Beethoven, Banking & Advertising

In the beginning was the flash flood; a nasty, life-threatening, weathery thing that nearly did for Noah.  Then along came the flash card which sent nerd pulses racing at the prospect of carrying as much 2MB of information without needing planning permission to do so.  Now, Youtube is crammed with videos of flash-crowds, flash-dances and flash-choirs and most recently the rather inelegantly named flash symphony orchestra. The product of classical musicians with time on their hands and a deep-rooted psychological need to perform for nothing in public?  Or a more plausible explanation is that this heavily produced and managed video of a supposedly spontaneous event is merely a thick, juicy slab of corporate advertising. The type of advert which agencies produce in the hope that they are so side-splittingly entertaining that they will go viral.  The type of advertising which, like an American dinner guest, recognises no irony.  Hell, no!  If you can use the face of Adolf Eichmann to sell burial plots in Israel, you just go ahead and do it. 

Such a piece of work is the advert for Banco de Sabadell in Catalunya (link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF-x3ybA1kc). 

On a quiet summer evening, a double bass player in full fig serenades the passing populace of the Catalunyan town of Sabadell with the bass part of what is now known as The Ode to Joy drawn from Beethoven's 9th Symphony ( Oh God! Not again!).  The irony starts early as a young girl drops a couple of euros into the bass players bag.  If Spain's economy continues on its current track, that was the bass player's pension!  The ad agency propaganda unit goes into overdrive with close-ups of children ranging in age from four to ten all looking bewitched as the bassist is joined by a cellist.  On Planet Reality, these same children would not let the appearance of a couple of musicians in any way hinder their noisy and anarchic play.  But on Planet Advertising, the oh-so-familiar Beethoven strains induce a torpor-like state which can only usually be achieved by the use of opiates or prolonged exposure to BBC Arts programming.

By the time the bassoonist and viola players arrive, quite a crowd has formed.  It's free, after all and who am I to deny the hard-working Catalans a five minute break from wondering how long their ever-rising tax bill will subsidise more laid-back areas of the Spanish economy.  Even those in the crowd who spent the last fifteen years living under an rock on Neptune now begin to recognise the EU's official anthem and glances of recognition are exchanged as a timpanist struggles through the crowd and toes began to tap as the impromptu choir kicks in.  You can almost hear the tumescent advertising executives hunched onanistically over the control room desk glorying in their triumph of presentation over substance.

The toe-tapping amongst the crowd continues and it looks like a few want to join in with the singing.  Mercifully this is edited.  Down the centuries, musical production supremos have tried rightly to deter audience participation having surmised that in order for a large impromptu choir to make music successfully, then a knowledge of the words is important and even a working knowledge of the language in which the words are written.  To ignore this would be to risk turning a musical event into an afternoon at Anfield.  Still, even this good work is now under threat by such darlings of the musical establishment as the Simon Bolivar Orchestra under Gustavo Dudamels.  Call me old-fashioned but I, for one, prefer my Haydn Symphony No. 86 without the string section samba'ing through the allegro.  If an orchestra is enjoying its music-making then surely it can express this in its playing and not have to resort to limbo dancing its way through Mozart's C Minor Mass, buck naked.  

Meanwhile, back on Planet Advertising, background shots of Banco de Sabadell have become more noticeable.  The whole ghastly pretence ends with one of those easy to remember but plainly wrong slogans; in this case: Som Sabadell (We are Sabadell).  For God's sake will someone pass the bucket!  How unutterably puke-making.

What is wrong with this assertion?  How long do you have and where should I begin?  The credit crisis brought on by the banks' foolish if not criminal behaviour looks likely to plunge western economies into two decade of stagnation like that suffered by Japan.  As western governments struggle to control expenditure, Arts is one policy area that most of the population still have difficulty in spelling let alone appreciating and is always at the top of the list for the chop. The irony of this shameless piece of fabrication is that many of the musicians featured will probably not have a job in three years time; that hands trained to play instruments will end up, if they are lucky, stacking shelves in the Corto Ingles; that musical education (so often an escape route for enterprising musicians) will also be a no-go option as the axe is poised to fall on here as well.

So. It looks like Sabadell is already having trouble with the 'we're all in it together' bollocks.

The irony is on so many levels, it's difficult to list them here.  Happy families all singing along with the anthem of an institution like the EU which is also rapidly becoming divided North and South.  Voters in northern EU member states are increasingly reluctant to fund blank cheques for the economies of their southern neighbours.  Not so much 'We are Europe' but 'We are closed. Come back next week'.  All the while, against a background babble of 'austerity' and 'cuts', the EU is entering its 11th year of operation without a set of audited accounts; a prerequisite for even the most basic financial discipline, one might think.  

Then, of course, there's the great deaf genius himself, Beethoven.  When he finally saw through Napoleon's PR, he withdrew the dedication of his Symphony No 3.  Sadly, he isn't around to stop his music and Schiller's words being used for political purposes by the technocrats and bankers.  By all means sing about the brotherhood of mankind. It takes their mind off looking for a job.  Invoke the Daughters of Elysium.  Even though many of them have 2 screaming kids, no partner and are worried to death about where the next social handout is coming from. On the ground, the Ode to Joy is not quite so jolly. Still, providing it keeps the minds of the masses off the harsh realities of economic decline, who caused it and how an integrated federal Europe will make everything better, then it's doing a good job.

Surely, the good people of Sabadell and elsewhere in Europe deserve better.  Surely, the bankers of Banco de Sabadell should know better.  After the mess the banks created, a period of silence and contemplation would be greatly welcomed not a barrage of cynical advertising trying to rewrite history with whatever flash crap happens to be popular at the time. And what of Beethoven's Ode to Joy? Wouldn't an anthem by Haydn better reflect the general yearning for security and stability.  Wouldn't something by Brahms better reflect Europe's new mitteleuropa character.  What the good people of Sabadell and their musicians need is not a perpetual state of revolution but a period of sustainable, achievable government with structures to match. What nobody needs is banks air-brushing history and reality distorted through the prism of advertising.