Life without music would be a mistake, Nietzsche said bluntly. But it's a mistake that many in Britain are prepared to make, at least for 24 hours on Wednesday, when the nation has been asked to knuckle down to a third annual No Music Day.
According to the official Web site (nomusicday.com), "iPods will be left at home," "rock bands will not rock," "choirboys will shut their mouths," "jingles will not jangle." All this is, of course, wishful thinking, because No Music Day has no legal force. It is simply the idea of one man: the maverick writer, thinker, conceptual artist and former rock star Bill Drummond, whose history as a member of the early 1990s band KLF gives him a certain authority on the subject of artistic self-denial.
At the height of its considerable success, KLF abruptly ceased playing, deleted its entire back catalog and - for no good reason that Drummond can now remember - publicly burned more than US$2 million of its earnings. Drummond has since dabbled in avant-garde activities and ruminated on life without fame. But more broadly he has been considering life without music, prompted, he said, by "the feeling that music wasn't having the effect on me that I wanted."
PHOTO: AP
"I remember going into record shops and thinking, there's too much of this to cope with," he added. "So I started wondering what it might be like to go without music for a year, a month, a week, all of which was a bit unpractical. So I settled on a day. And that's how it began: an entirely personal thing that was never meant to be a crusade but nonetheless went public."
He chose Nov. 21 because Nov. 22 is the feast of St Cecilia, the patron saint of music, and staging an antithetical observance the day before followed traditions like celebrating Mardi Gras before the start of Lent.
The whole thing might look like one of Drummond's concept statements or, worse, a stunt. But in the three years that No Music Day has functioned (if that's the right word), there have been practical consequences. This year, for example, there will be no music on BBC Radio Scotland and a general abstinence on the part of thousands of people who have pledged themselves to silence on the No Music Day Web site.
Not all the comments on the Web site are approving. But most come from people promising to "cut the strings on buskers' guitars" or, more pacifically, to "go about my business in the splendor of silence."
"It's not music anymore," reads another remark. "It's white noise. It's product. It's a core demographic. It's a target audience."
too much of a good thing
And there you have the issue in a nutshell. People like the idea of No Music Day because they believe that the commercialization of music has reached the saturation point: too much, too easily available.
The argument is not new. And historically it has been advanced by eminent musicians. When Benjamin Britten received the first Aspen Award for the advancement of the humanities in 1964, he devoted part of his acceptance speech to a denunciation of instantly available recorded music. The loudspeaker is "the principal enemy of music," he said, taking care to add that he was not ungrateful to it "as a means of education or study."
How he would have dealt with the age of personal stereos and iPods we can only guess. And there was an element of paradox in Britten's words, coming from a man who spent much of his life in the recording studio, promoting the dissemination of his own works to their lasting advantage. What's more, it has clearly been to the world's advantage to have the works not just of Britten but also of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven on tap.
Yet the complaint behind No Music Day also takes in music that we do not choose: the music - or more properly, Muzak - that assaults our ears unwanted from loudspeakers and television sets placed in restaurants, bars, shops, hotel lobbies and the workplace. Practicing musicians tend to despise Muzak, and last year their number was very publicly joined by the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim when he raised the subject, angrily, in his internationally broadcast Reith Lectures.
So great was the response to Barenboim's attack that the BBC decided to conduct a follow-up survey of public attitudes. Listeners were asked to keep a diary of all the music that came, chosen and unchosen, into their lives over a 24-hour period, including everything from bird song to radio jingles and cellphone ringtones.
The resulting figures showed an average 2 hours and 46 minutes of chosen music compared with 1 hour 16 minutes unchosen. And attitudes to the unchosen music were 38 percent negative, 28 percent positive and 34 percent neutral: an ambiguous conclusion that potentially supported both the pro- and anti-Muzak lobbies. Piped music was not loathed by everyone - most people didn't actively object - but the largest single group was hostile.
pros and cons of muzak
Some study participants enjoyed the serendipitous discovery of new music issuing from a permanently switched-on radio. Many enjoyed street buskers but deplored singing in the office. And psychologists were quick to emphasize a proven relationship between the hearing of music and the raising of spirits.
But equally quick off the mark was a group called Pipedown International, which has been campaigning in Britain for 15 years (with a more recently formed branch in the US) against Muzak in all its forms. Since musical appreciation is a matter of taste, the group argued, the imposition is likely to depress at least as many spirits as it raises.
"Think of the misery of shop workers forced to listen to the same tape over and over again, especially at festive seasons," said Pipedown's founder, Nigel Rodgers, "According to the Royal National Institute for the Deaf, an average shop assistant hears Jingle Bells 300 times in the few days before Christmas - enough to go mad. And it's the same in restaurants and hotels: bad for the customer but worse still for the staff."
A small but powerful group, Pipedown includes among its patrons the conductor Simon Rattle and the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, who is punchily direct about what he calls "the spreading cancer of piped music everywhere: an aural pollution every bit as bad as cigarette smoke."
At an individual level Pipedown members carry printed cards to give to store and restaurant managers, graded in order of approval from "Thank you for having no music" to "Your music has lost you my custom." More sweepingly the group exists to lobby Parliament (where it is currently promoting a bill to ban Muzak from hospitals) and speak to the senior management of larger retail companies.
"We've helped persuade two leading supermarket chains, Tesco and Sainsbury, not to broadcast music in their aisles," Rodgers said. "And I suppose our greatest victory to date has been persuading Gatwick Airport to desist after a passenger survey found that 43 percent disliked it, 34 percent didn't and the rest were neutral. But other fights we've lost, including Marks & Spencer's, so there's a long way to go. And it's why we support No Music Day, although for us, one day a year isn't enough."
But that one day will be significant this year in Scotland, with BBC Radio's decision to abstain from music. The producer responsible, David McGuinness, said it would mean "no songs, no bands, no orchestras."
"But it will also mean no music in trails and no jingles to introduce the news, which will make a qualitative difference to the little bits of sound furniture that make up a radio station," he said. "We're also closing down for the day the BBC Scotland music Web site, which is a huge music portal. And to get the message on the streets we're sending out a No Music Day squad to effect citizen's arrests of people wearing headphones."
In other words, a stunt.
"No, absolutely not." McGuinness said. "Of course there's an element of fun, or I hope there will be. But we want people to realize how ubiquitous music has become, how it invades their lives in ways they don't realize, and we want to challenge them to stop and think what that means, to consider how they might become more informed in their choices."
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