Furniture Music
Or, we're all in the mood for a melody and you've got us feeling' alright
In the Acknowledgements of a brilliant book called Authoring Autism, academic Remi Yergeau begins by thanking the Electric Light Orchestra. Without this band and their music, Yergeau says, there would have been no perseveration: hence no book. I know it’s not usual to quote a book’s acknowledgements section but I found that, after I’d taken this one back to the library, that surprising instance of gratitude was what I remembered most.
Perseveration. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as: ‘The prolonged and sometimes pathological repetition of an action, thought, or utterance.’ I know the word from my music therapy training. In that context it was used to refer to clients who seemed to get stuck, perhaps playing the same rhythm over and over again. I remember seeing footage of an autistic boy who, during music therapy, played every single key on the piano from low to high, returning to this pattern throughout his session, and pushing the therapist’s hands from the keyboard when she tried to intervene. From what I remember of my training, a therapist in this situation might (try to) introduce new musical material, with the aim of encouraging more interaction and a greater range of expression. The idea was that, over time, this musical experience might be generalised, leading to greater expressiveness, flexibility and mutuality in daily life.
At the time, I wouldn’t have seen the neurotypical assumptions behind this therapeutic aim. It wouldn’t have occurred to me that this might be an example of taking an autistic person and trying to make them less autistic. I didn’t yet understand that ‘perseveration’ is an equally valid way of making and experiencing music, that it could be regulating for an autistic nervous system. I didn’t understand that, through such perseveration, an autistic client might have been sharing something essential about himself, if only we had known how to listen.
For the past few weeks I’ve had a musical perseveration of my own. I wish I could report it was a Mahler symphony, or the Zen-like experimental works of John Cage. But no. In fact what I’ve been listening to is Billy Joel. And I’m not talking about an obscure back catalogue either. When I need a lift, it’s his three most famous songs I turn to, always in the same order, often on repeat. Uptown Girl. Vienna. Piano Man. I think I secretly want to be Billy Joel—Billy Joel in 1973, with his leather jacket on, that shaggy hair, face pale as a mushroom growing in the basement bars of LA—him, or at the very least one of his (echolalic) backing singers.
It’s partly the seedy lounge vibe. It’s partly the lyrics, both worldly and wise. Most of all it’s the joy. Those songs make me happy. They make me happy, reliably. And so I perseverate, entering again—and yet again—that state of carefree ease. That state of being Billy.
Furniture Music
As someone who (like Billy Joel) earned his living for a time playing piano in neighbourhood bars, the turn-of-the-century Parisian composer Erik Satie was used to the idea of music as background. For Satie, though, this went beyond a side hustle, developing into an innovative approach to music that later inspired the ambient works of Brian Eno and Cage himself. Satie called his invention ‘furniture music’—the musical equivalent of a sofa you sit on every day and never notice. What was radical about this at the time was that it was music designed not to be listened to, music that could warm and comfort you: music more felt than heard.
The painter Fernand Léger reported that Satie’s invention of furniture music was prompted by a lunch they shared with friends, where the music in the restaurant was so loud they had to escape to another room. Léger said that Satie that day described his invention as music that would:
‘soften the noise of knives and forks without dominating them, without imposing itself. It would furnish those silences which sometimes hang heavy between diners. It would save them from everyday banalities.’
Several writers have suggested that Satie was likely autistic1 and, from a contemporary perspective, it’s hard not to see furniture music as a response to some of the sensory and social needs common in autistic people, like hypersensitivity to sound, and discomfort with smalltalk. We might even see furniture music as Satie’s attempt to meet these sensory and social needs in himself.
One of the main techniques Satie used for creating background music was extreme repetition. Perseveration, really. For Max Jacob’s play Ruffian toujours, truand jamais, for example, his score was only a few bars long and designed to be repeated indefinitely.
If you’ve ever tried listening to the same song over and over again, you’ll know that after a while it becomes hard to hear it. For Satie, this meant music stopped being an aesthetic experience, becoming instead a tool for creating ambience. Extreme repetition makes music functional.
These days ambient music is used to create everything from a conducive environment for shopping to atmospheric soundtracks for film, but at the time this was a radical idea. Its newness caused problems for Satie when introducing it to audiences of the day. Before the first (and only) performance of Jacob’s play, the actor Pierre Bertin introduced Satie’s composition by telling the audience that:
‘We specifically wish to ask you not to give it any attention and to act during the interval as if it did not exist.’
The composer Milhaud, who was present at the performance, gave the following account of what happened next:
‘contrary to our instructions, as soon as the music started, the listeners hurried back to their seats. Satie shouted in vain “Talk! Walk around! Don’t listen!” They listened. They were quiet. It was a failure.’
Musical Repetition and Meditation
For Satie musical repetition helps regulate sensory experiences (those grating knives and forks), creating a soothing sonic environment. It also softens the silences in conversation, avoiding the implicit pressure to engage in the ‘everyday banalities’ of small talk. For Yergeau, such extreme repetition generates a creative state that allows her to focus and to work.
Sensory, social, creative: for me, musical repetition meets all three of these needs at times. And it does something else too, something I find harder to describe: it tunes me in to a state I recognise as akin to meditation, a state of being inside my own life.
At the top of the score for his famous first Gymnopédie, Satie wrote the phrase ‘white and still’ as a suggestive, if impossible, tempo marking. Caroline Potter points out, in her book on Satie’s life and music, that he often used these words when referring to repetitive passages in his work. She argues that, for Satie, this phrase was meant to describe a meditative atmosphere. The movement of repetition—such as that found in his Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes—is, for him, a kind of stillness.
This is not new. For centuries repetitive chants have been used, across many sacred traditions, as a tool for tuning into contemplative or prayerful states. I’m thinking of Christian plainchant and of the guttural incantations of Tibetan monks. Extreme repetition—which has been misunderstood as a negative ‘perseveration’ by some—has long been used create an atmosphere of peace or flow that supports meditation.
When I play music repetitively I stop being able to hear it. At this point it becomes me. Or I become it. It’s not so much furniture then as warmth, or light. I seem to need it almost like I need to breathe. Even when I’m not playing a song into my earphones, I always have a rhythm going somewhere inside—tongue tapping against teeth, or finger on thumb, creating cross-rhythms against the kick and snare of my feet as they walk.
It was only after reading Yergeau’s gratitude to the ELO that I realised this might be a specifically autistic way of relating to music, helping me explain to myself why I’ve never had my deepest experiences with music sitting in a concert hall. For me, music is daily bread. It gives life shape and rhythm. It motivates. When everything seems too close, too bright, music softens the world’s sharp edges. It’s as intimate—and as ordinary—as the rush of blood in vein, or a thought’s synaptic finger snap.
Perhaps, after all, perseveration is just another word for what’s essential to us.
Any other secret Billy Joel fans out there? What are your current musical perseverations? I would love to hear about them!
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I’m not sure how I feel about attempts to diagnose autism in people who are dead, particularly when it comes to those, like Satie, long enough dead that they couldn’t possibly have conceived of themselves that way. Saying this, I remember hearing that Satie collected umbrellas and shirt collars. That he would only eat white foods. That he earned the nickname of ‘Velvet Gentleman’ because for many years he would wear nothing but a rotation of seven identical corduroy suits. And that’s before you start to think about the music itself.
This is such a fabulous piece!
I would never call myself a Billy Joel fan but here’s the thing he is a salve on repeat.
I listen over and over and over to the same tracks. In my case I’ve a fascination with the track called Baby Grand. I’d love to hear what this does for you. If anything.
Ps. I clocked this music autism link a while back and listened to Billy’s tracks to see how they landed. Yes, turns out he hits a regulating spot. Meanwhile, how do you find Jumaane Smith’s ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’?