Music and the Social Etiquette of Teatime

No matter how well you think you know your city, there are always tiny areas of terra incognita, places you’ve either overlooked while walking past them or simply hadn’t ever heard of before. After familiar places begin to get boring, these little pockets of “urban wilderness” become a sought-out commodity, a certain kind of thrill you need to quench an inner fix.

I constantly find myself in situations where I’m looking for something new and different in the city, something of a very peculiar sort. Whether it’s a bookstore or a random trinket shop, there is a specific atmosphere I keep chasing after, and have not been able to find for a very long time. That is, until Instagram came to my rescue one day, with a rather lovely suggestion for an account to follow.

That is how I became acquainted with Kitten and the Bear, a tiny tea room dedicated specifically to selling buttermilk scones and handmade artisan jam made using the traditional French confectionary method. I have only been there a couple times, mainly due to how off the path the shop is from my regular travels through the city, yet it was during one of those visits that something was brought to my attention that I thought peculiar, a tiny sliver in time that felt almost like it was intruding upon the turn of the century Parisian café atmosphere.

This “detail” was a pair of girls sitting at one of the tables, having ordered the tea service with an abundance of scones, cream, and jams. Yet despite the sugary delights before them, both were fixated on their phone screens, ignoring not simply the food but, more significantly, each other’s presence. And this puzzled me, for teatime is most frequently known to be anything but anti-social, and not merely for the company of all those present. Tea has been made into something of a mini-ball, so strongly has it been linked with music to set the atmosphere.

Afternoon tea was originally introduced in 1840 by the seventh Duchess of Bedford to serve as a happy medium between lunch and a late dinner. Most are familiar with the image of polished china and an array of delectable pastries, along with the extension to that image of the gazebo and rose garden, with a small orchestra playing classical music, maintaining an air of sophistication to the entire event.

We’ve come a long way since then, particularly when looking at the way in which coffeehouses have changed over the centuries. While today they remain the meeting place of teenagers, lovers, coworkers, and strangers spending time socially, they have also become the source of music that has been dubbed “coffeehouse culture”. Think along the lines of Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith, He Is We, and Owl City, to mention only a few. The music accompanying the social event of tea time has changed just as much as the action of drinking tea itself – for starters, coffee has become the common drink of choice, no longer consumed at a specific time of day, rather becoming something that people just pop in and have whenever they fancy. The music has also become much more fluid, no longer trying to present a façade of a certain aristocratic sophistication as much as it now strives to break this façade. It’s as if the corset strings have been loosened on music, giving it now the freedom to search for that airy feeling of nostalgia and dreaminess that classifies many of these coffeehouse musicians.

Indeed, music has become so important that I have heard friends of mine mention that, during their interviews for the barista position in smaller coffee shops around the city, one’s ability to make a mean roast was quite closely matched by one’s ability to put together a good playlist, the discussion of music preferences – genres, bands, themes, or motifs in lyrics – becoming a significant part of the conversation. And rightly so. It was the choice of music that made one of my friends exclaim, while we were in one particular coffee shop, that she’ll definitely be coming back there because she loved their taste in music. Or, a much more recent example: I’ll forever remember one particular shop downtown for the fact that they played Semisonic’s “Closing Time” five minutes before their actual closing time, a polite reminder for customers to be mindful of their hours of operation.

The phenomenon can surely be analyzed from a scientific point of view – almost everything today is, with studies, charts, and surveys popping up almost out of thin air in order to try and answer why a specific phenomenon happens. Yet there aren’t many scholarly journal articles that even focus on the evolution of music over the centuries in regards to such social functions as teatime, as I found out firsthand when I tried satisfying my own curiosity. And while many people will readily point out that food is the glue that bonds people together and makes them social creatures, it’s a little harder for them to add that mixing music into the picture makes for an even more powerful equation.

While the melody and liberty of the lyrics may have changed, the small talk and calm, observant gaze have remained - they are, in fact, even more heightened in today’s typical coffee shop. But while tea parties of the past were social events that everyone wanted to attend as a way of emphasising their significance in society, today’s coffee equivalent is much more about hiding and toning down. The mellow lights, chipped brick walls, and hanging lightbulb garlands serve as a greenhouse that cultivates the present-day flaneur: the curious wallflower that is constantly hungry for its surroundings, photosynthesising off of an atmosphere of freshly roasted beans and the melting notes of an acoustic guitar.