Who can explain the Mantovani phenomenon— the taste for light orchestral music best described as aural thorazine?  Maestro Annunzio Paolo Mantovani (1905 – 1980) and his orchestra released over forty albums in the U.S. between 1955 and 1972, eleven of which made Top Ten.  After their biggest hit, Film Encores, which made it to No. 1 in 1957, Mantovani’s shimmering arrangements of cascading strings were heard, softly in the background, in finer elevators and coffee shops everywhere.  Many of us who came of age in the ‘60s (even those who were trained in the rigors of the Well-Tempered Clavier) possess fond memories of such elevator moments and an expanse of permanently exciting imaginative horizon that was forged when the experience of Mantovani was mapped onto fervent adolescent hopes and dreams.  Gauzy harmonies, oozing echoes—mmm, the promise of a teen’s idea of luxe, calme, et volupté. 

Sometimes Mantovani is claimed as a forerunner of so-called “New Age” music—though goodness knows there is plenty in John Cage and Miles Davis, let alone in Balinese gamelan music and Bulgarian chorales, to better account for that.   Yet something brave-new and possibly chilling seems to run through Mantovani’s work--something that, in recent years, has been pushing the work back into both mediasphere and mind.   A lavishly produced, ten-CD tribute set, The Wonderful World of Mantovani, was released in Japan last year, and two “Mantovani Magic” concerts, featuring the still-shimmering Mantovani Orchestra, have taken place in England since then.  And just the other day, doing research, I came across a perfectly iconic Mantovani track on YouTube, “The Lonely Ballerina.” I defy you to listen to this track and not to be awed by its insipidness. 

Is this not genius insipid?  Monumental insipid?  Insipid envisioned on a vast scale, commensurate with the desire of whole populations of World War II survivors for a stretch of post-war calm?  After all, Mantovani himself endured two great wars in England, where his family relocated in 1912 (his father had served as concertmaster at La Scala, under Toscanini).  Might the maestro’s message simply be peace at any cost?  Mantovani’s oeuvre is not light orchestral entertainment so much as a medicalized form of music applied to the victims of war trauma-- and applied, and applied.  Try watching the “Lonely Ballerina” video and not thinking about the generically pleasant stock photography that’s used today in ads for sedatives and anti-depressants.  Mantovani’s music neatly fit the American situation in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when solid citizens clung to an extended program of R&R after their acquisition of a world-spanning empire, and when certain unsolid ones, cultivating personal dissatisfactions and new-found empowerment, fomented social transformation that would erupt big-time in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, gauze or no gauze.

How did Mantovani manage it, musically?  Just listen to his arrangements, which blithely describe the debasement of the Western tradition.  Everything that great composers learned to do to create interesting tension gets flattened down: Bach’s propulsive harmonic architecture, Beethoven’s radical designs of rhythmic and textural contrast, Chopin’s structural mimesis of ennobled longing.  Even moments in Mantovani that promise a brief modulation into a different key—normally, in music, piercingly refreshing surprises-- are simply lubed away.  (Listen for this in “Lonely Ballerina.”)  

Ironically, music like this can be totalitarian—majestic and inhuman.  And the world’s once-huge taste for it, now largely subsided, despite the recent nostalgic fad, is like a secret atrocity, the site of which has been forgotten and, except for YouTube, is barely marked.

Or did you have a different thought?

--Florestan

(Speaking of loneliness and alienation, try a little Underworld ("Ring Road") for a palate cleanser.)