Wrong tracks ... Should Berlioz and Bach accompany our daily commute? Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty
Anyone commuting on London's Victoria line faces a twice-daily musical lottery: which masterpiece from the canons of classical music will accompany your descent into the overheated tumult of the tube at rush-hour, and what dulcet strains will dramatise your escape from the tunnels of public transport at the end of the day?
It makes for some weird juxtapositions: one day, I renewed my Oyster card to the first movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No 27 and re-emerged among the crowds to Rimsky Korsakov's Sheherazade. You can see the whole of the 40-hour Metronet playlist in a link from Neil Fisher's Times article about it earlier this year, in which I was coincidentally quoted.
You aren't meant to listen to this music: you're meant to be relaxed by it, ideally not commit crime to it. That's the idea, at any rate, and anecdotally it seems to work, not least because people don't want to hang around a place where classical music is playing. It's the same kind of social engineering that makes Top Shop play dance music at high-volume and high-speed to make you buy faster, quicker, and more; or that lulls you supposedly into an oasis of calm, as Vivaldi's Four Seasons chimes down the phone as you wait to speak to an airline, bank, or credit card company - something that tends to have the opposite effect.
What does all this do to music, classical in particular? Does it inure us to its power, turning the music into an aestheticised sort of crowd-control? The idea is that if its classical, it must be soothing (Mozart's Symphony No 40? Beethoven's Eroica? Mahler 1? - really?). That's the problem: if even Berlioz's diabolical, hallucinogenic March to the Scaffold from the Symphonie Fantastique (also part of the Underground's playlist) is supposed to turn jumpy commuters into emolliated consumers, then maybe we've reached an end-point in a history of listening.
Genres of music are reduced to their culturally conditioned meanings: classical music, it seems, can only represent, and can only mean, vague ideas of elitism, prestige, and dusty historicism. By definition, it cannot express violence and passion - even if, like the Berlioz, it's some of the most violent and vivid music ever written.
Maybe that's to overstate the case. It's possible, after all, for background music to be precisely that; and no one really wants to stop in the middle of a tube station to listen to music, should your favourite Strauss waltz come over the tannoy. In fact, the real effort is to try and ignore it.
Do other cities use classical music in this way, in the UK or around the world? Is this insidious social brainwashing or just a part of music in everyday life? And what's the strangest place you've encountered your favourite music playing in public? (Going beyond the realms of the anecdote, for a thorough investigation of the sociological power of music, have a look at Tia DeNora's book Music in Everyday Life.)
