For people on this board silence would indeed be golden.
Muzak is not only a company but it also employs musicians to record their custom arrangements of what they think you wish to hear. In the past they had different feeds for various situations and within those feeds varied the content to suit the hour and needs of different industries; sorting mail, assembly line, bank lobby, etc.
I would not be in favor of complicated background music such as we practice or compose.
OK, but are you against the use of any kind of "background music"? Personally, I can see no useful purpose served by music on hold on phones, music in hotel lobbies and elevators or music in other public places that is not there to be listened to. All worthwhile music is written / improvised in order that due attention be paid to it by listeners.
The question of live background music is a rather different matter. When music is performed live at a wedding, a company dinner or whatever, the listeners can see as well as hear what is going on and might be more likely to spend a little time actually listening rather than ignoring it as anything more than mere wallpaper. I know this from past personal experience in the days of my mis-spent youth when I used to play the piano a little; I ran a piano trio that performed at such functions and at coffee mornings, wine tastings and all sorts of occasions and there were always people who paid more attention from time to time to the music being played than the notion of "background" music might otherwise have led on to presume, although the rare occasions when someone would come up and ask - seriously - for "Brahms's Trio in C major" or "a movement from Tchaikovsky's Trio" (like there's only two and look at the size of them!) did cause no small amount of consternation (and yes, those did actually happen - as did a request for
Dikhthas at a university graduation dinner from a clever-clogs student, to whom I responded that not only did I think Xenakis not quite appropriate for the occasion but that I wasn't about to give the cellist time off). I do recall on one occasion having someone come up and compliment the ensemble by saying how refreshing it was to have this music rather than "boring muzak".
An amusing story that I once heard from a violinist who did this kind of thing many years ago concerned an occasion when he and his chums entered a bar-rerstaurant on the Argentinian coast where a piano trio were performing tangos; the others dared him to walk up to the trio and ask if they could play Schubert's Trio in B flat. When he did so, there was much head-scratching and worried-looking scrabbling around amoung a library of music but finally the Schubert was found and they played the whole work, whereupon our violinist went up and thanked them, adding "but I only asked if you could". He did live to see another day, otherwise I would not have heard that tale.
There is another story that Elliott Carter, who cannot stand piped muzak anywhere, was once asked how he would respond if he heard his own music piped in a hotel elevator, to which he is reported as having replied "I'd press the red emergency button".
This leads us back to the topic, which is Sir PMD's vilification of "piped muzak"; he deserves our wholehearted support for drawing attention to a phenomenon that effectively demeans music.
Best,
Alistair
Topic: Sir Peter Maxwell Davies criticises "piped muzak"