Light instrumental music considered “easy listening.” It is played not only in elevators but shopping malls, grocery stores, doctor’s offices, telephone systems (when the caller is on hold), and similar venues. Simple and unobtrusive, it serves purely as a background. It is also called Muzak, because the Muzak Corporation originally supplied such music. The New Yorker magazine (April 10, 2006) carried a piece by David Owen entitled “The Soundtrack of Your Life,” describing the matching of such music to the venues where it is played.

To meet the consequences of one’s bad behavior, mistakes, and the like; to confront difficulties bravely. This term, American in origin, is believed to come from the theater and refers to the orchestra in the pit, which an actor must face along with a perhaps hostile audience. Another writer suggests it comes from the armed services, where a soldier’s dismissal in disgrace might be accompanied by the band’s playing the “Rogue’s March.” An 1871 book of American sayings quotes James Fenimore Cooper discussing, about 1851, Rabelais’s “unpleasant quarter [of an hour],” when the French writer found he could not pay his bill and turned on the innkeeper with an accusation of treason, which so frightened him that he let Rabelais leave without paying. Cooper said that “our more picturesque people” called this facing the music. A less picturesque synonym is to face up to something.