Word: muzak
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...Cage and Muzak met several months ago when the composer was presented with a thorny problem involving Manhattan's giant new Pan American Building. Sculptor Richard Lippold, renowned for his glittering geometric structures of stainless steel and gold, had been commissioned by the Pan Am Building directors to design a work for the main lobby. Lippold created The Globe, an immense, shining piece three stories high. The directors were delighted, but Lippold...
...learned that Muzak would come oozing into elevators and lobby. The invasion, he decided, would destroy the bold effect of his sculpture. With the directors' permission, he called on Cage for help...
Composer Cage decided to "make use of the things that were right there," i.e., the Muzak speakers and some closed-circuit television cameras set up to watch the lobby. Cage wanted the TV to trigger the Muzak whenever people passed by or got in and out of elevators. But such familiar Muzak as Stardust and I'm in the Mood for Love would become electronically pulverized and filtered if Cage had his way, and there would be times when the traffic was light and there would be no music at all. The directors rejected the idea. Explained a vice...
Despite the grandeur of its funereal appetites, Hollywood is always graceless and uneasy inside its mourning clothes. Its undertakers are suntanned. Its dead lie listening to Muzak in poets' nooks. Its grief requires CinemaScope-so big, so awful, so thrilled with guilt. When Marilyn Monroe was buried last week in Los Angeles, Hollywood's heavy embrace was forcefully restrained, but there was little mercy in its absence. Here and there, film stars nudged past the line of true mourners to bear their terrible tributes into print. At the mortuary, Marilyn's coiffeur set her bone-white hair...
...hundreds of its 7,000 stations will disappear. The last of the beloved "puffing billies" will yield to gaseous diesels or electric locomotives, and the aromatic privacy of the old first-class passenger compartment will give way to open, air-conditioned cars with central aisles, airliner seats and Muzak...