CHAPTER TWELVE: ESSENCE, HISTORY, AND BEAUTY

CHAPTER TWELVE: ESSENCE, HISTORY, AND BEAUTY

The Music’s Essence

If one of the thrusts of Cage’s thought on the subject was that “Everything we do is music” (implying that at the least, music is a form of human activity), the development of recording and playback technology has produced an opposing idea: nowadays, it seems, we do not have to do anything to participate in music, other than put on a record and take in the sound passively – and such passive listening is certainly one level of activity for which Eno’s music is intended.

What is the ontological status of what may seem to be increasingly non-human forms of music – music that is neither performed nor heard actively in any conventional sense? At what level is the human element operative? In much of Eno’s music, deeply ingrained notions of competence, practice, and virtuosity (or “athleticism,” to use Nettl’s term) do not apply – or do they? Eno may have been eager to admit his instrumental incompetence, but in the studio, he sits at the center of a sophisticated body of music-making machinery, just as the traditional composer does when writing for an orchestra, and in both cases what the mind is able to conceive and the ear hear is the result of training and discipline as well as imagination.

Recording technology has made all musics seem equal: you put your LP, cassette, or CD on to the stereo, and there it is. But is that all there is to it? What went into the making of this or that music? And with the results coming out of the loudspeakers, does it matter? If for some people it does not matter, there are certainly many for whom it does. Bryan Ferry, the leader of Roxy Music, with whom Eno had collaborated between 1971 and 1973, was to say years later (“with a polite sniff,” according to the chronicler), “You see, Eno is a very clever fellow, but he’s not really a musician. He doesn’t know how to play anything. All he can do is manipulate those machines of his. What he does, he does very well, but it’s necessarily limited music, I think.”⁴⁰⁶

If Eno’s non-musicianship was a stumbling block for Ferry, others may have qualms about whether sound that is made totally in the studio and often impossible to reproduce live should be called music at all. Eno himself has his doubts on this point, as we have seen. To use a current manner of speaking, if music is a real-time activity among cooperating humans producing real-time results, then much of what Eno has done with sound is indeed not music, but some new, different form of art. On the other hand, a good deal of time must be spent by any contemporary keyboardist or electric guitarist simply assessing and mastering technological possibilities, articles and advertisements in current musicians’ magazines put so much emphasis on equipment – analog and digital synthesizers, MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), computers, tape recorders, effects devices – that an advertisement which announces, “The major in Music Synthesis at Berklee emphasizes ‘real-time’ performance skills” can seem something of an anomaly.⁴⁰⁷

Eno has been involved in a broad range of music-making activities of many different types. At one end of the spectrum are his live performances with other musicians – Roxy Music, Robert Fripp, the Winkies, 801, and others. In the middle are his studio collaborations on rock and ambient music albums. At the other end are his solo ambient records, particularly the title track of Discreet Music” – a piece that was made almost accidentally, automatically, while Eno was running around the house devoting his attention to other things. Seen as a whole, Eno’s work prescribes no single answer to the question of what music is at the level of its making.

A slightly different angle on the ontological question can be drawn by asking where a particular kind of music exists along the line between composed and improvised forms. Different cultures and sub-cultures invest composition and improvisation with various kinds of value. For the most part, improvisation is currently held in low esteem by traditional art music composers and audiences – it may be a nice idea to think about, but few actually do it, on the other hand, for jazz musicians, and for rock musicians to a lesser extent, it is a way of life.⁴⁰⁸ We may think we know the difference between improvisation and composition, but in fact the two concepts are by no means mutually exclusive. Composition in the traditional sense can be seen as a kind of improvisation in ultra-slow motion, conversely, even when improvising “freely,” musicians are usually operating within more or less fixed stylistic, formal, textural, “compositional” limits – improvising is composing in real-time.

Eno has made music occupying various segments along the line between composition and improvisation. The structure of a piece like “2/1” from Music for Airports is compositionally pre-determined down to the last detail, once the tape loops have been made and set in motion. In many other pieces, he used raw materials generated in a quasi-improvisational setting and then shaped them in the studio according to his empirical methods of timbral treatment, textural experimentation, and editing. Still other pieces, like some of the instrumental tracks on Another Green World, seem to be relatively untreated recordings of free collective improvisations within certain prescribed limits. And in some of his collaborations with Fripp, such as “The Heavenly Music Corporation,” once the tape recorders were turned on, both musicians simply played with the variables, whether this meant spontaneously producing certain kinds of melody in a given tonal framework or making alterations along the signal-delay path. Improvised music is ever open to the criticism – and to the very real threat – that the musicians are “just noodling around,” simply running on automatic. But in most of Eno’s works involving one or another forms of improvisation, we can perceive the active involvement of discerning intelligence in a real-time process.

Insofar as the question of music’s essence can be posed at the level of the social context in which music functions, Eno’s work again provides a range of answers. Live performance in front of concert audiences has been a part of his career, if a fairly small one. His audio-visual installations take on the character of art exhibits when set up in galleries, and of background ambiance in airports. Finally, his progressive rock and ambient music albums find their primary social context on the home stereo system, where they can function as decorative or fine art, depending on the inclination of the user. Eno does not flinch when asked to comment on the criticism that some of his works seem to be “merely decorative”:

I find it revealing that Kandinsky acquired the licence for what he was doing in 1912-15 through having had a background in the decorative arts – his fairy-tales, illustrations, Jugendstil, mythologies, and so on. In those contexts you’re allowed to be fanciful and brightly coloured without having to defend it. In a way it was decorative art, and decorative art has an enviable freedom in some respects.⁴⁰⁹

It may be a bit facile to say that music is what people think it is, yet thinking about it – theoretically, ontologically, historically, aesthetically – is undeniably part and parcel of the musical experience.⁴¹⁰ Eno, in a steady stream of liner notes, interviews, and articles, has provided a continuous flow of theorizing about his own music, and some knowledge of this theorizing can indeed add to the listener’s appreciation of the music itself. In a fundamental way, however, the music is able to, and does, speak for itself. Theorists have always made a supplemental exegetical exercise out of translating musical symbols, whether heard or written, into non-musical ideas, typically involving some combination of verbal language and mathematics. Music theory as a sort of exalted numbers game has a long history, stretching back to Pythagoras’s calculation of interval ratios, running through Renaissance enthusiasm with regard to the niceties of diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic genera, through Enlightenment reduction of harmonic phenomena to functional root progressions, to Schenkerian voice-leading graphs and set-complex theory in the present century. Eno has been more inclined to theorize about music-making processes than about musical materials per se, but when he plans compositions around the idea of layers of synchronized or non-synchronized cycles of events – and speaks to the press about it – he is contributing to the ongoing Western music theory tradition, however marginally aware he may be of that tradition.

Yet the theoretical tradition has had little direct impact on the way most people perceive music. Although theory and analysis certainly represent a continuous conversation – and probably an indispensable one – in the totality of the world’s musical discourse, I doubt whether a precise measurement of the tape-loop lengths of Eno’s “2/1” is likely to hold any greater sway over most listeners’ reaction to the sounding surface than is an explanation of the operation of tone row forms in Webern’s Symphony, Op. 21. A suggestion that recurring cyles underlie the piece’s structure is enough, and Eno knows it.