Word: backgrounding
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Over and over, the desperate voice shouted into the telephone: "They are breaking into Xa Loi Pagoda. They are breaking into Xa Loi Pagoda." In the background, gunfire mingled with the confused screams of Buddhist monks and nuns and the clanging alarm of the huge brass gong that hangs in the bell tower of Saigon's largest pagoda. Suddenly the phone connection from the temple went dead...
...head, and, relieved of the humdrum business of thinking, he feels better immediately. His mouth smiles. He likes his work, loves his wife, spends his money. The only thing he has to fear is silence, but thanks to a company called Muzak and its many imitators in the background music business, he has nothing to worry about. Loudspeakers are everywhere...
...hell to work with," says an unhappy listener at the Muzakized Ford plant in Dearborn. "It is pallid pap that will cause all our musical teeth to fall out," says Helmut Blume, acting dean of music at Montreal's McGill University. But in all their countless installations, background music hustlers claim to get complaints only from old men in green eyeshades and sleeve garters. "The nut who complains about music is the same one who bitches about the office being too hot or too cold and a thousand other things," says a Muzak man in Los Angeles. Adds...
...specialized sexual aberrations. The fad for Zen among U.S. beatniks is a London import (1950). Drugs in London are mostly run by what in New York are called "scratch bums," i.e.. bums so crawling with lice that they are immune from police search. Dimly in Kops's background, public events take place: the Jews of the East End defeat Mosley's blackshirts in pitched battle, but it is all a dream. Kops alone is real to Kops. What is anyone to make of a man so self-absorbed that when he briefly becomes "converted," he seems...
...Chante des Oyseaulx (Song of the Birds), a fantasy that includes imitations of bird sounds, was superb, shimmering with brilliant clusters of sound. Toutes les Nuictz was a translucent ruby, a deep and haunting love song. The Camerata Players also redeemed themselves in the Janequin with soft, mellow recorder background music...