Prize day|The use of classical music as a “teen repeller” was first decided in 1985.
Thousands young people gathered again on Saturday to celebrate the end of school. As usual, the police were also prepared to protect the young people’s partying.
The police in Western Uusimaa say in a press release that they used an old, well-proven method: soothing classical music was played on Mellsten beach in Espoo’s Haukilahti.
“We have noticed that classical music has a calming effect on young partygoers. This is the sixth year that we play classical in the deciders”, Chief Constable Mikko Juvonen says in the announcement.
A quick round of calls tells you that the method is only available in the capital region of the West Uusimaa Police Department. In the area of police departments in Helsinki and Eastern Uusimaa, classical music is not used to calm young people, the communication of the police departments said on Sunday.
Phenomenon interested the Californian musicologist Lily E. Hirsch so that he decided to find out where the use of classical music as a means of calming young people comes from.
In his work Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment Hirsch says that the idea originated in Canada in 1985. Hirsch’s investigative work has been reported by, among others, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation CBC.
At that time, a group of the management of 7-Eleven, a fast food chain in British Columbia, Canada, was distressed by the youths loitering in store parking lots, which they felt were having a detrimental effect on the chain’s business. The psychologists and the chain’s staff came to a common solution, where both classical music and so-called elevator music, or muzak, were played from the loudspeakers in the store chain’s parking lots.
According to Hirsch, the practice quickly spread from Canada to the rest of North America and eventually around the world.
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