Object Lesson: Samsung/Schubert

This object lesson considers Samsung’s use of Schubert’s “Die Forelle” as the end-of-cycle alert for its washing machines. As an aural signature of Samsung’s brand, the melody has been disseminated globally and virally as a charming, if annoying, feature. Yet stripped of its historical context, it exemplifies the way elements of classical music linger, unrecognized, in mass culture. Through a close examination of Samsung’s midified reduction of Schubert’s Lied, this article offers three nineteenth-century lessons for twenty-first-century listeners: the longue durée of domestic innovation and its paradoxical virality, the “middle music” that continues to hover between social classes and financial strata, and our ensnarement in a really, really long nineteenth century.