Last week it was reported that debt-ridden Muzak Holdings
LLC had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. This was no
doubt a blow to the company’s 1,250 employees
in Fort Mill, S.C., especially at a time when jobs are
scarce. In recent years Muzak has repositioned itself as a leader
in “audio architecture,” but at a time when businesses are having
trouble holding on to their “brick and mortar” architecture, it
is easy to see why Muzak is in trouble.
Muzak was the brainchild of Major General George Owen
Squier, a West Point graduate with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins.
Gen. Squier may have been the most celebrated inventor of his
day, had it not been for his contemporaries Thomas Edison and
Wilber and Orville Wright. In fact, as one of the founders of the
U.S. Air Force, Gen. Squier negotiated with the Wrights to buy
the first U.S. Army airplanes. More important, Squier invented
the multiplexing process (whereby multiple analog
message signals are combined into one signal over a shared
medium), was then elected to the National Academy of
Science, and had a class of troopships named after him. Still,
for all that, he will go down in history as the creator of
Muzak.
It was in 1922 that Squier capitalized on his wartime
telecommunications experience by founding Wired Radio, a service
that piped dance music and newscasts into businesses over
electric lines. The general was by no means the first to see the
beneficial effects of background music on production — as early
as 1915, Edison was asked to install several of his new
phonograph machines in a cigar factory, and General Electric had
been hiring piano players to play in its shops for decades.
Squire, who was partial to the sound of the brand name Kodak,
later changed the name of the company to Muzak. After Squier’s
death in 1934, Muzak playlists evolved from dance tunes and
newscasts to deliberately bland compositions performed by a
company orchestra. It was these compositions that were introduced
into elevators to calm the nerves of jittery passengers and
earned Muzak the derogatory nickname “elevator music.”
Throughout the mid-20th century Muzak oozed into America’s
airports, grocery stores, dentist offices and bank lobbies,
reaching at its peak100 million listeners a day. But by the late
1960s, rival companies appeared on the scene, most delivering
original rock tunes instead of square old Mantovani covers. By
the 1980s, background music was no longer simply a strategy to
boost productivity; it was ingrained in the culture. People grew
anxious and edgy in its absence, not unlike junkies in need of a
fix.
The inevitable Muzak backlash came in the 1980s, when
rocker Ted Nugent tried — and failed — to buy the company for
$10 million so he could “destroy it.” More and more, banks,
doctor’s offices, and restaurants realized they could save a
bundle by purchasing a speaker system and tuning into a local
easy rock radio station or simply popping in a cassette tape.
Today nearly every restaurant, lobby, department store, and
supermarket has its own endless audio loop that seems stuck on
Billy Joel’s “For the Longest Time” or some such diabolical
earworm. As I’ve doubtless mentioned, I have a low threshold for
psychic pain, which is why shopping causes me more than the usual
amount of agony. In my younger days I actually worked in one of
these evil aural environments and I don’t think I’ve ever
recovered.
RECENTLY BRITAIN’S Independent
newspaper
called Muzak “one of the most reviled
phenomena of the 20th century.” That seems a bit
extreme. After all, the pop music — or, more likely, television
shows — played in waiting rooms and restaurants today makes me
long for the heyday of relatively harmless Muzak. Or — even
better — silence. I am old enough to remember a time when one
could walk the aisles of Piggly Wiggly without being subjected to
the outrageous ululations of some R&B diva. For most people,
however, the sound of silence would have some sort of
catastrophic effect one dare not imagine. Indeed, the only thing
evidently worse than silence is classical music. This brings me
to a story Theodore Dalrymple likes to recount in which the
Belgian writer Simon Leys describes the alarming effects of
classical music on your average person:
Leys was sitting in a café where other customers were
chatting, playing cards, or having a drink. The radio was on,
tuned to a station that relayed idle chatter and banal popular
music (you are lucky these days if popular music is banal only).
But suddenly, and for no apparent reason, it played the first
movement of Mozart’s clarinet quintet, transforming the café into
what Leys called “the antechamber of paradise.” The customers
stopped what they were doing, as if startled. Then one of them
stood up, went over to the radio, and tuned it to another
station, restoring the idle chatter and banal music. There was
general relief, as if everyone felt that the beauty and
refinement of Mozart were a reproach to their lives to which they
could respond only by suppressing Mozart.
So who needs Mozart? In the hands of a great composer, even
canned background music can approach the sublime. This was
certainly the case in the ambient sound recordings of Brian Eno,
particularly his “elevator noir” masterwork Music for
Airports, recorded in 1978. The idea for
Music for Airports came to Eno, not
surprisingly, while his flight was delayed at Cologne Bonn
Airport and he was forced to endure hours of uninventive, grating
background music. Today Eno’s music graces those same terminals.
And while insipid background music inspired Brian Eno, Eno’s
ambient works inspired Muzak’s recent venture into audio
architecture.
Society’s default cultural setting is set incredibly low,
and seems to inch lower every year. Far from reversing the trend,
I fear Muzak’s passing will only drag us deeper into the cultural
abyss.
