The Rise and Fall of Easy Listening
A look at the marketing and mockery of a genre on its 70th birthday.
By MARC MYERS June 22, 2015 6:19 p.m. ET
Easy-listening music and its maestros never had to worry about screaming teenage fans or long stadium tours. Ridiculed in the 1960s and since as “elevator music,” the gentle genre was marketed then as music for frazzled adults run ragged by the decade’s social upheavals, argumentative kids and rock’s blare. Unlike other forms of music, easy listening wasn’t meant to be analyzed or even heard. Instead, albums typically featured lush orchestras playing pop melodies at a slow tempo that subliminally freed minds from the clutches of anxiety and distraction.
Back in the 1960s and ’70s, easy-listening orchestras led by Mantovani, Bert Kaempfert, Ray Conniff and Percy Faith, among others, accomplished this with yawning violins, wandering trumpets and moody pianos playing in a style free of jarring moments or aesthetic calories. Today, given the music’s calming, reflective powers, many aging baby boomers are rediscovering the soothing sounds they once derided in their parents’ dens and station wagons.
Found now largely on satellite radio stations, easy-listening music has a long history that dates back 70 years to the end of World War II, when the government and the music industry sought to help returning soldiers relax as they rejoined families and society. The first easy-listening album was released to widespread popularity at the end of May 1945, and enjoyed strong sales almost immediately. Issued by Capitol Records, Paul Weston’s “Music for Dreaming” featured eight songs on four 78s, which today remain masterpieces of understated jazz-pop orchestration.
“Music for Dreaming” introduced a radical new genre of pop-instrumental music that quickly became known as “mood music.” Its precursors were the “Sweet” bands of the 1930s and early ’40s that served up a softer form of swing, and Glenn Miller and Claude Thornhill both developed distinctly mellow sounds for their prewar dance bands. Weston’s album, however, was the first created specifically to change the moods of audiences. Songs like “Don’t Blame Me,” “I’m in the Mood for Love” and “Rain” featured warm-milk string arrangements to prepare evening listeners for a good night’s sleep.
Weston’s instrumental album was recorded just as the federal government was looking into music’s powers to alter emotions. With World War II winding down in early 1945, military officials researched music’s ability to help recondition millions of veterans struggling with psychological disorders ranging from trauma and stress to anger-management and insomnia. In March 1945, the U.S. War Department issued Technical Bulletin 187 detailing a program on the use of music for reconditioning service members convalescing in Army hospitals.
Record labels looking for new niches to exploit sensed an opportunity. With the country in the thick of World War II in 1944, pop vocalists like Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford and Doris Day had been recording romantic ballads backed by lush orchestrations. Weston, who was signed to Capitol that year as the label’s chief producer and arranger, conceived an album of softly arranged instrumentals that relaxed listeners without the distraction of singers.
The success of Weston’s “Music for Dreaming” was immediate: By July 1945, it was No. 3 on Billboard’s pop album chart. But despite the album’s success, Weston put the mood concept on hold. In 1944, an album was merely a collection of 78s slipped into a binder that resembled a photo album. Listeners had no hope of enjoying more than a few minutes of music on each side before having to get up and turn over the record, which ran counter to Weston’s chill-out objective.
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