Interpreting Muzak

Speculations on Musical Experience in Everyday Life

Bibliographic Data

ID8065368
AuthorsRonald M Radano (corresponding author)
Year1989
Volume7
Issue4
Pages448-448
Publication date1989-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Music (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0734-4392 • E-ISSN: 1945-2349
PublisherUniversity of Illinois Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2307/3051915
OpenAlexW2312643771
LanguageEN
Citations received17

ion of the private world it is meant to suggest. Muzak takes a place alongside other familiar objects of our private worlds. It functions as a special blanket of security that has through transference of complex This content downloaded from 207.46.13.114 on Thu, 26 May 2016 06:03:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Interpreting Muzak 457 personal perceptions come to represent symbolically a public transposition of domestic bourgeois life. The internalized language of Muzak functions to liberate thought and offer the opportunity for reflection. Because it establishes sonic order, it induces the individual, alone or in a group, to let the mind wander where it pleases, to respond to stimuli in a multitude of ways. The individual is free to think, to rhapsodize, to create, to worry, to wonder. Cognitive exercise is left to the individual, for unlike the complex musical work which demands an intellectual response Muzak liberates as much as it coerces. Of course Muzak arrangements stand outside the realm of masterpieces of the musical canon, which over time have acquired meanings that summon a strong aesthetic response. What Muzak does offer is a framework for simple being: it places the responsibility for creating a meaningful experience in the realm of the receiver, circumventing the dichotomy of artist and listener. From this vantage it would seem that Muzak, while taking the form of syntactically logical and organized sound, might best be thought of not as music but as a sonic form standing at the nexus of music and noise. Functionally it replaces the indeterminate sounds of the outdoors, becoming a kind of natural ambient music-noise of the indoor public environment. While conforming to harmonic logic it encourages nonreflective, non-intentional listening. Traditional forms of musical reception are disrupted, producing a low-level cognitive response. Muzak becomes a shadow-a likeness of music-for which the formalist arguments of value and quality are simply irrelevant. In virtually all cases the receivers do not scrutinize and examine Muzak as an art object; most barely even know it is there. The trouble with calling Muzak music is that for the listener it hardly exists; its effect, while powerful, is largely subliminal-beneath the level of critical discourse. This is why so many in the musical community react with such hostility to Muzak: it stands in opposition to traditional conceptions of musical form and function. And if we wish to maintain such conceptions then Muzak seems to find no logical place in and may even pose a threat to that world. Indeed, Muzak represents a shift in the center of power and authority in American musical life from the music schools and concert halls to Billboard's Top Forty and the sound forms of the everyday. Today individuals commonly develop musical taste not from private or institutional instruction but from listening to radio and Music Television; accordingly, taste finds its form in the offerings of the culture industry and the listening practices that have developed during the age of recording. Outside the musical community the high works of the classical repertory seem by comparison culturally impotent because they lack the appeal that popular music can steadily maintain. And Muzak This content downloaded from 207.46.13.114 on Thu, 26 May 2016 06:03:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Everyday life · Musical · Visual arts · Diverse Musicological Studies · Psychology · History · Philosophy

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