Elevator Music : A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-listening, and Other Moodsong

For a sound intended to be comforting, unobstructive, and inoffensive, "elevator music" has ignited strong and often heated options.
With an arsenal of historical anecdotes and facts, Joseph Lanza sings seriously, with healthy doses of humor and wit, the praises of his misunderstood musical genre. Lanza traces mood music's mystifying presence from yhe mind-altering sirens who lured Odysseus to the harp David played to soothe King Saul, but the tale gets more intriguing in the early twentieth century, with Erik Satie's "furniture music" experiments, the birth of the Muzak Corporation, and various science ficcion stories that featured mood music as a futuristic staple.
Lanza also xhronicles the parallel development of the "easy listening" instrumental, discussing such "mood maestros" as Ray Conniff, Percy Faith, Andre Kostelanetz, and Mantovani. Along the way, Lanza addresses mood music's social and even governmental uses, raising questions about music's role in modern life while challenling aesthetic assumptions.

CONTENIDO:

1. Probing the Jell-O
2. Lullabies from Heaven and Hell: Mood Music's Antiquity
3. The "Canned" Avant-Garde
4. Umbilical Chords: The birth of Muzak
5. The Push-Button Ballroom: Mood Music and Early Radio
6. Ghosts in the Elevator
7. Emotional Archives: Background Music in the movies
8. The Moodiest years on Record
9. World Music Originals: The 101 strings and the Mystic Moods Orchestra
10. Walls Talk!
11. "Beautiful Music": The Rise of Easy-Listening FM
12. Violins from Space
13. Metarock
14. Elevator Noir
15. Who's Hearing Things?
16. The New Sound of 1984
Afterword: Channeling the Phantom Band
Revised, Expanded, Annotated, and Selective Discography
Bibliography
Index