Background Music and Couperin

Canby discusses background and foreground music, as well as the different approaches or impulses to listening to such music.

CANBY:

"Background music in various sorts has been important in Western music history--and in fact, for much of our history it has honestly been more important and more pervasive than what we might now call 'foreground music,' or concert music, that is, music to be preformed before an immobilized concert or recital audience, supposedly an audience completely silent and 100% at the direct service of the music. But how many people actually in concerts really take in 100% and give 100% of their attention? It seems to me that some people who listen to music in the background actually hear more of what is going on than those who sit in concerts and supposedly give their full attention to the music at hand."

Discussing the difference in background and foreground music and listeners:

"...take the highly intelligent lady of 85 who I talked to just last week, who has a small radio next to her pillow and another small radio right next to her day chair where she sits when she's up. Those are to help her sleep. She leaves the one next to her pillow on loud all night long. But while I waited for her to wake up from her afternoon radio nap the other day, for the life of me I simply could not read the book I was trying to read because my ears insisted on taking precedence over my eyes and I listened to that radio that was keeping her asleep. Talk about McLuhan and his media. For her, the ear message coming out of that radio was simple enough: sleep. But for me it was a lot of banality which I was unable unfortunately to tune out in spite of the fact that the book I was trying to read was much more interesting than what was going on on the radio. ... This media business is very closely tied in with background music, particularly tied into our insatiable need for background music today."

[...]

"Now for the rest of the time I suggest that you try some good solid radio background listening right here of this very sort. Don't work at it; don't be too forward; don't try hard. Instead, while you listen treat Couperin with respect but informally, let him play quietly. Give him all of a half an ear. Relax. Don't think, just listen. And I think you'll find that this music makes extraordinary good uninterrupted background music of the most worthwhile sort, because that's exactly in the highest sense the way it was intended. It'll repay you if you don't take it too seriously as concert music and put it too much in the foreground. Instead, just let it go on, and see how after a while the style and the message and the mood and the lovely harmonies and rhythms and tunes begin to tell of their own accord. That's the way it should be. Now turn down the volume a bit, so it won't bother whatever else you're doing. It'll sound better that way, I promise you."

WNYC archives id: 58931