Brian eno his music and the vertical color of sound

The Music’s History

In one form or another, the image of technology is a central icon in contemporary culture, and that image has profoundly affected the ways in which music is perceived, used, and thought about.⁴¹¹ Brian Eno can be singled out as a musician who has taken serious stock of technology’s position in the world, and of his position vis-à-vis technology. With his eclectic background in conceptual art, progressive rock, and tape manipulation, he was particularly qualified to do so, and was able to approach technological resources in a fresh new way, lending his own musical tastes and sensibilities to the process.

Where exactly does Eno stand in the history of electronically produced and distributed music? In Chapter 1, I brought up some of the conceptual issues involved in attempts to distinguish popular from art music, and concluded that there was little point in trying to assign Eno’s music to either category. Here I would sum up the contribution of Eno’s music to both mega-genres, and suggest that he is among the musicians who have done much to obscure or erase the distinction between them.

After the invention of magnetic recording tape, early experiments in electronic music in France and Germany in the 1940s and 1950s took on an aura of rarefied research. Composers were entranced with the possibilities of making new sounds and manipulating them on tape, new aesthetic realms seemed to open up, and the last thing these composers wanted to do was to produce music that sounded in any way conventional. For several years approaches to the new tools were split along national lines – the Germans with their purely electronically generated music, the French with their musique concrète consisting of manipulated found sounds. An American – John Cage – was taking a different approach, with his strange, irreverent performance pieces in which radios were tuned randomly. Another American, Milton Babbitt, was less interested in the newly revealed timbral universe than in the fact that working with oscillators, filters, and tape enabled him to create precisely planned, complex rhythmic and pitch structures beyond the abilities of mere human musicians to play.

Thus from its very beginnings, electronic music, though often considered as a single category, never implied a single aesthetic, a single kind of sounding surface, nor a particular philosophy of music-making. Electronic music is not something in itself, it is something different people use for different purposes. Echoes of many of the early approaches can be heard in Eno’s work. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Junglinge (1956), with its treated voices that bleed imperceptibly into electronically produced sounds, has parallels in Eno’s continual search for a blend of the recognizable and the other-worldly.⁴¹² Edgar Varèse’s Poème electronique, a spatial installation in Le Corbusier’s Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958, used four hundred loudspeakers and was combined, in a non-synchronized way, with visual projections of photographs, paintings, montages, and printed and written phrases – a total environment, in short, very reminiscent of Eno’s later audio-visual installations. I have already discussed at length Cage’s influence on Eno, and here would stress only the element of playful conceptual experimentation so evident in both composers’ work with electronics. Babbitt’s electronic serialism constitutes a “system” whose intellectual properties Eno might well admire: Eno, too, has made pieces that almost seem to write themselves once certain structural parameters are laid down. But aesthetically, Eno and Babbit are poles apart.

In the 1960s, approaches to electronic music technology proliferated, and again Eno’s work can be seen as an extension of trends set in motion during that period. One important development was the realization by composers that by and large, audiences would not abide performerless concerts of electronic music. Watching spinning reels of tape on the stage was simply not engaging, there had to be at least the suggestion of some sort of human activity. A range of new performance practices sprang up, typically involving either real-time human-machine interaction or mixed-media conglomerations of events where the taped electronic music was not the sole or even primary focus of attention. Eno’s albums (and concerts) with Robert Fripp are of the “interaction” type, and his audio-visual installations are of the mixed-media type.

A milestone in the public acceptance of electronic music technology was Walter Carlos’ Switched-On Bach of 1968. In the previous decades, composers had attempted to integrate electronic intruments – such as the Theremin, Ondes Martenot, Ondioline, and Univox – into a more or less traditional musical setting, but for the most part electronics had been used to create strange, metallic, mechanical-sounding noises that many people simply could not accept as music. It took a new, compact, portable instrument – the Moog synthesizer – and a virtuoso electronic reading of a set of unquestionably canonic art-music masterpieces to convince audiences (and undoubtedly many composers and musicians as well) that the new technology could produce something more than disembodied beeps and boops. Switched-On Bach was simultaneously conservative and radical: if it left little doubt that what was heard was actually music, the process involved in its making gave one pause. The commercial success of Eno’s ambient music may well rest on a similar dialectic: in its resolutely consonant tonal idiom, and in its relaxed, gentle, smooth emotional ambiance, it does not demand that the listener cope with a violently expressive modernist musical idiom in addition to coping with unfamiliar timbral realms and conceptual subtleties. Its aesthetic surface is warmly inviting, altogether lacking in the machine-music connotations that have plagued electronic music from its beginnings.

The history of electronic technology in rock reads rather differently from its history in the art-music world. In the beginning was the amplifier – a device that quickly outgrew its original purpose of making things louder. In the hands of musicians like Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, who plugged in their guitars, the amplifier became an instrument capable of producing a wide variety of new tone colors, while elevating its user to the status of a technological shaman, unlike the art-music electronic composer, whose image was more that of a research technician in a white lab coat. From its beginnings, electronics in rock have emphasized the human-technology performance interface.⁴¹³

Among the electronic landmarks in rock up to the time of Eno’s arrival on the scene, one would have to include the experiments in studio multi-tracking techniques and electronic and concrète sound sources by the Beatles (Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967) and the Beach Boys (Pet Sounds, 1966), Jimi Hendrix’s dazzling late-1960s integration of technology and showmanship, noise and music, composition and improvisation, Pete Townshend’s use of the synthesizer in a non-keyboard manner in songs like “Baba O’Reilly” (Who’s Next, 1971), the layered electronic textures and glorification of the synthesizer as an organ-like keyboard instrument in albums by classical/progressive rock groups like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes, and Stevie Wonder’s funkification of electronics in the early and middle 1970s. Pink Floyd’s 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon deserves mention here because of its tight synthesis of electronic and traditional instrumental textures, and because, a decade and a half after its release, it is still on the album charts, continuing to exert an influence on younger musicians. Like Walter Carlos with Switched-On Bach, all of these musicians extended the timbral range of more or less pre-existent musical styles with the help of the new technology, and in the process were able to carry a large audience on to an appreciation of the musical possibilities.

The German synthesizer rock movement throws Eno’s work into perspective. The two leading groups, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, have been interpreted as representing two poles in an ongoing struggle between classical and romantic aesthetic ideals. Kraftwerk, Eno, the Doors, Thomas Dolby, and others sought streamlined, economical textures and refrained from excessive rhetorical display, Tangerine Dream, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Gary Wright and other “romantics” built up lavish, quasi-orchestral textures and went after passionate emotional statements. Bob Doerschuk puts it in the following way:

In their adherence to the traditional elements of rock, these [“classical”] keyboardists parallelled Stravinsky’s return to Mozartean classical form in symphonic music some fifty years earlier. Long after the words “punk” and “new wave” had lost their shock value, this idea persisted and continued to grow in rock. It is accurate to describe the proliferation of keyboard-oriented dance bands as a classical reaction to the new romanticism, and to recognize the musicians in these groups as the new classicists.⁴¹⁴

Doerschuk goes on to assess Eno’s influence on rock. His lack of keyboard technique meant that his work “was unencumbered by the traditional perceptions that piano training often imposed on other performing synthesists.” Other rock keyboardists found little in Eno’s music to imitate in terms of a specific playing style, but his many types of songs, his ambient music, his conceptual approach to avant-garde and classical sources, and his work as a producer did stimulate “countless young artists to liberate themselves from the musical conventions in which they had been raised, and to follow no dogma – including Kraftwerk’s techno-rock gospel – blindly.”⁴¹⁵

In Chapter 2 I discussed the important impact early minimalist music had on Eno in the late 1960s, he was fond of ’s In C, was positively enamored of Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain, and had performed LaMonte Young’s X for Harry Flynt. Here I would point out that the minimalism-rock connection, viewed as a whole, is not so much one of overlapping styles – though many have noted in both the marked emphasis on rhythmic subtlely and repetition – as of overlapping audiences, involving a generation brought up on phonograph records and increasingly uninhibited by or unconcerned with the philosophical and ideological distinctions between high and low art. From a social point of view, the decisive event in the connection between rock and minimalist genres is not to be found among examples of stylistic fusion, as in, for instance, Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969), Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells (1973), or King Crimson’s Discipline (1981), rather, it is the signing of a multi-record contract – symbol of success in the rock world, and decidedly an anomaly in the art music world – with CBS by Philip Glass, who cut his teeth in downtown New York rock clubs and went on to write operas performed at the Met, while still remaining in touch with his earlier constituency by collaborating with popular music luminaries like David Byrne, Paul Simon, and Linda Rondstadt on his 1986 album Songs from Liquid Days.

While Eno has written no operas, he stands very much at the center of this fluid historical situation in which genres and audiences mix and blend, causing confusion not only amongst those who would persist in categorizing music as art or popular at the abstract level, but amongst those whom the ever-changing demographics of music consumption force to invent new marketing strategies – the record industry and retailers. If one goes into a record shop in a town like Berkeley, California, one finds Eno’s ambient music in bins whose labels have been created only within the last few years: in Tower Records the label reads “Space/Meditation,” and in Leopold’s next door it reads “New Age.” The 1980s have seen a proliferation of recorded music linked stylistically to Eno’s first ambient experiments of over a decade ago and to the minimalist music in the air since the 1960s.

New age music, as the music industry seems to be leaning towards calling the genre, has begun to develop its own record labels, distribution networks, radio shows, periodicals, and catalogs.⁴¹⁶ What one finds in the record bins is a variety of music ranging from untreated stereo recordings of ocean surf, forest wind, and whale song to compositions written and executed entirely by computer programs, such as Larry Fast’s Synergy: Computer Experiments, Vol. 1 (1980). Somewhere in the middle is a range of electro-acoustic music by composer-performers such as the American Steve Roach (Structures from Silence, 1984) the German Chaitanya Deuter (Nirvana Road, 1984), the Greek Vangelis Papathannasiou (Chariots of Fire, 1981), and the Japanese Kitaro (Silk Road I & II, 1986), as well as solo acoustic piano improvisations, arrangements, and compositions by the genre’s commercial heavyweight, the Windham Hill label’s George Winston. Solo flute recorded by Paul Horn inside the Taê Mahal, vocal multiphonics recorded by David Hykes in a French cathedral, hammer dulcimer by Laraaji recorded with electronic echo by Eno in a studio – such are the varieties of new age music. Most of it shares a tranquil atmosphere, a non-developmental nature, a focus on tone color as a primary element of musical expression, and a high level of unabashed diatonicism and consonance.

Eno’s direct contributions to this genre are manifest: his records sit in the bins alongside the rest. More difficult to claim unequivocally is his position as one of the founders of the genre. The minimalists of the 1960s came first, but it may well have been Eno’s original, popular ambient records of the late 1970s, as much as any other single factor, that got the ambient sound in people’s ears, that provided the foundation for and impetus behind a thorough exploration of a new realm of musical possibilities.