Definitions and interpretations of environmental music proliferated in the 20th century. Many speculations about music's origins stress the significance of natural sounds such as birdsong, and much evidence exists of the ingenuity with which pre-20th-century musicians and composers of all kinds have incorporated environmental sounds into their music. The unprecedented impact of new technologies and global communications heightened the absorption of environmental influences during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Claude Debussy, for example, played pianistic impressions of Paris street sounds while still a student. His work as a mature composer came to reflect the influence of Javanese music heard at the Paris Exposition of 1889, and in 1913 he wrote: ‘The century of aeroplanes has a right to a music of its own’.
That view was shared by the Russian and Italian futurists (see Futurism). A futurist performance in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1922 choreographed factory sirens, steam whistles, foghorns, artillery, machine guns and aircraft into an epic of ‘proletarian music’. Between 1913 and 1916 the Italian painter Luigi Russolo wrote a series of polemical essays published under the collective title L'arte dei rumori. These celebrated the industrial and military noises of the new century, anticipating the use of ‘found’ sound in such later developments as musique concrète and digital sound sampling.
While Russolo imagined a stirring new music interwoven with the abstracted sounds of modern warfare, others were pioneering technologies that could deploy music to help create a soporific ambience. This notion of music as a utilitarian and unobtrusive background to other activities was predicted with typical wit in 1920 by Erik Satie with his Musique d'ameublement, or ‘furniture music’. In his music for the ballet Parade (1917), a collaboration between Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Leonid Massine, Satie had combined melodies from American and French popular songs with the sounds of pistol shots, typewriter, steamship whistle and siren. He intended his furniture music as a programme to be ignored, and speculated on a future in which music might mask dissonant ambient noise, fill awkward silences and add background sound to wedding ceremonies and house interiors.
Satie's vision of a soundtrack accompaniment to daily life was already close to realization. In 1922 George Owen Squier, a Michigan-born military officer who had conducted research into wireless systems, launched a company that would attempt to pipe music, advertising and public service announcements into homes and businesses. As well as foreseeing the late 20th-century home entertainment reality of cable communications, Squier coined the name Muzak, a fusion of the words ‘music’ and ‘Kodak’. During the 1930s the Muzak company, based in New York City, began systematic broadcasting to hotels, clubs, restaurants and shops. This programme of centralized transmission came to be rationalized into a system of stimulus codes, supported by scientific studies that demonstrated links between music, productivity and safety in factories.
Just as radio and cable facilitated this revolution in mood music, other technologies inspired musicians to use the sounds of the world as elements of composition or performance. Muzak's ‘canned’ music, used increasingly in lifts, airports, aircraft, supermarkets and other public spaces where controlled tranquillity was to be desired, was structured within a narrow dynamic and emotional range in order to avoid surprise or discomfort. This targeted approach to mood manipulation ran counter to innovations in electronic composition. In France, Pierre Schaeffer began experimenting with the manipulation of disc recordings of sound effects such as train noises in 1948. He called his technique musique concrète, to distinguish the concrete sound materials of the studio from the written notes of the score. Although Schaeffer was a pioneer of electronic music, his purpose was not so far removed from the sound paintings of jazz composers such as Duke Ellington, who used more conventional instruments to evoke and transform sound images of the urban environment.
Even further removed from the soothing purpose of Muzak was the theorizing and musical practice of John Cage. In books of collected writings, aphorisms and lectures such as Silence (containing essays first published in 1939), Cage unfolded a philosophy of chance composition which invited environmental sounds into music. He was content to allow these sounds to exert a disruptive force, rather than attempting to homogenize them. 4' 33'' (1952), one of his most celebrated compositions, is the pivotal environmental work of the 20th century. The performer is instructed to time three sections of silence, adding up to 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Nothing else happens, other than the audience's becoming acutely aware of the sounds of the immediate environment.
Cage's example led many musicians to abandon rigid compositional systems and pursue indeterminate or open methods. These new initiatives were linked to art movements such as happenings, land art, conceptual art, kinetic sculpture and underground film, and also overlapped with related trends in free jazz, improvisation and experimental rock. The Fluxus movement proposed musical events that questioned all definitions of music, using settings that relocated art into unfamiliar, absurd and even impossible environments. Walter De Maria's Art Yard (1960, New York), for example, imagined composers such as La Monte Young digging a hole in the ground in front of spectators.
The influence of this type of work, along with the audio ecology researches of R. Murray Schafer and the Vancouver-based World Soundscape Project, contributed to the growth of a loosely defined movement now known as sound art or audio art. Detaching itself from the organizing principles and performance conventions of music, audio art explored issues of spatial and environmental articulation or the physics of sound using media that included sound sculptures, performance and site-specific installations. In the 1990s, audio art overlapped with manifestations of ambient music, defined in the 1970s by Brian Eno and revived in the late 1980s in the wake of techno and acid house. The late 20th-century environment – a veritable ocean of audiovisual signals from cable and satellite television and the Internet, accompanied by the sounds of an accelerating revolution in digital communications – realized even the most improbable dreams of the musical avant garde.
L. Russolo: L'arte dei rumori (Milan, 1916; Eng. trans., 1986, as The Art of Noises)
J. Cage: Silence (Middletown, CT, 1961)
R.M. Schafer: The Tuning of the World (New York, 1977)
J. Lanza: Elevator Music (New York, 1994)
D. Toop: Ocean of Sound (London, 1995)
DAVID TOOP