Word: muzak
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...Horrible stuff' was the term once applied by the artist Ben Shahn. "Abominably offensive," said the novelist Vladimir Nabokov. And Philip Glass: "The range of music is truly enormous-opera at the top, Muzak at the bottom." John Cage spoke of composing a piece especially for the tormentors, with no notes in it. "The first step in describing silence is to use silence itself," Cage explained. "Matter of fact, I thought of composing a piece like that. It would be very beautiful, and I would offer it to Muzak." Perhaps Cage had that in mind when he created...
...That Muzak should soothe the inhabitants of the Pentagon is fitting, for the whole system was basically the creation of an unusual general, George Owen Squier, a West Pointer ('87) who devoted much of his Army career to science. Assigned to evaluate the military potential in the experiments of the Wright Brothers, he became in 1908 one of the first passengers to fly, for all of nine minutes, in a Wright machine. As a young artilleryman, he invented the polarizing photochronograph to measure the speed of a projectile...
...first Muzak recording in 1934 was a medley of Whispering, Do You Ever Think of Me? and Here in My Arms, performed by Sam Lanin's orchestra. The first customers were householders in the Lakeland section of Cleveland, who were offered, for $1.50 a month, three channels ranging from dance music to news. As a novelty, Muzak might well have gone the way of Sam Lanin's orchestra. But a series of experiments started in the late 1930s provided Muzak with the secret that converted base music into gold...
...Muzak is still conducting such tests, and still crowing over the results. At a firm called Precision Small Parts Inc. in Charlottesville, Va., for example, Muzak spent three months last year testing six women who spent their dreary days deburring very small items with dental drills. With Muzak in their ears, they deburred 16.8% more than before. Other tests showed that if music can make people produce more, it can also make them buy more. Sedately paced melodies in a supermarket slowed down customers enough so that they spent 38% more money...
...Muzak enthusiasts argue that there is a great tradition of music as an accompaniment to work. "It did so in the fields behind the great castles and monasteries of the middle ages," says Keenan. "It did so on shipboard and in the taverns where sailors met to sing their chanteys." Keenan has even unearthed a songbook once issued by a youthful industrial firm, which included a spirited ditty called Ever Onward Ever Onward: "Our reputation sparkles like a gem/ We've fought our way through and new/ Fields we're sure to conquer too/ Forever onward...