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This chapter explores the furniture music of French composer Erik Satie (1866–1925). Satie's pieces of furniture music are each fundamentally based on a short musical fragment, to be repeated ad lib (at one's pleasure). As such, they are intrinsically monotonous and can retain the attention of the active listener for only a short span before boredom inevitably sets in. Vexations (1893), for instance, is a short piece consisting of four repetitive phrases to be repeated 840 times. Strictly speaking, three sets of furniture music by Satie exist. The first set, from 1917, is composed for flute, clarinet, and strings, plus a trumpet for the first piece. The second set, from 1920 and labeled Sons industriels [Industrial sounds], was performed at the Galerie Barbazanges. The last piece of furniture music for small orchestra from 1923, was commissioned by Mrs. Eugè ne Meyer Jr. of Washington, D.C. Tenture de cabinet préfectoral (approximately: Upholstery for a Governor's Office) was delivered by Satie to furnish the library of her residence.

The iconoclastic composer Erik Satie (1866–1925) has been fascinated by the relationship between words, spoken or unspoken, and music. In some of his Rose+Croix pieces of the 1890s, Satie derived the musical form from literature. He wrote his first popular song, Je te veux, to words by his friend Henry Pacory in 1897 and began accompanying the pince-sans-rire cabaret artist Vincent Hyspa a year later. Satie also composed songs for Paulette Darty, known as ‘The Queen of the Slow Waltz’. This chapter examines Satie's compositions and his transition to surrealism, as well as the influence of Jean Cocteau in his life between 1915 and 1923.

Chapter One traces how the ambient emphasis on private, reflective moods developed out of the unexpected alignment of postwar Japanese background music and the “environmental art” of the 1960s avant-garde, converging through Expo ‘70 into the “Erik Satie boom” and the emergence of ambient music in the late 1970s.

The first period of the arrival of European modernism in New York City stretched from approximately 1914 to 1923. This was the time when Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford, Virgil Thomson, and other American composers of the generation born around 1900 were adolescents. Their youth unfolded as modernism emerged. Even though so many of these figures eventually spent substantial residencies abroad, most of them first discovered the newest music from Europe while still at home, and the ways they did so depended on a blend of socioeconomic background, education, geographic location, and serendipity. For some, the newest works were readily accessible in the United States, while for others they were totally unknown. European modernism traveled through live performances, published scores, written accounts, and verbal testimony. Among those European composers who made an impact on New York's music scene were Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Alexander Scriabin, Erik Satie, and Manuel de Falla.

This chapter analyzes furniture music and furniture films. Even though Erik Satie did not coin the term furniture music until 1917, it seems clear that the idea was already in its formative stages in 1893 when he composed Vexations, a delicate and haunting piece of music that would eventually be seen as his most radical composition. Satie was interested in music that was not meant to be closely listened to, but was instead designed to serve as a backdrop for other activities, such as conversing, eating, and drinking. Likewise, films by Andy Warhol such as Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964), are best understood as furniture films—works designed to be viewed partially and distractedly. One of the primary functions of Sleep and Empire is to direct the viewer's attention away from the screen, promoting a distracted, fragmentary, and unfocused mode of spectatorship.

In 1913, Georges Auric and his family moved to Paris, where he studied for one year at the Conservatoire and one year at the Schola Cantorum. During his first year in the capital, Auric published his first pieces of music criticism, performed a recital for the Société Musicale Indépendante, and had compositions performed on a recital for the Société Nationale de Musique. From these auspicious beginnings, he participated in several avant-garde art groups and was invited to join many of the most prestigious Parisian salons. In 1917, he was drafted into the army; though his military record was undistinguished, it led to close friendships with Louis Aragon and André Breton.

This introductory chapter discusses composer John Cage's views about Muzak and his interest in the work of French composer Erik Satie. Muzak is a company that provides functional music as a tool of management in environmental situations. The term has nonetheless a double entendre: muzak (lower case) refers to the genre of background music in general, while Muzak (with a capital) refers specifically to the trademarked product. For Cage, Muzak's discourse clarified the stakes of a competition in which both the arts and the products of industry were engaged. His comparative evaluation of furniture music and muzak may have stressed the possibility of separating one from the other, but by the same token it also indicated that they share a parallel if irreconcilable ambition.

The intersections of twentieth-century music with ancient Greek tragedy are many and various, reflecting the exceptional stylistic and ideological heterogeneity of twentieth-century culture. This chapter singles out four examples taken from Darius Milhaud's music for Aeschylus' Libation Bearers (1915–16), Erik Satie's Socrate (1919), Harry Partch's adaptation of Euripides' Bacchae, Revelation in the Courthouse Park (1961), and Iannis Xenakis's music for Aeschylus' Oresteia (1965–66, with additions in 1987 and 1992). The differences between these four composers' music illustrate the fragmentation of twentieth-century musical culture. That they all, in various degrees, came to work with ancient Greek material does partially connect them. The chapter discusses how this happens, with consideration of some possible reasons for it.

Chapter 4 explores and theorizes Eno’s approach to ambient music. It begins with a clear precursor, Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement—furniture music. Like Satie, Eno sought sounds that could blend into and color various situations without commanding the attention of the hearer. But he also wanted music that could engage listeners who elect to attend to the activity of the assembled sounds, which distances it from other background music like Muzak. Because “ambient” has exploded into a diverse musical genre, Music for Airports is contrasted with other ambient works from the like of Aphex Twin, Moby, Gas, and Thomas Köner. What seems to distinguish Music for Airports is its ability to elicit our attention without captivating it through musical developments. Instead, it initiates a kind of reverie, opening spaces for thought in ordinary living environments.

Drawing upon examples from art, psychology, literature, and philosophy, the chapter offers an introduction to boredom, one that is attentive both to its rich history and to how it is currently understood and studied. The chapter articulates the reasons why boredom has been widely understood to be either trivial or inconsequential. It then counters such a simplistic understanding of boredom by drawing a distinction between two types of boredom and by illuminating the ways in which both kinds of boredom can have serious consequences for one’s well-being. Even though a negative and potentially harmful side of boredom exists and ought to be taken seriously, the chapter concludes by suggesting that there is another, far more positive and beneficial side to boredom that has been largely ignored.