Triple Entendre: Furniture Music, Muzak, Muzak-Plus

Introduction

introduction The music of the future? Surely beyond notes and based on sound. In reality, of course, the music of the future can only be the music of the present, but is, with rare exceptions, the music of the past.1 —Edgard Varèse In October 1961, to his own puzzlement, the avant-garde composer John Cage was commissioned by the artist and thinker Gyorgy Kepes to write an essay on the questions of module, rhythm, proportion, symmetry, beauty, balance, and so on.2 Cage’s piece was to contribute to the collective volume Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm, part of the “Vision + Value” series, finally published in 1966.3 As he had done before,4 Cage used his score for Cartridge Music (1960) as a tool and ended up designing his piece of writing following a set of directives such as: “from line 24 to line 57, tell a story that is relevant to proportion, discuss an idea about rhythm, follow this with an idea that has nothing to do with balance.” In the final text, paragraphs are separated by empty spaces that were translated into silences when Cage delivered his piece as a lecture.5 There, in between two paragraphs, Cage offers a peculiar vision of a future music. “There’ll be centrally located pulverized Muzak-plus (‘You cling to composition.’) performed by listeners who do nothing more than go through the room.”6 Cage’s formulation of Muzak-plus remains, at first sight, rather elliptic. It is expressed in impersonal terms (“There’ll be . . .”) preventing the identification of Cage, or anyone else, as the composer. The future tense not only indicates a forthcoming phenomenon, it also induces its inevitability. Muzak-plus is described as being both contained (“centrally located”) and perfectly volatile (“pulverized”), as if Muzak-plus were an emanation of sorts, consciously or inadvertently released by “performers-listeners.” In between brackets, an unidentified voice opposes a conventional mode of making music to Muzak-plus, as if composition were getting in the way of a form of decomposition. The term Muzak-plus itself is meant, with some humor, to convey a sense of what this future music will be. Ringing like 2 introduction those advertising slogans promoting an old wine in a new bottle, Muzakplus promises something “more” than muzak but not, one might think, something entirely other. Cage died in 1992, and none of his work bears the title of Muzak-plus; to this extent it is reasonable to think that it remained unrealized. But the idea persisted, and, among “things that might be done that haven’t yet,” one reads in Cage’s “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1973–1982,” “The use of photoelectric eyes to scan the principal entrances and exits at Grand Central bringing about pulverization of Muzak.”7 What was Cage, with such persistence, expecting to pulverize? The general and common understanding of Muzak could not be clearer: It is “a registered trade name that has insinuated itself into people’s minds as a generic noun signifying ‘canned’ or pre-recorded background music played in places of public resort.”8 Or again, as the company defined itself at the end of the 1970s: “Muzak is a company that provides functional music as a tool of management in environmental situations.”9 The term has nonetheless a double entendre: muzak (lower case) refers to the genre of background music in general, while Muzak (with a capital, as in Cage’s remark above) refers specifically to the trademarked product. Generally speaking, however, both meanings easily convene in one common sentence: “Muzak is the single most reprehensible and destructive phenomenon in the history of music.”10 Muzak may be to blame, but it is impossible to consider Cage’s reference to Muzak outside of his lifelong interest in the work of the French composer Erik Satie and more specifically in musique d’ameublement [furniture music]. Designed by Satie in the late 1910s and early 1920s, such “music” (as it is often prudently labeled) would play in our houses “a role similar to light [and] heat.”11 Very few examples of such music by Satie exist, and, despite Cage’s notorious efforts to promote the composer’s achievements, they have long been regarded as marginal, eccentric, or “deliberately ludicrous ”12 experiments within a body of work of disputable quality. As the composer Lothar Klein remarked in 1966, Satie’s work is “small and much of it is purposely awkward,” and...