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Silence, please!

One of those protection rackets, properly known as a performance rights organisation, recently sent out a news letter. There was a short paragraph that caught my attention. Since their business model is to rake in money for their members from all sorts of venues that play their music, they are in fact interested in increasing the number of such venues, including restaurants and shops. Studies, they claimed, have shown that customers enjoy the _right kind_ of music being played in the stores. So, what a win-win situation: entice the venues to play more music, make their customers buy more, and collect larger royalties for the composers.

I, for one, don't appreciate background music in a restaurant, pub, or a boutique, even less so when it's blasting out loudly from every corner. OK, from an economic perspective it is the average customer who is always right, and if they buy more when there's nice music in the air, then so be it.

John Cage famously complained about muzak. He had come up with an idea for a piece called Silent Prayer, which would be a few minutes of silence to interrupt the stream of banalities piped into elevators. Later on, the idea was absorbed into the legendary piece 4'33, which is usually performed in concert settings. As always with brilliant ideas, Cage wasn't the first one to compose a piece consisting entirely of silence. Before him there was Alphonse Allais of Les Incoherents who had written his Marche funèbre composée pour les funérailles d'un grand homme sourd already in 1897. The only difference, of course, was that no-one took the Incoherents seriously, not even they themselves did.

On that note, I would like to call attention again to my latest release,

Pataphysical Conference

which has little to do with any of the above.

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