One man’s Mozart is another man’s poison. Music divides. So why do hotels insist on inflicting their musical tastes on their guests? ‘Music at dinner is an insult to both the cook and the musician,’ noted G.K. Chesterton. Or in Gordon Ramsay’s blunter version: ‘If you walk into a restaurant and music is being played, you know the food is crap.’ So what is wrong with silence?
The Guide makes a point of asking hotels what their policy is on background music. They often reply proudly that they have installed the latest Bang and Olufsen hi-fi system which they play to their guests, morning, noon, and night. One hotelier told us:’I am tone deaf. I have six CDs which I play in rotation, as they will probably like at least one of them.’ There may, I accept with reluctance, be a case for a little light music to ease the chill of a totally empty dining room. But too many hoteliers use background music as an all-purpose battering ram. One visitor to a designer hotel in Glasgow complained of ‘wall to wall music with the kind of low beat that rattles your fillings at breakfast’. I know just what he means. At a Relais and Chateau hotel on Little Palm Island, just off the Florida Keys, my mid-morning coffee was going splendidly until interrupted by some raucous modern jazz. As I was alone in the restaurant, I asked the waitress for it to be turned off so I could listen instead to bird song and the waves. ‘Sure’, she said. Five minutes later the music was still blaring out, I asked again. ‘Sure, no problem’, again without any result. That prompted direct action. I went to the console and ripped out every wire I could see. Bliss, birds and the sound of waves were back..
Vandalism? Ironically by far the most effective deterrent against yobbery is piped classical music which teenagers en masse can’t stand. Pipedown, an admirable pressure group which campaigns for silence, has no yobs but many distinguished musicians amongst its members, including Alfred Brendel, Lesley Garrett and Julian Lloyd Webber. The Hotel Guide is pleased to be one of its supporters. We all have our prejudices and Muzak is mine.
“Rock Island” The Music Man (opening scene)
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