Brian eno his music and the vertical color of sound

The Music’s Beauty

Eno’s ambient music is likewise multi-levelled. At one level is its apparent surface simplicity, unassertiveness, and high degree of consonance – hence its suitability for use as an ignorable background “tint.” But Eno has simultaneously succeeded in his effort to pack enough subtle musical information into his ambient pieces to enable them to stand up to close, repeated listening.

In Western music, whether popular or classical, originality is a major criterion of aesthetic importance and success. As we have seen, Eno believes that the importance of innovation in the creation of art-works is greatly overrated, accounting for only a small percentage of a piece’s real content. Can we point to anything specific, in the way of a style, a technique, a use of musical materials, that constitutes Eno’s original musical contribution? He has not really invented any new song types, though his strange songs are still among the strangest in the rock repertory. He has made no breakthroughs in terms of harmonic, formal, melodic, or rhythmic technique. His conceptual approach to art and music is firmly rooted in ideas that had become public domain by the mid-1960s. Even the gentle aesthetic and philosophy of his ambient music was not particularly revolutionary. Music with a similarly relaxing and repetitive surface has been around for centuries, for instance in certain Baroque keyboard ground basses and Viennese symphonic slow movements, even the idea of music as part of an environmental ambiance had already taken many forms – organ music in church, dinner music for aristocrats, carillons echoing across greens and rooftops, film music, commercial Muzak itself – before Eno seized on it.

Eno should be viewed, then, not so much as an innovator as one of those artists who takes a number of existing trends and ideas and forges them into a new synthesis. Once again, the comparison with Stravinsky seems apt – Stravinsky, who wrote Russian ballets, neo-classical orchestral works, jazz-art hybrids, sacred polyphony, and twelve-tone pieces, putting his own individual stamp on everything he touched, and doing it all at the highest level of craft.

Part of Stravinsky’s craft involved orchestration, and it is indeed in the realm of timbre and texture that claims for innovation on Eno’s part can most convincingly be made. Timbre has conventionally been regarded as a secondary element of musical expression – the colors that enliven and highlight the real musical structure, the skin that covers the skeleton and muscle. Lack of attention to nuances of timbre, and relegation of the whole matter to secondary importance in the compositional process, are so deeply entrenched in our cultural inheritance and consequently in our listening practices as to present a real stumbling-block to those who would approach Eno’s ambient music with ears oriented in a horizontal, linear fashion. For this is sculptural, spatial, non-narrative music – music that we are invited to move in and around and through, music that encourages us to listen in terms of the fine-tuning of the harmonic series, the balance between tone and noise, the perpetual play of shifting hues. In Eno’s ambient music, and, to a lesser extent, in his progressive rock, the traditional balance of and interaction between elements is reversed: motivic work is there, harmony is there, rhythm is there (somewhere), but in itself Eno’s use of these elements is often just as conventional as the orchestration of Beethoven’s symphonies. If in the classical work the timbre adorns the structure, then in the ambient work the structure can be said to adorn the timbre.

To appreciate the lengths to which Eno has gone to give breath and life to the color of sound itself, one need only listen to a piece like “Discreet Music” – a work which, for Eno, is relatively monochromatic – side by side with a new age piece apparently sharing similar aesthetic ideals and a similar approach to musical materials, such as Steve Roach’s “Structures from Silence.” The surface effect is much the same in both: the pieces are long (almost exactly half an hour), slow, quiet, diatonic, consonant, repetitive, electronically produced, recorded with very long reverberation times that lend the music a sense of spaciousness. But in Roach’s composition, the tone colors themselves are rather formica-like: clean, flat, smooth, constant and unchanging, with just a touch of low-depth chorusing. In “Discreet Music,” on the other hand, the tone color is constantly undergoing shifts of equalization, so that the “same” melodies resemble now a whistle, now a flute, now a muted foghorn. The third of Arnold Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16, of 1912 (“The Changing Chord – Summer Morning by a Lake – Colors”), is based on a similar idea: a lack of dramatic external motion and obvious rhythmic events in the music is offest by constantly changing, subtle shifts in orchestration. Schoenberg even coined a word for this idea: Klangfarbenmelodie, a melody of sound colors. Whether he is aware of it or not, Eno has taken this idea and made it the basis of his musical style.⁴¹⁷

If the aesthetic impact of Eno’s music depends to a large extent on timbre and texture (texture being simply layers or levels of individual timbres), another important – and related – contribution is his “holograph” paradigm of composition, according to which music can be made that seems to stay substantially the same even while continuously shifting in its details. While the idea itself is not original, being derived primarily from his study of minimalist tape-phase pieces, Eno has systematically pursued a set of musical possibilities that the new paradigm illuminates. The paradigm itself necessitates a tonal frame of reference no more than serial methods necessitate an atonal frame of reference, yet most minimalists working along these lines have made their music single-mindedly tonal, and Eno is no exception. Once again, this is a case of an artist who is exploring new territory, and yet who feels that the maps he makes must be capable of being read – and enjoyed. Eno has said as much – he wants his music to be seductive.⁴¹⁸

In the preceding chapters we have seen a number of writers attempt to capture some of the language-defying sense of Eno’s music through picturesque and sometimes surreal metaphors. And indeed, as in writing of any kind about music of any kind, there comes a point where the vessel of language seems to shiver and burst, unable to contain the precious essence – music – it is trying to hold. Medieval philosophers saw, heard, and conceived music as an evocation of the myriad overlapping rhythms of the cosmos. Eno’s long ambient pieces consisting of overlaid cycles of events give contemporary life to this ancient image. The duration of the world is vast, an hour on a “Thursday Afternoon” short, yet time during that hour seems to expand, to slow down, invested with the sense of the magical which it has fallen to art to summon up. If we may occasionally yearn for some time-lapse photography to speed things up, that may be because we live in a very artificially accelerated age.

Music deals with time and exists in time, and may be seen as a sacred observation of the mystery of time. Whether through classical symphony, Renaissance mass, reggae dance, jam session, or ambient soundscape, time marked by music is set aside, consecrated. Music concentrates time, making us aware of different levels of temporal magnification, from

immense historical vistas to momentary transitions. It enhances and focusses our ability to perceive changes, fluctuations, and developments in an overall state. Music is paradoxical: profoundly unnaturalistic, presenting an abstract temporal tableau, it may nevertheless poignantly evoke not only realms of common, everyday experience, but images of the grandeur of eternity. Eno’s music is capable of thus transforming time, for those who would listen.