On Ambient Music

One often hears from the listener not familiar with ambient music that the genre is a form of “background music”. It is true that ambient music has that quality, but more importantly, ambient music also extends beyond that narrow description. When Erik Satie talked about some of his more minimal and calm piano pieces, he liked to refer to it as “furniture music”. A piece of furniture can certainly be simply an uninteresting part of the background, but it doesn’t have to be. Just spot the difference between your standard IKEA chair and the famous Iron Throne from the Game of Thrones series (technically, also a kind of chair).

So, what differentiates mere background music, sometimes referred to as muzak, from ambient music? As with most things, the devil is in the details. Consider this chair from 1772, now exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

By Thomas Chippendale – This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy, CC0, Link

If you compare this chair to any cheap IKEA chair available today, what do you see? Both chairs can definitely function simply as furniture, and blend into the correct environment without attracting to much attention to themselves. But if you look closer, you see all kinds of fine details on the legs and on the backrest of the museum piece. So, both objects falls under the same category in terms of functionality, but as aesthetic objects, the difference is unmistakable.

But how does this relate to music? To me, it boils down to three criteria that have to be fulfilled for the music to be classified as ambient and not solely as background music.

1. The music should be able to run in the background and blend in with the environment of the listener without disturbing it. Meaning, there should be some predictability, and a certain minimalism in the dynamics and the tone colours. This allows the listener to play ambient music while doing other tasks, such as reading, without getting disturbed by sudden changes, jumpy textures, and the likes.
2. The music should also be interesting to listen to, should the listener want to focus on the music. This is where ambient music differs from, say, muzak. If the listener pays attention to the ambient music, if well composed, s/he will hear small textural changes as the music progresses, along with gentle changes in harmony and rhythm. In other words, the music should be able to function as background music without at the same time being boring.
3. The music should be multilayered and not focus on one single layer. That is, the melody should not play the part of being the main thing to listen to, but most elements should be more or less equal. That way, the typical story being told by a melody gets replaced by a tapestry of interacting melodic themes, sometimes creating ever-evolving harmonies that, albeit simple, almost never repeat in the exact same form.

As we see, muzak would only qualify for the first of these criteria, and perhaps in rare cases also for the third. When composing muzak, one has no interest in fulfilling the second criterion, since muzak is not supposed to attract any attention to it whatsoever. The third criterion is related to the other two, but is also an important one in its own right. Brian Eno, one of the founders of ambient music as a genre, had this to say: “Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” (Taken from Brian Eno – Music for Airports liner notes.)

As with all attempts to categorise music, this one is also doomed to fall short on some accounts, since diversity in the end tends to rip apart any attempts towards a full-covering definition. What do we do with music that has a noise aspect, while in other respects being ambient? It seems to violate criterion number 2, at least partly. Well, even though ambient/noise might sound like a contradiction in terms, the genre actually does make sense. Noise music is categorised as the use of noise in a musical context, and in ambient/noise, the description would be the use of noise in an ambient context. Our elastic thinking makes us fully capable of understanding such a description. To finish this piece of writing with the chair analogy, perhaps ambient/noise music could be compared to that Iron Throne that I mentioned in the beginning? It’s still a kind of chair, but a chair that stands out and begs to be seen.