One of the lengthier and more in-depth chapters of Anthony Haden-Guests's 1973 book The Paradise Program is about the Muzak company. Among other things, it makes clear that Muzak was doing very interesting and timely Music Cognition research decades before that term achieved wide currency. Also that the human and material resources the company devoted to this and all other facets of their business were anything but lightweight even as this process dictated that the programming itself could be nothing but.
I for one find this history newly relevant in light of the poor musicianship and uninspired curatorial sense that I've recently heard piped into so many LA establishments. One musically astute non-musician acquaintance of mine is known to react even more viscerally against this than I do, and, claiming a well-placed source in the local Whole Foods hierarchy, is convinced that simple nepotism is at work. This seems to me at best a partial explanation. For one thing, the Wild West of digital music distribution is finally starting to stabilize into fixed settlements, the squatters are jockeying for position, and the Spotify playlist game is among the biggest pile of crumbs left to fight over. There is, in absolute terms, more music being made specifically for this purpose than ever before, yet with the Gatekeeper summarily deposed there is nowhere near the level of care going into curation that Haden-Guest unearthed in his fieldwork. In Econ101 terms, the market pressures are, if anything, more intense on today's individual music creators than they were on the small handful of Muzak's competitors, and the barriers to entry into this market have been reduced to an almost negligible level; yet this is still a race to the bottom, it just has more contestants and fewer rational actors.
As a teenager I worked for 3 years at the Bruegger's Bagels at East Hennepin and University Avenues in Minneapolis. In addition to learning a few of the many life-lessons such jobs are supposed to teach young people, I also had the opportunity to passively consume a relatively constant selection name-brand Muzak. Only the classic Miles Davis rendition of "Someday My Prince Will Come" made any impression on me whatsoever; in fact I now can't recall any other specifics about the song rotation. But The Paradise Program did bring back to me one crucial detail: the 15 minutes of dead air for every 45 minutes of programming. Cue the obvious snark about how that sounds like the best part of an hour of Muzak; but it turns out that this recovery time was a carefully-considered, deeply-investigated, research-led decision, one which I wish every retail proprietor would consider. If we've lost those programmed respites forever, then I for one will have to stop using the word "Muzak" pejoratively.
04 December 2019
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This morning in Naperville, IL, I had the opportunity to relate the programmed silence topic to a flirty barista who had met a tech crisis upon coming into work (as most of us do nowadays no matter our profession). At the time of my arrival, I was told, she had solved all but two issues: the office computer was still rendering in Spanish, and the house music still was not running. Not for lack of intelligence, I don't think, the concept of programmed silence met with no comprehension whatsoever.
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