Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong; Revised and Expanded Edition | 
| Author: Joseph Lanza
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book
List Price: $18.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 799420
Media: Paperback
Edition: Rev Exp
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 344
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0472089420
Dewey Decimal Number: 781.5
EAN: 9780472089420
ASIN: 0472089420
Publication Date: January 26, 2004
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Product Description
It's campy, it's cool, empty, intrusive, trite, and treacly. It's Big Brother singing. Call it what you will -- elevator music, Moodsong easy listening, or Muzak . For a musical genre that was supposed to offend no one, it has a lot of enemies.
Musical cognoscenti decry its insipid content; regular folk -- if they notice -- bemoan its pervasiveness; while hipsters and campsters celebrate its retro chic. Mindful of the many voices, Joseph Lanza's Elevator Music sings seriously, with tongue in cheek, the praises of this venerable American institution.
Lanza addresses the criticisms of elites who say that Muzak and its ilk are dehumanized, vapid, or cheesy. These reactions, he argues, are based more on cultural prejudices than honest musical appraisal.
Says Lanza, today's so-called mood music is the inheritor of a long tradition of mood-altering music stretching back to the ancients; Nero's fiddle and the sirens of Odysseus being two famous examples. Contemporary atmospheric music, Lanza argues, not only serves the same purpose, it is also the inevitable background for our media-dominated age.
One of Lanza's premises, to quote Mark Twain, is that this music is "better than it sounds." "This book will have succeeded in its purpose," he writes, "if I can help efface...the distinction between one person's elevator music and another's prized recording."
Joseph Lanza is an author, producer, and music historian. His most recent book is Russ Columbo and the Crooner Mystique.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 fantastic book October 18, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I loved those beautiful music radio stations back in the 70s and 80s . There was so much background information in this book about the makers of that wonderful music that we all grew up with.I had no idea about . It was interesting reading about the beginnings of MUZAc and the orchestras of that period.They really were very high quality.They were indeed quite artistic and always entertaining.I agree with the author that that type of music did not deserve the criticism it got. There was a lot of prejudice.The muzac today is really the problem as it does invade one's privacy.
 Unscholarly study gives readers the shaft April 24, 2005
10 out of 23 found this review helpful
"Elevator Music" packs the car pretty tightly with information, but the ride is aimless and, ultimately, frustrating. Much of the problem lies with the musicology, which is nearly nonexistent. That is to say, most of the analysis focuses on non-musical subjects (there's even two pages of elevator history). When the text lets off for occasional commentary of a musical sort, it misses the floor entirely. We're told, for example, that Erik Satie's music differed completely from Debussy's, especially in regard to "parallel chords"--when, of course, Satie's harmonic language anticipated Debussy's to the point that the controversy over who influenced whom will probably never be resolved. Elsewhere, performance marks are treated as an invention of mood music--when, in fact, such manuscript markings as "agitato," "dolce," "cantabile," etc. not only predate Muzak, but silent film music, as well, and by quite a few years! Worst of all, "Elevator Music" caters to the common misconception that easy-listening, or mood, music emerged during the hi-fi era. To wit, after 70 pages of data to the contrary, the book informs us that such music is/was "tailored exclusively to the electronic revolution" (meaning, hi-fi and stereo). It could be claimed, I suppose, that the pop-instrumental fare common to radio and discs in the 1930s and 1940s (Andre Kostelanetz, Morton Gould, David Rose, et al) proved ideal for hi-fi rigs and hi-fi owners who may not have wanted to listen to jazz or Stravinsky. However, to claim that the music was "tailored for" a given era, rather than "adapted to," is quite a jump, and historically inaccurate. One listen to Andre Kostelanetz' massed-strings version of "Clair de Lune" from 1939 is enough to dispel the myth that mood music was born during the rock and roll era, but "Elevator Music" seems determined to feed this myth. The poorly-selected discography, in fact, focuses mostly on the 1950s-1970s, in keeping with the journalistic cliche of "pop" vs. rock, or Mantovani vs. Elvis, a cliche that needs to be sent down the shaft if pop music studies are ever to be elevated to the level of serious scholarship.
 Fails to entertain or inform very well... February 19, 2003
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
Despite the fact that this book is endorsed (on the back cover) by no less than Wendy Carlos (a fairly well-known composer and musical traditionalist), and despite the fact that I personally like a lot of "easy listening" type music, Lanza still fails here in his attempt to write a good book.Part of the problem, in my opinion, is that there really is no definable genre that could be called "moodsong." All music creates a mood of some sort, when it comes right down to it (whether by accident or design, what's the real difference?). And Lanza does a poor job of covering the history of the Muzak Corp. or any specific area of "easy listening" (all are drastically short-shrifted in a mere 233 pages). In defining the genre, it seems Lanza defined it too broadly -- it would take a thousand pages at least to really do justice to the material he covers -- not to mention, a lot more in-depth research than he apparently did or was willing to do. What's more, his speculative arguments fail to convince me... I do enjoy most of the music (aesthetically) and am not ashamed to say so, but it's my right-brain, emotional side that likes it. Lanza's attempts to analyze or 'justify' easy-listening and mood music in general fall flat, and his utopian speculation just ends up sounding silly and contrived. I agree with most of the points the previous reviewer made.
Fails to entertain or inform very well... February 19, 2003
2 out of 10 found this review helpful
Despite the fact that this book is endorsed (on the back cover) by no less than Wendy Carlos (a fairly well-known composer and musical traditionalist), and despite the fact that I personally like a lot of "easy listening" type music, Lanza still fails here in his attempt to write a good book.Part of the problem, in my opinion, is that there really is no definable genre that could be called "moodsong." All music creates a mood of some sort, when it comes right down to it (whether by accident or design, what's the real difference?). And Lanza does a poor job of covering the history of the Muzak Corp. or any specific area of "easy listening" (all are drastically short-shrifted in a mere 233 pages). In defining the genre, it seems Lanza defined it too broadly -- it would take a thousand pages at least to really do justice to the material he covers -- not to mention, a lot more in-depth research than he apparently did or was willing to do. What's more, his speculative arguments fail to convince me... I do enjoy most of the music (aesthetically) and am not ashamed to say so, but it's my right-brain, emotional side that likes it. Lanza's attempts to analyze or 'justify' easy-listening and mood music in general fall flat, and his utopian speculation just ends up sounding silly and contrived. I agree with most of the points the previous reviewer made.
 Going up? November 15, 2002
7 out of 16 found this review helpful
I wanted to like this book. Whatever its aesthetic merits, "elevator music" and its cognates -- easy-listening, Muzac, mood music, etc. -- have been such a pervasive phenomenon that the subject deserves serious investigation. Unfortunately, Lanza wants to extend his case beyond the seriousness of the subject to arguing that elevator music deserves to be regarded as serious music.Maybe someone out there is capable of sustaining that argument; Lanza can't. For starters, his grip on other forms of music that many of us do take seriously (such as classical, jazz and rock) is shakey at best. What do you make of an author who describes the jazz trumpeter Bobby Hackett's stints with Muzak as a departure from "improvisation dementia"? In addition to being a broad and inaccurate swipe at jazz, the comment demonstrates complete ignorance of Hackett, a musician famed for his golden tone and smooth, melodic interpretations of Dixieland and popular songs. Or consider the following regarding easy-listening interpretations of famous rock songs: "Many from Bob Dylan, the Doors, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Mamas and the Papas, R.E.M., the B-52s, U2, and Van Morrison have been refurbished from loud, plodding, adolescent thunder to something tasteful, airy, and mystical." Dylan, adolescent? Van Morrison, plodding? The Mamas and the Papas, loud? But the root problem -- and authorial prejudice -- is in his assignment of the adjectives "tasteful, airy, and mystical" to music that's best described as bland, flat, and deliberately unengaging. "Mystical," is a term Lanza frequently applies to elevator music. Bottom line: he cannot distinguish the amniotic state of neutered consciousness that Muzak acheives from the genuine achievement of goodness, truth and beauty that can be enjoyed in better music, whether it be folk, rock, jazz or classical. In the end, Lanza's posture shifts from being one that provokes curiousity to one that seems downright perverse. Lanza concludes his book with a sympathetic reading of the "emotional engineers" in Huxley's "Brave New World." As I read Lanza's praise of the artificial ("most of us, in our hearts, want a world tailored by Walt Disney's 'imagineers'") I couldn't help but think of George Orwell and the sad conclusion to "1984" in which the hero, numbed by falsehood, confesses his love for Big Brother.
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