The residents of Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà were orphaned and abandoned girls, among the most vulnerable people in Venetian society and coming from its poorest quarters. Gabriele Bella “Le Lagon Gelé” (Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons) One can only imagine what the composer, who worked much of his career at an all-girls’ convent-orphanage, would have made of this. In this role, Vivaldi was the literal soundtrack to post-2008 austerity “The Four Seasons” came to represent everything debased and exclusive about classical music.

When the DWP retired the music last year, an official told The Guardian: “We had some feedback that the Vivaldi clip caused anxiety for claimants and in particular had an impact on autistic callers.” The Guardian questioned whether there had been any consideration that the psychological effects of Vivaldi’s “pastoral evocation of murmuring streams, softly caressing breezes, and flower-strewn meadows” on “stressed benefit claimants hovering on the edge of destitution in 21st-century Britain.” One 2019 documentary showed a caller sobbing to it.

If you were an unemployment or benefit claimant and phoned the helpline for the Department for Work and Pensions between 2006 and last year, you would have likely heard the same 30-second excerpt on loop as hold music. Transport for London wasn’t the only British organization to make use of Vivaldi’s quartet of seasonal concertos (published in 1723 and composed a few years before). Since then, the practice has been widely adopted across all kinds of modern metropolitan spaces, deploying classical music as a form of social cleansing.

Realizing that piping classical music into its stations was a cost-effective means to deter young people from hanging around, Transport for London started playing Vivaldi, Mozart, and Beethoven in 2006. Here’s a reason to hate “The Four Seasons”: I last heard “Spring”-unbidden-as I passed through east London’s Walthamstow Bus Station during a routine commute home.

4 seasons classical