Music: Trapped in a Musical Elevator

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Muzak, now 50, soothes (or irritates) 80 million people a day

Yes, this was the year in which Ronald Reagan was re-elected to the White House, but those with a broader historical perspective have other things to commemorate. Like the 400th anniversary of Sir Walter Raleigh's first colony in the New World, the 300th anniversary of the completion of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the 200th anniversary of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, the 100th anniversary of the first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary and the 50th anniversary of Muzak. Muzak? Wouldn't that be like celebrating the first broadcast singing commercial (1924)?

The sound of Muzak is, of course, almost everywhere, and metastasizing: in the bank and the supermarket and the of fice elevator, on the telephone line when the victim has been put on hold. It plays in the White House and the Pentagon; it played during the Olympics; it played in the Apollo XI spaceship that carried Neil Armstrong to the moon.

The Muzak Corp., which is now part of Westinghouse, estimates that its recordings are heard by 80 million people every day; they are syndicated in 19 countries; the company and its affiliates take in more than $150 million annually. "Muzak promotes the sharing of meaning," says James Keenan, an industrial psychologist and chairman of the firm's board of scientific advisers, "because it massifies symbolism in which not few but all can participate." But not quite all, Dr. Keenan.

"Horrible stuff' was the term once applied by the artist Ben Shahn. "Abominably offensive," said the novelist Vladimir Nabokov. And Philip Glass: "The range of music is truly enormous—opera at the top, Muzak at the bottom." John Cage spoke of composing a piece especially for the tormentors, with no notes in it. "The first step in describing silence is to use silence itself," Cage explained. "Matter of fact, I thought of composing a piece like that. It would be very beautiful, and I would offer it to Muzak." Perhaps Cage had that in mind when he created 4' 33 ", which consists of one or more musicians sitting on a stage and not playing their instruments for 4 min. 33 sec.

That Muzak should soothe the inhabitants of the Pentagon is fitting, for the whole system was basically the creation of an unusual general, George Owen Squier, a West Pointer ('87) who devoted much of his Army career to science. Assigned to evaluate the military potential in the experiments of the Wright Brothers, he became in 1908 one of the first passengers to fly, for all of nine minutes, in a Wright machine. As a young artilleryman, he invented the polarizing photochronograph to measure the speed of a projectile.

On the U.S. entry into World War I, Squier became head of the Signal Corps, and his omnivorous curiosity led to a notable invention: a system for transmitting several messages simultaneously over existing electric power lines. In 1922, nearing retirement, he took his ideas and his patents to the North American Co. utilities combine, which backed him in launching Wired Radio, Inc., a kind of competitor to the booming fad for wireless radio. But not until 1934, the year of his death, did the general think up a catchy new name, combining the sound of music with the sound of the popular camera called the Kodak.

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