🎶 What Lift Music Has to Do with Ambient House — and Why You Should Listen to It the Morning After | iServalan | Continuum Approach

   This essay accompanies an audio episode from iServalan and forms part of a wider approach to learning music through listening, movement, and attention.

 🎶 In Defence of Lift Music: Regulation, Honesty, and the Sound That Stayed

Before we talk about taste,
before we talk about credibility,
before we talk about whether something is “serious” music —

we should listen.

Because lift music was never asking to be admired.
It was asking to help.

Lift music — also called elevator music, background music, or later, Muzak — did not begin as a genre in the artistic sense. It began as a regulatory tool. A response to a new kind of human problem: being suspended, briefly and repeatedly, in small enclosed spaces with strangers. How absolutely terrifying.

Early twentieth-century buildings grew upwards faster than social customs adapted. Elevators introduced pauses where there had previously been movement. Silence in those moments created tension — not dramatic fear, but low-level unease.

The solution was sound that softened the nervous system.

Not exciting sound.
Not expressive sound.
But sound that reduced exposure.

This is regulation.

Long before the language of music therapy entered the mainstream, lift music was already doing therapeutic work. Its steady tempos, predictable harmonies, gentle dynamics, and lack of sudden change were not accidents or signs of incompetence. They were carefully chosen features designed to keep the body calm.

Lift music does not ask for attention.
It gives us safety.

This is one reason it has been so persistently misunderstood. We are used to valuing music for what it expresses. How it gyrates on a stage. Lift music values what it contains.

It mirrors a very human need: the need to exist without the pressure required to perform.

In this sense, lift music is profoundly honest. It does not pretend to be profound. It does not disguise itself as rebellion or innovation. It accepts its role as environmental sound — as a soft buffer between individuals and the world.

When Brian Eno later described ambient music as “as ignorable as it is interesting,” he articulated something lift music had already been practising quietly for decades. The difference was not musical, but cultural. Ambient music arrived framed as art. Lift music arrived framed as service.

And framing matters.

What we later celebrate in ambient house, downtempo electronica, Café del Mar compilations, and even lo-fi hip hop playlists — repetition, warmth, emotional neutrality, gentle looping — is structurally similar to what lift music was designed to do.

The same qualities are now openly discussed in therapeutic contexts.

Sound for grounding.
Sound for emotional containment.
Sound that reduces cognitive load.

Sound for the afterparty 

When these sounds appear in clinical or wellness settings, they are called supportive. When they appear in corporate spaces, they are called manipulative. The sound itself has not changed. Only our assumptions have. 

OK, I will concede somewhat, there are probably some stylised production techniques are used for more popular and commercial music.

And yes, lift music is often criticised for lacking emotion. But that criticism misunderstands its relationship to humanity. Lift music does not project emotion. It reflects the listener’s state back at them without interference.

If you are anxious, it steadies you.
If you are calm, it stays out of the way.

That is not emptiness.
That is restraint.

In a world where music is increasingly expected to brand identity, assert mood, and demand attention, lift music stands almost alone in refusing to do so. It does not insist on meaning. It does not escalate. It does not climax.

It mirrors a quieter truth about human life: that much of it happens in between moments. Waiting. Passing. Pausing.

And perhaps this is why lift music endures.

Not because it is powerful,
but because it is kind.

Not because it is expressive,
but because it is regulatory.

Lift music does not ask who you are.
It allows you to be there.

And in an age of constant stimulation, that honesty may be its greatest contribution of all.

🎹 The Piano: Naming the Structure, Entering the Architecture | iServalan | Continuum Approach

   This essay accompanies an audio episode from iServalan and forms part of a wider approach to learning music through listening, movement, and attention.

🎹 The Piano: Naming the Structure, Entering the Architecture

Before we talk about repertoire,
before we talk about grades,
before we talk about whether the piano is a “beginner’s instrument” —

we meet it properly.

Because the piano is not something you hold.
It is something you enter.

And to enter it with confidence,
we need shared language.

Not memorised.
Not examined.
Simply known.

So when I name something,
you know where we are.

The Body of the Piano

Let’s begin at the point of contact.

The keyboard.

A row of keys — black and white —
balanced levers rather than buttons.

Each key is a length of wood, weighted and hinged,
designed to travel down and return up with consistency.

Beneath the keys is the keybed,
the foundation that holds the keyboard steady,
allowing repetition, reliability, trust.

When a key is pressed, it sets a mechanism in motion —
the action.

This is the heart of the piano.

The action is a system of joints, levers, and felt,
translating finger movement into sound
with astonishing precision.

The hammers sit at the far end of this system,
felt-covered and carefully shaped,
striking the strings and immediately rebounding.

They do not stay on the string.
They touch and release.

The strings themselves are stretched across a heavy metal frame,
grouped in twos and threes for most notes,
thicker and fewer in the bass,
thinner and more numerous as the pitch rises.

These strings rest on bridges,
which transfer vibration into the soundboard.

The soundboard is the piano’s voice.

A broad, resonant wooden surface
that takes the small vibration of strings
and turns it into something that fills a room.

Above all of this sits the lid,
which can be closed, opened partway, or fully raised,
not to make the piano louder,
but to shape how the sound travels outward.

Below, at the feet, are the pedals.

The sustain pedal allows sound to continue after the keys are released.
The soft pedal shifts the action to change colour and weight.
The middle pedal, where present, selectively holds sound.

You don’t need to remember all of this at once.

You only need to recognise that this is not a simple instrument.

It is a contained architecture of time, weight, and resonance.

Sitting at the Piano

The piano does not ask you to wrap yourself around it.
It asks you to arrive.

Your bench should allow your feet to rest fully on the floor.
Your thighs should slope gently downward.
Your spine is upright but unforced.

You are not leaning into the keyboard.
You are meeting it.

Your arms hang from your shoulders.
Your hands are carried, not held.

This is not an instrument for gripping.
It is an instrument for balance.

Taking Up Space: The Horizontal Orb

Unlike string instruments,
the piano opens sideways.

Imagine an orb around you —
wide now,
stretching from left to right.

Your shoulders belong to this orb.
Your elbows.
Your forearms.
The arc your hands travel across the keyboard.

Nothing should feel cramped.
Nothing should feel hurried.

The piano does not reward collapse.
It rewards presence across width.

If you shrink inward,
the sound narrows.

So you allow yourself space.

Quietly.
Without performance.
Without apology.

You are allowed to sit here.

What Comes Next

Now — and only now —
do we have what we need.

Not scales.
Not pieces.

But orientation.

A named structure.
A balanced seat.
An architecture entered with calm.

Now we can make a sound.

And when that sound arrives,
it arrives supported.

---

©2025 Sarnia de la Mare 

Why does my music teacher insist on slow practice? | iServalan | Digital Conservatoire

Why Slow Practice Is Crucial to Excellence

......and is often misunderstood.

It is sometimes framed as remedial, cautious, or something you endure until you are “good enough” to go faster. And it is, in many ways, all of those things. But the advantages of purposeful slowing down cannot be underestimated.

When you slow a passage down, you are not merely reducing speed. You are changing how the brain experiences the music. Gaps appear where none existed before. Tiny weaknesses are now revealed and can be adjusted. Transitions become visible. Movements that once blurred together can now be felt individually. "What am I doing wrong?".... becomes "now I can solve this little thing I do which I am not happy with."

This is why slow practice is used by elite performers across disciplines — not because they lack skill, but because they understand how learning consolidates.

Fast practice relies heavily on momentum. Slow practice relies on awareness.

Slowing teaches you how to breath the music. 

There is a crucial difference between muscle memory and narrative memory. Muscle memory allows the body to repeat actions. Narrative memory allows the brain to understand why one action leads to another. Slow practice builds the latter.

Glenn Gould was famously meticulous about tempo in the practice room, often working at speeds far removed from performance. He understood that speed, when it arrives too early, conceals instability rather than resolving it.

This approach aligns closely with the Suzuki principle, though it is often misunderstood. The goal is not perfection through discipline, but fluency through familiarity. When the body knows what comes next without anxiety, speed emerges naturally, inevitabley. Listening and predicting add an advantage to players that put them ahead of the novice.

Speed is not something you add like a condiment.
It is something that appears when nothing is in the way.

Slow practice is not about being fearful and should never be shamed.
It is about giving the music time to organise itself in the mind and the body.

Speed runs the risk of hiding mistakes which then become learned and embedded, the mistake is now an irreversible habit. This is fatal for exams and performances.

This is especially important for children and neurodiverse students who should be led by the slow example well before flashy, nimble virtuosity.