From the noun Kleenex, a proprietary name for a soft, disposable paper tissue, used especially as a handkerchief, the phrase Kleenex music designates:
– a type of popular music that is rapidly discarded (cf. also the phrase singing milkshake);
– Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, regarded as a lachrymose piece of music.
—Cf. also notes on ‘Kleenex’ in similes.
DISCARDABLE MUSIC
The earliest occurrences that I have found of the phrase Kleenex music used in the sense of discardable music are as follows, in chronological order:
1-: From Michael Jackson: ‘Psychiatry’ On the Pre-Dawn Air Waves, by Phyllis Seidkin, about the British-U.S. talk-radio host Michael Jackson (1934-2022), published in the San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, California, USA) of Sunday 16th September 1962 [Pictorial Living: page 12, column 1]:
He was hired by KYA in San Francisco.
The KYA job was less than met the eye back in Springfield. Jackson, hired for “the morning show”, found that morning begins at midnight. And so he was playing rock-and-roll from midnight to six.
“I don’t like rock-and-roll,” he says, “and I don’t play any these days. It’s Kleenex music—use it once and throw it away.”
2-: From 48 joyful voices, by Margo Miller, published in The Boston Globe (Boston, Massachusetts, USA) of Sunday 10th April 1977 [Vol. 211, No. 100, page A9, column 1, and page A12, column 3]:
“I call it Kleenex music,” said Ted Marier with disapproval, some sadness but no malice in his voice, when the subject of folk music Masses came up.
He had been talking about a progression of events in the Roman Catholic Church and the effect on music for the liturgy.
“Kleenex music” is not tolerated in Marier’s domain—he is music director of the Boston Archdiocesan Choir School—and neither is the thinking that leads to such music. […]
[…]
About “Kleenex music”… […]
[…]
While Marier’s adult career has been in classical and church music—he became organist at St. Paul’s in 1934 and choir director there in 1947—he is not unacquainted with popular music. In college he played piano with Eddie Welch’s band and on the “Old Man Sunshine” morning radio show. To Kenny’s lyrics, he wrote the music for two still-current Boston College football songs, “Sweep Down the Field for Boston” and “Boston’s Out to Win Again.”
For informal, secular occasions like football, the sing-along aspect of “instant music”—as Marier calls the folk guitar Mass—may be fitting and proper. And he has worked in the archdiocese to give parishioners hymns and anthems worth singing.
The way he runs his school, and the response of the boys enrolled there, suggests that music of substance nourishes because it challenges.
3-: From Fortune Smiles on Greek R&B Band, an interview by Todd Webb of Basile Kolliopoulos, bassist in the Oklahoma City-based Fortune Tellers, published in The Daily Oklahoman (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA) of Sunday 13th January 1985 [Entertainment & Arts: page 2, column 1]:
To this three-man band, R&B isn’t a trend—it’s an obsession. Kolliopoulos labels most modern music trends “Kleenex music.”
“You use it and throw it away,” he says. “We stand for something much more lasting than that; we stand for music that is much more severe. Music that will stick around.”
4-: From a comment on current pop music, made by Steve Goddard, music director of the radio station KZZP, published in The Arizona Republic (Phoenix, Arizona, USA) of Sunday 14th September 1986 [97th Year, No. 119, page E3, column 6]:
“I don’t think music has ever been so disposable,” he said. “It’s a sign of the times.
“It’s great fun for now, but you aren’t going to hear it 10 years from now. It’s Kleenex music.”
BENJAMIN BRITTEN’S WAR REQUIEM
The phrase Kleenex music has also been applied to War Requiem (1962), written by the English composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976).
The earliest occurrence of this use of Kleenex music that I have found is from The Listener and BBC Television Review (London: British Broadcasting Corporation) of Thursday 16th March 1967 [page 368, column 3]—here, “the Master” refers to the Russian-born U.S. composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971):
WHILE THE MASTER himself fulminates in California against some of his more conservative juniors, in an essay not yet reprinted in England (it dismisses Britten’s War Requiem as Kleenex Music), his most faithful apostle now publishes his third Stravinskyan gospel in London.
It was probably in the following from Themes and Episodes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1966), by Igor Stravinsky and the U.S. orchestra conductor Robert Craft (1923-2015) [page 14], that Britten’s War Requiem was first associated with the noun Kleenex:
The tide of applause virtually packaged along with the War Requiem is so loud and the Battle-of-Britten sentiment is so thick that these phenomena, and the national inferiority feelings in music they expose, are at least as absorbing a subject of investigation as the music. Behold the critics as they vie in abasement before the wonder of native-born genius. […] Here is The Times, in actual, Churchillian quotes: “Few recordings can ever have been awaited so eagerly and by so many people as that of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem” . . . and “. . . practically everyone who has heard it has instantly acknowledged it as a masterpiece . . .” […]
Kleenex at the ready, then, and feeling as though one had failed to stand up for “God Save the Queen.”
In this essay, therefore, the noun Kleenex alludes to the lachrymosity of Britten’s War Requiem. This is confirmed by the text containing the second-earliest occurrence that I have found of the phrase Kleenex music as applied to Britten’s War Requiem, which is a review by Gerald Larner, published in The Guardian (Manchester, Lancashire, England) of Monday 2nd September 1968 [No. 37,991, page 4, column 2]:
THE extremists in approval or disapproval of Britten’s music differ most acutely on the subject of the War Requiem. It is unfortunate—although inevitable, with a composer as influential as Britten—that the factions ever arose and particularly unfortunate that this work should be used as a weapon between them. Stravinsky has referred to it as “Kleenex music,” presumably in ironic reference to its lachrymose qualities but, whatever one’s opinion for or against public tears, and as the Edinburgh Festival performance in the Usher Hall made abundantly clear, the War Requiem is a work of genuine sentiment masterfully written.
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