Word: muzakal
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Music was as ubiquitous as Muzak at the Tanglewood festival in Lenox, Mass. last week. As the Boston Symphony's 16th summer season came to a close, Pianist Artur Rubinstein and Conductor Charles Munch performed for 10,000 listeners in & around the wall-less Music Shed. Then Leonard Bernstein took the podium to lead a concert and a revised version of his 35-minute-long opera, Trouble in Tahiti (TIME, June 23). At week's end, there were three orchestral programs, one for chorus and one of chamber music. The grand finale : a 280-man performance of Berlioz...
First of all, there are the traditional pops concerts, with Arthur Fielder and is small symphony playing a wide variety of selections from music to Muzak. As you might judge from his theatre program appearances, Fiedler sanctions the quaint custom of purveying beer among the higher priced seats. Harvard night at the Pops, May 10, is, of course, without peer as an adventure into the realm of familiar music. Unfortunately, Pops also holds B.U. and Northeastern nights, and attendance at these affairs is somewhat less comforting, unless you prefer their songs...
...every room-from the browsing room ("Just what the name implies," says a Settlemayer sign. "Look around . . ."), to the reference room ("Answers questions on anything and everything, from quizzes to theses and back again")-he has installed brilliant lighting and brightly upholstered chairs. He has even had Muzak pumped in to "relax" his readers. Book circulation has more than doubled since Thanksgiving, and, once the "off season" ends, Librarian Settlemayer expects it to treble. He is still not satisfied...
Cold Air. "The problem is to project yourself as a person," explained dynamic Bill Benton, who owns Muzak, runs the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and as an Assistant Secretary of State once directed the Voice of America. He hired a helicopter, plastered a big sign on it: "Here's Bill Benton," and went hopping about the state like a man on an aerial pogo stick. A leather-chair type gladhander, he strove for the common touch. At country fairs, he handed out windshield stickers and buttons, told the crowd: "I will say for you ladies that...
Peaks & Valleys. All Muzak's industrial customers (General Electric, Ford Motor Co., Socony-Vacuum Oil Co., etc.) use it for the same purpose: to ease the tedium of workers performing endlessly repetitive operations. "It keeps me from getting nervous," said an assembler in the Chicago Hallicrafters' plant last week. "And it makes the fellow next to me more cheerful." In Manhattan's Federal Reserve Bank, where 300 girls sort out and count as much as $25 million in paper money every day, the officers have found that Muzak lightens their spirits and lessens their fatigue...