Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

One Ringy-Dingy, Two Ringy-Dingies

The American Music Center has just commissioned six composers to create an original electroacoustic piece for use as on-hold music in AMC�s telephone system. Starting in June, you can listen to a short piece by Halim El-Dabh, Raz Mesinai, Ira J. Mowitz, Larry Polansky, Roddy Schrock, or Randall Woolf while you�re waiting for Frank Oteri to pick up the phone. Each of the composers gets $1,000.

�The Siday Music On Hold Program,� as it is called. was developed last year as a partnership between the American Music Center and the Eric and Edith Siday Charitable Foundation to honor the legacy of Eric Siday, a pioneering electroacoustic composer and educator who is known as the inventor of �identitones,� the musical logos used for commercial entities like Maxwell House coffee, ABC-TV, and Westinghouse.

According to the blurb:

The American Music Center and the Siday Foundation anticipate that the full impact of Music On Hold will reach far beyond one organization�s telephone system. In the age of cell phone ringtones and other technology-based �incidental� listening opportunities, Music On Hold draws attention to office telephone systems as a ubiquitous, untapped venue in which composers can promote their work, music enthusiasts and professionals can discover and enjoy new pieces, and organizations can develop brand identity and support the arts.

I dunno. I�m for anything that promotes good new music and the idea that such potentially low-brow endeavors might lead serious composers to be co-opted by large corporations and pressed into service creating sugary jingles for large amounts of money doesn�t bother me because, hey, we�ve all got to make a living.

My concern has nothing to do with the AMC, which does a great job, or the Siday Foundation; I�m sure they mean well. It is that we now live in a society that has been so continuously saturated by visual and audio messages that we have lost the ability to amuse ourselves quietly for 10, 20, 30 seconds...or, at least, the marketing meta-structure (let�s call it Big Brother) has assumed that we are incapable of doing so. Public America now operates on the old broadcast maxim of �no dead air,� the split second a batter whiffs for the third out, the organ surges, and a loud male voice starts selling you on next week�s game or on the forthcoming Jason Giambi bobble-headed dope day. All of this artificial stimulation cannot be good for the soul.

posted by Jerry Bowles 2/13/2005