The Muzak Box

Fifty years ago this month was "The Day the Music Died", when Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens died in a plane crash. It took karma fifty years and one week to fix that mistake, but it did so last week when Muzak died - or at least began the process by filing for bankruptcy.

Muzak made its now long-gone fortune by piping bland music into elevators, restaurants, lobbies, department stores and work places. The worst thing you could say about a band in the 60's was that they were like Muzak. The best thing you could say about Muzak itself is that it was really never meant to be listened to.

Muzak's music was always intended to be background noise. The company promoted itself in the 50's as a way of increasing productivity in the factories and sales in the stores. They produced all sorts of efficiency reports showing that a place with Muzak playing was a place where customers were paying.

Their studies also showed that the most effective music was bland, soft music of a certain tempo. Anyone stuck on an elevator stopping on every floor pretty quickly grew to hate Muzak. But that, of course, showed how correct the company was. Because almost no one ever talks on an elevator, when you are on one, suddenly the background noise is in the foreground and it's all you hear. It only took a couple of trips up and down a building for most people to become haters of elevator music.

But once back on the floor, the music faded into the background, making the place seem just that much nicer or more sociable or whatever else it was the Muzak thought it was accomplishing. And, of course, after more than 50 years of piping this stuff into just about every public place there is, we hear it all the time but we've all trained ourselves to automatically ignore it.

Probably the last time I noticed background music was a couple of years ago when Linda and I were on a cruise. Probably not surprisingly, we found ourselves in the bar as the ship left port, and the music was just some noise no one was listening to. But then they played a stringed up version of a song I so disliked that it moved its way to the front of my brain.

About 35 violins were working their way through "My Heart Will Go On". Hmm, I said to LK, I don't know about taking a cruise on a ship that plays the theme from Titanic as it leaves port. So I got another drink from the bar and forced myself to ignore the rest of the music.

Unlike the sound that was Muzak, there is another kind of music meant to be played in the background and I surprise myself by listening to it quite often lately while I am doing stuff on the computer. I stumbled upon a web site called StreamingSoundtracks.com. This is not the kind of music I usually - or ever - listen to, but I thought it might be interesting.

It has turned out to be just that. It's not full of those awful songs they keep nominating for Oscars. Mostly it's orchestras playing the score for a scene from a wide variety of movies. Here's some of what I heard the other day:

WarGames - Arthur B. Rubinstein
Helicopter Pursuit & Launch Detected (1:20)

Open Range - Michael Kamen
Wagon Wheel (1:36)

Paperhouse - Hans Zimmer
I´ll Be Back (2:11)

Queen, The - Alexandre Desplat
Flowers Of Buckingham (2:07)

Rocker, The - Chad Fischer
The Rocker Score Suite (2:30)

Samsara - Cyril Morin
Dawa's Theme (2:16)

On The Beach - Christopher Gordon
The Burial Cloud: Flight Through The Apostles And Elegy (5:43)

Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade - John Williams
The Keeper Of The Grail (2:38)

The music is occasionally quite good, and almost never bad. And it is surprising to me how much music is being composed for movies and TV (and video games, too). I would guess they're the reason that any of our young composers even have a chance to have a career in a world that doesn't seem to disposed to going down to the symphony to check out the latest opus.

Anyhow, it's better background noise than Muzak. It was written to make a scene more dramatic or romantic or suspenseful or exciting. Not to increase sales by tricking part of a customer's brain into thinking they're in a friendly, happy environment.