Ubiquitous Musics

The Everyday Sounds That We Don't Always Notice

Marta García Quiñones, Anahid Kassabian, Elena Boschi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317005674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Ubiquitous Musics offers a multidisciplinary approach to the pervasive presence of music in everyday life. The essays address a variety of situations in which music is present alongside other activities and does not demand focused attention from (sometimes involuntary) listeners. The contributors present different theoretical perspectives on the increasing ubiquity of music and its implications for the experience of listening. The collection consists of nine essays divided into three sections: Histories, Technologies, and Spaces. The first section addresses the historical origins of functional music and the debates on how reproduced music, including a wide range of styles and genres, spread so quickly across so many environments. The second section focuses on more contemporary sound technologies, including mobile phones in India, the role of visible playback technology in film, and listening to portable digital players. The final section reflects on settings such as malls, stores, gyms, offices and cars in which ubiquitous musics are often present, but rarely thought about. This last section - and ultimately the whole collection - seeks to foster a wider understanding of listening practices by lending a fresh, critical ear.

PART I
Histories

Chapter 1
Caliban’s Ear: A Short History of Ambient Music

Lawrence Kramer

People today are awash in music from radios, television, elevators and supermarkets. It is possible that the pervasiveness of music may lead to more hallucinations.

The New York Times, 12 July 20051

The hallucinations in question are exaggerated forms of ‘brainworms’ – music stuck in the head. Scientists, the Times story reports, are currently investigating the strange phenomenon of an outbreak of ‘musical hallucinations’ among older people who have lost some hearing. These involuntary listeners find fully detailed music in their ears – music heard, not just imagined – when the segment of the brain that organizes sound into music operates on its own without auditory input.

The researchers plausibly enough suggest a cause-and-effect relationship between this phenomenon and ambient music, but the relationship may be more convoluted than that. If ambient music is now a fact of everyday perception – and it is – why speak of hallucinations when confronted with a continuation, at higher volume, of the music already in everyone’s head: an echo, a resonance, an ensemble-playing by the brain, which knows quite well what world it is living in? (Do they have the same hallucinations in Cairo, where the decibel level of just living is reportedly about the same as standing next to a jackhammer?) Not for nothing is this volume (are you reading it in silence, or with music on?) called Ubiquitous Musics. When ambient music comes to be everywhere, following wherever technology has gone, it has no trouble worming its way into the fabled inside of the head.

In that locale, however, more is reorganized than just perception. Ambient music today tends to rinse away the subjective interiority that used to live between the ears. Why would it do that? Why has it done that? When did it start? In what follows I hope to float some answers in the air.

The Welkin

Ambient music is a modern phenomenon, born of the assembly line and the elevator and before that of the department store.2 Commercial and industrial modernity coincide with its rise, and it has now handily survived their fall. But the idea of ambient music is much older. Music in the air, music heard across space, is a pastoral idea and a cosmological idea, in both cases with antique roots. At its most sophisticated in the era before its technological possibility, such music marked the intersection of the pastoral and the cosmological. This idea can be found working with undiminished force early in Thomas Hardy’s novel of 1874, Far from the Madding Crowd:

The sky was clear – remarkably clear – and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse. The North Star was directly in the wind’s eye, and since evening the Bear had swung round it outwardly to the east, till he was now at a right angle to the meridian … Suddenly an unexpected series of sounds began to be heard in this place against the sky. They had a clearness which was to be found nowhere in the wind and a sequence which was to be found nowhere in nature. They were the notes of Farmer Oak’s flute.3

The sounds of the flute address nature from outside, not as an opposite, but as a supplement: the clearness of the notes to the clearness of the sky, the sequence of the notes to the rotation of the constellations. The music and the stars move to the same common pulse, even if the human pulse is, in a trope typical of Hardy, almost lost amid the grand but indifferent pulse of the cosmic whole. Farmer Oak’s flute is of a piece with, in effect plays the same piece as, the shepherd’s pipe of Virgil and Theocritus.4

They learned

Sweet plaintive songs, such as the pipe pours forth
When pressed by player’s fingers, heard through woods
And brakes and pathless groves, through desert haunts
And scenery of godlike calm.

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, V, 1385–1390

It ought to be possible, therefore, to compose a genealogy of ambient music. Not a chronicle, although that is possible, too, but a genealogy in the Nietzschean and Foucauldian sense, an indirect speculative history that re-conceives the phenomenon by exposing the antecedents to which it is linked, not by affiliation but by rupture. What follows is a fragment of one such genealogy. Others would have been possible, but perhaps not so many as one might think; the starting-point, at least – my title gives it away – is both a limit and a landmark. The destination is, too, though for different reasons – reasons in part idiosyncratic, in part symptomatic: they involve classical music, in the era of its cultural recession, finding a new career in ambient form. In a sense that destination is my true starting-point. Classical music, for better or worse, is the centre of my work, and its contemporary destinies have all too compelling an interest for me. The effect of its floating sound in a train station is the question, even the enigma, which I hope to unravel by taking it as the end-term in a sequence of moments, dispersed across time, of ambient music.

Three moments, to be exact: one fictional, one semi-fictional, one real; one early modern, one modern, one postmodern. The genealogical sequence resembles that of a literary genre, the progress poem, the speculative quasi-allegorical history by which a poem accounts the conditions of its own possibility. Three moments, then, as a Progress of Ambient Music in prose – only, to complicate matters, the early-modern moment that starts the sequence will not consent simply to pass but instead turns up again, and again, in later metamorphoses. Perhaps this proliferation is simply the means by which the allegory refuses to forget its own nature as artifice. Perhaps it suggests that, as a listening subject, the auditor of ambient music is (almost) always addressed as a Caliban. Nonetheless, the Progress moves (not advances, simply moves) through three emblematic moments: the first natural, the third technological, the second in transit between. That these categories will not survive the transition intact is only to be expected.

What did the listening subjects of these moments hear? In what sound-world did they hear it? How, in that world, did it matter that it was music that they heard, whether figuratively or literally? What, in that case, did the music, the musicality of music, (come to) mean?

The questions are posed of a liminal figure in liminal spaces and could hardly be posed otherwise. Liminality, too, is an acoustic issue; what is more liminal than the ear? So the questions are posed of Caliban, roaming an island that is no longer his except for its ambient music and its later echoes; of James Agee, caught between the metropolis and the backwoods in a dark time; and of myself, passing through the Bluebeard’s Castle of New York’s Pennsylvania Station to the sounds of disembodied Brahms and Mozart.

At this point we need descriptions of the moments in question. They will, of necessity, be partial descriptions (in both senses of the word), attuned to acoustic matters, devices for cupping the mind’s ear.

The Island

Early in The Tempest, Prospero accuses Caliban of ingratitude for having been civilized, which, from Caliban’s point of view, means dispossessed and subjugated. (Prospero, in exile from Europe, has appropriated the island from Caliban’s mother. He rules there with the help of a book whose ‘white magic’ gives him power over the four traditional elements: water, air, earth and fire. All but water are personified, by Ariel, Caliban and Prospero himself, respectively.) The exchange between master and slave turns on the major instrument of civilization, namely language:

Prospero:
Abhorred slave
Which any print of goodness will not take,
Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes
With words that made them known: but thy vile race,
Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures
Could not abide to be with.

Caliban:
You taught me language: and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse.5

But Caliban has learned to do more than curse. His way with words may be one of the reasons why audiences, unlike Prospero (who nominally speaks for them), tend to find Caliban oddly endearing. (Perhaps another reason is because Caliban speaks for the audience’s own resistance to docility in the name of virtue.) Nowhere is this truer than in the unique moment when Caliban speaks lyrically to convey his impression of the island’s ambient music. His description even anticipates the masque of plenty that Prospero will later invoke with magic. But Caliban’s magic lies entirely in his speech:

The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,
I cried to dream again.6

The isle is indeed full of noises, in the form of songs, most of them sung by Ariel, the spirit of the air placing music in the air. The audience is supposed to imagine Ariel as invisible even as it sees him singing. Caliban’s music alone is actually invisible, which imbues it with an inherent sense of distance and gives it a greater degree of wonder – a primary theme in the play – than can be found in Ariel’s songs (for which some music survives). Shelley later, and Auden much later, would refer the play’s music solely to Ariel – and Auden would ironically have Caliban speak in long-winded prose.7 But Robert Browning, in ‘Caliban upon Setebos’ (ca. 1860, published 1864), heard things differently.

Browning remembered Caliban’s ear and, in an important if disenchanting move, reconceived it as the ear of a purely natural being – Caliban as natural man. But then, Browning’s is a post-Darwinian Caliban, caught up in the religious controversies of the Victorian era and portrayed as making a god in his own atavistic image. Browning’s version of the island’s music is therefore cruel and ominous. But it is still ubiquitous.

The Porch

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with photographs by Walker Evans and text by James Agee, is an account of life in the sharecropper South during the Great Depression, strangely divided between Evans’s stark photos and Agee’s rhapsodic prose. The text is punctuated by three meditative segments entitled ‘On the Porch’, each of which describes the sights and sounds that came to Agee and his hosts as they all lay on the porch at night. The third of these segmen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Notes on Contributors
• General Editor’s Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A Day in the Life of a Ubiquitous Musics Listener
• PART I HISTORIES
• PART II TECHNOLOGIES
• PART III SPACES
• Bibliography
• Index