Furniture music, in French musique d’ameublement, is the name Erik Satie gave from 1917 to pieces meant to be part of the surroundings, like furniture or wallpaper, rather than the centre of attention. He wrote three sets of these short, repetitive pieces for small ensembles between 1917 and 1923.
The best-known performance took place in Paris in 1920 at the Galerie Barbazanges, where pieces were played during the intervals of a comedy by Max Jacob, with Darius Milhaud among the performers. The audience was supposed to carry on chatting and moving about, but many people ignored the instruction and listened instead. The musicologist Caroline Potter has described the concept as a precursor of both minimalism and Muzak, and it is routinely cited as an ancestor of Brian Eno’s ambient music and, more distantly, of today’s background playlists for study and work.