Furniture Music for Airports: Erik Satie and Brian Eno reflect ont he music that best suits everyday life

Abstract

[EN] This paper considers ambient music in a comparative perspective. Taking the 1950s as a mirror time axis, I suggest comparing Erik Satie’s ideas on Furniture music (1920s) to Brian Eno’s notions of ambient music (1970s onwards). Both of them are closely related to the visual arts and that is why ambient music’s theoretical foundations can be compared to the functional art of the Bauhaus school and to American Minimalist and environmental art. This is an attempt to study the artistic side of ambient music, which has a wide scope of applications beyond the art sphere. In this respect, I will try to state the differences between ambient music as an art intermission in our everyday life and ambient music as a control device over human behaviour.