Sound and fury | 28 January 2016

No one is consulted. No one is held to account. No one has the authority to turn it off. How is it that muzak has slipped through every legal control?

The blame, I’d say, lies with those who are frightened of silence — with those who spend more money in shops that buzz to a friendly background hum, and laugh too loudly when all around are mute. To moderate their visceral fear of the quiet they cling to cheaply produced, intellectually demeaning and superficially comforting sub-music. Muzak comes in various forms — piped, performed live, and through other people’s headphones, when you can’t actually hear pitched sounds, only a desiccated, insistent beat.

Live it can be most memorable. Everyone must have their least favourite story. Mine is that last summer I went to stay in a hotel by the Valley of the Temples, just outside Agrigento in Sicily. In the middle distance was the perfect silhouette of the ancient Tempio della Concordia, at dinner time beautifully lit. The meal was fussy and overpriced, but one gets used to that in my profession. Behind the table was an eager young man at a Steinway, trying to play Scott Joplin’s rags. These are difficult to bring off at the best of times (which was when Joplin played them himself). Timing is of the essence, which in this case was only a fraction of the problem. Much worse was that he had misheard or mislaid the original harmonies. So I sat there, trapped, chewing, fighting every note I heard. Unlike piped music, it was an intrusion that stopped and started, was human and was applauded. It was there because before loudspeakers and recordings existed, the same nervousness with silence had afflicted those responsible for public spaces.