At some point, some bureaucrat decided that it was necessary to interrupt the music once in a while for a very important announcement over the loudspeakers. Then, of course, more announcements became important, until every piece of information that could possibly be conveyed to passengers must be spoken over the loudspeakers, because the noun “accessibility” needs no verb.
Yet the music still plays—between announcements. Yesterday afternoon Dr. Boli was waiting for a Red Line car in the Wood Street station, and the Pittsburgh Symphony was playing Dukas’ Sorcerer’s Apprentice—an entertaining bit of light classical music that is entertaining only because of the way it builds up suspense and amusement by varying its themes. Of course no one can hear that, because the very longest interval between announcements—yes, Dr. Boli got out a stopwatch—was twenty-seven seconds. That was an outlier: the usual interval was less than half that.
It made him wonder what people think music is, and he came to the conclusion that, for the people who program the announcements, music is an incomprehensible pattern of sounds, the aural equivalent of a repeating abstract pattern on wallpaper, which is not meaningfully interrupted by hanging a picture or installing a switchplate.
How does one explain to such people that music has a meaning—that it has structure, that it progresses, that it makes sense unless you make nonsense of it?
Perhaps they are verbally oriented rather than musically oriented. In that case, dear Pittsburgh Regional Transit announcement programmers, what you are doing is something like this:
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind the elevator
At Allegheny station between the platform
And the street is out of service. Passengers
Who require the elevator should proceed
To the next stop. We apologize
For the inconvenience natural shocks
That flesh is heir to? ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die inbound
Passengers headed for Station Square station
Should proceed to First Avenue and take
An outbound Subway Local to Station Square.
Station Square is included in the free zone
For the duration of the construction life:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the poor man’s contumely,
The pangs of Red Line riders may experience
Delays of up to…
Or perhaps our transit bureaucrats are more the visual type. In that case, it is something like this:
