Explore how Erik Satie’s avant-garde ideas—sounds designed to be ignored and dominated—paved the way for beloved forms of background music
While most musical compositions of his time resounded in grand concert halls, Erik Satie, a French composer known for his minimalist piano pieces, devised something that merely peeks out from behind the curtains—music that doesn’t impose itself but instead serves humbly as a perfect backdrop to life’s everyday clamor, as explained in a video essay by Inside the Score. Some music, notes Dayten Rose in his article on Dirt, only seeks to skirt people’s attention. “Music, but no songs. A shape, but no edges,” he writes. This concept, details Inside the Score, is not a particularly modern invention.
Long before this age of ambient Spotify playlists and lo-fi beats, Open Culture says, Satie already understood humanity’s need to hear music that did not demand full attention—sounds that simply drift with the gentle pulse of everyday life. According to Rose, Satie imagined composing “music that would be a part of the surrounding noise,” which would “soften the noise of knives and forks without dominating them” and “neutralize those street sounds which impinge on us indiscreetly.” This, Rose notes, is what they called musique d’ameublement, or “furniture music.”
“A chair, for example, is not usually something you would pay a great deal of attention to,” says Inside the Score. This concept, the video essay details, gave birth to furniture pieces Satie was known for—such as Tenture de cabinet préfectoral, Carrelage phonique and Tapisserie en fer forgé—all designed to be unobtrusive.
Satie’s subtle revolution
“Before Satie, this was not done. When music played, people listened. No music had ever been composed for the purposes of not being listened to,” writes Rose. For most of history, he says, music has been nothing but an ephemeral moment—rare, fleeting and only appearing in descriptions of heaven—so every encounter with it was cherished.
But amid the rise of industrialization and all the vulgar noise that came with it, Open Culture says Satie thought of designing music that functions like water, electricity or furniture—ever-present, largely unnoticed and not regarded as an especially momentous occasion. According to Inside the Score, the composer’s furniture music accomplishes exactly that.
“Furniture music was the natural consequence of a loudening world,” Rose writes. This approach, he shares, gave birth to pieces so repetitive, monotonous and exceptional only because they were designed to be unexceptional on purpose. “Yet they were a vision of utopia,” he stresses. There was even a story, he notes, that during the first time Satie performed his furniture music, he instructed the audience to chat, mingle, stretch their legs or do anything other than sit and listen.
“If it’s doing its job well, it’s likely to blend well into the environment, allowing for other things to absorb the user’s attention,” states Inside the Score. According to the video, furniture music functions correctly by simply brushing against people’s awareness, dominated by other tasks. It is not meant to be meaningful on its own—its purpose is contingent on another activity. “Furniture music creates vibrations; it has no other aims. It fulfills the same role as light, heat and comfort in all its forms,” Inside the Score explains.
When music critics like Theodor Adorno valued thematic development in Western art music, Satie, according to the video essay, served unvaried repetitions of short musical compositions. Inside the Score says Satie’s sounds did not comply with the musical conventions of his time, rendering his pieces meaningless in their aesthetic—and that was precisely the point. “Just as thematically rich and complex art music only makes full sense when you listen to it attentively, furniture music only makes sense when it is listened to as background music,” Inside the Score explains.
According to the video, Satie envisioned a type of music that “should be part of the ambience, which would take account of it.” This music, says Inside the Score, would both soothe the clatter of everyday life and embellish the silence that sometimes hangs heavy between people. This philosophy, shares Open Culture, would later on influence generations of composers and musicians—from John Cage’s musical innovations, Brian Eno’s development of ambient music to the banal soundtracks of Muzak often heard in shopping malls and elevators.
The soundtrack of functional spaces
According to James Picken’s article on Startle, the concept of “music while you work” began to emerge in the late 19th century, when factories learned to maintain productivity and morale among workers by playing upbeat tunes. “This practice laid the foundation for Muzak, a brand that would become synonymous with background music in the 20th century,” he writes.
The Industrial Revolution, Picken says, significantly changed how music was treated in public spaces. And Muzak Corporation, founded in the 1930s by George Owen Squier, pioneered the concept of music specifically made to be played in the background of spaces like elevators, offices and shops. Funding Universe states Muzak enjoyed a ubiquity that left an indelible mark on American society. “However it happened, Muzak became the word and the law and the air,” Rose writes.
According to the Passport to Dreams website, Squier and his idea of transmitting background music to homes, offices, factories and ballrooms across the country were in for a serious competition: the radio that gave life a distinct rhythm during that time. But roughly a decade after Squier’s death, says the website, Muzak experienced full ascendancy. “The constant hum of nonintrusive music has become a welcome addition to a world plagued by depressions and worldwide wars,” the website states.
Muzak differentiated itself from its competitors by refusing to play bootlegged light classical music—the company thoroughly designed and recorded its own pleasant and unobtrusive sounds in house, says the website. Moreover, propelled by studies that explore music’s influence on behavior, the corporation introduced the concept of stimulus progression—
a specific method of programming playlists. “Muzak claimed that workers were happier and more efficient while background music was playing, and that said music was more effective when played in 15-minute chunks, then silenced for another 15,” the website explains.
Muzak’s influence spread rapidly, says Picken, and by the mid-20th century, its carefully curated instrumental tracks have already become a staple in countless public and private spaces, their intentionally nonintrusive tunes subtly guiding people through everyday routines. According to Rose, the corporation did not regard itself as a maker of music. Instead, music was its raw material, and its service “the sequential arrangement to gain certain effects and to serve a functional purpose,” he explains.
“Companies paid Muzak to cultivate particular environments within their stores,” Rose writes. In addition, Picken shares merchants learned that carefully chosen background music influences customer behavior, driving the movement of products and encouraging people to stay longer. This, he notes, was where music became functional.
Muzak strived to trudge along until the late 20th century, but as cultural tastes shifted and technology evolved, its omnipresence gradually declined, says the Passport to Dreams website. “For the size of its empire, Muzak [now] feels a little bit like lost media,” Rose writes.
Music, but no songs. A shape, but no edges.
Beyond Satie and Muzak
“Today, we are all music curators,” states the Passport to Dreams website. As simply making it through the week grows increasingly difficult, any opportunity for a relaxing, stress-free escape is appreciated, it says. “The growing interest in wellness and mindfulness has led to the creation of background music designed to reduce stress, enhance focus or promote relaxation,” Picken writes. This, he continues, indicates that background music will continue to play a vital role in people’s lives—it’s like Satie’s avant-garde ideas and Muzak’s stimulus progression are still stretching through time to keep steering the world forward.
Around the time Muzak began to decline, English musician Brian Eno, shares Rose, sat in an airport and “thought of the disharmony between chipper Muzak and the death wish of flying in an airplane.” Eno, like Satie, envisioned highlighting audio production as an art form, separate from the vocals and instruments that usually sit on top of it, explains Rose. “But in the opposite direction,” he added. “Satie saw a lack of music, and imagined filling it. Eno saw a glut of music, and imagined paring it down. Both dreamed of improving silence.”
Eno, stresses Rose, wanted music to be a place—an environment—rather than an event. “In that way, his art aligned with that of Muzak: using music to differentiate between ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’” Rose writes. The result, he continues, is Eno’s Ambient Music 1: Music for Airports. Inside the Score says his music “fuses the artistic ideals of romanticism with the functional uses of Muzak and Satie’s furniture music.”•