A Musical Menu for Indigestion

One of the most pleasing things about my recent trip to Madrid was the discovery that sit-down restaurants there, where serious diners go, almost never have music in the background. People go to eat and talk. They don't need a mish-mash of music thumping away in the background to add burnish to their lives. But such is not the case in North America.

The Wall Street Journal has a piece up today titled:

How Restaurants Make Music Go with Food:
Rap builds up to peak speed at dinner hour or jazz standards; chefs and restaurateurs have options with digital streaming and DJs for hire

I wanted you to get the full picture as revealed in the sub-heading. Ah, exactly how I want to experience my Coquilles St-Jacques followed by a nice Dover Sole: with rap building up to peak speed, not so much in the background as pounding away loud enough to make the cutlery rattle. Now that's fine dining! Sadly, the cultural decay is even revealed in the botched grammar in the sub-head. But let's let the writer reveal the full horror:

At Charlie Bird in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, diners hear hip-hop from The Notorious B.I.G. while they twirl their tagliatelle. A few blocks away at Carbone, lobster ravioli comes with 1960s love songs such as “Just One Look.” 

Restaurant playlists have a critical role in shaping a diner’s experience and an establishment’s image. Music may make guests feel upbeat or calm. The right playlist can ward off a stuffy customer and attract a stylish one. It may also prevent the staff mutinies that come with hearing the same song 10,000 times.

One of the crucial restaurant management failures I have noticed recently is allowing your 20-something staff to pick the music while your 50-something guests grit their teeth in discomfort. But yes, the right playlist can certainly ward off this stuffy customer, never to return! Here is how one chef puts it:

“I think it’s possible to drink great Burgundy, eat great food, and listen to music that makes your head bob at the same time,” says Charlie Bird chef Ryan Hardy, describing himself and his business partner as “hip-hop heads” who wanted restaurant guests to feel like they were being invited into their homes. To Mr. Hardy, that meant music would play a prominent role, with few apologies for it being predominantly rap and containing explicit lyrics. “If you can’t handle it as an adult in downtown New York City, you can’t handle it,” Mr. Hardy says.

Oh, it is certainly possible to drink great Burgundy, eat great food and listen to head-banging music all at the same time--but the effect on your digestion is likely to be unfortunate. Every single place I have ever eaten where the music was aggressively bad in this way were, without exception, poor dining experiences. With all the kitchen staff bobbing away, who is actually paying attention to the food? That final sneering comment, “If you can’t handle it as an adult in downtown New York City, you can’t handle it,” is both condescending and tautological.

One of the songs mentioned as being particularly effective is this one, Wale’s “Lotus Flower Bomb.” I can't find a complete non-cover version on YouTube, but this brief excerpt might give you the idea:

Here is an interesting quote from the article:

“Light, color, sound, people, and food. If one of those is miscalibrated, you run amok,” says Sean Sullivan, a vice president at the parent company for Atlanta-based chef Ford Fry’s eclectic mix of 10 restaurants.

Notice the order: people and food come last. There is something deeply ironic going on here, I think. The culture has reached a point of considerable decline. People are more and more narcissistic and need a constant, glorifying soundtrack even when they are eating. The irony is that it seems that this narcissism is a kind of vacuum. Instead of sitting with friends talking about themselves, they need some kind of musical cues to tell them who they are and what sort of mood they should be in.

As a kind of finale, let's have a little Notorious B.I.G. to clear the palate:

A Beef and a Quiz

NewMusicBox has an essay up titled "The Dangers of Secondhand Music" that bemoans the ubiquitous presence of background music almost everywhere you go. That is certainly a beef I share! Yesterday I had lunch at a very fine restaurant in a very high-class hotel. The menu was original and creative and the preparation and presentation outstanding. The service was courteous and attentive. Everything was excellent. With one exception: there was a constant thumping, very bad, background music--just a bit too loud to be really in the background making it impossible to ignore. What was so bad about this music was its industrial quality. There were no vocals, it was just instrumental tracks that were vaguely like Electronic Dance Music, but without any trace of creativity. I would much have preferred regurgitated 60s hits! They brought a little comment form to the table, so I made sure to point out how horrible the music was. We will see if anyone takes note.

So that's the beef. Now the quiz. The Guardian has a quiz on the Beatles up on their site. Let's see how we do.

Well, I did pretty good with ten out of a possible thirteen correct. The average score is six. No fair looking anything up! I really had no idea what Stones song John and Paul sang backing vocals on, so I picked "I Wanna Be Your Man" because John and Paul wrote it and then gave it to the Stones to record. And I had no idea what song kept Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane from the number one spot. Anyway, a fairly fun quiz if you like that sort of thing.

I am tempted to do one of my quizes, but the last one so demoralized my readers that I'm afraid to! Maybe a really short one?

1. What is a "tam-tam"?
2. How many strings on a mid-16th century lute?
3. On Sylvius Leopold Weiss' lute?
4. What is the order of instrumental solos on Archie Bell and the Drells' 1968 hit "Tighten Up"?
5. What is "automatic double-tracking"?
6. What does MIDI stand for?
7. How many cents in a semitone?
8. Who was Janáček's muse?
9. What solo instrument did Chopin write for other than the piano?
10. Who wrote the longest string quartet ever composed?

Oh, darn, I think I came up with another really daunting one! All of these can be answered easily with Google, except maybe the last question, but it is really more fun to do without a search engine. Just like the New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle. In pen.

Bonne chance!

And some music to end with, a suite for Baroque lute by Sylvius Leopold Weiss. And no the illustration is not of a Baroque lute (that's a Renaissance lute) so you can't answer the question by counting the pegs:

UPDATE: Anyone want to have a go at the quiz? Or should I just put up the answers?

Restaurant Music

Now here's something odd. I was in a restaurant the other day--the kind that you could describe as a fashionable bistro striving for quality. They had a quite good menu with creative and interesting dishes, well-prepared. The service was attentive. I didn't sample, but the wine-list looked interesting and thoughtfully assembled. The layout of the restaurant was well-designed and they had some interesting antique furniture as well as quite a number of original paintings. So, on the whole a well-thought out experience. But guess what, the music was the kind of music that people who are oblivious to music think is good music. It was sort of a melange of easy-listening noodling and ambient soundscape. That is, music of no quality. True, it wasn't aggressively annoying the way music in so many places is. But the enormous divergence between the attention to quality everywhere else and the neglect of quality with the music was quite striking.

Only to me, though, I guess!

I think this might have been more appropriate:

The troubling thing is that many of the patrons might have been bothered by this music. In England, mall owners have resorted to playing classical music to drive away mobs of rowdy "youths". Here's the link to a story. There are examples of this in the US as well, here and here. Anne Midgette has a column on the phenomenon. In that column she mentions that, just as classical music can drive away the "great unwashed" it is suitable for "fine-dining establishments". But it may be the case that even in fine restaurants, classical music is no longer suitable as the sphere of classical listeners has shrunk to the point that even the affluent no longer are accustomed to it.

I'm an eccentric listener by most people's standards, I'm sure. First of all, I hate background music on principle. Probably a result of years of ear-training and listening tests, I can't NOT listen to music.  Background music is supposed to be ignored, but I always find myself listening to it unless I am in conversation. Since I do this, the kind of music that is popular for background music, the meandering, formless kind, I find particularly irritating.