What kind of music do you listen to when you're reading? That's one question. My quick answer would be composers like Max Richter, whose lit credentials include the soundtracks to TV series based on Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers and Elena Ferrante's novels (My Brilliant Friend), or sometimes medieval choral music--something that accompanies the reading experience rather than distracts from it.
My serious musically-inclined friends would be appalled if I said that part out loud. The music is the experience, they would insist. It's not background noise. And they would, of course, be right, which is why I tend not to tell them about my music/reading habit. And I've never read a book during a live concert, so there's that.
But one of my favorite authors, Jonathan Coe, recently told the Guardian that he "takes himself off to a classical concert when he's stuck with his writing. Some authors walk it out, or nap to get around a mental brick wall, but for Coe, who at 63 is publishing his 15th novel, the experience of 'sitting there for two or three hours with your thoughts wandering, but in a disciplined way because the music is guiding them' can help resolve the toughest of literary puzzles. The process works particularly well, he adds mildly, at those concerts 'where you're not really into the music.' "
More than half of my work life was spent in music-infused retail environments, beginning with a supermarket job in the 1970s. To this day, I retain a distinct, spine-tingling memory of the butcher's band saw whining in counterpoint to Muzak. This is perhaps one reason why '60s flower children like myself remain a little bewildered. How could we psychologically process a catatonic string arrangement of "The Age of Aquarius," accompanied by steel cutting through flesh and bone?
Booksellers have a different relationship with music. Many, perhaps even most, bookshops have music playing in the background on the sales floor. Sometimes they host live performances by local musicians.
By the 1990s, when I became a bookseller, there were logical retail grounds for inflicting piped music on bookstore customers in the form of increased CD sales. Playing a select rotation of CDs--soft jazz or classical or folk, minimal words--not only fostered a certain aural calm, it also consistently sparked patron's interest, despite moments of confusion:
Customer: "What's that playing? Do you have the CD in stock?"
Me (listening closely for the first time in hours, having instinctively learned how to not hear the endless music loop): "That? It's... Let me check. (quick glance at CD cases by stereo) It's George Winston's Forest."
Customer: "I think it's beautiful. Don't you?"
Me: "Um, sure... Let me show you where to find it."
(Customer follows, whistling an unrecognizable tune in the spirit of George Winston.)
During the holiday season, we sold buckets of seasonally-appropriate CDs, thanks to a lush wave of piped Yuletide tunes, ranging from solemn to jolly, punctuated at regular intervals by our PA system's semi-desperate calls for assistance at the customer service stations. Now that was an odd bit of accompaniment to carols: "Oh, Holy night, the... 'We need help at the front service desk, please!' ...of our dear Savior's birth."
Music is still in the air at most bookstores I visit now, and I like the fact that not every shop feels compelled to play only quiet stuff, the piped music equivalent of library shushing. While few bookstores would get away with cranking the volume to 11, the range of music played in-store expanded admirably, even as CD sales lost their bookstore lives.
Music has many bookshop applications. On social media, #BookTok rules. At this year's TikTok Book Awards U.K. and Ireland, Melissa McFarlane, operations manager at TikTok U.K. & Nordics, said: "This year's longlist was a true celebration of what makes the BookTok ecosystem unique, from romantasy epics to our much-loved local book shops.... It has been humbling to see the impact this community of book lovers is having not only on the sales and discovery of books, but the lives of new authors and young readers. We cannot wait to see what the future has in store for literature fans everywhere!"
But bookstore videos on every platform almost require a soundtrack, whether the subject is a bookseller cat (Ratty Books, Jeffersonville, N.Y.), finding your soulmate, '80s style (Bookish, Modesto, Calif.), a rainy day (Black Cat Books & Oddities, Medina, Ohio), or enhancing your Halloween spirit with "Bad Reputation" (Bleak House Books, Honeoye Falls, N.Y.).
And speaking of Joan Jett, the Booksmiths, Danbury, Conn., posted a pre-work musical observation on Instagram: "Even before work, Saw this on my way into work. Be yourself. Yeah. I was blasting Joan Jett and rocking it out with myself. I love this song 🎵."
Where else am I hearing bookstore music lately? Well, to showcase events at Loyalty Bookstore, Washington, D.C., and Belmont Bookshop, Belmont, N.C.
The most popular option, logically enough, is to use music to accompany book recommendations. Among the stores doing so recently were the Pretty Posy, Overland Park, Kan., Ink & Paper Bookstore, Cazenovia, N.Y., Urban Reads Bookstore, Baltimore, Md., the Family Bookshop, Deland, Fla., Chapter Book Lounge, Noblesville, Ind., and Betty's Books, Webster Groves, Mo.
What does the future hold? Who knows, but I bet it will have something to do with Artificial Intelligence (not a big stretch as predictions go). Do I hear somebody queuing up "Daisy" from 2001: A Space Odyssey?