cover image Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong

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

Joseph Lanza. St. Martin's Press, $22 (280pp) ISBN 978-0-312-10540-2

In this entertaining book, Lanza ( Fragile Geometry: The Films, Philosophy, and Misadventures of Nicolas Roeg ) treats background music as a serious art form, tracing its evolution and arguing that there is more to the world of engineered sound than Muzak (whose inventor he calls the ``unsung hero of the electronic age'') and other types of canned music. Lanza places movie soundtracks, mood music, space-age music and ``lite'' radio all in the realm of indirect listening, along with numerous popular performers from Lawrence Welk and Ray Conniff to the Swingle Singers and the Norman Luboff Choir. Many contemporary composers work in this sphere, maintains the author, who also includes 18th-century composers such as Vivaldi, Telemann and Boccherini, because he considers their music ``feathery.'' Lanza covers his subject in such an engaging manner that one could almost be lulled into accepting his analysis that ``Muzak and mood music are, in many respects, aesthetically superior to all other musical forms'' because ``they emit music the way the twentieth century is equipped to receive it.'' Photos not seen by PW. (Feb.)