Walter Meyer writes:

>When my wife and I travelled through China in 1979, the trains had Chinese
>popular music and what I suspect was verbal propaganda continuously piped
>through the railway train, even into the private compartments, of which
>we occupied one.  The volume could be turned down but not off.  It was a
>24-hour trip from Beijing to Soochow.  Our Fodor travel guide suggested we
>simply rip out the wires if we wanted silence.

It's not much better in South Korea.  What should have been a pleasant
scenic boat ride down the Han River was rendered an endurance test by the
piping in of local pop music.  And for a society that produces so many
brilliant classical performers, there seems to be very little classical
music played; most of what I heard on my stay there seemed to be retreads
of Seventies disco or sentimental popular tunes.  No verbal propaganda,
though the spoken word would be a welcome relief.

On the other hand, there was a marvelous display of traditional Korean folk
music which was stunning in the complexity of its rhythmic structure and
use of percussive colors.

Bob Draper writes of Eno's "Music for Airports".  As I recall, Eno had
lamented that most conventional airport muzak actually made passengers
more anxious rather than calming them; his music was designed to rectify
that.  Personally, I've found that the most effective music for that
anxiety-reducing airport experience is - sorry, Bob - Mozart.  (And the
airlines seem to know this, for they pipe in a fair amount of it while
the plane is on the ground.)

Btw, are we about to witness the irresistible force of the trend toward
piping classical music into areas of juvenile congregation confronting
the immovable object of the PipeDown movement? Where do we stand when it's
"our" music that's being piped in?

 - seb