Looking into possible avenues around background music.
Looking into sources that could speak negatively about the commodification or commercialisation of background music but finding more far out stuff criticising ambient artworks in modern times, as ambience being seen as ‘nice’ – and this therefore being a problem for curation in our modern times. Asking the question whether we need a more abrasive and conceptual form of art. In ‘Against Ambience’. They speak about Seth Seigelaub dying, a famous conceptual artist and curator.
Against Ambience by Seth Kim-Cohen, isn’t particularly concerned with background music, but ambient sound and it’s limits in contemporary art. Critiquing galleries and museums for focussing on sensory art like the works of Ryoji Ikeda, LaMonte Young & Mariah Zazeela’s Dream House and Turrell & Irwin. Stating that the art world needed to embrace sound art that was more conceptual and less concerned with light and sound as ambience. I guess the crux of the criticism could quite primitively be stated as only concerned with spatiality, immersion and sensory affect. A very interesting quote from the opening chapter in this book.
hearing is spherical; vision is directional
hearing immerses its subject; vision offers a perspective
sounds come to us, but vision travels to its object
hearing is concerned with interiors; vision is concerned with surfaces
hearing involves physical contact with the outside world; vision requires distance from it
hearing places you inside an event; seeing gives you a perspective on the event
hearing tends toward subjectivity; vision tends toward objectivity
hearing brings us into the living world; sight moves us toward atrophy and death
hearing is about affect; vision is about intellect
hearing is a primarily temporal sense; vision is a primarily spatial sense
hearing is a sense that immerses us in the world, while vision removes us from it.
The Audible Past: Cultural Studies of Sound Reproduction – Jonathan Sterne (As quoted in ‘Against Ambience’ – Seth Kim-Cohen
Will look into reading some more from Jonathan Sterne. His book
Listening to this BBC Documentary on Background Music, talking about Muzak and Furniture Music amongst other things. There is an interview with Brian Eno where he talks about how no composer was addressing the fact nobody was listening intently to the records and they served more as things you put on whilst you are ‘doing other things’
‘Audio Architecture’ – feels like a very loaded phrase. ‘Mood Music’ the new name for Muzak in 2021. It’s a glorified playlist generator with automated brand messages that can be fed through their playlists. Muzak is no longer Muzak, Popular Music is Muzak and which Mood Music, they have various playlist samples on their website including; ‘Classic Rock, Ambrosia (soft rock) and quite notably ‘Revolution’ channel playing 60s rock. ‘Tap into Emotion’ seems like quite a manipulative phrase.
In a blog from 2007, I found a few quotes from the 2007 Muzak site;
The “power” of audio architecture, Muzak‘s website continues, “lies in its subtlety.” These subtle sounds, played incessantly in the background, can “bypass the resistance of the mind and target the receptiveness of the heart.” It is thus almost literally subliminal. “When people are made to feel good in, say, a store, they feel good about that store. They like it,” Muzak claims. “Audio architecture builds a bridge to loyalty. And loyalty is what keeps brands alive.”
Pipedown Campaign – against background music in cafes and bars, run by Julian Lloyd-Webber.
Webber said that background music destroys the power of music. His concern mainly seems to be with classical music being used in these areas, which feels quite elitist to me and this podcast does well to point out that lots of these pieces were written initially for waltz’ and balls for the richest in historic times. What power in that case is lost? The power of music that was meant initially for the rich? One thing it makes me wonder is what then is the power of live music. I am not interested in this preservation of music as a sacred entity but rather our listening habits and whether they have changed with the development of recorded music. One thing is for certain so many different types of music become available to a class of people of whom they were never available before, whether it’s from far reaches of the world or the upper classes. People of importance having quartets play at functions to mostly be ignored as a symbol of cultural standing. If anything does that mean we listen more intently to musicians playing live now? In modern popular music we have lyrics, the artist has more of a voice. It’s interesting how Eno wants to create ambient music, but actually is more in line with the historic listening habits of the upper class – but it raises another question. What is better, to embrace your art as a commercial product that serves as decorative to an environment. Or, to express yourself supposedly free from this and eventually be wound up in this commercialisation. Political music of the past that was meant to lash out at the systemic oppression; punk, reggae, blues et al. All this music can be consumed by the background and commodified in certain environments, like classical music, yacht rock, easy listening that were never set on contesting the status quo. Julian Lloyd-Webber seems mostly concerned with the consecration of elite music that was never anti-capitalist – what I find stranger is this neo-liberal embrace of counter culture as a means to be invulnerable from it.
‘So much of the listening what we do is about having something on in the background’ – the one of the passing thoughts by the presenter in this podcast. ‘Life intervenes in all the glorious ways that life will’.
The ironic thing about Furniture Music, you are more likely to hear most pieces of classical music today in the spaces this music was composed for. Perhaps background music has always existed for those able to live in excess and with the freedom of information that technology and the internet has brought, we have begun to experience this. Also I think another avenue I need to think about bringing in is film and the soundtrack and how are awareness of the soundtrack as a feature in television and radio turns music into something that can centre us in a story. Music never existed in these ‘dead spaces’ until Muzak – but also until film, when a soundtrack might accompany someone in such a space.