption of goods. Classic FM is, in a sense, seeking to push the consumption of musical goods – CDs – with affective states as the vehicle by which to do so; in another sense, though, it can be seen as marketing the affective state itself, with a musical soundtrack as the vehicle. The small changes to soundtracks – the minor differences between compilations promising ‘relaxation’, for instance – are, in a way, the equivalent of introducing new features on a phone, or the identification of new germs killed by a toilet cleaning fluid; arguably, they are excuses to remarket a largely similar product. By organizing compilations and programming as they do, by placing affect explicitly at the forefront of their musical commodity, such that Classic FM are part of a shift towards marketing not just through affect, but of affective states.

In recent years, certain technological phenomena have arisen that also merit attention in this world of affectively organized music, and enable listeners to hunt out affectively organized musical experiences themselves far beyond the possibilities of mix-tapes and iTunes playlists. In so-called Web 2.0 online spaces, social connections are actively encouraged through engagement with various media. One of the most pervasive of these in the Western world has been Facebook, which itself can be linked to any number of other online spaces and smartphone apps to facilitate connections with ‘friends’. Many music services have emerged in this technological context (for example, 8tracks.com, Deezer, Grooveshark, last.fm, Pandora Radio and Spotify), and several either connect with Facebook or otherwise enable social networking through music. The services are not exactly identical, and indeed last.fm works with both Spotify and Deezer to gather information about listening habits and recommend new music on that basis, but they all offer social connectivity in various ways. Of these services, it is Spotify that seems, anecdotally, to be dominant in the UK (despite boasting only 15 million total users against last.fm’s 21 million or Deezer’s 20 million),⁶ and it offers users connections via Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, as well as an in-house sharing option. Playlists and single tracks are also assigned http links and Spotify identifiers to enable pasting into other sites or emails and later opening through Spotify by other users. The interface of the Spotify software is designed to actively encourage music sharing in several ways. One panel shows Facebook ‘friends’ and other Spotify users selected by the user, who can click on these and view a profile. (To clarify, it is possible to have other users in this panel who are not also Facebook contacts; connection with Facebook simply makes importing those users faster. It is also possible to have a short list of selected ‘favourite’ individuals.) Viewing another user’s profile on Spotify involves being able to view their ‘top’ (most listened to, recently) artists, and any playlists they have made available for viewing by other users, which can be subscribed to for updates of any changes made to the playlist. At the top of a profile is an invitation to send the user a track, and to include a short comment with it, with search and text boxes to facilitate an immediate act of music-sharing. Below the panel of ‘favourites’ is a constant stream of what all the Facebook contacts are listening to, periodically interrupted by more invitations to share music with specific individuals. And, finally, once connected to Facebook, the default setting is that a full feed of information about the user’s listening habits is sent directly to his or her Facebook profile, appearing for his or her contacts to see, ‘Like’ and comment on.

All of this social connectivity through music already points to the possibility that Spotify and services like it are almost real-time channels through which subjectivities are distributed, but another app available as a plugin within Spotify makes the latter an even richer site for this kind of space. Moodagent, which started its public life as a smartphone app, was designed to ‘draw lines of emotional logic between diverse artists and their music’ (Moodagent 2011). Its interface in the smartphone and recently developed desktop versions invites listeners to adjust five parameters through sliders: sensual, tender, happy, angry and tempo. By cross-referencing the chosen combination against the user’s music library, Moodagent is able to construct a playlist based primarily on an identified affective state. In Spotify, the app works through one of several different mechanisms. The user can search for a seed track, and from there Moodagent will identify the combination of the five parameters and generate a playlist accordingly, or the user can select one of the four emotional parameters from which to start a new playlist. Alternatively, users are invited to ‘visualize the mood of a playlist’ by dragging one of their own playlists onto the window and seeing Moodagent’s analysis of the tracks within it. Once users are taken to a playlist, however generated, they cannot control individual parameters directly, but they can set different contours for the various parameters (falling, rising and so on), and they can choose any track within the list as a seed track for a new list. Spotify itself intervenes and invites the user to add Moodagent’s results as a new playlist, which can then be made available to other users, and the social music circle begins again.

In this conglomeration of interfaces between Spotify and Moodagent, the user – emphatically a user, with its implications of agency, rather than a listener – is at the centre of the musical network, both creating and consuming the musical space in which subjectivities are distributed. As a result, certain features are brought to the foreground for which Classic FM has already laid the foundation. Not only is there an emphasis on social connections, where the additional comment to a track shared on Facebook stands in for the phone-in, but there is, crucially, a much heightened focus on reception and affective use. In this user-created world, just as in Classic FM’s compilations, the key agent is the listener, the music-user; meanwhile, over on Radio 3, the ‘Your Call’ feature is still vilified for its banality, while the Composer of the Week feature upholds the importance of the composer’s identity, biography and creative input.

Moreover, the logic that connects individual musical units transforms the terrain of consumption. Moodagent’s creators were apparently spurred to their invention by anxieties about the possible demise of the album in an MP3-focused market:

During the advent of MP3, friends Peter Berg Steffensen and Mikael Henderson looked into the future. Fearing that the dismantling of albums into individual tracks would destroy the “album experience,” their new company, Syntonetic, invented and patented a solution to draw lines of emotional logic between diverse artists and their music. This new and unique technology could, for the first time, understand the truly musical values of individual tracks and then repackage them to create a whole new mood based album-like experience. (Moodagent 2011)

Clearly, if one considers the album as the largest unit of musical currency, the ideal Gestalt experience (at least in the world of popular music), then this aim at an ‘album-like experience’ will always fall short of the mark. When considered according to the expectations and conventions of classical music, the picture looks even more interesting. ‘Dismantling’ full multi-movement works into individual ‘tracks’ (movements, overtures or arias, most obviously) is quite simply a dismantling not of an ‘album experience’ but of an entire unit of music. (At least, this is true if one accepts that a piece of music such as a symphony consists by definition of all of its sub-units, its movements.) To compile a playlist or CD according to affective state, or to ask Moodagent to generate a playlist on the basis of a single movement, is to detach the individual movements from the rest of the work and to connect them instead to other pieces with similarly identified affective qualities. No longer is the second movement of Bruch’s Violin Concerto connected to the first and third movements of the same work; rather, it is connected to a number of other second movements and miniature pieces that are packaged with the intention of generating the same affective state in the listener.

I do not in any way intend to imply a conservative stance here; I am certainly not proposing that the situation should be some other way. However, it is apparent that this current state of affairs is forcing us to reconsider the very status of classical music in contemporary culture. For Julian Johnson, there seems to be an implicit threat from popular culture – a force that can easily be identified as running through Classic FM, for instance – as he writes, ‘Classical music is shaped by different functional expectations than popular music, a fact all but lost today because of the dominance of the functional expectations of popular culture’ (2002: 5). He goes on to explain that this has to do precisely with how the function of music operates: ‘The paradox of music in a commercial context is that, for all appearance of difference, musics that derive from quite different functions lost their distinctiveness because they are assumed to serve the same function as all the others’ (ibid.: 5). In the present discussion, then, we can easily enough say that classical music has responded to the commercial contexts of the late twentieth century by turning to popular culture and borrowing not only its marketing strategies (as Carboni [2011] suggests), but also its functional expectations. But, for the present discussion, perhaps the richest observation Johnson makes has to do with the ‘paradoxical claim’ on which he argues that classical music has always been based, saying:

it relates to the immediacy of everyday life but not immediately. That is to say, it takes aspects of our immediate experience and reworks them, reflecting them back in altered form. In this way, it creates for itself a distance from the everyday while preserving a relation to it. (Johnson 2002: 5, emphasis added)

Peter Szendy notes that since the early days of the mechanical reproduction of music – even before recording, but with barrel organs and music boxes – the increased dissemination (and attendant popularization) of music has brought with it the risk that the ‘whole hierarchy of the musical sciences – composers, interpreters, listeners’ could be brought down if notation were thereby replaced as the primary means of circulation (2008: 76). With regard to the ‘distance’ of which Johnson speaks, Ian Biddle argues a similar point, but he also guards against the musicologist’s instinct to want to ‘preserve’ classical music from the ‘threat’ of popular culture that Johnson implies and that Szendy traces:

If there is one thing that classical music has never been able to do […], it is to insert itself into the noise and speed of modernity. Indeed, from its very outset, it has always been (and imagined as being) a kind of island or nature reserve in which delicately sanctioned musical practices and rituals must be preserved, held in place, against the thump and roar of a brash modernity. In short, classical music, undoubtedly one of the greatest achievements of the age of industrialisation, has always suffered from agoraphobia. The ‘field’ or territory of classical music, then, has always been a defensive one, always imagined as under some kind of malign threat from the vernacular horde. (Biddle 2011: 3)

It is almost certainly the same discourse of threat from which Classic FM suffers, for in offering the ‘nature reserve’ to such a wide audience – by making it possible for every evening bather to relax and chill out – the paradisiacal island becomes ‘overpopulated’ as the ‘vernacular horde’ invade (in their bubble baths, menacingly wielding their glasses of red wine).

Even more than this, however, is the possibility that the distribution of classical music according to affective logics threatens to reveal something of what the music has learned to deny about itself: that it is, and it relies on, affective labour. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are most famously credited with this term (2001), by which is meant labour that is intended to produce or modify affective states. Prior to his work with Negri, Hardt himself wrote on such labour, and noted that the phenomenon he perceived was not new as such, but was taking on a newly large scale in economic terms:

I do not mean to argue that affective labor itself is new or that the fact that affective labor produces value in some sense is new. Feminist analyses in particular have long recognized the social value of caring labor, kin work, nurturing, and maternal activities. What are new, on the other hand, are the extent to which this affective immaterial labor is now directly productive of capital and the extent to which it has become generalized through wide sectors of the economy. (Hardt 1999: 97)

Arguably, discourse around classical music is quicker to assign value within the repertoire along lines of reason rather than emotion, of ‘absolute’ quality over the programmatic or narrative. Symphonic and chamber musics are more centrally canonized than are tone-poems and ballets, for instance, and it is the ‘truths’ and internal musical meanings revealed through close analytical readings of works that are more commonly upheld over hermeneutic interpretations. (Hence, perhaps, Radio 3’s Discovering Music and the resistance to critical musicology [see, for instance, van den Toorn 1995].) Nonetheless, just as affective labour has always produced capital on some level, classical music has always participated in an affective economy, producing emotional responses from listeners and benefiting from those responses, from the emotional attachments listeners make to music. In the end, what this raises is an intriguing tension in the relationships among composers, interpreters, listeners and music distribution channels. When the affective outcome in the listener is placed at the centre of the experience – and particularly when the musical stimulus is one movement extracted from a multi-movement work, and arguably even more when the listener determines the stimulus for themselves rather than consuming through a radio programmer’s choice – then the listener’s response is exalted over the composer’s ‘intention’. But when a musical package is constructed for consumption, as in the case of Smooth Classics or any one of the Classic FM compilations, then the listener is arguably being very carefully directed in their affective state. The entire system of distribution along these lines, then, performs a very delicate balancing act of simulating the importance of the listener, all the while being carefully reassured that none of it matters: relax … feel good … chill out …

Notes

1 The potentially small size and inherently limited capacity of early crystal sets meant that solitary listening was no doubt a common enough activity in the early decades of radio, and Susan Douglas imagines a scene of ‘American boys and men […] connected […] umbilically by headphones to small black boxes powered by sets of batteries’ (1999: 55) in the 1920s. This is certainly individual listening. Conversely, many a workplace in modern Western culture is held together by a centrally placed radio set. What I am suggesting is a rise over time of the potential and worth in terms of audio quality of solitary listening. Andrew Crisell observes that listening has largely come full circle: ‘as in the days of the crystal set, listening has once again become a mostly solitary activity’ (1986: 13).

2 See Chapter 6 of Kassabian (2013) for more on this subject.

3 This tension was noted by Radio 3’s controller Stephen Hearst in 1978, who described the ‘two opposed, but often-voiced strands of opinion’ as ‘the real threats to Radio 3’ (Hearst 1978).

4 See the Radio Joint Audience Research website (RAJAR 2012) for listening figures.

5 The evidence for this is not quite as substantive as one might hope, but circumstantially it does begin to add up. See ABRSM (2011) and several comments that listeners avoid Classic FM because of the amount of dynamic range compression. See also the Wikipedia entry on dynamic range compression, in particular an explanation document that cites Classic FM as an example. See also comment 94 at Brun (2010).

6 See Butcher (2012); Social Media Statistics (2012); Rys (2012).