In the program "Historically yours" on Europe 1 this Friday, the journalist David Castello-Lopes looks back on the origin of elevator music, this background music so often despised to the point of becoming today an insult.

>> Every day in 

Historically yours

, David Castello-Lopes looks back on the origins of an object or a concept.

This Friday, he focuses on the famous elevator music, with a sound as recognizable as it is unloved.

>> Find all the shows of Matthieu Noël and Stéphane Bern in replay and podcast here

Jazz without contours

“Imagine that you have never heard the expression elevator music in your life and that you are hearing it for the first time. You are going to say to yourself, 'Elevator music is the music that plays in elevators' and there you have it, it's neutral. But in fact no, elevator music today is an insult that designates a certain type of music, which we have difficulty defining exactly but we recognize everything immediately when you hear it.

Elevator music is generally jazz, but jazz without contours and with a personality that is always the same.

That is, if the elevator music was someone it would be a kind but boring person, a person who agrees with everything you say all the time, even if you say Nazi things .

Music despised but difficult to make

What is sad is that it is despised music but also difficult to make.

It's filled with super complicated chords, expert guitar solos.

And me it always seemed unfair to me that so much musical professionalism gives rise to so much contempt on the part of the public.

Especially since I have always asked myself: do we despise elevator music because it's fundamentally bad music?

Or do we despise it because our judgment has been contaminated by the circumstances in which we have always heard it?

That is to say in elevators or while waiting for the banker to answer the phone.

If every time I played Bach you would prick your eyes with a little fork, you would end up hating Bach even when I didn't prick your eyes.

Music that owes its appearance to that of skyscrapers

What I do know, however, is where the elevator music comes from.

And I'm going to ask you the question: what was decisive in your opinion in the development of elevator music?

Well, the existence of elevators of course, and more particularly the appearance at the beginning of the 20th century in the United States of the first skyscrapers with elevators in which we stayed for a long time.

And maybe also in which we were a little stressed, because it was the beginning of these vertiginous buildings and it is not reassuring to be in a box that rises 300 meters above the ground at 20 km / hour.

And what is it nice to do when you're waiting or stressed?

Listening to music that makes us wait without being too noticed.

An American company that has been very successful

In the early 1930s, an American company specializing in sound began to offer background music to public places.

This company is called Muzak because of the music on the one hand of course, but also because the founder of the company thought that Kodak was too cool as a name.

So he made a fusion between music and Kodak… and it gave Muzak.

And Muzak immediately had a crazy success, not only in elevators but also more generally in stores, banks etc ... To the point that Muzak today in the United States has become a common name which designates what we call elevator music.

It's like Mobilette or Kleenex.

The turning point of the 1940s

But there is an important turning point in background music: it was in the 1940s, when Muzak stopped relying on elevators and started selling music to companies to increase employee productivity, by based on questionable scientific studies full of super accurate but not very true psychological graphs.

But it still worked.

A lot of companies around the world, especially in the 1950s to 1970s, bought productivity Muzaks because they were convinced that it made them money, because it increased the productivity of employees and in particular. of those who did repetitive tasks.

Muzak has since gone bankrupt because they still missed a turning point.

And this turning point, it is the one which consisted quite simply in playing well-known pieces in the elevators, like Katy Perry or the Beatles, in the place of this kind of learned jazz but soft of the knee. "