Easy listening12/28/2022 ![]() Some symphonies were specifically founded for playing predominantly popular music, such as the Boston Pops Orchestra. During the 1960s, a number of orchestral settings were made for songs written by the Beatles, including symphonic performances of " Yesterday" by orchestras. Many pop arrangers and producers worked orchestral pop into their artists' releases, including George Martin and his strings arrangements with the Beatles, and John Barry for his scores to the James Bond films. During the 1960s, pop music on radio and in both American and British film moved away from refined Tin Pan Alley to more eccentric songwriting and incorporated reverb-drenched rock guitar, symphonic strings, and horns played by groups of properly arranged and rehearsed studio musicians. According to AllMusic, it refers to popular music that has been arranged and performed by a symphonic orchestra. Orchestral pop is a more challenging form of easy listening. This practice was known as storecasting and was very common on the FM dial in the 1940s and 1950s. EASY LISTENING FREEIt often functioned as a free background music service for stores, with commercial breaks consisting only of announcements aimed at shoppers already in the stores. ![]() It remains one of the most popular radio formats of all time.Ī precursor to Easy Listening initially offered soft and unobtrusive instrumental selections on a very structured schedule with limited commercial interruptions. An attempt by Whitaker and his partner Lynn Christian, formerly GM of WPIX FM, to revive the original format in the late 1990s was unsuccessful because of problems with delivery. It later became known as Adult Contemporary, and this signaled an end to the instrumental content of the format. The format was emulated by many syndicated programmers (including Whitaker himself) and became the most popular format in FM radio nationwide. ![]() WPIX FM also quickly became the top-rated FM radio station in New York and ranked among the top five of all stations, AM and FM, with adults 25–49 from 1964 through 1968. Whitaker had designed the format as program director of KODA FM in Houston, where it achieved top ratings in that market. ![]() The format was developed by Charlie Whitaker, Program Director of the New York Daily News' station, broadcasting from the "Pix Penthouse" in the Daily News Building. The name "easy listening" was used by Claude Hall, radio-TV editor of Billboard magazine to describe the sound of WPIX-FM in New York. ![]() Vocals have been provided by popular artists such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Matt Monro, Henry Mancini, Jack Jones, Vic Damone, Barbra Streisand, Vikki Carr, Dionne Warwick, Nancy Wilson and others, and vocal groups or duos such as The Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel, The 5th Dimension, Harpers Bizarre, The Lettermen and The Sandpipers. Orchestras and groups include Percy Faith, André Kostelanetz, The Melachrino Strings, The 101 Strings, Herb Alpert, Stan Getz, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Paul Mauriat. 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 day parts during the broadcast day.Įasy listening music is often confused with so-called elevator music provided by Muzak Holdings and other music services for malls and elevators, or lounge music, but while it was popular in some of the same venues it bore only modest resemblance to the background sound of this kind of music.Ī significant portion of easy listening music is purely instrumental and included some big band and orchestral arrangements of standards, themes from movies, bossa nova hits and small instrumental ensembles playing instrumental versions of popular songs, including light jazz and even some soft rock. It is related to middle-of-the-road (MOR) music and encompasses instrumental recordings of standards, hit songs and popular non- rock vocals. Easy listening (also known as orchestral pop) is a popular music genre and radio format that was most popular during the 1950s to 1970s. ![]()
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