Fractured Muzak

Perhaps the most perfect captive audience in all America is the one that steps into an elevator, watches the door slide shut, and then listens to a piped-in ver sion of Surrey with the Fringe on Top.

The least captive audience is the one that attends the concerts of Avant-Garde Composer John Cage. Its members are always free to walk out--and frequently do. For all that, it now appears that Cage and canned music may have been made for each other.

Cage and Muzak met several months ago when the composer was presented with a thorny problem involving Manhattan's giant new Pan American Building. Sculptor Richard Lippold, renowned for his glittering geometric structures of stainless steel and gold, had been commissioned by the Pan Am Building directors to design a work for the main lobby. Lippold created The Globe, an immense, shining piece three stories high. The directors were delighted, but Lippold was not.

He learned that Muzak would come oozing into elevators and lobby. The invasion, he decided, would destroy the bold effect of his sculpture. With the directors' permission, he called on Cage for help.

Composer Cage decided to "make use of the things that were right there," i.e., the Muzak speakers and some closed-circuit television cameras set up to watch the lobby. Cage wanted the TV to trigger the Muzak whenever people passed by or got in and out of elevators. But such familiar Muzak as Stardust and I'm in the Mood for Love would become electronically pulverized and filtered if Cage had his way, and there would be times when the traffic was light and there would be no music at all. The directors rejected the idea. Explained a vice president: "The American businessman and the esthete do not always see eye to eye." Now it appears that for a while, at least, there will be no music at all in the Pan Am lobby. But that in itself is something of a vindication for Composer Cage.

One of his most notorious compositions is 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds, which requires a pianist to sit in silence at the keyboard for 4 min. 33 sec., staring at a stop watch before he departs the stage without striking a note.

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