Furniture therapy - Opening movements

Salé, Morocco. A child watches from above as prayers are held in the square. Photograph: Jalal Morchidi/EPA. Source.

For the last few years I’ve been giving serious thought to the meaning of the term therapy.

Here’s an example, from an article I wrote in 2022 titled How do you touch an impossible thing?;

‘If a leaf falls from a tree in autumn and, by decaying, feeds the soil, can we say that this is an act of therapeutic touch? If not, why not? Because therapeutic touch only applies to humans, we might say. But is this true? Surely, it is therapeutic when our pet dog senses some unhappiness in us and rests its head on our knee? Ah yes, but does the dog intend to act therapeutically? Surely, for touch to be therapeutic, it must be intentional? However, is this also true? Don't many acts of therapy happen when we touch someone without us knowing or intending their effects? So if we cannot think of therapeutic touch as exclusively human or intentional, is there anything—beyond the obvious differences in kind—that differentiates a massage technique like petrissage from a leaf falling from a tree? In other words, are they different ontologically? And why does this matter?’ (Nicholls, 2022).

I’ve felt for a long time that therapy is a much bigger concept than physiotherapists, psychotherapists and beauty therapists allow. But how much bigger? How wide and how deep does it go? Can anything be considered a therapist? Is therapy a quality present in every process throughout the cosmos, or is it a specific event that manifests at specific times? If it’s not, and it’s specific to certain conditions, where do we draw the line, and why?

Answer me this, for instance: if I manually inflate the lungs of a paralysed and sedated patient, am I — Dave — the therapeutic agent, or should that honour go to the Ambu bag that I’m using? Is the air itself the therapist — forcing the airways open and re-inflating the lung segment — or is the therapy actually a latent property of the lung tissues themselves; a potential waiting to be realised?

These are not trivial questions, because so much of the caring, healing, reparative, and therapeutic work that goes on in the world is based on some assumptions about what is doing the work and how. But what if all of these assumptions are wrong?

In my own profession — physiotherapy — there are two words that are central to the discipline — physical and therapy — and neither of these have really ever received serious critical scrutiny.

My unholy mission is to change that.

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Thinking about these questions has led me to some interesting places, some of which I’ve explored here on ParaDoxa.

I’ve tried to remain open to the possibility that my answer to the problem of what therapy is could be found anywhere. So I’ve sought inspiration from lots of different places: gardening, woodworking, cooking, architecture, literature, walking and swimming…

A few years ago I started thinking about music. And this is where the idea of furniture therapy comes from.

Furniture therapy is my play on Eric Satie’s idea of musique d’ameublement, or furniture music.

As I try to unpack furniture music over the next few weeks, I hope you’ll be able to see how it might relate to my quest to transform the way we think about therapy.

Furniture music

Satie developed his idea of furniture, or wallpaper, music in the early 1900s during a meal with a friend. Satie took exception to some “unbearable, vulgar music” being played nearby.

Listening to the showiness and grandiloquence of the musicians, Satie realised he wanted something different. There needed to be a place, he thought, for a kind of music that wasn’t heroic, bombastic or demonstrative, and didn’t force itself upon you, but instead contributed to the atmosphere and softened the harsh noises of a noisy world.

For much of the previous three centuries, classical music had been written to impress. Composers were trained to write music that demanded one’s attention. The symphonic styles of Beethoven, Berlioz, and Brahms, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner were meant to move you, affect you emotionally, shock and to delight you.

Concert music had become its own performance, with special programs of works given in concert halls in front of largely silent, attentive, well dressed, paying audiences.

Satie, instead, wanted something that was functional, like furniture. He thought there ought to be a kind of music that was mobile, adjustable and compossible.

He wanted a music that could blend into its environment and reflect its ambience. More than this, he wanted a music that brought the background forward; made the context part of the music. This was music as background.

Going completely against convention, Satie began composing pieces to be ignored.

He wanted his pieces to take second place to some other activity. And he actively discouraged people from listening to them.

He championed compositions that had no artistic value whatsoever, something that caused consternation amongst the music community at the time.

Crucially though, he still saw a place for composition and careful use of music to save people from the banalities of everyday life. But his music was designed to furnish people’s silences, not drown it out. His ideal was of a music that, as Brian Eno described many years later, was as interesting as it was ignorable.

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One of Satie’s earliest experiments in furniture music — the brilliantly titled Carrelage Phonique, or acoustic tiling¹ — involved six musicians repeating a phrase of only two melodic lines. It produces an incessant, almost meditative effect. There is nothing tonically interesting here; nothing stands out. On purpose.

Another of his pieces, Vexations, has the same piano refrain repeated 840 times. The first and, perhaps, only live performance of Vexations was by John Cage in the 1960s and took 12 pianists working in shifts to complete. In the surrealist spirit of the age, audience members were given refunds off the ticket price for ever 20 minutes they endured. The video below shows Cage on the 1963 American game show I’ve got a secret where he plays the refrain and handles everyone’s bemusement with lofty disdain.

This all sounds very amusing and cerebral I know, but what Satie didn’t realise was that furniture music would have a profound effect on the music we listen to today.

Ambient music, film music, and the Muzak we hear in shopping malls all derive from furniture music.

This is music to be consumed passively.

Ambient music today works best when it is “like air conditioning or the colour of a wall”, Brian Eno said. It should be innocuous, unassuming, relaxed and spacious.

‘Furniture music creates vibrations: it has no other aims; it fulfils the same role as light, heat and comfort in all its forms’ Link

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Perhaps you can already see where I’m going with this and how the idea of furniture music relates to a different understanding of therapy.

Before I get to talking specifically about furniture therapy though, I want to unpack a little bit about the concept itself and, specifically, some of the ways it has informed future music and philosophy over the last 100 years.

More of that then next week.

Reference

Nicholls, D.A. (2022). How do you touch an impossible thing? Frontiers in Rehabilitation Sciences. 10.3389/fresc.2022.934698 Link

1. Satie gave some fantastically banal names to his compositions, including Tapisserie en fer forgé (Tapestry in Wrought Iron), Embryons desséchés (Desiccated Embryos), Véritables préludes flasques pour un chien (Truly Flabby Preludes for a Dog), and Trois morceaux en forme de poire (Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear).