The Sound of Cottage Cheese: (Why Background Music is the Real World Beat!)

The Sound of Cottage Cheese (Why BackgroundMusic is the Real World Beat!) JosephLanza THE HOWARD JOHNSON'S restaurant centered in New York City's theatre district offers a spectacle extraordinaire:vinyl upholstery, fake wood laminants, formica moderne, and a turnover of seemingly listless players savoring their french fries, over-boiled vegetables and jello cubes to the latest Muzak selections. Muzak is, in fact, the most integral part of this performance: a computerized chorus that judges, reflects and determines the actions and thoughts of every character. But if this show is too lowbrow , you need only journey to a cafe in Soho, the East Village, or any other enclave where chic is kitsch spelled backwards, to find the digitized drones of artists like Brian Eno counterpointing cappuccino milk steamers and sundry book chat. The actors, sound, context and coffee brands may differ from theatre to theatre, but the stage is essentially the same as modern life evolves into a megalopolis of air-conditioned and sonicallymonitored atriums. As restaurants, elevators, malls, supermarkets, office complexes, airports, lobbies, hotels and theme parks proliferate, the background or environmental music needed to fill these spaces becomes an increasing staple in our social diet. Background music has gotten so pervasive and sophisticated that it is no longer limited to syrupy strings, whipped-cream Wurlitzers or Velveeta vocals. We now have avant-garde "sound installations" permeating malls and automobile showrooms, quaint piano recitals comforting us as we wait in bank lines, telephone techno-tunes keeping us 42 complacently on hold, brunch Baroque for our dining pleasure, and even synthesized "nature" noises that further blur the boundary between our high-tech Platonic caves and "real life." Championed by Muzak Corporation decades ago, the philosophy and musicology of background music are more complex and engaging than we may realize. What distinguishes such contoured concertos from other music? An artfully contrived regimen of metronomic repetition, limited pitch, melodic segments that overlap into a tonal wash, and mechanized harmonies with a lack of expression that borders on lunacy. To put it more clinically, it shifts music from figure to groundin order to encourage peripheral hearing. Be it Philip Glass parsimony or Mantovani excess, background music provides an illusion of distended time. It makes us feel more relaxed, contemplative, distracted from problems, and prone to whistle over chores otherwise unbearable when the alternative is to suffer in silence. To paraphrase one Muzak executive: Background music is something you should hear without listening. Background music's origins vary. There are ancient references to selfgenerating Aeolian harps in Homer's Odyssey and a "Singing Tree" in The Thousand and One Nights. Sir Thomas More anticipated mealtime music in his Utopia. European Baroque gardens often had hydraulic organs with artificial singing birds. We can trace its composition to the first church organ recitals that pacified worshippers between sermons. Also Gregorian chants most likely tranquilized Benedictine monastaries for hundreds of years and have a similar relaxing, yet unobtrusive, effect when played at low volume on today's compact discs. It may not be just coincidental that Muzak's antiphonal murmur has religious precursors. The nineteenth-century Italian author Mario Morasso anticipated Muzak futurism by declaring that "the holy temple, as a means of satisfying a spiritual need ... has become the Department Store or the clerical office." Edward Bellamy, in his turn-of-the-century novel Looking Backward (2000-1887), took a more secular approach by predicting a future where piped-in music was one of many perks offered by a benign, state-controlled consumer utopia. We also cannot forget such populist influences as carnival calliopes and silent movie accompaniments. This mass dousing of aural cologne was brought to us by the Industrial Revolution. The continuous combinations of generators, ventilation systems and low-frequency electrical lighting made silence an unwelcome anomaly when it existed at all. If Taylorism allowed employers to monitor the lag time between a clerk reaching for his pencil and marking his paper, sound engineers could likewise manufacture their version of the optimum work womb. Distinguished composer Erik Satie responded to this trend 43 in the early 1920s with a (perhaps sardonic) manifesto advocating "furniture music" that could "mingle with the sounds of the knives...