The State of Furniture Music
Posted by ben on 15 Apr 2008 at 10:51 pm | Tagged as: design, music
“Nevertheless, we must bring about a music which is like furniture — a music, that is, which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing itself. It would fill up those heavy silences that sometimes fall between friends dining together. It would spare them the trouble of paying attention to their own banal remarks. And at the same time it would neutralize the street noises which so indiscreetly enter into the play of conversation. To make such music would be to respond to a need.” — Erik Satie, prophesying Muzak.
Isn’t it interesting that architects have not taken up music as a part of their discipline? We have all this music now which is piped in but bears no particular relationship to the space which it inhabits. I suppose the only architectural sound works I’ve experienced are the pieces Max Neuhaus created for Dia:Beacon and Times Square. He’s on the verge of installing another permanent sound installation at the Menil in Houston on May 3, which will be only the third permanent sound work of his in the United States.
Neuhaus doesn’t conceive these works in the way that Erik Satie talked about ‘furniture music’ — he speaks instead of using the sound to “transform the space into a place” — and I think this notion is more socially sensitive than Satie’s conception. Satie’s idea is probably closer to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, which, although it was created for a specific airport, was never “installed” in that space, and now exists as just another ambient recording.
Update: Just to clarify, what I’m talking about here is not the quality of Satie’s compositions, but his conception of ‘furniture music.’ Knowing that Max Neuhaus was a follower of John Cage’s, and that Cage studied Satie’s work very closely, I take Neuhaus’ work as a refinement of the idea of ‘furniture music.’ I’m not sure that he would see it this way, but this seems to be very a plausible thread. Since Neuhaus has had the opportunity to fully put this concept into practice in diverse environments, the idea naturally evolved from Satie’s original notion. What Neuhaus is doing seems to be less of a social intervention than what Satie talks about in the quote above — it changes your awareness of space, but doesn’t spare you the trouble of paying attention to banal remarks. The notion that Music for Airports is closer than Neuhaus’ installations to Satie’s concept of ‘furniture music’ may not be as defensible.
The Further Bus brought the outside in (and in out)…
tapers:)
There is a lot to be said for that. Thin skin of our buildings – insulative as it may be – is a barrier and often not parallel with the design intent. But – brining in the outside via artificial means is awkward and often contradicts other intents.
Architecture is often a physical manifestation of programmatic compromise. With minimal and strict cannons compromise may be avoided and program approaches its objective truth. With freer pluralist programs which incorporate the diverse matrix of complexities – compromise is at its essence and is left to one’s subjective nature though often justified objectively via weak crutches. Wish I could get into Gate’s house!
The scales of magnitude of decibels makes it difficult. Micro-sounds of a cockroach crawling across the floor are brick-walled by the sirens passing by. A layering of pre-amps and mics would have to be established and integrated with software in order to denature, attenuate and resolve this problem. But there is a lot of fun to be had here:)
On the Creation of Monuments Archaeological work of the last ten to twenty years has increasingly turned to a consideration of the wider setting of contexts in which ‘sites’ occur, so that even quite basic excavation reports may feature rather extensive considerations of the topographical setting of the excavation. Others, such as Chris Tilley, in A Phenomenology of Landscape or Sally Exon and colleagues for the Stonehenge landscape (Exon et al. . 2000) have concentrated on the physicality of the subject area almost above everything else.
welcome to the world of sampling. Good or bad? A little of both i guess. Not much original music being composed these days in any genre. Like everything though, that will eventually change.
There’s a love triangle of music and architecture between Le Corbusier, Xenakis, and Varése. Xenakis was both architect and composer in his lifetime.
Eno’s airport muzak maybe didn’t get installed in one, but at Detroit Metro there is a tunnel with a (Fitzgibbons-esque) light show and a shifting musical score.
Your blog entry, here, makes me wonder if there are superstar acoustic engineers or sound environment designers who have done even more work in this area. These are folks who wouldn’t be in the art magazines. I suppose the closest most architects come to that kind of specific one-to-one relationship, matching new designs to new tunes, would be in the design of a concert hall, or that occasional public attraction or museum where the sound is intended to be a part of the “experience.” Like the tunnel at Detroit Metro.
Muzak, by the way, seems to be where the conversation about Satie’s furniture music usually ends up going.
OM