Background Music

In 1917 Satie wrote furniture music, asking music not to be listened to.

Related

ModernTimbreImpressionist

In 1917 Satie proposed furniture music, the first explicit request that music not be listened to seriously.

Time and place

Paris, 1917 and 1920. Satie placed this music at an exhibition and at a lunch, calling it furniture music and having a small band play while the audience talked. In 1934 an American company began sending recorded music over telephone lines, later known as Muzak, into factories, shops and lifts. Loudspeakers sat in corners and ceilings under one building-wide volume, and no individual could choose the programme.

What happened

Satie's idea was that music should fill a space like wallpaper or a chair, without asking for attention. His sections were short, repetitive and without dramatic climax, and listeners were allowed to walk and talk during them, the players not treated as the centre of a stage. His band was small, a few wind instruments and piano repeating short phrases while the meal went on. Muzak industrialised the function, sending recordings by wire and loudspeaker into public rooms and arranging programmes by hour and mood, bracing in the morning and slower after lunch. It joined the recordings into a continuous band with no applause or announcements between. Both avoided strong contrast and anything that might stop a person working.

What changed

Listening split into two modes, attentive and ambient. Music became infrastructure, the loudspeaker replaced the performer, and composition and programming began to aim at not disturbing. Background music also drew criticism, for occupying silence and for tuning labour and shopping to one rhythm. The manner later returned to the foreground, and ambient music, lo-fi and streaming playlists all work from the same principles, as do the soundtracks of shops, gyms and video.

Listen for the turn

Begin with Gymnopédie No. 1, slow, its harmony almost unchanging, with no thematic development to remember. Then the three Morceaux en forme de poire, for four hands, their phrases loose like talk in a drawing room. Finally Vexations, one passage repeated hundreds of times, forcing the listener either to attend or to treat it as air. Before the turn the hall demanded silence and focus; afterwards music was designed to be ignored.

Related

The turn belongs to Modern, with colour and space at Timbre, radio carrying music into daily life, and Satie's early manner at Impressionist.

Sources

• Grove Music Online 的 Background music 与 Satie 条目，用于核对家具音乐的概念
• Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music（St. Martin's Press），用于核对缪扎克与公共空间配乐

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.