In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Preface Cage Free Rob Haskins once remarked that John Cage had always been “many things to many people—an extraordinarily prolific composer, performer, teacher, essayist, aesthetician, painter, and poet. He was known for his avid and often learned pursuit of subjects other than music, such as Zen Buddhism, Thoreau, mushrooms, and Marshall McLuhan. His musical output was no less diverse.”1 Cage also, suggests Daniel A. Herwitz, may have been many things to himself, and it remains daunting to distinguish clearly among the composer’s many voices: “[They] both coagulate and contradict, leaving one unsure as to what one is hearing and thus how one should respond. Furthermore, Cage isn’t simply a man of many selves; he specifically intends to conflate and confuse.”2 Many scholars have thus studied the work of this tutelary and versatile figure from a wide range of critical perspectives. The following inquiry is fully indebted to many incredibly sophisticated studies devoted to Cage by scholars like James Pritchett, Richard Kostelanetz, William Fetterman, David Patterson, Douglas Kahn, and more recently Branden W. Joseph, Julia Robinson, and Rebecca Y. Kim.3 While it may, at times, conflict with existing interpretations, the purpose of the discussion in this volume is not to dispute their relevance. It would not only be impossible to resolve the contradictions that the large body of Cagean studies reflects, discusses, perpetuates, and sometimes accentuates. It would also be fundamentally useless to attempt to imprison the polysemic nature of his artistic trajectory into a single and fixed meaning. The following inquiry does not seek to subsume the extraordinary plurality of John Cage’s art into one interpretative model; it is first and foremost concerned with the implications of the strange (and ultimately unrealized) concept of Muzak-plus, formulated by Cage in 1961. In this light, what follows is not x preface a musicological study, and the figure of John Cage that is privileged is that of the artist-thinker, especially in its 1960s incarnation. This volume, however, is not strictly devoted to Cage. In order to discuss the concept of Muzak-plus, it appeared necessary to examine its industrial counterpart, that is, the pervasive product known as Muzak. The existing body of literature devoted to this phenomenon may not be as vast as the one dedicated to Cage, but it is nonetheless significant. Joseph Lanza’s Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong (1994) is certainly the most popular book on this controversial genre of music, but Stephen H. Barnes’s 1988 study on the Muzak Corporation presents a more focused critical history of the major company that developed and distributed functional music. Jerri A. Husch’s unpublished dissertation Music of the Workplace: A Study of Muzak Culture (1984) offers a notable foray into the study of Muzak as a tool for work management.4 In addition, one cannot but mention the innumerable articles published on the subject from various points of view, including ethnomusicology, sociology, psychology, (pop) cultural studies, and marketing. Ultimately, all of those sources contribute to an understanding of Muzak. Still, probably the most fascinating literature on Muzak remains that produced or sanctioned by the company itself; unburdened by critical concerns and bolstered by an unashamed desire to subjugate, it exhibits Muzak’s rhetoric in all its crudeness. Muzak-plus undeniably responds to Muzak, but Erik Satie’s earlier investigations into musique d’ameublement (furniture music) are inscribed as a watermark within Cage’s concept. Satie is, no less than Cage, a complex personality. Here again, it would be impossible to consider part of Erik Satie’s oeuvre without referring to the work of many experts, from PierreDaniel Templier, Rollo H. Myers, Robert Orledge, and Alan M. Gillmor, to Ornella Volta and Jean-Pierre Armengaud.5 Although many of them have discussed musique d’ameublement, reaching various conclusions, this minor output of the composer’s production remains nonetheless remarkably problematic. The issue becomes even thornier when it intersects with John Cage’s aesthetics and/or Muzak. It quickly appears, for instance, that furniture music and Muzak are bound to explain each other. Readers interested in this issue mostly face a double bind: Satie invented muzak, and muzak realized Satie’s idea (whether unfaithfully or not). Oftentimes, rather interchangeably, the understanding of the first depends on a missing definition of the second. As it seems, many attempts to examine the influence of one concept from a single point of view—say, the legacy of Satie’s work...

Share