Background Music of the Avant-Garde

Just as neoliberalism sought to make social discipline palatable by couching it in the context of freely chosen forms of self-care, ambient music sought to personalize the explicitly instrumental emotions of earlier background music in order to position mood regulation not as an imposition from the outside but as a freely chosen technique of the self. Ironically, in seeking out atmospheres more amenable to personal use, the emerging ambient style would draw heavily from an artistic lineage positioning itself against the earlier forms of communal mood regulation: the environmental avant-garde of the 1960s. Ambient music emerges out of this strange dialectic between Muzak and modernism: a sort of background music of the avant-garde.

In order to get a phenomenological sense of the utilitarian background music against which the avant-garde railed so strongly, I spent a few days immersed in more traditional BGM while staying at a hotel on the southeastern coast of Chiba prefecture, a few hours’ bus ride east of Tokyo.1 The hotel featured perpetual soft piano music piped through speakers in the lobby, the attached café, the hallways, and every guest room. The same piano soundtrack would be playing as I returned to my room each day, wafting down from a gray speaker placed near the center of the vaulted ceiling above the bed. A small knob next to the light switch near the door controlled the volume: from low to very low to inaudible. The music continued automatically until nine in the evening, at which point the piano would fade into silence for the night, only to start back up the following morning.

I left the music playing during my stay, curious if I could experience the sort of productivity enhancement and stress relief touted by so much of the background music promotional literature. The tone of the music was sentimental without ever building to any kind of catharsis, pleasant without allowing for any shade of ambiguity or emotional complexity. Harmonically, the piano never strayed far from consonance, moving through a series of mostly major chords in continuously resolving progressions. Occasionally, the melodic line hinted at something more expressive: a jazz improvisation, a distantly familiar tune, a slight deviation from the steady midrange pulse. But these hints never materialized into anything more substantial. While occasionally gesturing at further development, the music would always quickly fall back into the realm of the ignorable, retreating to a series of predictably consonant notes.

As I sat and listened for these flickers of expression, I felt a slowly rising frustration. Far from relaxed, I found myself becoming more irritated by the piano with each passing hour. The purposefully limited tonal, dynamic, and emotional range of the music pulled me toward feelings of emotional claustrophobia. I felt my range of possible responses narrowing to a thin selection of noncommittal pleasantries. The lack of musical ambiguity and complexity left no room to enter the music and move around in it. The more I tried to find a place for myself to emerge within these sounds, the more frustrated I became. The music allowed no gap between audience and sonic mood that might allow a relationship to develop between the two. I was being pushed into an emotional dynamic I was not ready to reciprocate, leading to discomfort and emotional alienation. I was at the hotel by myself but felt haunted by the unsettling sensation the feelings occupying the room were not my own.

Looking back, I was trying to be a good neoliberal subject, responsible for and in control of my own emotions independent of environmental influence. Yet the music would not let me, interrupting my ability to make my own choices about how I was going to feel. I came to the hotel hoping to find a quiet space to write alone and undisturbed. But really, I was alone only if the single kind of being-with that counted was being with other humans. At the hotel I was together with the music, or rather, the music wouldn’t leave me alone. I was becoming the type of subject the music allowed me to be, but in this case, it didn’t match my own desire for self-determination, my preference for a music leaving me to determine how I wanted to feel yet serving as a willing tool to help me get there. But this more pushy, more explicit form of atmospheric mood regulation wasn’t frustrating me just because it wasn’t respecting my demands for self-determination. What made it particularly annoying—and what I think has long made this kind of music an affront to anyone with aspirations to self-determination—was it forced me to confront the fact I was never really as independent as I wanted to believe. All music was going to help determine me in one way or another. The difference between traditional BGM and the ambient music I might voluntarily listen to was the ambient music helped sustain my illusions, letting me carry on believing I was ultimately the one in control.

Fueled by a similar antipathy to being told how to feel, critical responses to background music have for a long time focused on resisting emotional manipulation, promoting instead a supposedly more neutral set of emotional cues. From this perspective, a less mediated reality is out there for the sensing, but BGM undermines this objectivity with its inauthentic and calculated moods. BGM critics from the 1930s to the 1960s regularly portrayed urban space as a battleground between the inauthentic mood regulation of corporate and governmental interests and the independent, objective sensory needs of the autonomous modern subject. This distrust of mood regulation is understandable considering the history of corporate and governmental mood music. When Japanese artists and composers turned to the “environmental arts” (kankyō geijutsu) in the 1960s, they began to acknowledge the impact of atmospheric design on human behavior but remained suspicious of attempts to use it to manipulate human emotion. But while they were caught up in the question of how to replace moods governed by corporate and government interests with the more emotionally ambiguous atmospheres of the avant-garde, their experiments in fact opened up a path for the ambivalent calm of ambient styles. In what follows I trace this strange historical crossfade, from utilitarian BGM to ambient subjectivation, by way of the environmental avant-garde and one long-dead French composer of “furnishing music” by the name of Erik Satie.

The Birth of Modern BGM

For the most part, the early history of environmental media is a history built on attempts to regulate the behavior of others. The workplace was the first site where background music was put to practical use. Music to accompany and ease the burden of work has probably been around as long as music itself. But starting in the late nineteenth century, work music began to move to increasingly rationalized, utilitarian, and prerecorded rhythms. The earliest documented uses of background music in a business setting were in the United States, where a Chicago automobile plant was experimenting with it as early as 1886. The practice spread as the American push for worksite productivity enhancement grew to a frenzy around the turn of the century, under the influence of Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” theories and the larger flourishing of efficiency studies and managerial psychology.2

Japanese manufacturers were inspired to try similar experiments in the following decades. In 1932 the Imperial Silk factory in Yamanashi prefecture began spinning records to increase efficiency. Another factory serenade accompanied the mostly teenage girls working to package candies at the Glico bagging facility in Osaka. Factory managers studied the girls and found playing popular music over the speaker system increased productivity by as much as 10 percent.3

On the retail side of the equation, in-store mood music began with live performances in high-end establishments before gradually shifting to more affordable and easily deployed recorded forms. Philadelphia’s John Wanamaker Store, one of the first department stores in the United States, introduced an organ player in 1876 to provide “store music” and hired a group of singers performing as a “store chorus.” Japan’s first department store, Mitsukoshi, began a similar practice in 1907 at their Nihonbashi, Tokyo, location, hiring a youth ensemble to perform in the style of a Scottish band. In 1930 the store installed a pipe organ as well to serenade shoppers.4 While itinerant vendors had long called out to advertise their wares and traveling bands of chindon’ya musicians could be hired to play in front of a shop to lure customers from late in the nineteenth century, this was the first time music was deployed in Japan to set the background mood for indoor retail.

These proved to be rather isolated experiments, however, and up through the 1950s most workplaces and retail establishments in Japan remained BGM-free. The silence was particularly conspicuous during the Pacific War. The wartime government outlawed music not oriented toward the national cause, and skeptics insisted much of the acceptably patriotic Japanese song repertoire was too languid to contribute much toward increased productivity anyhow. This was in stark contrast with the enthusiastic embrace of workplace music for wartime manufacturing in the United States, where it played to workers at thousands of factories and weapons manufacturers.

Meanwhile, outside the context of workplace productivity, radio stations across Japan were commanded by the government to play patriotic music at set hours of the day. Japan’s first national attempt at musical mood regulation thus emerged in the service of war—though it is not clear how many people actually tuned in.

Pioneering science fiction author Unno Jūza’s 1937 short story “The Music Bath at 1800 Hours” (Jūhachi jikan no ongaku yoku) is an early, incisive satire of the use of music as social mood control and a direct critique of the patriotic music the Japanese government was forcing radio stations to play. The story describes a future society on a fictional planet where all citizens are forced to take a “music bath” every day at six in the evening. The music is scientifically engineered to make citizens both hyperproductive and absolute believers in government propaganda. Everything is running along smoothly until a threat from a neighboring race emerges, a military coup takes place, and the new ruler decides to play the music twenty-four hours a day in the hopes of creating an even more productive citizenry. At this sustained intensity, however, the music bath proves toxic to the human body, melting everyone’s brain and leaving the planet wide open to invasion.

“The Music Bath” points precisely to emotional manipulation through background music as the moment where science loses its conscience and slips toward fascism. For Unno, as for the later environmental artists of the 1960s, science is wonderful when it stays dry and objective but becomes dangerous the moment it begins to manipulate human feeling.5

Muzak in Japan

Background music fully emerged in Japan in commercial contexts in the aftermath of the war, spurred on by the American occupation (1945–52). George Thomas Forester, an American who first came to Tokyo with the American forces, teamed up with the British company Readytune in 1957 to form the first company in Japan specializing in background music, the Japan Music Distribution Corporation (Nihon ongaku haikyū kabushiki gaisha). Other companies soon followed: Tōyō Music Broadcasting (Tōyō ongaku hōsō), an affiliate of the American company Altphonic; the Tokyo Radio Service, another affiliate of Readytune based on a public-broadcasting model; and Asahi Broadcasting (Asahi hōsō), affiliated with the American company National Musitime. Around 1963 these providers consolidated into the Key Corporation, which emerged as Japan’s primary provider of “sound conditioning” to consumer environments like banks, restaurants, and shopping arcades (shōtengai).6

In 1964 the most famous elevator music of all arrived in Japan. Mainichi Broadcasting (Mainichi hōsō), with the cooperation of Nichimen Jitsugyō, signed a contract with the American Muzak Corporation to form the exclusive Japanese Muzak affiliate, the Mainichi Music System (Mainichi myūjikku shisutemu, now the Mainichi eizō onkyō shisutemu). Muzak was at the height of its commercial and cultural influence in the United States, having been piped into the White House by Dwight D. Eisenhower and included to accompany astronauts on NASA space missions.7

Mainichi’s Nagamatsu Akira introduced the term “environmental music” (kankyō ongaku) as the preferred Japanese translation of Muzak, probably to distinguish it from the more common abbreviation for background music, BGM.8 The company published a book of the same name in 1966, explaining the history of Muzak and laying out the research demonstrating its efficacy. The text is stuffed full of graphs and charts documenting the benefits of Muzak’s patented mood regulation systems and proclaiming their greater rationality over ordinary background music.9 As the Muzak corporate literature put it at the time, “music is art, but Muzak is science.”

Despite its infamy as a ubiquitous purveyor of “elevator music,” however, Muzak’s global market share began to shrink rapidly in subsequent decades, amid changing musical tastes and an increased preference for original artists over “canned” backgrounds. In 1984, after being purchased by Seattle’s Yesco, Muzak shifted their focus from productivity enhancement to corporate branding, with background music selections now sourced directly from existing artists in their original “foreground” arrangements.

In the switch from productivity to atmospheric branding, Muzak was catching up with global developments in environmental design spurred on by Philip Kotler’s landmark 1973 paper “Atmospherics as a Marketing Tool.” Here, Kotler introduced the term “atmospherics” to describe “the effort to design buying environments to produce specific emotional effects that enhance purchase probability.”10 Numerous studies soon followed investigating the impact of different varieties of in-store music on sales. This evolved into a push for “sensory branding,” the creation of synesthetic atmospheres providing specialized moods for target demographics, with the aim of indirectly making customers more likely to make a purchase.

Muzak vice president and creative director Alvin Collis describes the approach as one of staging emotion as a marketable good:

I walked into a store and understood: this is just like a movie. The company has built a set, and they’ve hired actors and given them costumes and taught them their lines, and every day they open their doors and say, “Let’s put on a show.” It was retail theatre. And I realized then that Muzak’s business wasn’t really about selling music. It was about selling emotion—about finding the soundtrack that would make this store or that restaurant feel like something, rather than being just an intellectual proposition.11

Muzak’s new role was to mix playlists to capture as precisely as possible a store’s target audience, working toward a “personal audio imaging profile.”

At the time of Muzak’s rebranding, however, just one regional affiliate petitioned Muzak not to completely abandon stimulus progression: Japan’s Mainichi. Among all the new foreground styles on offer, Muzak still maintains at least one program of traditional Muzak in order to keep Japanese programmers happy. In interviews Muzak executives in the United States appear rather baffled at their Japanese client’s continued preference for the “stimulus progression” style of Muzak. One former Muzak executive in the United States was quoted as recently as 2006 as remarking (with thinly veiled condescension) “the Japanese think they love it, but they actually don’t. They’ll get over it soon.”12 And yet even in 2010, Mainichi presented their services primarily in terms of background stimulus, using the same graphs and charts from decades before. Japan is currently one of the few places where “elevator music” of the older style is still regularly encountered, albeit most often in older establishments clearly behind the times in more ways than one.13 Even at Mainichi, stimulus progression is now only one option alongside others like “stylish,” “classical,” “jazz,” “healing/relax,” “Modern Japanese,” “lounge,” and the new BGM standard bearer, “bossa nova.” This more flexible list of channels (which, with satellite technology, expands into the hundreds) provides a much wider palette of possible in-store moods, each with their own set of atmospheric affordances.

These more individually tailored backgrounds appear in a sequel to Environmental Music published in 1992, featuring new contributions from Japanese sound researchers from across the country. In the book’s introduction, psychologist Osaka Ryōji notes how background music has gone from being a rather obscure idea in Japan when the book was first published in 1966 to something almost entirely taken for granted in the 1990s.

The book provides a long list of the various objectives driving the deployment of background music over the intervening decades. Part of the list includes older productivity-oriented goals, such as “reducing the amount of time spent resting one’s hands,” “reducing the amount of idle chatter,” and “controlling the monotonous feeling of work.” There are also some nods to the newer sensory branding emphasis on using in-store music as a way to “improve company image” by associating it with a desired musical demographic. But above all, the emphasis is on mood regulation for calm and comfort at a somatic level: “reducing feelings of tension and strain,” “eliminating emotional variability and anxiety,” and “contributing to the construction of comfortable spaces.”14 Japanese environmental designers eagerly embraced this ever-expanding list of atmospheric objectives starting in the 1970s, and by the 1980s the country was at the forefront of sensory branding.

Environmental Music

Let’s jump back now to when BGM was first spreading through Japan in the 1950s and 1960s. Many artists and social critics were growing uncomfortable with this use of aesthetic conditioning to regulate public space and began seeking out other aesthetic approaches to the shared environment. A wide range of Japanese artists began developing alternative environmental aesthetics in the 1960s and 1970s, including a range of experiments in what, despite Mainichi’s claim to the term, also came to be called “environmental music” (kankyō ongaku). Part of a larger movement toward “environmental art” (kankyō geijutsu), the avant-garde environmental music of the period sought to critically respond to the larger transformation and rationalization of the urban Japanese soundscape.

The most well-known of the environmental art groups to emerge in Japan was the short-lived Environment Society (Enbairamento no kai), based in Tokyo. The Environment Society consisted of a group of thirty-eight artists in a wide variety of disciplines, including music, painting, sculpture, design, photography, and criticism. The group is best known for From Space to Environment (Kūkan kara kankyō e), a 1966 exhibition at the Matsuya Department Store Galley with an accompanying performance event at the Sōgetsu Art Center, both in Tokyo.

As expressed in a statement presented for the show, the Environment Society sought to create “works that are not autonomous and complete by themselves but . . . become open to the external world by involving viewers in their environment.”15 In this the group was closely aligned with the happenings and performance art presented by people like Allan Kaprow and John Cage in New York—a scene with which at least two society members, Akiyama Kuniharu and Ay-O, had been involved immediately before returning to Tokyo to start the group. The Environment Society drew on the widely discussed ideas of Marshall McLuhan, who wrote of the “new environmental communication of the electronic age,” and on the “correalism” of Romanian theater designer and architect Frederick John Kiesler.16 More fundamental than these distant influences, however, was the Environment Society’s desire to directly respond to large-scale transformations in the city they called home. Tokyo had been radically transformed in the lead up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, with massive raised highways built across the city and large tracts of land cleared and rebuilt. On a more intimate scale, environmental conditioning of all kinds had emerged as a powerful rationalizing force on urban Japanese life, providing calculated comforts that, from the perspective of Environment Society artists, threatened to have a numbing influence on everyday life. If Mainichi’s background music promised an environment conducive to productivity, marketability, and comfort, the Environment Society pushed back with environments built around the classic avant-garde principles of play, experimentation, and the creative potential of discomfort.

In her study of the From Space to Environment exhibition, Midori Yoshimoto provides two brief examples of what this meant in practice. Music critic and composer Akiyama Kuniharu’s work for the exhibition, Environmental Mechanical Orchestra No. 1, uses sounds picked up from transistors aimed at the surface of a basin of water presented in the gallery space, as well as microphones picking up the voices and footsteps of exhibition visitors. The work literally takes the mundane sounds of the given “space” and mediates them into an immersive but unpredictable sound “environment,” which subsequently generates its own responsive actions from gallery visitors. Another piece envisioning a more volatile environment was a performance by Fukuda Shigeo, Awazu Kiyoshi, Tōno Yoshiaki, Ay-O, and Ichiyanagi Toshi, based on a composition by Ichiyanagi simply entitled Environmental Music (Kankyō ongaku). Moving beyond the strictly auditory, the score instructs performers to “incline your body on a chair as slowly as possible to an unbearable position.”17

For the Environment Society, the creation of more open and unstable environments like these served as a means of defending against the increasingly rationalized and predictable spaces emerging all around them. From a broader perspective, however, these artists were themselves generating new approaches to urban environmental design. Like the creators of Muzak, the Environment Society introduced mediated atmospheres into a communal space and allowed audiences to physically attune to these environmental affordances. While the types of behavior the two groups hoped to cultivate in their audiences were ideologically opposed, the aesthetic “stages” created by both Mainichi and the Environment Society came together on a more basic premise: the use of environmental media to shift audiences’ engagement with the everyday spaces of urban Japanese life.

Where the two groups differed was not simply the degree of environmental volatility desired but also their attitudes toward the role of emotion. Commercial background music early on embraced mood as a core component of environmental mediation, recognizing how powerfully feeling inflects human behavior. In contrast, the Environment Society, like Unno before them, remained suspicious of emotional manipulation, downplaying its role by assuming a posture of detached, quasi-scientific objectivity in their work.

This resistance to emotional control was an attitude common to avant-garde expression in postwar Japan, based on a view of emotion as an irrational force easily susceptible to ideological manipulation. We might suppose the recent experience of highly emotional propaganda during the Pacific War made this danger a salient one for Japanese artists in the 1960s, and this shaped the environmental artists’ attitudes to background music and other forms of environmental design. But this resistance to feeling would soon be eclipsed in the following decade.

Expo ’70

While the environmental artists were busy pushing people out of their chairs, comfort (kaitekisa) was steadily securing its place as a central affective priority of postindustrial Japanese society.18 This emerged as part of a larger transnational move toward “amenity culture,” a major focus of key 1970s environmental design texts like Jay Appleton’s The Experience of Landscape (1975).

For environmental designers, factoring out individual particularities and focusing as much as possible on preconscious, predictable somatic responses allowed for the creation of environments able to appeal to as wide and diverse a population as possible. This prioritization of somatic comfort over semantic meaning marked an important shift in postindustrial design, toward an increasing reliance on aesthetics aiming to trigger affective responses before they could begin to be colored by personal reflection and memory. Unlike earlier approaches to landscape, which focused more on what a place represented to a particular group or culture, the newly rationalized environments of postindustrial Japan began to focus instead on providing impersonal amenities to a rapidly diversifying consumer population.19

The gap between the 1960s avant-garde environmental volatility and the emerging orientation toward engineered comfort came out in vivid relief on the grounds of the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka. While the expo was commercially successful, drawing over 83 million visitors in the 183 days it was open, its emphasis on high-tech corporate-sponsored pavilions symbolized for many artists in Japan the death of the avant-garde and the advent of a new era of consumerism. In this context the participants in Expo ’70, including many of the members of the Environment Society, were on the side of the coming corporate takeover. Protests in print and in person greeted the opening of the expo and have done much to shape the subsequent narrative of the event’s larger cultural impact.20 But there was also an aesthetic and ideological rift within rather than around the Expo ’70 grounds. This rift was between the more challenging musical environments presented by many of the participating Japanese artists and the more harmonious, comfortable environments sought out by many expo visitors.

The tension between these two orientations is evident in the contrasting coverage of Expo ’70 in two large tomes dedicated to the history of electronic music in Japan, Kawasaki Kōji’s Japanese Electronic Music (Nihon no denshi ongaku) and Tanaka Yūji’s Electronic Music in Japan (Denshi ongaku in Japan). While the former approaches the topic from the perspective of the electronic avant-garde, emphasizing the Expo ’70 works as a culmination of many of the musical experiments of earlier decades,21 the latter opens by presenting the expo as the last gasp of an overly theoretical and out-of-touch art music, one about to give way to the more popular electronic music of the coming decades. The latter book blames this on the abstract dissonance favored by many of the Expo ’70 works—including those curated by ex–Environment Society members like Akiyama. Tanaka writes:

With the boom in science fiction following the television broadcast of Astro Boy in 1963, along with the reverberations of the success of the Apollo moon landing, there ought to have been a lot of interest in the electronic music flowing out of the various Expo pavilions. It should have given new expression to these dreams of the future.

However, most of the electronic music played at the corporate pavilions was the kind sounding like piiiii, garigarigari, or puuuuuun . . . difficult to understand modern music with no melody. If you listen to the few recordings still available from the pavilions . . . you soon understand why this music left the average visitor with no fond memories (as opposed to, for example, the moon rock on view at the American Pavilion).

NHK’s Satō Shigeru recounts an episode where one female attendant at the Japan Pavilion complained of suddenly having irregular menstrual cycles. According to the doctor called to examine her, the reason was likely the dissonant electronic music playing nonstop as BGM within the pavilion. Of course, the staff were quite disturbed by these unprecedented “incidents.”

The German Pavilion, featuring a live performance of electronic music by Karlheinz Stockhausen, apparently had many visitors there simply to enjoy the air conditioning and escape from the disappointing chaos of the other pavilions. One heard stories of old couples, tired from walking around and finally sitting down to take a rest, who nonetheless had to quickly flee once the garigarigari bakyuuun of Stockhausen’s music began.22

Tanaka reads the unpopularity of the expo’s electronic music as evidence of a disconnect between the participants’ modernist notions of “environmental music” and the type of sounds the Expo ’70 audience might appreciate in their environment. There were, undoubtedly, visitors who enjoyed the music itself. But for audiences looking for a comfortable environment in which to spend some time, however, all the garigarigari in the world was no match for a quiet space with good air conditioning.

These scenes from Expo ’70 underline the tension between the atmospheric priorities of the emerging amenity culture—comfort, calm, refreshment, relaxation—and the more unwieldy alternatives offered by the avant-garde and its emphasis on complexity, surprise, and contingency. Among those pieces from the expo still available to audition, the most compelling works capture this tension between comforting and discomforting design in their own internal structure. For example, Ichiyanagi Toshi’s Music for Living Space (Seikatsu kūkan no tame no ongaku) starts with a background layer of flowing Gregorian chant, a soft modal music with mood to spare. On top of this calm foundation, however, Ichiyanagi presents a metallic electronic voice reciting a text by metabolist architect Kurokawa Kishō on the future design of everyday life. The harsh, angular voice was synthesized entirely by computer (a familiar sound now but a difficult technological feat in 1970). The work was installed in the “Future” section inside the upper part of Okamoto Tarō’s massive Tower of the Sun sculpture, the seventy-meter-tall visual centerpiece of the Expo ’70 grounds. Listening to it now, the contrast between the monks’ flowing chant and the harsh, inhuman voice in Ichiyanagi’s piece seems to sound out the tension between the hard-edged resistance of the avant-garde and the comfortably designed “living spaces” rapidly spreading across urban Japan.23

Against Designer Music

A key figure in curating the expo’s environmental music, Akiyama Kuniharu (1929–96), was also the central critic of Japanese avant-garde music during this period. He was one of the founding members of the influential Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop) in 1951 and in the early sixties participated in the Fluxus movement in New York before returning to Tokyo middecade to help start the Environment Society. Akiyama repeatedly published essays in the 1950s and 1960s warning against the dangers of emotional manipulation in commercial background music, which for him represented a threat to both art and culture.

Akiyama makes his most elaborate anti-BGM argument in a 1966 essay published in Dezain hihyō (Design criticism) entitled “Dezain suru ongaku” (Music that designs).24 He begins by emphasizing his general disdain for design as a field of activity and the way it has—in recent decades at least—functioned mainly as a tool of commercialism. For Akiyama design, in its obsession with functionality, has become powerless as a form of artistic expression. Yet he admits design, along with the rise of consumer electronics, has became the main venue where the aesthetics of ordinary experience are forged. Music was earliest among all the existing art fields to become absorbed into a design context, as background music rapidly expanded to fill the spaces of everyday life.

Akiyama notes he has been warning against this “music for design” since the mid-1950s and sees it as a major threat to the integrity of music as an art form. Not only does BGM reduce music to serving as a tool of commerce, but musically it tends toward pale imitations of earlier musical genres. BGM arbitrarily loots music of the past, creating a shoddy mixture of classical and popular (foreign) music styles. Tapping into a fear of miscegenation, Akiyama argues background music, unlike “pure” music, flattens all genres into a “mixed-blood” amalgam of stitched-together musical cues. He frets many composers in Japan are already moonlighting as producers of commercial BGM and warns this can be a slippery slope into mediocrity. Without realizing it, a composer’s entire musical output becomes contaminated by these side jobs selling their music as a functional backdrop for someone else’s product line.

Up to this point in the essay, Akiyama’s argument reads as a reactionary plea against the mixing of music and design, of the contamination of “pure” expression with practical utility. After rehearsing this familiar art-versus-design complaint, however, the essay swerves to propose something else: a more purely scientific BGM.

First, Akiyama acknowledges the absurdity of his earlier idea of artistic or musical “purity,” noting music composed for background use has a long and surprisingly distinguished lineage: Mozart made music for the dinner table, and Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1741) were written as a kind of insomnia medication for sleepless royalty.25 Second, he admits contemporary background music does in its own way reflect the same aspects of modernity with which so much twentieth-century art music has grappled: the disappearance of shared social investments and the increasing isolation and atomization of the person against ever more rationalized and anonymous urban environments.

Akiyama’s issue with BGM is not that it fails to respond to these contemporary social conditions but that its response is incomplete, still laced with vestiges of an earlier humanism based on romantic ideals of unmediated expression. The problem Akiyama has with background music is its focus on atmospheric mood creation (funiki mūdo zukuri), whereas, he proposes, a truly “contemporary” background music would not get lost in such sentimentality.26 He pursues this point by proposing a hypothetical compositional challenge: the design of BGM to accompany astronauts on their voyage to outer space (a remarkably prophetic proposal, given Muzak would in fact accompany the Apollo astronauts to the moon just three years later):

It goes without saying that thinking [of BGM as mood creation] leads to all kinds of random makeshift designs. For example, from this perspective, it would make sense for there to also be mood music installed inside a space shuttle. However, in such a narrow and solitary space, mood music would be a completely useless form of BGM for the astronaut. To the contrary, it might even be dangerous. . . .

Why is mood music inappropriate here? Because mood music is someone else’s music [tanin no ongaku]. In providing a virtual existence to accompany the astronaut, it at first seems like it might be of use. But in an isolated context like this where connections with other people have been thoroughly severed, mood music cannot provide anything like comfort. For it to be comforting, the astronaut would have to be an extreme optimist, or at least sentimental.

Mood music, from the first instant you hear it, already does not belong to you. And precisely because it is someone else’s music, there is no responsibility involved. Even as you acknowledge its existence, you also fail to hear it. It is a kind of irresponsible music within the crowd.27

Akiyama argues most BGM seeks only to shallowly represent the feelings of abstracted “other people.” It doesn’t engage with the listener’s personal psychology, so in an isolated environment like the space shuttle, it quickly begins to irritate. For Akiyama, background mood regulation makes sense only in the context of an anonymous crowd. It becomes a way to establish an impersonal relationship between isolated selves without demanding any personal responsibility for the collective situation. Listened to in isolation, as an inauthentic echo of the self, this same impersonality becomes unbearable.

After my frustrating experience alone with the sentimental piano at the Chiba hotel, I could understand what Akiyama means when he describes Muzak-style BGM as “other people’s music.” The narrow emotional range of Muzak is easier to tolerate in a public setting like a café or a shopping arcade. There, the simplified emotions of the music match the shallow emotional façades deployed when interacting or coexisting with strangers in the city. Muzak, to borrow Ngai’s apt phrasing, “runs on a feeling that no one actually feels.”28 The lightweight, narrow emotionality of the music diffuses the potential threat of being in close proximity to so many strangers. The music in these impersonal situations contours the relations between people, rather than serving as an expression of any single one of them. Often, it is not clear who is responsible for choosing the music, making it belong to no one but the space itself (and difficult to lodge a complaint against it).

When listening alone, however, there is nowhere to situate this emotional narrowing except the space of one’s own reflective identity, and there it can feel only narrow and constricting, an ill match for anyone seeking to understand the self as an independent subject in full control of its feelings.

As an alternative to this “irresponsible” music of the sentimental crowd, Akiyama proposes a space shuttle music directly seeking to counter the isolation and atomization of the astronaut. This demands a more unemotional, scientific approach, with frequencies tuned to the specific physical and mental needs of the astronaut. “More than ‘music,’ this would be a ‘sound’ prepared specially for the inside of the space shuttle, the manufactured sonic equivalent of space food.” Akiyama contrasts these hypothetical research-based sound compositions with the cold and spacey electronic music most often heard in TV commercials and science fiction dramas, concluding “we shouldn’t call it ‘design’ if it just appeals to a private pathos or mood.”29

Akiyama’s discomfort with emotion regulation emerges from within his semifacetious argument for a hyperrational space music. By proclaiming the need for an even more rationalist BGM completely devoid of sentimentality, Akiyama seeks, in part, to reassert a clear distinction between music for listening and music for design. His essay is indicative of a more general approach to the new media landscape among the environmental avant-garde, one seeking out emotionally “dry” forms of mediation capable of overcoming the manipulative sentimentality of the commercial mass media.

While insightfully diagnosing the incompatibility of BGM sentimentality with the lonely space crusader, Akiyama replaces it with an ambivalent proposal to do away with emotional considerations entirely. While for Akiyama and many of his circle this lack of sentimentality was key to the music of the future, for many would-be listeners—including visitors to Expo ’70 a few years later—the lack of attention to human feeling made the new music just as off-putting as the older forms of BGM, if not more so.

In this respect both traditional BGM and the environmental avant-garde were out of sync with the contemporary turn toward using music as a technology of the self. What the new listeners wanted, above all, was an environmental music reflecting their own feelings, desires, and physical needs while also acknowledging the isolation and atomization of the individual within the emerging consumer culture. They would find their personal soundtrack in neither BGM nor the Japanese avant-garde but in the work of long-dead French gymnopédiste Erik Satie (1866–1925).

The Quiet Boom of Erik Satie

In the 1970s and early 1980s, Satie’s work became central to the Japanese avant-garde’s ongoing fascination with environmental listening, impersonal repetition, and intermedia performance. But at the same time, his softer music played a pivotal role in establishing an audience for moods of comforting autonomy, priming listeners for the subsequent emergence of ambient music and other related genres including new age, “healing” music, and the more atmospheric side of the 1980s “world music” boom (featuring, among other things, a lot of Gregorian chant).30

Unlike the corporate creators of Muzak and other affiliated background music, Satie’s image as an idiosyncratic and solitary genius from Montmartre allowed him to serve as an ideal ancestor for later generations of ambient musicians attempting to envision a more artistic and independent heritage for atmospheric music. His musique d’ameublement (“furniture music,” or more literally, “furnishing music”), while a minor part of Satie’s total oeuvre, became a key reference point for ambient music when it emerged later in the 1970s.

Satie first introduced the furniture music concept in a 1917 collaborative concert with Darius Milhaud. The program states:

We are presenting today for the first time a creation of Messieurs Erik Satie and Darius Milhaud, directed by M. Delgrange, the “musique d’ameublement” which will be played during the intermissions. We urge you to take no notice of it and to behave during the intervals as if it did not exist. This music . . . claims to make a contribution to life in the same way as a private conversation, a painting in a gallery, or the chair in which you may or may not be seated.31

Satie later writes:

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 a noise would respond to a need.32

Satie’s emphasis on furnishing music as a way to “fill up those heavy silences” and “neutralize the street noises” strongly parallels the emotional and cognitive orientation of the commercial BGM to come. Crucially, however, his plea to treat music as if it were a chair “in which you may or may not be seated” is delivered in a playful and ironic tone. Presented by Satie, environmental music sounds like a lighthearted experiment with everyday life rather than a deadening pursuit of increased productivity and managed moods. Furniture music hints at environmental mood regulation, but only while ironically distancing itself from its own instrumentality. The idea of a music for playfully furnishing everyday life appealed not only to the postwar avant-garde but also to those pursuing the new self-mediated designer lifestyles on offer in 1970s Japan. By middecade Satie had emerged as an important icon for a new era of atmospheric mood regulation and self-care (Figure 2).

Like John Cage in the United States, Japan had its own tireless Satie champion in the form of none other than Akiyama Kuniharu. Akiyama first encountered Satie as a second-year student in middle school through reading Sakaguchi Ango’s translations of Jean Cocteau and, later, by finding his music at a used record shop in Kanda, Tokyo. This was before John Cage discovered Satie and began championing his work in the United States.33 At the time, the composer was largely unknown in Japan outside the new music community and a few literary salons.34 This all changed following the Japanese premier of Louie Malle’s 1963 film Will o’ the Wisp (Le feu follet, also known as The Fire Within). Malle’s film included much of what would come to be Satie’s most well-known compositions, including the Gymnopédies and the Gnossiennes. Not long after the film’s appearance, the same pieces started popping up in Japanese theater productions, films, and television commercials.35

This popularity grew over the next decade, and in September 1975 Akiyama began the Complete Works of Erik Satie concert series at Jean-Jean in Shibuya, Tokyo, timed to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Satie’s death. The concerts featured Akiyama’s wife, Takahashi Aki, and her brother, Takahashi Yūji, on piano, along with a wealth of other musicians, dancers, and artists; poetry readings; a lecture on Dada by critic Nakahara Yūsuke; and a screening of René Clair’s short experimental film Entr’acte (1924), with its Satie score and cameo appearance. The series was a smash hit and ran for over two years, at which point a full-scale Satie revival was well under way. The Yomiuri newspaper dubbed this swelling interest in Satie a “quiet boom.”36

The many Satie concerts following this initial outing are remarkable not only for their quantity but also for their multimedia character, as if the Japanese avant-garde’s earlier interest in “intermedia” environments was finding itself reflected in Satie’s turn-of-the-century works for theater, cinema, dance, music hall, offices, and living rooms.37

Reviews of the Satie events often note with some surprise how the enthusiastic audiences at these concerts were not the usual classical music crowds. In an Asahi newspaper review of one of the 1977 Satie concerts, composer Shibata Minao notes how Satie’s accessible avant-garde sensibility had drawn many new young listeners to attend a classical music concert for the first time.38

The more classically trained, academically researched, experimentally minded participants in these concerts greeted Satie’s newfound popularity among the general public with both excitement and consternation. There was a clear recognition early on the younger Japanese attending the concerts were not regular classical (or even avant-garde) music listeners and there was something different in their relationship to the music. In his comprehensive 1990 study of Satie’s work, Akiyama recalls the eager anticipation and packed crowds greeting each event (a memory I have often heard echoed in speaking with others who were in attendance). Recalling the first Complete Works concerts, he writes:

Each time there was a feverish response from the packed audience of young people. I think this was a period where we were starting to see, alongside an empathy with Satie’s music, a new transformation in the audience itself. At the time I really felt this was the birth of a newly active (rather than passive) audience, one eager to participate in the music they had chosen for themselves. This was still an age with no relation to what came to be called the “Satie boom.”39

Here, Akiyama reveals his hope the new audiences were more “active” and ready to pursue the music “they had chosen for themselves,” unlike an earlier classical music crowd—or, implicitly, “passive” listeners of standard BGM. At the same time, Akiyama, with his roots in both Fluxus and Jikken Kōbō, was often at pains to emphasize Satie’s more avant-garde side. As the “Satie boom” progressed, he became increasingly chagrined at how his favorite composer became known only for the relaxing melodies of early compositions like the Gymnopédies, Gnossiennes, and Nocturnes and not the absurdist provocation of a piece like Vexations or the ironically upbeat moods of the furnishing music works.40

At the same time, even early on Akiyama recognized Satie’s popular appeal had much to do with his music’s softness and its compatibility with contemporary lifestyles. Akiyama explores this idea in a 1977 article in the Yomiuri newspaper, where he ponders why Satie has become so popular among a younger generation of Japanese listeners. He proposes much of Satie’s music—which he describes as “naked music, white music, pure music, poetic music”—is now in “metaphysical alignment” with the “everyday gentleness” aspired to by a younger generation of Japanese listeners. In this it outdoes even pop and folk music. Satie’s work seems to directly soothe the struggles of contemporary life. Akiyama urges, though, the harder edges of Satie’s “acerbic critical spirit” not be forgotten, including the works born from the composer’s personal and financial struggles and his later work as part of the Dada movement.41 Eight years later, in an interview connected with her 1985 Satie recital, pianist Kamiya Ikuyo sounds a similar note, telling the Yomiuri Satie was no minor composer and that despite the strange titles his music has deep feeling. She pleads, “Don’t listen to it as BGM, okay?”42

In an essay reflecting back on the Satie boom, Takahashi Aki gives a somewhat different perspective on the composer’s popularity, one more accepting of his position in Japanese popular culture:

These simple and quiet melodies that seemed to wrap up and heal the tired soul were soft and beautiful—and sad. Satie’s music didn’t bother with imagery or story, but turned drama into the creation of atmosphere. At the same time, it was polished until there was almost nothing left, leaving a musical structure made of few sounds, a wafting aroma with beauty hard like a diamond.43

After Takahashi released a string of popular recordings of Satie’s music, as she describes, strangers often approached to thank her, saying things like, “Even when I am tired, when I listen to Satie my mind goes blank, my spirit relaxes, and I can go on working.” Takahashi describes being glad to hear this from her listeners, as she feels it is a realization of Satie’s original ideal of furniture music: “Music like a chair, or wallpaper, or other furniture, that can comfort and relax people even when they are not focusing on it.”44

A Soundtrack for the Privatized Self

The Satie boom reveals the increasing priority on comforting mood regulation from the 1970s on, in stark contrast with both BGM and the hard-edged experimentation of the previous decade. But it also maintained ties to the more ambivalent atmospherics rooted in Satie’s original furnishing music. By providing moods simultaneously soft, sad, and healing, Satie’s work sounded an advance echo of not just the ideals of neoliberal autonomy and therapy culture but the isolation and uncertainty of the emerging social situation. This emphasis on ambivalent yet relaxing moods made Satie’s music an important model for ambient music to follow. Unlike commercial BGM or the environmental avant-garde, the ambiguous comforts of Satie’s music respected Japanese listeners’ desire for self-determination while acknowledging the flip side of this autonomy in its moods of isolation and loneliness.

Satie’s most well-known piece, Gymnopedie No. 1, sounds out this delicate balance in the contrast between the crisp contour of the right-hand melody and the much more dispersed background of the sustained chords of the left hand. Takahashi captures this duality in her description of Satie’s work as “a wafting aroma with a beauty hard like a diamond.”45 While this piece was written almost nine decades earlier, the sculptural way the piece dissolves the hard edge into the foggy background allowed it to serve as a catalyst for the 1970s shift from using atmosphere as a tool of productivity and provocation to a more autonomous and slightly sad style of subjective drift.

Key to the ability of Satie’s music to allow for more open forms of subjectivation is its refusal of forward-moving harmonic series in favor of giving the listener more freedom in choosing how to relate to the music. John Cage notes how rather than relying on harmonic progressions to organize a composition, Satie’s work defines structure through discrete blocks of time.46 This freer approach to duration refuses forward momentum, replacing regimented pulses and teleological harmonic progressions with a more static, sculptural creation of time-space. As Constant Lambert writes:

By [Satie’s] abstention from the usual forms of development and by his unusual employment of what might be called interrupted and overlapping recapitulations, which causes the piece to fold in on itself, as it were, he completely abolishes the element of rhetorical argument and even succeeds in abolishing as far as possible our time sense. We do not feel that the emotional significance of a phrase is dependent on its being placed at the beginning or end of a particular section.47

Lambert goes on to emphasize the unique spatial properties of Satie’s works, noting how the three Gymnopédies were conceived as three different versions of the same piece—a radical idea at the time:

Satie’s habit of writing his pieces in groups of three was not just a mannerism. It took place in his art of dramatic development, and was part of his peculiarly sculpturesque views of music. When we pass from the first to the second Gymnopédie . . . we do not feel that we are passing from one object to another. It is as though we were moving slowly round a piece of sculpture and examining it from a different point of view. . . . It does not matter which way you walk around a statue and it does not matter in which order you play the three Gymnopédies.48

For Satie’s new audience in 1970s Japan, this more open use of time modeled a music that did not, to borrow Morton Feldman’s famous phrase, “push the sounds around.”49 But just as important, the music didn’t push listeners around either. Rather than being forced to respond to the music, as with the BGM at the Chiba hotel or the electronic squelching of the Expo ’70 pavilions, the Gymnopédies allow listeners to approach the sounds on their own time and in their own space, choosing when and how to situate themselves in relation to the music’s more ambiguous atmospheres.

Satie’s Gymnopédies served as a model for an ambient music reflecting the new autonomy even as it soothed it. It is not difficult to imagine how these Satie soundtracks, wafting stylish solitude, minimal yet poignant, were eagerly taken up as preferred listening for those attempting to tune themselves to the emerging postindustrial society. Satie’s music allowed for the molding of a disciplined emotional self while hinting at both the allure and uncertainty of unknown mysteries lying just below the surface. This is perhaps the source of the remarkable ubiquity of the first Gymnopédie, used to sell a wide range of products, serenade shoppers and urban strollers, and lend mood to all manner of visuals from the 1970s onward, making it one of the most frequently heard classical compositions of late twentieth-century Japan. Satie’s music allowed Japanese to feel better and, also, better about themselves—whether fantasizing in front of one of the many Satie-scored luxury car commercials, picturing themselves driving free and easy across the countryside, or watching Kitano Takeshi’s film Violent Cop (Sono otoko, kyōbō ni tsuki, 1989), in which a wayward police officer lumbers down the street socially isolated but accompanied by Kume Daisaku’s version of Satie’s first Gnossienne. Satie’s music modeled a form of subjectivation where this new autonomy felt not threatening but relaxing, playful, and free, if always a little bit sad. 50

The Post-Satie Ambience

Ambient media would come to take up this task of affording moods of reflective calm with a hint of deeper mysteries within. Brian Eno’s 1978 essay introducing his conception of ambient music (packaged with Ambient 1: Music for Airports) reached Japan at the height of the Satie boom. The type of listening Eno called for soon converged with Satie’s work in the minds of Japanese listeners.51

In the oft-quoted liner notes, Eno describes ambient music as an attempt to expand the attunement possibilities of BGM by moving beyond its purely instrumentalist orientation. After declaring his desire to rehabilitate environmental music from the taint of Muzak, Eno goes on to specify exactly where ambient music departs from commercial BGM:

Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to “brighten” the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and leveling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms), Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.52

Here, Eno provides a succinct articulation of how ambient music sets out to synthesize BGM and the environmental avant-garde, cultivating a calm and thoughtful mood for the listener while promising to stay out of the way and make room for a listener’s personal rhythms and preferred level of attention. Eno’s essay gives a precise name and definition to the aesthetic space Satie’s music helped carve out for an alternative BGM, one playing more directly into new cultural demands for both autonomy and self-care.

When Eno’s idea of “ambient music” arrived in Japan, it was quickly taken up as a useful term to mark a transformation in listening already well under way.53 The first Sony Walkman came on the market just months after Music for Airports, setting off a radical transformation in the experience of recorded music. By the 1980s recorded music was no longer tethered to living rooms and bulky stereos but could be carried on a person’s body as they made their way through the city. People could now wrap their ears with their chosen audio accompaniment and quickly learned how different music might influence their movement through public space. The primary purpose of music was gradually shifting to become, as Böhme succinctly puts it, “a modification of space as it is perceived by the body.”54 Ambient music and the new portable audio technology made an excellent pair. When Sony Japan set out to release their new Compact Disc format in 1984, they commissioned Eno to produce the sixty-one-minute ambient track Thursday Afternoon to demonstrate the long-playing background potential of the new technology.

As the next chapter explores, the Japanese ambient music of the following decades followed Satie and Eno in seeking to sculpt sound as a spatial object. The emerging ambient composers smoothed sonic contours by stretching out attack and decay. They avoided hard edges in favor of gradual transitions between different background layers. They implied vast open spaces through lush echo, reverb, and delay effects. They worked toward a mood of calm uncertainty by basing drones around the fifth of a chord rather than the tonic or by keeping tonality consonant but always slightly ambiguous or by repeating a basic pattern in constantly shifting permutations. Steady rhythms would give way to a slow pulse, a gradual ebb and flow.55 In the ambivalent space carved out between environmental art and designer moods, in drifted the ambient.