"john cage's muzak-plus: the fu(rni)ture of music," representations, vol. 102, no. 1...

John Cage's Muzak-Plus: The Fu(rni)ture of MusicAuthor(s): Herve VanelSource: Representations, Vol. 102, No. 1 (Spring 2008), pp. 94-128Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2008.102.1.94 .Accessed: 21/10/2011 09:55

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HERVE VANEL

John Cage’s Muzak-Plus:The Fu(rni)ture of Music

Constructing the Future

If John Cage remains one of the most important com-posers of the second half of the twentieth century, it may be because hehad little interest in music after all. “For many years,” he said in 1974,“I’ve noticed that music as an activity separated from the rest of life does-n’t enter my mind. Strictly musical questions are no longer serious ques-tions.”1 It should be no surprise, then, to discover Cage’s long-lastinginterest in Muzak. Since the concept of Muzak was formulated in theearly 1920s, it has become one of the most successful forms of “environ-mental music.” To use Cage’s very words, it has been perfectly integratedinto “the rest of our life.” Moreover, Muzak (or muzak) remains conve-niently set apart from strictly musical matters, and is barely—if at all—given serious consideration by historians beyond the field of social orcultural studies.2 This relative contempt is expected, and actuallyencouraged, by the producers of Muzak. As the president of Muzak Cor-poration (the pioneer and one of the leaders in background music) ex-plained in the 1970s, “We are not trying to get [intellectual or emotionalinvolvement], anymore than you do with air-conditioning or the color ofan office.”3

If nothing else, the claims that Muzak is neither music nor art have fa-cilitated its expansion. In reality, resistance is futile (“We are simply notequipped with earlids”), and Cage, in tune with Marshall McLuhan, under-stood this better than anyone.4 Not only did Cage investigate the concept of“furniture music” developed by Erik Satie in 1920 but he also formulatedthe concept of a “Muzak-Plus,” which, as this essay will suggest, came close

94

A B S T R A C T This article investigates the relationships between Muzak and the work of the avant-garde composer John Cage as one of the many unexplored links between the most advanced artisticendeavors and the aesthetics of the commercial and corporate environment. It suggests that the differ-ence between the art of Cage (“Muzak-Plus”) and the commercial music by the Muzak Corporation liesless in what superficially distinguishes them than in their common attempt to affect and shape societyby the means of an aesthetic product designed to dissolve into life itself. / R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S 102.Spring 2008 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734–6018, electronic ISSN 1533–855X,pages 94–128. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article con-tent to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2008.102.1.94.

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to being realized in the early 1960s for the Pan Am Building in New YorkCity. Discussing this specific project, however, would not make much sensewithout examining first how in the 1940s and 50s Muzak could have ap-peared as a powerful instrument to the composer, who ultimately did muchmore than attempt to reject or silence it. On the contrary, one could arguethat Cage’s entire musical endeavor was geared toward the conception andrealization of a form of muzak that, as much as its industrial counterpart,was intended to produce a certain effect on society at large. “Our businessin living,” argued Cage, “is to become fluent with the life we are living, andart can help this.”5 In this regard, the difference between the art of Cage (as“Muzak-Plus”) and the commercial music by the Muzak Corporation liesless in what superficially opposes them (“commercial” versus “experimen-tal,” “bad music” versus “serious music,” “coercive tool” versus “emancipa-tive experience”) than in their common attempt to affect and shape societyby the means of an aesthetic product designed to dissolve into life itself.This connection between Cage and the most despised form of canned mu-sic does not imply, however, that the composer liked Muzak, or that he wassympathetic to its alleged power. On the contrary, he often expressed hisdistaste and even fear of Muzak.6 Yet in 1961 he also argued, “if I likedMuzak, which I also don’t, the world would be more open to me. I intend towork on it.”7

Actually, Cage’s mixture of interest in and dislike for Muzak is neitherparadoxical nor ambiguous. He had a similar reaction to the Theremin(fig. 1), an early electronic instrument (eerie sounding and touch-free) in-vented in 1917 by Lev Termen (Léon Théremin), and commercialized byRCA in 1929.8 As Cage perceived it, the Theremin was undoubtedly “an in-strument with genuinely new possibilities.”9 To a certain extent, Termenhimself exploited such possibilities with the Terpsiton, a device allowingdancers “to create music by the movement of [their] bodies.”10 Neverthe-less, the problem remained, said Cage, that the “Thereministes [such asClara Rockmore] did their utmost to make the instrument sound like [an]old instrument . . . performing upon it, with difficulty, masterpieces fromthe past.”11 In other words, the problem of the Theremin, as it might be forMuzak, is not the instrument itself but its misuse. In the case of theTheremin, concluded Cage, it amounts to “imitat[ing] the past rather thanconstruct[ing] the future.”12

Similarly, why not grant Muzak the genuinely new capability of construct-ing the future? It may be necessary to admit this potential, even reluctantly,in order to understand why, in the early 1970s, Cage was still seriously keep-ing “muzak in mind as a project.”13 Only in this context can the nature ofCage’s “project,” the extent to which it has been realized, and its conse-quences in music and society be discussed.

John Cage’s Muzak-Plus: The Fu(rni)ture of Music 95

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The Backgroundof Background Music

The history of background music is long and complex. It must begathered from early studies in functional music, promotional material fromthe Muzak Corporation, countless journalistic pieces, a fair number ofscholarly articles, and a small number of comprehensive studies of dis-putable value.14 Only a short and necessarily partial overview is offered inthe context of this study.

Muzak “proper” owes its name to General George Owen Squier (1865–1934), a Chief Signal Officer in the United States Army who, in 1922, sub-mitted to a utility holding company the idea of “employ[ing] electric power

R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S96

FIGURE 1. Flyer designedby Andrei Hudiakoff for

Léon Théremin’sAmerican debut at the

Metropolitan OperaHouse, January 31, 1928.

Music Research Collection,New York Public Libraryfor the Performing Arts;

Astor, Lenox, and TildenFoundation.

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lines to transmit news programs, music, lectures, general entertainment andadvertising directly into private homes.”15 Inspired by the popularity of Ko-dak, the new company, first called Wired Inc., was finally named Muzak in1934 by Squier himself. Servicing only New York in the early 1940s, Muzakhad nonetheless already designed a colorful catalog of different “networks”(purple, red, blue, and green) tailored to the needs of their selected sub-scribers: banks, restaurants, post offices, medical environments, retail stores,and private residences.16

Starting in 1945, Muzak launched its product in a large number of citiesand continued to expand its service to elevators, buses, airplanes, and soon.17 According to a study published in 1950 by the U.S. Chamber of Com-merce, Muzak was a fast-growing business. The network now covered twohundred cities and counted more than seven thousand subscribers, tentimes more than it had ten years earlier.18 It would be misleading, however,to attribute this success to the largely undisputed power of Muzak to “makeus feel more relaxed, contemplative, distracted from problems, etc.”19 Theexpansion of Muzak is more, it seems, the consequence of a complex combi-nation of related factors.

First and foremost, the expansion of Muzak is a direct result of the warindustry. During the Second World War, indeed, the intense research con-ducted on music in industry as a means of increasing productivity clearly in-flected Muzak’s shift from mere entertainment to functionality (althoughthese are obviously not totally incompatible). Second, such studies of thefunctionality of music were mostly grounded in a faith or belief in the thera-peutic use of music and its nonetheless unproven capacity to improve theproductivity of workers.20 That is why, as an acoustician of the Stevens Insti-tute of Technology observed in 1947, the development of functional musicalso owed much to its “vigorous promotion by persons anxious to be in on agood thing.”21 These included first the British government, soon followed bythe American War Production Board, record and radio companies, andMuzak Corporation itself.22 It was with their support that during the waracousticians and scientists explored the potential of applying music to indus-try, defining in this context the criteria that would inform the subsequent ex-pansion of Muzak. The experimental use of music in the medical field,especially in mental institutions was particularly important. “With respect tomental illness,” remarked one researcher of functional music, “there is agrowing disposition to try music as a means of calming the manic, stimulat-ing the depressive, arousing the lethargic and reaching the withdrawn.”23

Applying these fragile observations to factories in order to affect workersthrough their working day, required some adjustments: First, functionalmusic “must not seize and hold [the] conscious attention of the listener, to thedetriment of his activity,” including during the lunch break (fig. 2). To this


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end, the music should possess what researchers called a “high acceptance fac-tor.”24 That is why, after relying on commercially available material (fig. 3), itwas eventually considered necessary to control every level of the music:“from the creation or composition . . . through its instrumental arrangement,its performance, its interpretation, its preservation, its reproduction, anddistribution and finally the manner of its presentation [in order] to achievethe desired psychological effect upon the ultimate listener.”25 Eventually, asone researcher formulated it, “to be functionally effective the music must beused to counteract the natural degeneration and reinforce desirable changeswhich take place in the individual during his normal working day.”26 That itmust be used for such a purpose does not entail that it actually can be with anyefficiency. It seems relatively clear that the claim for the actual efficiency offunctional music relies on empirical studies and observations, a claim that isnot only supported by Muzak Corporation and the like but also constitutesthe bedrock of the most fervent critics of background music.27 However, onemust realize that it is on such unstable ground that a researcher like Ray-mond Cardinell, originally studying industrial and functional music at theStevens Institute of Technology, reappears after the war as director of theresearch department at Muzak Corporation, where he pursued his largelyempirical studies in order to rationalize the nature and content of their pro-grams in the civil sector.28

In the early 1950s, the integration of Muzak into our surroundings wasalready well advanced. The latest trend in architecture, reported Nation’s


FIGURE 2. “Time Out forLunch and Music” (1945),

from Barbara Elna Benson,Music and Sound Systems inIndustry (New York, 1945).

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FIGURE 3. “ProgrammingMusic for Industry” (1945),from Benson, Music and SoundSystems in Industry.

Business, was “to install loudspeakers and wiring in office and professionalbuildings during the process of construction” and have them “wired forMuzak from basement to roof.”29 The technology of Muzak was thus becom-ing as unobtrusive as its product. Muzak, noted another observer, had defi-nitely found its place “alongside air conditioning, sound-proof ceilings,indirect lighting, contour chairs and the coffee-break as a commodity de-signed to help us meet the tension of our daily life” and far beyond our work-ing day.30 In the 1960s it was no longer “Complementary music by Muzak”that was promoted in addition to a “scientifically planned kitchen” and tele-phone service, but the guarantee that alongside “quiet central air condition-ing for all season comfort” and “dishwashers in all bedroom apartments,” atruly modern residence would be furnished with “music by Muzak in lobby, el-evators, laundry room—and on your own TV set”31 (figs. 4 and 5). Today it isstill the pride of the Muzak Corporation to design what they call “Audio Archi-tecture,” which, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s characterization of architecture,is indeed “received in a state of distraction and through the collective.”32

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FIGURE 4. “Complementary Music by Muzak.” Detail of a real estate advertisementprinted in the New York Times, April 28, 1940.

FIGURE 5. “Music by Muzak in lobby, elevators, laundry room . . .” Detail of a realestate advertisement printed in the New York Times, June 12, 1963.

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Melodic Surveillanceand the “Police Situation”

A first encounter between John Cage and Muzak took place in1948. In his “Composer’s Confessions,” the thirty-six-year old avant-gardemusician explained that he had indeed the desire to “compose a piece ofuninterrupted silence and sell it to Muzak Co. It will be 3 or 4 minuteslong—those being the standard length of ‘canned music’—and its title willbe Silent Prayer. It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make asseductive as the color and shape and fragrance of a flower. The ending willapproach imperceptibility.”33 The project, as Cage suggests, may be both se-rious and absurd.34 Absurd first because one does not expect a proper mu-sician to deal with such an objectionable network. But also serious, if oneadmits that Silent Prayer simultaneously interrupts or disrupts the programof background music while, when approaching imperceptibility, it also ful-fills its exigency of not being listened to. Considering the role subsequentlyplayed by silence in Cage’s life and music (in his famous 4’33” in 1952, no-tably), one can choose to pay more or less attention to Silent Prayer. But ulti-mately, if one is to find it as “seductive as the color and shape and fragranceof a flower,” one can hardly argue that it had been designed to possess ahigher or lower acceptance factor than any piece of Muzak.

In fact, considering the Muzak programming department’s thinking atthe time, Silent Prayer had somehow already been integrated into the pro-gram. Relentlessly studying programming strategies, they had discoveredfor themselves the virtue of silence after realizing that many subscribers toMuzak, saturated by the flow, were actually turning the music off.35 Inrestaurants and retail shops, the complaints came not from the customersbut from the individuals permanently exposed to Muzak during theirworking day: the cashiers and the waiters, notably. Consequently, to pre-serve the efficiency of the program, explained Jerri Husch in his study ofMuzak, “the programming department introduced a silent interval of 1 to2 minutes at the end of each quarter hour.”36 Actually, the timing of the in-terval remains quite unclear. According to the same study, the concept of“quarter-hour programming—15 minutes of music alternating with 15minutes of silence . . . started in 1948.”37 If the date is correct, Cage’s prayerhad already been answered.

By intention if not in effect, Silent Prayer nonetheless qualifies as a moresubtle criticism of a functional program of music than does the dominant con-cert of objections to Muzak and background music. In the 1950s, there was al-ready a sense, as one journalist put it, that with Muzak, persuasion was in theair.38 Since then, little has changed: Muzak has proliferated, such that a morerecent critic could conclude that “everywhere [Muzak] seems associated with


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containment, imprisonment, and control, a denial of human emotions—what[Joseph] Lanza christens ‘melodic surveillance.’”39 In itself, the concept ofmelodic surveillance combines the two poles of the criticism generally sur-rounding Muzak. The aesthetic criticism judges Muzak a degraded formof sugarcoated music, literally crossing the border into nonmusic. And onthe other side of the coin, the ideological criticism insists on the coerciveeffect that Muzak has on individuals, “perpetuating alienation and falseconsciousness.”40

The problem with such criticisms of Muzak, whether or not they are ac-curate, is twofold. First, it takes the effectiveness of Muzak for granted, andsecond, as a result, it tends to present the aesthetic quality of Muzak as thecause of its coercive power. Even without considering the wide range of mu-sical genres included in Muzak’s programming, this argument barelystands.41 In addition, thinking that one can resist Muzak by simply calling it“bad” falls equally short. Conversely, while he openly disliked it, Cageseemed to have developed what could be called an early “pop” sensibility to-ward Muzak; that is—as Roy Lichtenstein would define it—“an involvementwith . . . things we hate, but which are also powerful in their impingementon us.”42 This was an involvement that, for many artists—including RobertRauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol, for example—hadbeen informed by their work as commercial artists (fig. 6). Hence, respond-ing to a criticism of his 1956 Radio Music, Cage explained that with the help . . . of some American paintings, Bob Rauschenberg’s particularly, Ican pass through Times Square without disgust. And similarly, having written radiomusic has enabled me to accept, not only the sounds I there encounter, but thetelevision, radio, and Muzak ones, which nearly and constantly everywhere offerthemselves. Formerly, for me, they were a source of irritation. Now they are just aslively as ever, but I have changed. I am more and more realizing, that is to say, that Ihave ears and can hear.43

Relying on chance operations, and composed for from one to eight per-formers using a radio as an instrument, Radio Music can actually be heard asa continuation of the criticism of any programming network, and Muzakspecifically, inaugurated in Silent Prayer. Cage’s piece turns the technology ofthe programmed radio broadcast, designed for isolated listeners, into an in-strument capable of generating a collective experience of a resolutely unpre-dictable soundscape and recalling, in effect, the quality of Times Square.44

Still, it would be limiting to compare the unpredictability of Radio Musicto the predictability of a sugarcoated melody. Fundamentally, of course,Cage targets an entire Western musical tradition, not just Muzak or radioprogramming. But more important for our concern, the unpredictability ofRadio Music can be sustained only if it resists—as did Cage, incidentally—thetechnology of recording, which induces repetition and fosters a familiarization


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capable of turning the most random organization of sound into somethingperfectly predictable by the listener.45

It may not have been the Music by Muzak© that Cage fundamentally ob-jected to, but rather its reliance on the technology and pseudoscience ofprogramming. Far beyond his engagement with Muzak, Cage was especiallyprompt to pin down any attempt at programmatic thinking or at imposingany kind of grid upon a given environment. Even the genre of the happen-ing, one of the most unrestrained and liberating forms of art to come out ofthe 1950s (and partly due to the influence of Cage himself), could fail to sat-isfy his sense of anarchy.46 Simply being asked “not to sit down” (as in ClaesOldenburg’s Moviehouse, 1965), or being invited by one of his former stu-dents to “move from one room to the other” (in Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happen-ings in 6 Parts, in 1959), elicited a sharp response from Cage: “I refuse to betold what to do.”47 So, like Marcel Duchamp during Moviehouse, he satdown—without a word—to express his discontent at being trapped in whathe perceived as a “police situation.”48

As Cage’s former student, Kaprow had acquired at least one major con-viction.49 The conviction, as he remembered, was that “experimental music,


FIGURE 6. James Rosenquist and billboard painters from Artkraft Strauss Companyworking on Big Country billboard, exterior of Astor Theater, TimesSquare, New York City, 1958. Reproduced in Les Années Pop (Paris, 2001).

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or any other experimental art of our time, can be an introduction to right liv-ing; and after that introduction art can be bypassed for the main course.”50

Once again, one doubts that Muzak as a product fully responded to Kaprow’sown sense of right living, but the pervasiveness of background music had,nonetheless, opened a path toward what the artist identified as a significantform of “communication programming”:

TV “snow” and Muzak in restaurants are accompaniments to conscious activitywhich if suddenly withdrawn, produce a feeling of void in the human situation. Con-temporary art, which tends to “think” in multi-media, intermedia, overlays, fusionsand hybridizations, is a closer parallel to modern mental life than we have realized.Its judgments, therefore, may be acute. “Art” may soon become a meaningless word.In its place, “communication programming” would be a more imaginative label.51

In Kaprow’s terms, the reference to Muzak bears no value judgment. Dis-cussing whether or not it is a coercive tool of the corporate industry, and eval-uating its quality, seems to matter less to the artist than does asserting itsachievement as an addictive product (involving withdrawal symptoms) and asan inconspicuous aesthetic presence in our everyday surroundings. As such,Muzak’s feature of unobtrusive indispensability undeniably constitutes amodel of sorts for the highest of artistic ambitions: to program instances ofcommunication in society, even though, unlike Muzak, such ambition mightdisrupt the mechanisms of the society of consumption. In this line, while thenotion of “communication programming” as formulated by Kaprow remainsrelatively allusive, it nonetheless implies that, very much like muzak, the artform that Kaprow coined “happening” should neither function as an objectof contemplation nor manifest its artiness too strongly. Rather, through theinduced participation of a performing audience, and with the art componentideally “approximating imperceptibility,” the creation of such “rearrangeableenvironments” (for instance, Words, 1962) should merely facilitate all formsof exchange between the people involved in the making or the “production”of the piece and, eventually, between the community of participants and theenvironment itself.52 In other words, the primary purpose of “programming”communication is to restore or to reconstitute experimentally an ideal andharmonious community of human beings, thereby sketching out and project-ing the forms and conditions of a future emancipated society. As the remarkof the critic Udo Kultermann indicated in the early 1970s, the requirement ofan all-inclusive and general participation in happenings and performancesmight have appeared to be a necessity in order to bring about changes in so-ciety, but its outcome remained potentially hazardous:

The participation of actors and audience, artist and society, in an all-encompassingevent is analogous to political reality. To reform society—and this is necessary—requires participation. The prerequisites for individual participation, however, are


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many: a sense of responsibility, the ability to think independently, and the will notto let oneself be manipulated, driven, or coerced.53

Kultermann’s observation, it seems, is representative of a rhetoric pervad-ing the 1960s discourse on happenings and performances: his urge for“participation” ends up oscillating between the utopian ideal of a lost com-munity and the phantasm of a free and sovereign individual subject.54

Trapped in the middle, the required participation finally appears as the verystrength and, at the same time, the ultimate danger of happenings as aform of artistic “communication programming.” And indeed, as Cage’smemories of Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts and Oldenburg’s Moviehousehave suggested, the composer found himself confronted with the likeli-hood that, as Italo Calvino would say, “an antirepressive theory taken to itsultimate consequences . . . leaves precious little margin to spontaneity, orchance, to the vagueness of psychological impulses.”55

Following the line of Cage’s criticism of the “police situation,” andwhether or not it properly reflects Kaprow’s intention, one might concludethat a more or less scripted happening could altogether eliminate frictions,smooth out tensions and contradictions in a given situation, bringing forth aharmonious collective experience. However, as Claire Bishop argued in hercriticism of the recent infatuation with relational aesthetics in contemporaryarts, the problem remains that “without antagonism there is only the im-posed consensus of authoritarian order—a total suppression of debate anddiscussion, which is inimical to democracy.”56 Similarly, suggested Cage, it ispossible that beyond any potential emancipatory effect the mode of libera-tion defined in the loose genre of happening might sometimes simply dis-place and reproduce existing relationships of power. In these terms, the roleof the artist as a communication programmer would not be unlike that of the en-gineers of functional music who, during the war, worked hard to promotethe medium as a tool of work management, firmly advocating functional orindustrial music for its capacity to “[establish] and [maintain] . . . a desiredemotional relationship between the man, his work, and his environment.”57

Whether it was designed to increase the production rate in a factory, theconsumption level in a commercial center, or the feeling of safety in an ele-vator, Muzak was thus conceived as a lubricant in a preexisting order, reduc-ing or ideally eliminating inevitable friction between humans and theirenvironment. Piped-in music might actually have achieved such a goalwhen, in July 1945, a bomber hit the seventy-ninth floor of the Empire StateBuilding. At that time, reported the New York Times, about fifty persons werein the glass-enclosed observatory situated on the eighty-sixth floor, closeenough to the crash to see the debris of the plane landing on the open bal-cony. However, wrote the journalist: “the ‘canned’ music that is wired into


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the observatory, continued to play and the soothing sound of a waltz helpedthe spectators there to control themselves. There was no panic, but within afew minutes the heat and choking fumes from the fire below made the ob-servatory uncomfortable” (fig. 7).58

The situation was certainly far from ideal, but it nonetheless indicatesthat Muzak somehow systematized the lesson of the Titanic’s legendarywreck to the sound of a cheerful tune.59 In a way, Muzak presents itself as thetechnological, modern equivalent of a permanently available orchestra care-fully designed to quell panic in a society where passengers are constantly be-ing assured that there is no danger. To this end, it is crucial to ensure thecontinuity of the program in case of emergency. And that is why, as an un-dated Muzak research document reportedly claims, “in the event of failureof our Basic Programme we do not panic. . . . In the advent of nuclear war,Muzak [relies on its own] power generators to ensure no failure of the BasicProgramme to those facilities still functioning and able to receive our trans-missions.”60 True or not, such a claim is inherent to the logic of Muzak.Whether you have to work, to buy, or to die, its purpose (as reiterated by itschief programmer in the mid-1990s) “is to make customers realize thatthey’ve come to the right place.”61


FIGURE 7. “Date: July 28,1945: A hole was torn

between the 78th and 79thfloors when a B-25 bomber,flying low in fog, crashed inthe Empire State Building.”

Ernie Sisto/New YorkTimes/Redux.

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Furniture Music and Muzak-Plus

Beyond this objectionable purpose (or desired emotional relationship),one must nevertheless admit that Muzak succeeded in two important areas:first, in the creation of a network capable of massively distributing and liter-ally integrating music into our surroundings; and second, in effectivelyshifting the level of attention devoted to music to a point approximatingzero. Both the dissemination of sounds in space and the questioning of lis-tening as something that requires a focused and exclusive attention werecentral to Cage’s concept of music, and the latter aspect had actually beenexplored previously in Erik Satie’s Furniture Music.62

As is well known, Cage played a major role in the rediscovery of ErikSatie’s music after World War II and was familiar with the concept of Furni-ture Music formulated by the French composer in 1920.63 Yet, the detailsof the Paris premiere of Furniture Music in 1920, as part of what would qualifytoday as an early multimedia event, remain quite unclear.64 If one relies onthe memory of Darius Milhaud (who collaborated with Satie), the programincluded music by Les Six and a play by Max Jacob, and it was during the in-termission that Satie’s Furniture Music was performed.65 “A program note” in-dicates that Milhaud “warned the audience that it was not to pay any moreattention to the ritornellos that would be played . . . than to the candelabra,the seats, or the balcony.”66 In the end, however, it was clear to the musicianthat the intention of having the audience “[take] no notice” of the musicand “behave . . . as if [it] did not exist” failed miserably.67 “Contrary to ourexpectations,” remembered Milhaud, “as soon as the music started up, theaudience began to stream back to their seats. It was no use for Satie to shout:‘Go on talking! Walk about! Don’t listen!’ They listened without speaking.The whole effect was spoiled.”68 Yet the achievement of Satie’s concept, con-cluded Milhaud, is not to be gauged from the failure of its premiere. As acorrective, he remembered, Satie eventually recommended having suchpieces “recorded and played over and over again,” in order to further theirintegration.69 Furthermore, wrote Milhaud in 1953, “the future was to provethat Satie was right.” Today, he noticed, people are commonly “reading andworking to the sound of the radio,” and “in all public places, large stores andrestaurants the customers are drenched in an unending flood of music. InAmerica cafeterias are equipped with a sufficient number of machines foreach client to be able, for the modest sum of 5 cents, to furnish his own soli-tude with music or supply a background for his conversation with his guest.Is this not ‘musique d’ameublement,’ heard, but not listened to?”70

Cage, however, would strongly disagree: “In a very weak way,” he proposed,“[Muzak] attempts to distract us from what we are doing . . . whereas Satie’sfurniture music would like us to pay attention to whatever else we are doing.”71


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The problem, again, is less of the effectiveness of Muzak than, altogether, amatter of purpose: that of maintaining order versus organizing disorder. Inother words, the difference is that Muzak seeks to foster a collective un-awareness of the environment (and of its potential violence), whereas Furni-ture Music would potentially foster a new awareness of our relationship to acomplex, open, and somehow violent environment (or at least an irritatingone, as Cage had said of Times Square). This, however, does not underminethe accomplishments of Muzak in terms of the spatialization of music andthe modification of the mode of listening to it. Yet it indicates the need for acorrective or supplement, which came to be called Muzak-Plus.

Muzak-Plus appears allusively in a piece of writing by Cage titled“Rhythm Etc.” that had been commissioned in 1961 by Gyorgy Kepes as acontribution to a collective publication on Module, Proportion, Symmetry,Rhythm. Initially perplexed by the invitation to discuss such notions, Cagequickly came to suspect, as he wrote, that “the words might have come fromLe Corbusier’s book, The Modulor.”72 In response to the architect’s dogma,Cage made sure to emphasize in his text (completed in 1962) that the idealpromoted by Le Corbusier was meant to be executed through a “grid of pro-portion . . . proclaimed by law.”73 Le Corbursier’s model, Cage swiftly concluded,has the “shape of tyranny” because “the social inflexibility follows from theinitial conception of proportion. . . . Unless we find some way to get out,we’re lost.”74 It is in the midst of such polemic that the formulation ofMuzak-Plus appears, without much warning, simply reading: “There’ll becentrally located pulverized Muzak-Plus (‘You cling to composition’) per-formed by listeners who do nothing more than go through the room.”75

At first the prophecy appears to be fairly enigmatic.76 No work by Cagebears the title Muzak-Plus, and it would seem reasonable to assume that ithas actually never been given any other form than a written one: a dream ofa music that would rely only on the constant flux of a crowd of listenerswhose interaction with the space would actually generate the musical execu-tion. In the early 1960s, this reliance of the concept of Muzak-Plus on the ex-istence of listeners-performers-composers clearly relates to what PaulGriffiths identified as a shift in Cage’s musical approach. “Where in the1950s [Cage] had addressed his music to soloists and to individual listeners,”wrote Griffiths; “he was now working very consciously in society.”77 How toeffect such a revolution, to change society’s foundations and structures with-out dictating (or composing) a new order or without simply relocating thecenter, certainly remained one of his main artistic challenges.

Cage strongly relied on the power of music to inflect our relationship tothe environment in a powerful and comprehensive way, and to this end, heargued, it was necessary to create certain specific “musical situations”: It isonly by “making musical situations which are analogies to desirable social


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circumstances which we do not yet have,”—wrote Cage in the mid-1970s—“that we make music suggestive and relevant to the serious questions whichface Mankind.”78 As he had formulated it in 1962, Muzak-Plus qualifies as asituation where being creative never sounded so natural and unnoticeablean act. In itself, the principle of listeners-performers-composers activatingthe space by simply traversing it recalls Cage’s remark (incidentally inspiredby Satie’s concept of Furniture Music) that, actually, “no one means to circu-late his blood.”79 Thus, with Muzak-Plus, one can barely dream of a more in-tegrated form of art as life.

Cage almost realized this dream when, in 1962, the sculptor Richard Lip-pold asked him to create a sound environment that would complement thesculpture he was designing for the lobby of the Pan Am Building in NewYork City (fig. 8).80 Quite strikingly, and despite Cage’s praise of Lippold’swork, his sculptures seem to fit the criteria for “visual Muzak.” In the 1960s,Lippold’s constructivist-inspired wire sculptures were characteristic of a formof soft modernism that was perfectly suited to the desire of a company likePan Am to project a modern image without being too threatening. Two of


FIGURE 8. Richard Lippold, TheGlobe (or Flight), 1963, main lobbyof the Pan American (now MetLife)Building, New York. Photo: © 2007Estate of Richard Lippold/ArtistsRights Society (ARS), New York.

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the main qualities of Lippold’s work in this regard are its predictability andadaptability. With these qualities in mind, Walter Gropius (as a design con-sultant to the architects of the building), at the earliest stage of the commis-sion, envisioned the final work as consisting of “a large metal screen as aprominent feature” and “in front of this screen a large globe designed as anabstract.”81 In the end, wrote Lippold, the sculpture would “provide a meansfor tranquil contemplation in a center of unordered movement, thus beingparty to the concurrence of law and chance.”82 But that is not all. Followingthis obvious allusion to Cage’s mode of composition, the sculptor finally in-dicated that

to further this possibility I have commissioned John Cage to compose a continuousprogram of music which will provide different sounds for each of ten loud speakersin the ceiling, under the bridges, and in the base of the sculpture—as an alterna-tive to a piped-in program of Musak [sic], originally planned for all the public areasof the building. The sounds will be produced by special tapes constructed by Mr.Cage, as well as by noise generators, electronic devices, and the regular Musak [sic]programs, altered electronically. The activation of the sounds from each speakerwill be photo-electrically accompanied by movement of the public through thelobby. The result will be a constantly changing, continuous concert of music inthree-dimensional space, becoming, in effect, part of the sculpture.83

This ambitious project did not leave much of a trace beyond a prospec-tive budget listing the necessary material including tape recorders, photo-electric cells, oscillators, noise generators, a mysterious TV monitor scope,and of course “Muzac” [sic] as part (and an essential one) of the technologi-cal apparatus.84 The existence of a budget suggests that some work on thedesign of the sound system was completed, and, in his correspondence withGrand Central Building Corporation, Lippold insisted that he and Cage had“spent a great deal of time and effort designing [it]” in collaboration withMax Matthews, the director of Human Communication Research at BellTelephone Laboratories.85

Ultimately, while Lippold presented the sound system as a “part of thesculpture,” it appears to have been more of a rescue operation than any-thing else. In reality, Lippold had not been notified that the Pan Am Build-ing, like many other buildings of the time, had been conceived with anintegrated system of piped-in music. Consequently, the sculptor solicited themusician only after he “became concerned when he learned that Muzak wasgoing to be piped into the lobbies and elevators of the building.”86 Indeed,reported the New York Times in August 1962, Lippold “was unhappy with theidea of the conventional Muzak product seeping sweetly out of the sur-rounding walls and flowing around his sculpture. To him the music andsculpture were incompatible.”87 In the end, the Times journalist reported,that was the reason why


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Mr. Cage devised a system whereby the people going through the lobby would activatethe photo-electric cells. These in turn would release the Muzak music, which wouldbecome pulverized [italics mine] and filtered in the process. Even people getting inand out of the elevators would have a part in producing the sound. Since the cellswould never be activated the same way, the results would be constantly in variation.88

In retrospect, this description of the Pan Am project seems like a dis-guised reminder of the concept of Muzak-Plus (“There’ll be centrally lo-cated pulverized Muzak-Plus”), formulated a year before by Cage himself.Moreover, following Lippold, the Times journalist clearly emphasizes themain outcome of the device (its state of constant variation) thereby revealingits main difference from Muzak. Rather than being a preprogrammed, cyclicbroadcast, the Muzak-Plus program is indeterminate and in constant flux.Therefore, the space itself would constantly change depending on the un-predictable activation of its users-performers-listeners. In the end, the Timesjournalist tellingly evoked the project in the conditional tense, knowing thatthe board of directors of Pan Am had, predictably, rejected a plan that ap-peared to compromise the integrity of Muzak as a means of regulating theenvironment—creating a disruption that (one imagines) would have af-fected the security of the whole building. As a compromise, curiously evok-ing the Silent Prayer that Cage had written fourteen years earlier, it wasagreed that Muzak would be silenced in the lobby until further notice.

From Art to Life and Back Again

Rejected from this instance of daily life, the concept of Muzak-Plus nevertheless found its way back into Cage’s art. Indeed, while reviewingCage’s performance of Variations V in 1965 (fig. 9) for the Village Voice, JillJohnston remarked that the mixer designed by Max Matthews for the PanAm lobby was actually “similar to the one [Billy] Kluver [sic] (also an engi-neer at Bell Telephone) masterminded for ‘Variations V.’”89 Thus, the conti-nuity between Muzak-Plus, the Pan Am project, and Variations V is not merespeculation. Johnston’s account indicates that the unfulfilled Cage-Lippoldcollaboration at least did not go unnoticed and that the concept apparentlyinformed the audience of Variations V, who like the reviewer, witnessed onstage a version of what they had not been allowed to perform in the lobbyof the Pan Am Building, that is, what Cage defined in a series of notes forVariations V as a “non-focused . . . performance without score or parts” thatwould ultimately “escape stagnation.”90

In this regard, Merce Cunningham’s recollection of Variations V is crucial.As the dancer remembered it, only two of the many ways Cage and David Tu-dor intended the sound to be affected by movement were ultimately usedduring the performance. The first, remembered Cunningham, “was a series


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of poles, twelve in all, like antennae, placed over the stage” each having asound radius of four feet and different “sound possibilities.”91 Then “when adancer came into this radius, sound could be triggered.” To some extent, thisfirst device is an indication of how Cage himself exploited the “genuinely newpossibilities” suggested by Lev Termin’s Theremin and Terpsiton.

In addition, bringing us back to the Pan Am project and the concept ofMuzak-Plus, Cage and Tudor used “a series of photoelectric cells which wereto be positioned on the floor along the sides of the stage.” Hence, reportedCunningham, “when a dancer passed between the cell and the light, moresound possibilities were triggered.” And at last, completing the environ-ment, “Stan Van Der Beek and Nam June Paik both showed visual elements[film and television images] on screens behind and to the side of the per-forming area.”92 If not to the audience, which generally failed to perceive


FIGURE 9. Performance of Variations V, 1965; music by John Cage, film by StanVan Der Beek, TV images by Nam June Paik. Foreground left to right:John Cage, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma; background left to right:Carolyn Brown, Merce Cunningham, Barbara Diley. Photo: HervéGloaguen, © Merce Cunningham Foundation, New York.

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the correspondence between the sounds and the movements, to Cunninghamthe feedback effect was clear enough. And to him, in fact, the general princi-ple of the piece was not unlike certain specific instances of daily life: “As far asI was concerned,” he concluded, it “was like the doors automatically openingwhen you enter a supermarket.”93 The comparison is trivial but sensible,covertly conveying the sense of an essential feedback effect between art andlife that was at the core of the Pan Am project. Ultimately, while the possibilityof making a work of art out of life had remained unfulfilled in the context ofthe Pan Am Building, Cage continued to promote the transformative power ofart in life. Yet, as he clarified in 1967, the dynamic of experimental art formswas, first and foremost, one of anticipation—not immediate implementation:

Changes in music precede equivalent ones in theater, and changes in theater pre-cede general changes in the lives of people. Theater is obligatory eventually be-cause it resembles life more than other arts do. . . . Thus, more and more, weencounter works of art, visual or audible, which are not strictly speaking eitherpainting or music. In New York City they are called “happenings.”94

That art will eventually affect and transform life is thus an unavoidableoutcome, but the temporality of the process locates the resolution in an in-determinate future. Hence, suggests Cage, beyond the blurring of these ulti-mate boundaries between the senses and between art and life, the primarystrength of happenings as an art form is to lessen a nonetheless necessarygap between anticipation and realization. Theater, in this regard, only resembleslife to the extent that it is, after all, separated from it. Cage, it seems, per-ceived acutely that “the identity of art and life is an ideal, not a reality,” and,as Richard Shiff put it, that “neither an art possessing the immediacy of life’sexperience nor a life having the fixed formal structure of art would seem tobelong to the world as we know it. Art seems to depend upon its distinctionfrom life, and vice versa.”95 Thus, the necessity of maintaining the gap be-tween art and life does not only appear as an unfortunate consequence ofthe failure of the Pan Am project—a failure that only heralds its practical im-possibility at a given time and in a given place. In reality, as Cage had madeclear, any attempt to resolve the gap between art and life runs the risk of gen-erating just another “police situation”—as it does, differently, in the pro-gramming of Muzak, in certain scripted happenings, or again, in the late1960s, in the psychedelic “power fantasy” of introducing LSD into drinkingwater as a means of insuring a collective salvation.96

The genre of happenings might have appeared as a privileged vehicle ofchange to Cage, but only on the difficult condition that it would not enforceor induce any collective behaviors. Ideally, the concept of Muzak-Plus reversedthe dynamic of change: it is simply not the environment that modifies the con-duct of individuals, but the unpredictable conduct of individuals that modifies


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the environment. Later in the 1960s, Cage referred to the possibility of suchvariable environments as “Musicircuses,” or simply “reunions,” and conceivedof them as free and nonprofitable artistic situations where musicians were notpaid and tickets were not sold.97 None of his work could have come closer toartistically defining a desirable social circumstance than the Musicircus, cele-brating collectively the suicide of the artist as a “lunatic authoritarian.”98 As autopian fantasy, noted Daniel Charles, the Musicircus could easily be dis-counted as inoffensive and naive. Yet, he suggested, it remains more difficultto escape the fact that such a utopia had taken shape.99 “Nowhere, observedCharles Junkerman, has Cage contrived a more compelling musical model ofan amiable anarchic community than in the genre he invented called the Mu-sicircus”100—a genre that was mostly an atmosphere, suggests Cage, and inwhich as “in the case of the weather, though we notice changes in it, we haveno clear knowledge of its beginning or ending.”101

The Musicircus, indeed, had “no score, but consisted of simply inviting allthose who would perform in the same time and space to do so,” hoping, clari-fied Cage, “to involve the public in this. I want the performers to be the public.My job is to facilitate their performance.”102 The performance in question,nonetheless, did not follow any script. Combining the experiment of VariationsV with the premise of Muzak-Plus as something to be performed by the listen-ers, the simultaneity and the spatial explosion of the ephemeral Musicircuswere thus intended, argued Cage, to give the audience the possibility of liter-ally “changing its experience by where it moves,” therefore leaving to the audi-ence the task of composing its own individual, and/or collective experience ofthe environment.103 In this regard, added Cage, “if you don’t like what you’redoing here, you can go there.”104 And in the end, as evidence that one was fac-ing the ultimate participatory experience, he also added: “You can leave alto-gether.”105 These last words are perhaps more significant than they sound.They do not promote the ideal of a pacified reconciliation between humansand their environment, supported by Muzak or induced in any type of artisticpolice situation. To be truly all-inclusive, Cage’s final view of an artistic com-munity needed to embrace the possibility of voluntary exclusion (rather thanfostering the opportunity of becoming voluntary prisoners of a situation).Feeling that one has not come to the right place is an option that Muzak-Plusoffers, but the question of who is going to perform it remains.

The Community to Come

Ultimately, Cage’s attempt to create a Muzak-Plus addressed hisidealistic belief that art could foster a revolution in society, one that wouldlead not to a transfer of power but, in an anarchist fashion, to its pulveriza-tion in the hands of the individual members of a collectivity.


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Cage’s sociopolitical stance has occasionally been scorned for itsnaiveté, and, while it is undeniable that the composer “concentrated onsounds of the world and the interaction of art and life,” one might also con-clude, as Douglas Kahn suggests, that the artist failed to deliver on hispromise.106 Such criticism is not new. Modern artists, including Cage, oftenencouraged their audiences to dream the impossible. Once, reportedBarnett Newman, “[the critic Harold Rosenberg] challenged me to explainwhat one of my paintings could possibly mean to the world. My answer wasthat if he and others could read it properly it would mean the end of allstate capitalism and totalitarianism. The answer still goes.”107 Thus, theanswer—always in the process of becoming—stands at the advent of a “soci-ety entirely composed of artists,” which, as Newman had already made clearin the 1930s, would be the only one “really worth living in.”108 Newman’sperspective not only suggests that, through art, change might be possibleon a large scale but that the responsibility to effect such a change lies withineach individual.

Closely attuned to Newman’s philosophy in this regard, the primary taskthat John Cage assigned to his art was not (unlike Joseph Beuys’s programfor a social sculpture, for example) to lull society into the expectation “ofsome one artist who will satisfy all our aesthetic needs.”109 His goal was ac-tively to transform himself as an artist before attempting to transform any-one else.110 For as modern artists, suggested Richard Shiff, Newman, andCage in this regard, served as a model for all members of society—models of“individual[s] who channeled the product of [their] isolated thought backinto the flow of society . . . constitut[ing] a strike force of one dedicated toanarchist principles.”111 In the artistic community of his time and beyond,John Cage embodies such a “strike force” and his art, very much like New-man’s, remains in his own terms “a political art which is not about politicsbut political itself.”112 “I am interested in social ends,” admitted Cage, “butnot in political ends, because politics deals with power, and society deals withnumbers of individuals; and I’m interested both in single individuals andlarge numbers or medium numbers or any kinds of numbers of individuals.In other words, I’m interested in society, not for purposes of power, but forpurposes of cooperation and enjoyment.”113

Hence Cage’s Muzak-Plus revolution may be anarchist in spirit and ac-tively threatening to the order of things, but only to the extent that it avoids,as he would say, any “impracticable anarchy which provokes the intervention ofthe police.”114 Cage, quite clearly, never foresaw the outcome of the revolutionas an organized, premeditated overthrowing of any governing authority—nomatter how artistically done. Suggesting or inducing changes through artdoes not necessarily imply that art, as such, is politically productive in society.In this regard, it is true that Cage’s revolutionary edifice remained specifically


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musical, struggling to preserve an essential and constant flexibility. So that,suggested Cage,

instead of planning [the revolution], or stopping what we’re doing in order to doit, it may be that we are at all times in it. I quote from M. C. Richards’ book, TheCrossing Point: “Instead of revolution being considered exclusively as an attack fromoutside upon an established form, it is being considered as a potential resource—an art of transformation voluntarily undertaken from within. Revolution arm inarm with evolution, creating a balance which is neither rigid nor explosive.”115

To a certain extent, one might agree with Richard Taruskin’s opinionthat it is misleading to think that Cage wanted to liberate people. ForTaruskin, it is clear that “he wanted nothing of the kind. He wanted to liber-ate sounds. People, with their ‘memory, tastes, likes and dislikes,’ were in theway. Getting rid of them was serious business—not something you couldleave to chance” and even less, suggested Cage, to one single artist.116 But nomatter how sensible Taruskin’s argument may sound, such a conclusion dis-misses altogether the notion that “all music, any organization of sounds is . . .a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality.”117

Cage, indeed, constantly reaffirmed what Jacques Attali called the politicaleconomy of music. For Cage, there is no ambiguity: “less anarchic kinds of mu-sic give examples of less anarchic states of society. The masterpieces of Westernmusic exemplify monarchies and dictatorships. Composer and conductor:king and prime minister.”118 Furthermore, encouraging and noticing the“blurring of the distinctions between composers, performers, and listeners”in contemporary music, Cage would interpret it as “evidence of an ongoingchange in society, not only in the structure of society, but in the feelings thatpeople have for one another.”119

In the end, it is true that liberating sound and liberating people are notidentical, but they are inseparable in Cage’s view. Beyond all skepticism—including his own—Cage always maintained that he had written music first“in order to produce a revolution in the mind” and then with the hope that,ultimately, “it could further the revolution in society.”120 This remains an in-tention, to be certain, but one that needs to be taken seriously. Whether ornot John Cage practiced music or politics, and whether or not his endeavoreffectively changed society altogether is not the point: it actually did, to the ex-tent that Cage practiced his responsibility as an artist and “all responsibility,”as Jacques Derrida reminded us, “is revolutionary, since it seeks to do the im-possible, to interrupt the order of things on the basis of nonprogrammableevents.”121 For it is true, added the philosopher, that “a revolution cannot beprogrammed. In a certain way, as the only event worthy of the name, it ex-ceeds every possible horizon, every horizon of the possible—and therefore ofpotency and power.”122 This interruption is the plus in Muzak-Plus, and it is


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what makes Muzak-Plus essentially revolutionary and, therefore, impossible:it belongs only to its unforeseeable future performers and, to this extent,Cage’s answer still goes.

Notes

1. John Cage, “The Future of Music” (1974) revised text of a lecture given at theYMHA in New York, in John Cage, Empty Words: Writings ’73–’78 (Hanover, NH,1979), 177. See also John Cage, foreword to A Year from Monday (Middletown,CT, 1967), ix: “The reason I am less and less interested in music is not onlythat I find environmental sounds and noises more useful aesthetically than thesounds produced by the world’s musical cultures, but that, when you get rightdown to it, a composer is simply someone who tells other people what to do. Ifind this an unattractive way of getting things done.”

2. Like “Vaseline,” the brand name Muzak eased itself into the vernacular lan-guage to become a common name: muzak. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nded., provides the following definition: “MUZAK Also erron. Musak [Cf. musicsb.] The proprietary name of a system of piped music for factories, restaurants,supermarkets, etc.; also used loosely, with small initial, to designate recordedlight background music generally.”

3. Umberto V. Muscio (president of the Muzak Division of Wrather Corp.)quoted in Richard Woodley, “Music by Muzak,” Audience 1, no. 5 (1971): 6.

4. In the words of Marshall McLuhan, whose ideas Cage highly respected: “Weare simply not equipped with earlids.” See Marshall McLuhan and QuentinFiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York, 1967).

5. John Cage, “[Memoir]” (1966) in John Cage: An Anthology, 77. 6. In 1961, for example, Cage stated: “I can see perfectly that, if I liked vibraphone,

the world would be more open to me. In the same way, if I liked Muzak, which Ialso don’t, the world would be more open to me. I intend to work on it. The sim-plest thing for me to do in order to come to terms with both things would be touse them in my work, and this was, I believe, how so-called primitive peopledealt with animals which frightened them”; John Cage, “Interview with RogerReynolds” (1961), first published in Generation Magazine (1962), reprinted in theC. F. Peters Co.’s John Cage catalog (New York, 1962), and subsequently in Con-temporary Composers on Contemporary Music, ed. Elliott Schwartz and Barney Childs(New York, 1967), 338. See also “John Cage and Roger Reynolds: A Conversa-tion” (1961), Musical Quarterly 65, no. 4 (October 1979): 578.

7. “John Cage and Roger Reynolds: A Conversation,” 338.8. For insight on Lev Termen’s career see, for example, Stephen Montague,

“Rediscovering Leon Theremin,” Tempo 177 (June 1991): 18–23.9. John Cage, “The Music of the Future: Credo” (1937), in Silence (Cambridge,

MA, 1961), 4.10. See promotional material for Lev Termen’s Terpsiton (or Terpsitone), illus-

trated in Radio-Craft, December 1936, reproduced in Bulat M. Galeyev, “L. S.Termen: Faustus of the Twentieth Century,” Leonardo 24, no. 5 (1991): 573–79.


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11. Cage, “The Music of the Future: Credo,” 4.12. Ibid.13. In John Cage, Roger Shattuck, and Allan Gillmor, “Erik Satie: A Conversation”

(1973), Contact 25 (Autumn 1992): 22.14. Innumerable articles have been published on Muzak, background music, and

functional music, but they for the most part fall into the category accuratelydescribed by David Huron in 1990 as a “dearth of published factual and criti-cal literature . . . the pertinent analytic literature [being] surprisingly rar-efied.” One is still, indeed, longing for a “scholarly treatment of functionalmusic.” See David Huron, review of Muzak: The Hidden Messages in Music: A So-cial Psychology of Culture, by Stephen H. Barnes, Psychology of Music 18, no. 2(1990): 183–84. Three informative studies, equally questionable in their ap-proach and methodology, present themselves as a comprehensive analysis ofMuzak (and related avatars): Jerri A. Husch, “Music of the Workplace: A Studyof Muzak Culture” (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts 1984); Stephen H.Barnes, Muzak®, The Hidden Messages in Music: A Social Psychology of Culture(Lewiston, NY, 1988) and finally, more recently, Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music:A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong (New York, 1994).

15. Husch, “Music of the Workplace,” 57.16. For more details on the early Muzak networks see Lillian G. Genn, “Music by

Muzak,” New York Times, 12 October 1941, X7.17. A good account of the early history of Muzak is provided in Sidney Hyman,

The Lives of William Benton (Chicago, 1969), 211–39.18. Lawrence Lader, “Music That Nobody Hears,” Nation’s Business 38, no. 9

(September 1950): 60. 19. Lanza, Elevator Music, 3.20. On this question see R. C. Lewis, R. L. Cardinell, and Harold Burris-Meyer,

“Music as an Aid to Healing,” Journal of Acoustical Society of America 19, no. 4(July 1947): 545.

21. Ibid. The meaning of “a good thing” (humanitarian purpose? scientificprogress? financial operation? all of the above?) remains purposefully vague.

22. A study published by the War Production Drive Headquarters in August 1943opens with the following statement: “Except for one investigation made undercontrolled conditions (Survey on Industrial Music made by Profs Burris-Meyerand Cardinell, Stevens Institute, Hoboken, NJ) and the report from theBritish Ministry of Information, ‘Music While You Work,’ little was knownabout the use of music in industry. However, fragmentary information indi-cated that its use was growing at mushroom speed.” See Wheeler Beckett, Mu-sic in War Plants (Washington, DC, 1943), 7. In 1937 a pioneering studyconducted in England had already concluded that “since boredom is due toan awareness of the monotonous condition of work, its alleviation will dependupon the extent to which the mind can be distracted from this condition.Clearly, the form of distraction must appeal to the ear rather than to the eye,and music in some form or other seems to be the most suitable medium forthis purpose”; S. Wyatt and J. N. Langdon (assisted by F. G. L. Stock), Fatigueand Boredom in Repetitive Work (London, 1937), 31. Wyatt and Langdon’s en-couraging results served the elaboration of the “Music While You Work” pro-gram broadcast by the BBC during the war: “More than 8,000,000 war workersin Britain daily heard [this program], and millions worked to the tune of


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phonograph records, while traveling bands and orchestras gave weekly con-certs to as many as 5,000 or 6,000 workers in 1,000 factories.” Figures found inDoris Soibelman, Therapeutic and Industrial Uses of Music: A Review of the Litera-ture (New York, 1948), 176.

In her 1945 guide to music in industry, Barbara Elna Benson, who alsorefers to studies conducted by the War Production Board, mentions FellowsGear Shaper, Jack & Heintz, and RCA Victor as the leaders in industrial broad-casting. See Barbara Elna Benson, Music and Sound Systems in Industry (NewYork, 1945), 11. Her study reveals that the material used for broadcasting wascoming from three major companies: Columbia, Decca, and RCA Victor (orcompanies affiliated to RCA). See also Dan D. Halpin (RCA Victor Division,Radio Corporation of America), “Industrial Music and Morale,” Journal of theAcoustical Society of America 15, no. 2 (October 1943): 118–23. For more infor-mation on the strategies and development of industrial music see Ben Selvin,“Programming Music for Industry,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 15,no. 2 (October 1943): 131, and R. L. Cardinell and Harold Burris-Meyer, “Mu-sic in Industry Today,” Journal of Acoustical Society of America 19, no. 4 (July1947): 548.

23. See Lewis, Cardinell, and Burris-Meyer, “Music as an Aid to Healing,” 545.24. Ibid.25. Ibid. Of course, the aesthetic of Muzak has changed since these early experi-

ments. The use of specific instrumental arrangements, particularly, was aban-doned by Muzak in 1987. Thus, “if you go to a store and you think you arehearing Muzak it probably isn’t Muzak. . . . There is probably a couple of com-panies out there doing that old-style, 1,001 strings, ruin-your-favorite-songkind of thing, but we dropped all that in 87.” See Bruce Funkhouser, VicePresident of Muzak Programming and Licensing, quoted in Paul Verna,“Muzak Today: Hip, Current, and Firmly in the Foreground,” Muzak 60th An-niversary: A Billboard Advertising Supplement, Billboard, 29 October 1994, 92.

26. Cardinell and Burris-Meyer, “Music in Industry Today,” 548–49.27. This claim has been accurately characterized in David Huron’s review of

Muzak: The Hidden Messages in Music, 183.28. See, for example, R. L. Cardinell (director of Muzak’s research department)

and E. M. Werner (Muzak’s assistant director), Studies on the Use of Muzak inLife Insurance Company ‘P’ (New York, August 1945), a Muzak Corporation re-port.

29. Lader, “Music That Nobody Hears,” 60.30. Stanley Green, “Music to Hear, But Not to Listen to,” Saturday Review, Special

Issue: “Ten Years of Recording,” September 28, 1957, 55. 31. Advertisement for “240 Central Park South” in New York Times, 28 April 1940,

151. Advertisement published in New York Times, 12 June 1963, 87.32. The definition provided by the company in 2006 on its Web site

www.muzak.com, simply read: “Audio Architecture is emotion by design.” Wal-ter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibil-ity: Second Version” (1936), in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–1938 (Cambridge,MA, 2002), 119–20.

33. John Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions” (1948), in John Cage, Writer, SelectedTexts (New York, 2000), 43.

34. Ibid.


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35. Husch, “Music of the Workplace,” 72.36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 64.38. “This Invisible emanation, this effluvium is like pep pills, yet something like

tranquilizers, and maybe like getting a light general anesthetic,” wrote RobertM. Yoder in “‘Background Music’: Persuasion in the Air,” Saturday Evening Post,December 6, 1958, 31, 83–85.

39. Nick Groom, “The Condition of Music,” Popular Music and Society 20, no. 3(Fall 1996): 8. The author refers to Lanza, Elevator Music.

40. See Simon C. Jones and Thomas G. Schumacher, “Muzak: On the FunctionalMusic and Power,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 9, no. 2 (June 1992):156. The authors precisely trace and perfectly summarize the limitations ofthe general discourse on Muzak: “Muzak has traditionally been criticized fromone of two positions: either on aesthetic and musical grounds, as a form ofsonic banality, musical ‘castration,’ or ‘wallpaper music,” or as an instance ofcultural totalitarianism, reproducing an ideology of bureaucratic rationalismand perpetuating alienation and false consciousness. In striving to avoid bothof the positions, our intentions here are not to critique muzak as music per se,nor to reduce muzak to an unambiguous reflection of a monolithic, ‘domi-nant ideology.’”

41. Stressing the tendency (or necessity) of accepting Muzak’s efficiency in exist-ing criticisms of Muzak, David Huron points out that evidence against the“Hawthorne effect” can be similarly welcomed by critics of Muzak while suchevidences could, at least partially, undermine Muzak’s “scientific” claims to ef-ficiency by showing that changes in workers’ behaviors are (to a certain ex-tent) the result of their knowing they are being watched. The “Hawthorneeffect” was demonstrated in a research project conducted between 1927 and1932 at the Hawthorne Plant of the Western Electric Company in Cicero, Illi-nois. See David Huron’s review of Muzak: The Hidden Messages in Music,183–84. In addition, Huron accurately qualifies most of the existing studies ofMuzak when he concludes about Barnes’s book that “the work is more of apop social commentary than a scholarly analysis. The book contains no foot-notes, references or bibliography—symptoms that the publishers have donethe author a disservice by packaging it as a ‘musicological study.’”

As for the aesthetic value of Muzak, the issue should certainly be left to mu-sicologists to discuss. Yet, it is hard to understand how a sugarcoated melodyor any over-familiar tune can qualify as a “denial of human emotions.” On thecontrary, as it has been argued, the predictability of a musical tune, beyondMuzak and the so-called field of popular music, is part of the pleasure that alistener might take in it: “Opera as a whole has a shabby reputation,” writesCharles Rosen, “(it is also the most prestigious of music genres, but that is theother side of the coin). . . . The banality of the tunes is the heaviest charge,and this might seem to be a relative, even a subjective, matter—the banal isthe overfamiliar, the too often-heard. But that was exactly what was wanted—or, rather, the initial success of an opera demanded at least one originalmelody that seemed long familiar at first hearing, and could be whistled by theaudience on leaving the opera house. Both Donizetti and Verdi needed suchtunes, at once original and instantly banal, for their dramatic structures towork: neither the sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor nor “‘La donna è mobile’”from Rigoletto, to take only two examples, would have the right effect if they


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did not sound immediately as if one had known them all one’s life.” SeeCharles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, 1998), 602.

42. Roy Lichtenstein quoted in G. R. Swenson, “What is Pop Art, Part I,” inter-views with G. R. Swenson (November 1963) reprinted in Steven H. Madoff,ed., Pop Art: A Critical History (Los Angeles, 1997), 107.

43. John Cage, “[Letter to Paul Henry Lang] (1956),” first published in John Cage:An Anthology, 118.

44. Interestingly, Cage actually derided radio as a form of Muzak in its own right.When asked in 1968 what he considered to be Muzak, Cage stretched its defi-nition from “music for factory workers, or for chickens to force them to layeggs [to] the miscellaneous music played throughout the day by most radio.”See also For the Birds, John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles (Boston,1981), 137. In this regard, composing and performing Imaginary Landscape # 4(1951), for instance, using radio as a “musical” instrument can be consideredan incursion into the realm of Muzak, exercising what Cage called “the respon-sibility of the artist . . . in perfecting his work so that it may become attractivelydisinteresting.” See Cage, Silence, 64.

45. On this question, see David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Soundand Imaginary Worlds (London, 1995), 140.

46. On the seminal untitled event organized by Cage at Black Mountain Collegein 1952 see Cage, Silence, x, and also Merce Cunningham, “A CollaborativeProcess Between Music and Dance” (1982), reprinted in Merce Cunningham/Dancing in Space and Time (Pennington, NJ, 1992), 141.

47. John Cage in Richard Kostelanetz, “Conversation with John Cage (Summer1966),” in John Cage: An Anthology, 26. Cage had made a similar statement in1965 during an interview with Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner: “I thinkwhat we’re doing is something else and not that. So when I go to a Happeningthat seems to me to have intention in it I go away saying that I’m not inter-ested. I also did not like to be told, in the Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, tomove from one room to another. Though I don’t actively engage in politics Ido as an artist have some awareness of art’s political content, and it doesn’t in-clude policemen. . . . It is not during organized or policed moments that thesethings [“awareness,” “curiosity”] happen”; John Cage, Michael Kirby, andRichard Schechner, “An Interview with John Cage,” Tulane Drama Review 10,no. 2 (Winter, 1965): 69–70.

48. Ibid. Cage refers to the fact that Oldenburg requested the audience “to standin the side of the theater in the aisles and not occupy the seats”; Claes Olden-burg, “Moviehouse (1965),” in Raw Notes (Halifax, 2005), 68. Apparently Old-enburg himself would not object to Cage’s reaction as he wrote in subsequenttheoretical notes on happenings: “The artist is a lunatic authoritarian andsadist and he must go (self-destruction).” See Raw Notes, 218.

49. In 1966, after Cage had severely criticized Kaprow’s aesthetic, the latter char-acterized the general understanding of Cage’s influence on his work as fol-lows: “Now, speaking personally, my studies with Cage followed a direction Ihad begun to take a few years before when I was concerned with the implica-tion that Action painting . . . led not to more painting, but to more action. I per-ceived that Cage could help, especially in the area of noisemaking which I wasusing in my Assemblages and Environments then. Needless to say, he did notdiscourage me, and I did my first happening in his classroom. Yet I possibly


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learned things which Cage was not inclined to teach, although I was quite sat-isfied. This is reason enough to relieve him of any responsibility for my differ-ent interests”; Allan Kaprow, “On Happenings,” Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 4(Summer 1966): 282.

50. Allan Kaprow, “The Right Living” (1987), reprinted in Jeff Kelley, ed., Essayson the Blurring of Art and Life (Berkeley, 1996), 225.

51. Allan Kaprow, “Communication Programming” originally appeared untitledin the Great Bear Pamphlet Manifestos (New York, 1966), 21–23, it has beenreprinted in the exhibition catalog Allan Kaprow, Pasadena Art Museum,September–October 1967, 12–14, and under the title “Manifesto,” in Kelley,Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, 83.

52. As Kaprow’s Words, 1961, is described in Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environ-ments, and Happenings (New York, 1966).

53. Udo Kultermann, Art and Life, trans. William Gabriel (New York, 1971), 106–7.54. On this question, see Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désœuvrée (Paris, 1986).55. Italo Calvino, “On Fourier I: The Society of Love,” in The Machine Literature:

Essays (London, 1987), 215. 56. Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall

2004): 60.57. Cardinell and Burris-Meyer, “Music in Industry Today,” 548.58. Frank Adams, “Bomber Hits the Empire State Building,” New York Times,

Sunday 29 July 1945, section 1, 25.59. See “San Francisco’s Assessor Tells Story of the Wreck of the Titanic From

Which He Escapes After Thrilling Experience,” Bulletin, San Francisco, 19April 1912.

60. Quoted (loosely) by Genesis P. Orridge, “Muzak: A Concept in Muzak Engi-neering,” Vague 16/17 (1984): 60. Orridge’s article contains some low qualityreproductions of Muzak’s promotional material.

61. Quoted in Richard Henderson, “The Pioneering Firm’s ‘Functional Music’Has Upped Production, Aided the War Effort And Been to the Moon. What’sNext for the Ambient Champion?” in Muzak 60th Anniversary: A BillboardAdvertising Supplement, 96.

62. With varying degrees of irony, some historians consider that Satie “officially in-vented Muzak in 1920” and deserves the title of “father of Muzak.” See, for in-stance, Alan M. Gillmor, Erik Satie (Boston, 1988), 232. Gillmor offers the mostprecise and reliable account of Satie’s creation of furniture music. See alsoDouglas W. Glazer, “Satie’s Entr’acte: A Model of Film Music,” Cinema Journal16 (Autumn 1976): 37. David Toop estimates that “the notion of music as autilitarian and unobtrusive background to other activities was predicted withtypical wit in 1920 by Erik Satie with his Musique d’ameublement, or ‘furnituremusic’” in the article “Environmental Music (background music),” in The NewGrove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., 2001. For Wilfrid Mellers,however, the question was less the historical precedence of Satie’s conceptthan that of a qualitative difference. Satie, he observed, has composed “func-tional” or “circumstantial” music, which, with its “intended banality” and re-fusal to express or illustrate anything “only serves as background ‘music.’ Amusic of that type”—pursues Mellers—“has obviously no intrinsic value, but ata time when the emotional and intellectual life of the ‘masses’ is continuallybrought down by the low standard [infériorité] of the art they are offered, it was


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important to ask clairvoyantly the question of the ‘emotional material of mu-sic’ and of the quality of this material.” See Wilfrid Mellers, “Satie et lemusique ‘fonctionnelle,’” La Revue musicale, special issue “Erik Satie: SonTemps et ses Amis,” 214 (June 1952): 35: “Dans la banalité voulue de laMusique d’ameublement, et, de façon moins tranchée, dans les Cinq grimaces pourle songe d’une nuit d’été, Satie a composé de la musique proprement de circon-stance, qui se refuse à illustrer ou exprimer quoi que ce soit, et sert tout sim-plement de musique de fond. Une musique de ce genre n’a évidemmentaucune valeur intrinsèque; mais à une époque où la vie émotive et intel-lectuelle de la ‘masse’ ne cesse d’être abaissée par l’infériorité de l’art qui luiest offert, il importait de poser de façon clairvoyante la question du ‘matérielde l’émotion musicale’ et de la qualité de ce matériel.”

63. Matthew Shlomowitz noted that “the first evidence of Cage’s interest in Satie isin 1945 [when] he made a two-piano arrangement of the first movement ofSatie’s Socrate for Merce Cunningham’s ballet Idyllic Song.” Three years later, inthe summer of 1948, Cage remembered being struck by the “lack of experi-ence of the music of Erik Satie” among the community of the Black MountainCollege where he was teaching during the summer. Hence, while BuckminsterFuller, who was teaching there as well, “put up his first dome, which immedi-ately collapsed,” Cage “arranged a festival of Satie’s music. It is following thisevent that Cage began collecting Satie’s music.” At the festival, Cage delivereda lecture in which, as he remembered, he “opposed Satie and Beethoven andfound that Satie, not Beethoven, was right.” See Matthew Shlomowitz, “Cage’sPlace in the Reception of Satie,” published on the Web Site Erik Satie createdby Niclas Fogwall in 1996 in cooperation with Archives Erik Satie, Paris,http://www.af.lu.se/~fogwall/satie.html. See also Gavin Bryars, “Vexationsand Its Performers,” Contact 26 (Spring 1983): 12–20, and John Cage, “An Au-tobiographical Statement” (1989), delivered at Southern Methodist Univer-sity, 17 April 1990, published in John Cage, Writer: Selected Texts, 243. Themanuscript of Satie’s Carrelage phonique (Acoustic Floor Tiling; 1917) was re-produced in John Cage, Notations (New York, 1969). The book is based on themanuscript collection of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, which alsopossesses the manuscript of Satie’s Tapisserie en fer forgé (Wrought-ironTapestry; 1917). One must note that Jacques Attali, when investigating what hecoined the “political economy of music” in the late 1970s, became quite con-cerned with Cage’s argument that (quoting the composer): “we must bringabout a music which is like furniture music—a music, that is, which will bepart of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. Ithink of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dom-inating them, not imposing itself. It would fill up those heavy silences thatsometimes fall between friends dining together. It would spare them the trou-ble of paying attention to their own banal remarks. And at the same time itwould neutralize the street noises which so indiscreetly enter into the play ofconversation. To make such music would be to respond to a need.” It did notreally matter to Attali that this statement was actually voiced by Erik Satie in animaginary dialogue written by Cage in 1958, and it mattered even less thatthese words had actually been attributed to Satie by the painter FernandLéger in his memoirs of Satie published in 1952 in a special issue of La Revuemusicale devoted to the French composer. Cf. Jacques Attali, Bruits, Essai sur


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l’économie politique de la musique (Paris, 1977), 223. Attali refers to a passage inJohn Cage, “Erik Satie” (1958) in Silence, 76. In his introduction to this imagi-nary dialogue, and without revealing his sources, Cage indicates that Satie’swords had been either written by Satie or attributed to the composer. Indeed,the quote used by Cage and subsequently attributed to him by Attali is to befound in Fernand Léger, “Satie Inconnu,” in La Revue Musicale, special issue“Erik Satie,” 137–38. It reads: “Nous déjeûnions, des amis et lui dans un restau-rant. Obligés de subir une musique tapageuse, insupportable nous quittons lasalle et Satie nous dit: ‘Il y a tout de même à réaliser une musique d’ameuble-ment, c’est-à-dire une musique qui ferait partie des bruits ambiant, qui entiendrait compte. Je la suppose mélodieuse, elle adoucirait les bruits descouteaux, des fourchettes sans les dominer, sans s’imposer. Elle meublerait lessilences pesant parfois entre les convives. Elle leur épargnerait les banalitéscourantes. Elle neutraliserait en même temps les bruits de la rue qui entrentdans le jeu sans discrétion.’ Ce serait, disait-il, répondre à un besoin.” In thelate fifties, Muzak Corp. used a similar argument to promote the use of itsproduct in restaurants—without Satie’s irony: “As far as our dining room isconcerned,” reported a satisfied customer, “Muzak is a must—for it helps tocreate a warm, friendly, enjoyable atmosphere, while subduing the naturalrestaurant clatter of dishes, knives, forks, etc.”; “Music for Dining,” Food ServiceMagazine/The Merchandising Journal of the Food Industry (May 1957).

64. It has been said, for example, that a “picture exhibition” was held at the sametime; even more specifically an “exhibition of children’s drawing,” and, ac-cording to the critic Rollo Myers, who claimed to have witnessed the event, themusic “was performed in the gallery while people were looking at the pic-tures.” See Rollo H. Myers, Erik Satie (1948), unabridged and slightly correctededition (New York, 1968), 60. Myers only claimed to having been present atthe event later on, when he repeated his version in “A Music Critic in Paris inthe Nineteen-Twenties: Some Personal Recollection,” Musical Quarterly 63, no. 4(October 1977): 542. According to Alan M. Gilmor (Erik Satie, 232), the exhi-bition of children’s drawing was reportedly titled: “Les Belles Promesses.”

65. Formally the Groupe des Six members were: Georges Auric (1899–1983), LouisDurey (1888–1979), Arthur Honegger (1892–1955), Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), and Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983).In reality Max Jacob’s play Trois nouveaux figurant au théâtre de Nantes, pre-viewed and reviewed by Jean Cocteau, was premiered at the galerie Barbazangeson June 24, 1919. See Béatrice Mousli, Max Jacob (Paris, 2005), 218, and Max Jacob/Jean Cocteau, Correspondance, 1917–1944, ed. Anne Kimball (Quebec, 2000), 46n. 18.

66. “We present for the first time, under the supervision of MM. Erik Satie andDarius Milhaud and directed by M. Delgrange, ‘furnishing music’ to be playedduring the entr’actes. We beg you to take no notice of it and to behave duringthe entr’actes as if the music did not exist. This music . . . claims to make itscontribution to life in the same way as a private conversation, a picture, or thechair on which you may or may not be seated.” Quoted by Myers, Erik Satie, 60.Darius Milhaud, “‘Musique d’ameublement’ and Catalogue Music,” from NotesWithout Music, trans. Donald Evans, ed. Rollo H. Myers (New York, 1953),116–24, also reprinted in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, ed.Elliott Schwartz and Barney Childs (New York, 1967), 37–39.


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67. See the program note as quoted by Myers, Erik Satie, 60.68. Darius Milhaud, “‘Musique d’ameublement’ and Catalogue Music,” 116–24.69. Ibid. According to Milhaud, the premiere was the first and last public perfor-

mance of Satie’s “furnishing” music. Later, when Ms. Eugène Meyers, the wifeof the owner of the Washington Post, acquired an autographed score of Tenturede Cabinet Préfectoral, a piece of furniture music by Satie, she was advised by thecomposer that “to have its full meaning, she should have had it recorded andplayed over and over again, thus forming part of the furniture of her beautifullibrary in Crescent Place.”

70. Ibid.71. In Cage, Shattuck, and Gillmor, “Erik Satie: A Conversation,” 22. For Cage it

is the effect of the music on the performance itself that matters (which is whylisteners have to become performers). This was demonstrated, it seems, dur-ing the performance of Satie’s Vexations, a piece made of a single musicalphrase to be repeated 840 times, that Cage organized in 1963. The perfor-mance, which lasted eighteen hours and forty minutes, required a team oftwelve pianists. One of them, Christian Wolff, found the performance hard toforget: “As the first cycle of pianists went round the playing was quite diverse, avariety—quite extreme, from the most sober and cautious to the willful and ef-fusive—of personalities was revealed. Musically the effect seemed disturbing.But after another round the more expansive players began to subside, themore restrained to relax, and by the third round or so the personalities andplaying techniques of the pianists had been almost completely subsumed bythe music. The music simply took over.” The performance, in other words,gradually suspended the intentions of each individual performer, resulting ina gradual surrender of their individuality to what Wolff called a collective“state of suspension of self,” which he felt to be as risky as it was beautiful.However, Gavin Bryars reported Cage’s regret that many people who “under-stood [the piece], and sympathized and even agreed with the idea of playingsomething 840 times, didn’t bother to show up.” Only by being there, he con-sidered, could you sense, “the great difference between an idea and an experi-ence.” Not even a recording of it, one guesses, would transmit the “element ofcomedy” or the sense of “solidarity” that, according to Wolff, built up duringthe performance. See Gavin Bryars, “Vexations and Its Performers,” 12–20.

72. See Cage’s detailed introduction to “Rhythm Etc.,” in John Cage, A Year FromMonday, New Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT, 1967), 120.

73. For a more comprehensive inquiry on Cage’s relation to Le Corbusier’sdogma see Branden W. Joseph, “John Cage and the Architecture of Silence,”October 81 (Summer 1997): 80–104. Cage’s emphasis. See John Cage, “RhythmEtc.,” 126.

74. Ibid. 75. Ibid.76. The statement is preceded and followed by empty spaces that Cage would

translate as silences when giving the text as a lecture. Ibid., 120.77. See Paul Griffiths, Cage (London, 1981), 38.78. John Cage, “The Future of Music,” revised text of a lecture given at the YMHA

in New York City and printed in Numus West, no. 5–74, reprinted in Cage,Empty Words, 183. This recalls Cage’s appreciation of Arnold Schoenberg’s mu-sic in 1937: “Schoenberg’s method assigns to each material, in a group ofequal materials, its function with respect to the group. (Harmony assigned to


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each material, in a group of unequal materials, its function with respect to thefundamental or most important material in the group.) Schoenberg’s methodis analogous to modern society, in which the emphasis is on the group and theintegration of the individual in the group”; John Cage, “The Future of Music:Credo” (1937), published for the first time in 1958 in the brochure accompa-nying George Avakian’s recording of Cage’s 25-Year Retrospective Concert,reprinted in John Cage: An Anthology, 56.

79. “Why is it necessary to give the sounds of knives and fork consideration? Satiesays so. He is right. Otherwise, the music will have to have walls to defenditself. . . . It is evidently a question of bringing one’s intended actions into re-lation with the ambient unintended ones. The common denominator is zero,where the heart beats (no one means to circulate his blood)”; Cage, “ErikSatie,” (1958) in Silence, 76.

80. The two artists had met at Black Mountain College in 1948. From 1933 to1937, Richard Lippold was trained at the School of the Art Institute ofChicago and the University of Chicago, majoring in industrial design, and hestudied music and dance (modern and folk) for six years. In the summer of1948, Lippold was an artist in residence at Black Mountain College, North Car-olina. In the mid-forties, he was still pondering whether to pursue music orsculpture. His wife, Louise Greusel, whom he had married in 1940, studied withMartha Graham and Merce Cunningham. See Curtis L. Carter, Jack W. Burn-ham, and Edward Lucie-Smith, Richard Lippold: Sculpture (Milwaukee, WI, 1990).

81. Letter from Walter Gropius to Richard Lippold, October 13, 1960. Richard Lip-pold papers, 1944–1977, reels D342—Frame 636, Archives of American Art,New York.

82. Richard Lippold, “Projects for Pan Am and Philharmonic,” Art in America 50,no. 2 (Summer 1962): 55.

83. Ibid.84. The undated budget, inscribed “Info from John Cage” at the top is part of

Richard Lippold papers, 1944–1977, reels D342—Frame 0027, Archives of Amer-ican Art. Another similar set of notes is preserved at The New York Public Libraryfor the Performing Arts under the title “Unrealized project for the Lippold roomat Grand Central Building,” NYC—Ref.: JPB 95-3 Folder 1069.

85. Letter from Richard Lippold to James D. Landauer [President of Grand Cen-tral Building, Inc.] August 11, 1962, Richard Lippold papers, 1944–1977, reelsD342—Frame 643, Archives of American Art.

86. Raymond Ericson, “Music World: No Sound,” New York Times, 12 August1962, X9.

87. Ibid. 88. Ibid.89. Jill Johnston, “Billy Kluver,” [sic], Village Voice, 12 August 1965.90. Quoted in William Fetterman, John Cage’s Theatre Pieces: Notations and Perfor-

mances (Amsterdam, 1996), 130.91. All quotes by Merce Cunningham are from “A Collaborative Process Between

Music and Dance,” 146–47. For a study of Variations V, see also Marcella Lista,“Expanded Body: Variations V et la conversion des arts à l’ère électronique,”Les Cahiers du Mnam, no. 74 (Winter 2000–2001): 99–119.

92. Ibid.93. Merce Cunningham, “A Collaborative Process Between Music and Dance,”

146–47.


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94. John Cage, “Happy New Ears,” 30.95. Richard Shiff, “Art and Life: A Metaphoric Relationship,” Critical Inquiry 5, no.

1 (Autumn 1978): 118.96. See Diedrich Diederichsen, “Veiling and Unveiling: The Culture of the

Psychedelic,” in Christoph Grunenberg, ed., Summer of Love: Art of thePsychedelic Era (London, 2005), 86.

97. “Reunions” are discussed in Patricia Sibbert, “Presenting John Cage’s ElectricMusic Machine,” Champaign-Urbana Courier, 29 September 1967, 21; StephenHusarik, “John Cage and LeJaren Hiller: HPSCHD, 1969,” American Music 1,no. 2 (Summer 1983): 1–21; and Charles Junkerman, “Modeling Anarchy: TheExample of John Cage’s Musicircus,” Chicago Review 38, no. 4 (1992): 153.

98. Again, I refer here to Claes Oldenburg’s blunt statement: “The artist is a lu-natic authoritarian and sadist and he must go (self-destruction).” See Olden-berg, Raw Notes, 218.

99. See Daniel Charles, Gloses sur John Cage (Paris, 1978), 156. “On pourrait—certes—rejeter dans l’inoffensif, dans l’utopie, le projet naïf d’une célébrationcollective de la chute du principe d’autorité. Mais il est plus difficile de sesoustraire au fait que cette utopie prenne corps.”

100. Ibid.101. Cage, Empty Words, 178, see also Junkerman, “Modeling Anarchy: The Exam-

ple of John Cage’s Musicircus,” 153.102. Patricia Sibbert, “Presenting John Cage’s Electric Music Machine” (1967),

quoted in Stephen Husarik, “John Cage and LeJaren Hiller: HPSCHD, 1969,”20 n. 7.

103. Steve Yahn, “John Cage, a Mixed Bag,” Focus on the Arts at Illinois, 1 (November1976), 1, as quoted in Husarik, “John Cage and LeJaren Hiller: HPSCHD,1969,” 20 n. 8.

104. Ibid. 105. Ibid.106. Of Cage’s view that “the very life we’re living . . . is so excellent once one gets

one’s mind and one’s desire out of its way and lets it act of its own accord,”Yvonne Rainer remarked, “Let’s not come down too heavily on the goofynaiveté of such an utterance, on its invocation of J. J. Rousseau, on Cage’s ad-herence to the messianic ideas of Bucky Fuller some years back, with their to-tal ignoring of worldwide struggles for liberation and the realities ofimperialist politics, on the suppression of the question, ‘Whose life is so excel-lent at what cost to others?’”; Yvonne Rainer, “Looking Myself in the Mouth,”October 17 (Summer 1981): 67. See Douglas Kahn, “John Cage: Silence andSilencing,” Musical Quarterly 81, no. 4. (Winter 1997): 557.

107. Barnett Newman, “‘Frontiers of Space’ Interview with Dorothy Gees Seckler,”Art in America 50, no. 2 (Summer 1962): 83–87, reprinted in Barnett Newman,Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (New York, 1990), 251.

108. Barnett Newman quoted in A. J. Liebling, “Two Aesthetes Offer Themselves asCandidate to Provide Own Ticket for Intellectuals,” New York World Telegram, 4November 1933, reproduced in Harold Rosenberg, Barnett Newman (NewYork, 1978), 231: “We must spread culture through society. Only a society en-tirely composed of artists would be really worth living in. That is our aim,which is not dictated by expediency.”

109. For a contrasting analysis of John Cage’s and Joseph Beuys’s views of a modernGesamtkunstwerk, see Eric Michaud, “De Fluxus à Beuys: La fascination du


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politique,” in L’œuvre d’art totale (Paris, 1995), 291. John Cage, “Happy NewEars,” 33.

110. Hence, Cage formulated the principle of “a music in which I would not ex-press my feelings or my ideas but in which the sounds themselves wouldchange me. . . . They would change in particular my likes and dislikes.” SeeHans G. Helms, interview with John Cage (1972), “Reflections of a ProgressiveComposer on a Damaged Society,” October 82 (Autumn 1997): 79.

111. Shiff, “Art and Life: A Metaphoric Relationship,” 107. I take the license to ex-pand Richard Shiff’s conclusion about Newman to the philosophy of JohnCage. See Richard Shiff, introduction to Newman, Selected Writings and Inter-views, xxvi.

112. Cage quoted in Richard Kostelanetz, “Environmental Abundance” (1969), inJohn Cage: An Anthology, 175.

113. John Cage, “Political/Social Ends?” (1969), in John Cage, Writer: Selected Texts,115.

114. John Cage in Charles, For the Birds, 53.115. Cage, “The Future of Music,” 182. Cage refers to Mary Caroline Richards, The

Crossing Point: Selected Talks and Writings (Middletown, CT, 1973).116. Richard Taruskin, “Letter to the editor,” New York Times, 27 September 1992, H4. 117. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977), excerpted chapter in

Audio Culture, Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christopher Cox and DanielWarner (New York, 2004), 7.

118. Cage, “The Future of Music,” 183.119. Ibid. (Italics mine.)120. Hans G. Helms, an interview with John Cage (1972): “Reflections of a Progres-

sive Composer on a Damaged Society,” October 82 (Autumn 1997): 89.121. Jacques Derrida, “The Spirit of the Revolution,” in Jacques Derrida and Elisa-

beth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford,2004), 83.

122. Ibid.


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