Pre-conceiving pre-existing music

Is there a trend with contemporary film viewing that makes a distinction between the viewer identifications we make with classical film scoring versus popular songs compilation scoring? It seems that we understand lyric-based popular songs as coming into a compilation scoring with a certain kind of “baggage” – a set of preconceived ideas about the song, the artist, the culture it comes from.

But does pre-existing classical music come with similar baggage? In particular, I am thinking of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. As a piece of music, it has been used and reused countless times on film and television. As a pre-existing piece of classical music, it is more recognizable than a score from Star Wars, and also brings with it a discourse that is tied to (high) culture with various connotations. As a result, you would assume it more likely to appear on an advertisement for luxury carpets than an American indie film.

Hence, I find Happiness, directed by Todd Solondz, amusing for how he uses Four Seasons. I think that Four Seasons is generally thought of with pleasant, positive connotations – a scene of nature, man at harmony with nature and the seasons. In the film, Dr Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker) drives in his car playing the music in his car, and he looks tense and urgent as he searches for something. The music sits very uncertainly with his body language, and even more so when it is revealed that he is buying a magazine catered for young pre-teen boys, and that he is a homosexual pedophile.
This visual-audio association completely subverts any pre-conceived ideas we may have about Four Seasons. A pre-existing piece of classical music can also function as subversion, and not simply just to heighten and support the visual as we assume it does in the majority of classical scoring does in contemporary films.