#15: A taxonomy of background music

Making sense of one hundred years of noise.

Long post today — but it’s a deep dive, and a labor of love. Also I read a whole-ass book for this one. If you want to take breather, take it between “Elevator music” and “Foreground music.”

“The day the ‘Muzak’ died” at Piccadilly Station (Row17)

I’ve been thinking a lot about background music lately. The problem is, if you actually try to research background music, you find out that this one term incorporates a hundred others — genres, inventions, radio formats — none of which can be understood without understanding the others. Here are those terms.

Background music

For this taxonomy, we’re going to be taking “background music” as the generic term, because it describes nothing about the music to which it refers. Background music has no definite theme or style: any song that isn’t the focus of its listener’s attention is background music.

Some music wants to skirt your attention. It’s designed from the ground up to be heard, but not listened to. Music, but no songs. A shape, but no edges. Most of what I’m going to describe is like this.

Other times, as with film scores and video game soundtracks, composers fine-tune their music to accentuate some other artwork. They’re carefully built — usually even listenable — but also symbiotic: both lose something without the other. The generic term for this category is “incidental music,.”

And anyway, even the best music in the world, your favorite music, will fade into scenery if you aren’t paying attention. As we’ll see, anything can become background music.

Furniture music

There’s a poem by William Wordsworth, “The Solitary Reaper,” from one of his million hikes in the Scottish Highlands. It describes a woman singing as she works the field, in a language the speaker can’t understand. (He writes, “Will no one tell me what she sings?”) As he climbs the next hill, the music fades behind him. This is part of its beauty: He will never hear it again.

For most of history, music has been a rare thing. Every performance was fleeting. Constant access to music appears in descriptions of heaven.

Against the backdrop of industrialization — all the access to noise that came with it — Erik Satie is credited with a radical idea. He imagined composing “music that would be a part of the surrounding noise,” which would “[mask] the clatter of knives and forks without drowning it completely” and “neutralize the street noises that indiscreetly force themselves into the picture.”

Before Satie, this was not done. When music played, people listened. No music had ever been composed for the purposes of not being listened to.

“Furniture music” describes both Satie’s approach — music as a decoration — and also a set of specific songs he devised, with names like “Tapestry in forged iron” and “Wall-lining in a chief officer’s office.”

These were repetitive, monotonous, and if they were exceptional in any way it’s only because they were unexceptional on purpose. Yet they were a vision of utopia. The story goes that the first time Satie performed his furniture music during a theatrical intermission, he had to yell at the crowd to get them to mingle, stretch their legs, do anything other than sit and listen.

Furniture music was the natural consequence of a loudening world. Its primary limitation was that it had to be performed by a live musician. Background music would not be so limited for long.

Functional music

The term “functional music” wouldn’t be invented until much later on, but the concept twinkled through in Erik Satie’s manifesto on street noise. It describes war drums, church bells, those Apple wakeup alarms.

Functional music is music with a job. Nothing as self-evident as “to replicate heaven on earth” or “to produce a good aesthetic experience for the widest possible audience.” Functional music works in factories to boost efficiency, in grocery stores to retain customers, in breakfast nooks to allay alpha waves and get Middle America moving.

Characteristically, it originates from outside of the audience it works for. Of the Gregorian plainsong used to mollify serfs, Joseph Lanza writes, “Unlike the earthy work songs of migrant or slave laborers, plainsong came not from the workers but from an outside source — the descant of deities trickling from the clouds.”¹

Well it’s 1934, baby, and the deities are bleeding out. Radio will have to do.

Muzak (1934-1997)

Describing the origins of Muzak is like describing the origins of the Ten Commandments. I could say, “George Owen Squier [pronounced “square”] climbed to the top of Mount Sinai, and there found the secret of wired radio. He descended to find his followers knelt at that altar of mammon, the residential wireless set, and punished their descendants with a generation of grocery store bossa nova.”

However it happened, Muzak became the word and the law and the air. It refers to two different things: Muzak is the name of the company founded by Squier, a service which sold original background music to businesses by wire — an invented portmanteau of “music” and “Kodak,” itself an invention — and it’s the generic term for all background music of its kind, such was its ubiquity.

For the size of its empire, Muzak feels a little bit like lost media. You can find plenty of Muzak nostalgia compilations on YouTube — some even have commercial breaks of the era — but it’s never easy to tell if these are originals or fond fabrications.

And anyway, the feeling of going to the A&P and buying one of those cylinder cans of Coke with real Muzak playing probably can’t be recaptured. The company and the genre are both gone over the hill.

To the best of my knowledge, the Nick Perito Orchestra was contracted by Muzak. Stimulus Progression 5 is as good a reference as I have for the real thing.

That name should tell you something about the utility of Muzak. Notwithstanding the stations, which were named like subway lines — Purple for restaurants, Blue for department stores — “stimulus progression five” shouldn’t be read as a title. It’s more like an index card: the fifth record in Muzak’s Stimulus Progression program, an initiative to sequence tracks in such a way as to keep workers peppy in the morning, brisk at lunch, and efficient through the end of the workday.

Stimulus progression’s architects described an “ascending curve” to combat the average worker’s “fatigue curve.” The result, characteristic of Muzak, was destructive interference: the cancelation peaks and valleys, the supremacy of the flatline.

Elevator music

Muzak didn’t play in elevators, not even at the company headquarters. That association came from the use of background music to soothe passengers of the very first elevators, then perilous boxes of steel which took you higher and faster than anyone had ever been.

A 1945 plane crash against the Empire State Building stranded fifty people on the 88th floor with nothing but elevator music. It played until help arrived.

“Elevator music” is simply a derisive term for background music, picking on its bland qualities and the fact that, like plastic, it will probably be all that’s left when the world ends.

Foreground music

Hilariously, a kind of background music. So hated was Muzak, with its instrumental covers of popular songs, that competitors made a market out of original artist recordings. Vocals! Electric guitars!

Despite claiming to play “real music” — as opposed to elevator music — foreground music companies still chose their artists carefully to avoid sensory overwhelm.

Foreground music owes its success to Muzak, which owes its success to Satie running through the crowd at intermission, begging listeners to unlisten. More than a response to Muzak, foreground music is the linear result of a population practiced in ignoring.

Ambient music

Brian Eno, who among other things composed the music for Spore and the Windows 95 startup sound, tells the following story about the invention of ambient music: Bedridden in the ‘70s, his friend put on a record for him, then left. Rain pounded the window. Unable to raise the volume, Eno let the music and the clatter of rain become indistinguishable.

Then, in an airport, he thought of the disharmony between chipper Muzak and the deathwish of flying in an airplane. “I want to make the kind of music that prepares you for dying,” he wrote, “that doesn’t get all bright and cheerful and pretend you’re not a little apprehensive, but which makes you say to yourself, ‘Actually, it’s not that big a deal if I die.’” The result, Ambient Music 1: Music for Airports, is a kind of anti-elevator music.

Like Satie, Eno’s vision of background music was actually innovative — he wanted to draw attention to audio production as an art form, as distinct from the vocals and instrumentation that typically overlay it — but in the opposite direction. Satie saw a lack of music, and imagined filling it. Eno saw a glut of music, and imagined paring it down. Both dreamed of improving silence.

Eno expressed his desire for music to be a place. In that way, his art aligned with that of Muzak: using music to differentiate between “inside” and “outside.”

Beautiful Music

The history of Beautiful Music (often capitalized to avoid confusion) runs parallel to that of Muzak, but it’s much harder to understand without some really specific knowledge of FM radio. It’s a kind of programming, like “top-40” or “classic rock,” that plays unobtrusive music. The specific genre — easy listening, adult standard, light classical — changed often to maximize reach.

The hosts, too, were chosen with minimal intrusion in mind: “Big voice male. Deep resonant. Announcers presence was low. Names were not important.”

Like Muzak, Beautiful Music sold itself as a background music service for retail. Like Muzak, it attracted older listeners by villainizing young music.

One ad reads: “The songbird, the cricket, the soft crunch of snow underfoot are all becoming lost in the roar of the Seventies.” But Beautiful Music stations didn’t play crickets or snow crunching. Certain music was forbidden, but a lack of music was unthinkable.

I find it instructive that, when Beautiful Music died, existing stations that didn’t defect to adult contemporary — Adele, Shawn Mendez, “Rude” — switched to country and Christian stations. Not bad music, just music that reinforces rather than undermines. Music that is beautiful, but nothing else.

And, think: Do we feel any differently? Do 24-hour lo-fi stations not strip away the parts of hip hop that aren’t wallpaper? Do you listen to Death Grips while you file your taxes?

What am I saying — maybe you do. Anything can become background music. All it takes is a century of exposure.

Muzak (1997-2013)

Muzak stopped thinking of itself as a maker of music. It thought of music as its “raw material,” its service “the sequential arrangement to gain certain effects and to serve a functional purpose.” According to The New Yorker’s David Owen, 1997 marked the company’s rebranding from music producers to pioneers of “audio branding.”

Companies paid Muzak to cultivate particular environments within their stores. Classic rock at Applebee’s. Pop punk among the Nightmare Before Christmas tees. The best part of this new hustle: no limit on the kinds of music that could play. Gone were the days of covering Frank Sinatra with a thousand strings — now, you just played Sinatra.

Muzak is no more, its name retired after emerging from bankruptcy and getting purchased by Mood Media, an absolutely impenetrable organization that curates every atom of retail. Its Wikipedia page includes “scent” as one of its products, a reality I don’t want to contemplate right now.

My remaining question is: What was the point? What did we, what did music, gain from this whole experiment? Why did anyone bother?

From the very beginning, Muzak was made up of real musicians. So I suppose one answer to that question is, “A lot of artists got paid.” But I’ve stopped short of deciding that this was all an exercise in profit.

Muzak fought brainwashing allegations left and right. They argued for the real necessity of music. (“What a dreary world it would be if we could only listen to Bach,” said one former composer.) In other words, if there existed a string of numbers that could boost sales and reduce absenteeism, I don’t think Muzak would have aired only those numbers.

But it did leave us with a kind of dependency. No single company will ever again harness that dependency the way Muzak did — the world simply isn’t built for it. Walmart has its own in-house team airing Walmart & Sam’s Club Radio. It doesn’t need outside contractors.

At the same time, if Muzak pioneered the art of audio sequencing, streaming returned it to the collective. Unless you’re literally Walmart and can pay an orchestra to compose the mood of your store, a large part of it will be determined by the person controlling the speaker. It’s like its own desert island test: if you were stuck in one place for eight hours, what would you listen to?

In fact, the same is true for all of us. We’re free to compose our own space, our own bubble of branding, though with none of Muzak’s cultivated skill. I’m beneath a speaker playing “Good Vibrations” — the most expensive single ever recorded, arguably the greatest song ever made, and certainly great enough to pull me from the sticky tables of the bar. I’m looping The Strokes’ “Selfless” or Hiroshi Sato’s “Blue and Moody Music,” two pieces of heaven, like with repeat listens I can pull myself to their heights instead of dragging them down to mine.

As Patrick McKemey wrote of Eno’s startup sound, it created a threshold, a clear delineation between “online” and “offline.” The internet was a place. With no threshold, there is no offline, just like a world contained by music has no outside.

One Muzak adage went, “Our biggest competitor is silence.” But that’s not exactly true. Its biggest competitor was the songbird, the cricket, the soft crunch of snow underfoot. When everything is utopia, there is no earth.

When concrete is poured over the last secret place, elevator music will already be there.

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Thank you for reading!

I appreciate y’all’s patience with this one, in the writing and in the reading. I want to give a prize for making it this far, so here’s a sample of Yesco’s foreground music, which I had to cut because it’s couched in a very sweet video with 60 views.

Also, those of you who trickled in from the

Perfectly Imperfect

shoutout — thanks for stopping by! They’re not all like this lol.

DR

1.  From Elevator Music: The Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong, an invaluable resource for this taxonomy. The above Satie quotes are also pulled from this text.