Brian eno his music and the vertical color of sound

Epilog – 1989-1995

He was there to be interviewed in front of an enthusiastic, appreciative packed house by Bay Area composer and new music champion Charles Amirkhanian, who had kindly arranged the meeting between us.

Before the interview show, Eno came into the dressing room and we were introduced by his manager. Amazingly enough, he was just like all the descriptions I'd read: slightly built, with an ingenuous smile, oddly forthright and self-effacing at the same time. He displayed an easy sense of humor, opinionated yet self-deprecating.

Eno had with him a bound copy of my dissertation, which Charles had given him earlier that week, and he had already read portions of it. The problem was, in the taxi on the way over to the Palace of Fine Arts, he had unwittingly sat on a juicy wad of chewing gum, which was now ungraciously affixed to his posterior regions. Consequently, much of our keenly anticipated enounter took place with the great Brian Eno bent over a dressing table while an assistant nimbly applied a razor blade to a delicate area on the seat of his stylish black pants.

With the dissertation open before him on the table, Eno flipped through the pages, reading out loud and commenting on various passages. He said he was was sincerely impressed with the effort that had gone into the book, while simultaneously making amusing remarks to the effect that he couldn't believe anyone would actually write an academic thesis about his music. He liked it, though, joking that I'd somehow found all the best things he'd ever said and assembled them together in one place.

As the sure-fingered assistant continued to perform his deft surgical removal of the offending blob, Eno lighted on a passage where I'd described one of his ambient compositions as being in the Dorian mode. He chuckled and said, "I didn't know that piece was in Dorian mode."

This – and it was confirmed in subsequent communications between us – turned out to be the aspect of the book that most fascinated Eno. For as a musician, Eno was self-educated but largely untrained: well-versed in a variety of philosophical issues surrounding music, its history, and its production, he nevertheless had less knowledge of traditional music theory, harmony, counterpoint, and form than the average American college music student. So to read my learned analyses of his works was an eye-opener.

In his heavily analytical 1973 book Twilight of the Gods: The Music of the Beatles, musicologist Wilfrid Mellers mused that "Some people seem to find it inherently risible that pop music should be discussed in technical terms at all; when the senior critic of The Times wrote the first musically literate piece about the Beatles it was greeted with hoots of mirth both from the Beatles themselves and from their hostile critics."

Perhaps times have changed; or perhaps Brian Eno is simply unusually literary for a pop figure – and unusually open-minded when it comes to taking in different perspectives that hold the potential to develop and advance his own work. He told me that reading my book made him want to go back and listen to some of his old pieces again, re-evaluate them with this new knowledge, and, possibly, to try composing new music with some of the tools he'd gleaned. As a music theorist and analyst, I felt that this was the most gratifying tribute a musician could have possibly paid my work.

Eno's Music of the 1990s

In short, he is a person at the full height of his creative powers.

Eno released four major musical works during this period: Wrong Way Up (1990), an album of slightly skewed poppish songs with John Cale; The Shutov Assembly (1992), a colorful anthology of varied ambient pieces; Nerve Net (1992), an astonishing set of studies in rhythm and near-atonality; and Neroli (1993), a rather severe exercise in dark modal minimalism.

Wrong Way Up

A number of the songs are campy, in the vein of the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine," borrowing elements from folk music, British music hall, and nursery rhyme. But here the campiness, instead of being jolly and light-hearted, gets bogged down in bulky, ponderous, unconvincing electronic arrangements. There's little light, little transparency here – little in the way of the unique, unreasonable textures that Eno is capable of creating – textures that are capable of turning a ho-hum song into a compelling piece of music.

In a way, Wrong Way Up exposes Eno's weaknesses as a songwriter – for in reality he is not a songwriter. Songwriters craft melodies and chords, and arrangers and singers create the performance. Eno does not write real vocal melodies – they tend to be static, they don't "go" anywhere – and he doesn't really understand the power of functional harmony to create, support, and propel emotional movement. Eno is not a songwriter, but rather a deft manipulator of sounds, colors, and blocks of music. So when he writes a song and the arrangment isn't up to snuff, there's little left to sustain interest.

The Shutov Assembly

As a whole, what sets this collection – recorded between 1985 and 1990 – apart from earlier efforts is the de-emphasis of pitch and mode. To put this another way, Eno was experimenting with atonality.

For example, if the pitch set used in the second piece, "ALHONDIGA," corresponds to any known mode or scale, it is not readily apparent to me. My mind strains to find a tonic center of gravity, a point at the middle of the galaxy of pitches around which they all revolve and to which they are all logically related; but such a center does not seem to exist. Other pieces in The Shutov Assembly, such as "FRANCISCO," are similar.

The fourth composition, "LANZAROTE," is a reissue of the Glint (East of Woodbridge) flexi-disk first released in 1986. In the original edition of this book, I wrote that "As Glint shows, the ambient style is capable of seemingly perpetual variation and extension: beyond the Phrygian mode of Glint, the still gloomier tones of the Locrian mode are waiting ... Even an atonal ambient style does not seem beyond the realm of the possible."

With The Shutov Assembly, Eno sticks his toe into the still largely uncharted universe of atonality, the universe that has no up and down, no central point, no gravity. Schoenberg and Webern, experiencing giddy vertigo as they floated in that vast domain, felt they had to invent, through sheer force of artifice, a viable theoretical construct to impose a semblance of order on it: that construct was the 12-tone system.

The "word square" that shows the titles of the individual pieces on the CD's back cover is eerily reminiscent of the kind of 12-tone pitch matrixes I used to pore over in graduate seminars on Schoenberg, Webern, Stockhausen, Boulez, and the later Stravinsky. I do not know whether, or to what extent, Eno used or adapted actual 12-tone techniques in The Shutov Assembly. But in a 1992 interview in Opal Information, Eno cited Webern as one of his favorite composers. And Eno has always had a penchant for cyclic systems; as I pointed out in the original edition of this book, the serial organization of "2/1" from Music for Airports is reminiscent of Webern pieces like the first movement of his Symphony, Op. 21.

(Note: if some of this sounds cryptic, please refer to the definitions of "Atonality," "Mode," and "Tonality" in the Glossary of this book.)

Nerve Net

Not since 1981's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts had Eno used percussive elements so relentlessly and successfully. On Nerve Net, the drumming, electronic drumming, and percussion – by Sugarfoot Moffett, Markus Draws, Isaac Osapanin, Winston Ngukwe, Ernest Darling, Cecil Stamper III, Richard Bailey, Benmont Tench, Ian Dench, and Eno himself-- stand out for their precision, power, and raw intensity.

Indeed, in Nerve Net as a whole, Eno once again excels in coaxing outrageous performances out of all his instrumentalists and vocalists, somehow managing to create, out of the widest, most disparate palette of sounds, something that congeals – and rocks.

Neroli

March, 1995