Easy listening is a popular music genre and radio format that was most popular during the 1950s to 1970s. It is related to middle-of-the-road music and encompasses instrumental recordings of standards, hit songs, non-rock vocals and instrumental covers of selected popular rock songs. It mostly concentrates on music that pre-dates the rock n' roll era, characteristically on music from the 1940s and 1950s. It was differentiated from the mostly instrumental beautiful music format by its variety of styles, including a percentage of vocals, arrangements and tempos to fit various parts of the broadcast day. Easy listening music is often confused with elevator music, or lounge music, but while it was popular in some of the same venues it was meant to be listened to for enjoyment rather than as background sound.
History
The style has been synonymous with the tag "with strings". String instruments had been used in sweet bands in the 1930s and was the dominant sound track to movies of Hollywood's Golden Age. In the 1940s and 1950s strings had been used in jazz and popular music contexts. As examples in the jazz genre, there are the post-World War II recordings of Charlie Parker and the 1955 recordings of Clifford Brown and Helen Merrill. Early examples of practitioner in the popular context were Dinah Washington in 1951, and Jackie Gleason in 1952. In the 1950s the use of strings quickly became a main feature of the developing easy listening genre. Gleason, a master at this genre, whose first ten albums went Gold, expressed the goal of producing "musical wallpaper that should never be intrusive, but conducive". Similarly, in 1956 John Serry Sr. sought to utilize the accordion within the context of a jazz sextet in order to create a soothing mood ideally suited for "low pressure" listening on his album Squeeze Play. Jerry Murad also contributed to the music, including a variety of types of harmonica.
Reception
The magazines Billboard and Record World featured easy listening singles in independently audited record charts. Generally 40 positions in length, they charted airplay on stations such as WNEW, New York City, WWEZ, Cincinnati, and KMPC, Los Angeles. Record World began their listings January 29, 1967 and ended these charts in the early 1970s. Billboards Easy Listening chart morphed into the Adult Contemporary chart in 1979, and continues to this day. During the format's heyday in the 1960s, it was not at all uncommon for easy listening instrumental singles to reach the top of the charts on the Billboard Hot 100. Beautiful music, which grew up alongside easy listening music, had rigid standards for instrumentation, e.g., few or no saxophones, and restrictions on how many vocal pieces could be played in an hour. The easy listening radio format has been generally, but not completely, superseded by the soft adult contemporary format. According to the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, "The public prominence and profitability of easy listening led to its close association with the so-called 'Establishment' that would eventually be demonized by the rockcounterculture." In , rock criticRobert Christgau said "semiclassical music is a systematic dilution of highbrow preferences".
