Brian eno his music and the vertical color of sound
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Circus (May 1975), 62.
306 Wayne Robins, “Records: Taking Rock’s Future by Artifice: Roxy Music, Country Life; Eno, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy),” Creem 6 (Mar. 1975), 67. 307 Ed Naha, “Review: Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy),” Crawdaddy (May 1975), 76. 308 Bill Milkowski, “Eno: Excursions in the Electronic Environment,” Down Beat 50 (June 1983), 15. 309 Bangs, “Eno,” 42. 310 Interview by Allan Jones, Melody Maker (29 Nov. 1975), quoted in Eno and Mills, More Dark than Shark, 98. 311 Stephen Demorest, “The Discreet Charm of Brian Eno: An English Pop Theorist Seeks to Redefine Music,” Horizon 21 (June 1978), 85. 312 Henry Edwards, “Records: Another Green World,” High Fidelity (June 1976), 101. 313 Tom Hull, “Eno Races Toward the New World,” Village Voice 21 (12 Apr. 1976), 88. 314 Charley Walters, “Records: Eno’s Electronic Sonic Exotica: Another Green World,” Rolling Stone 212 (6 May 1976), 67-8. 315 Alexander Austin and Steve Erickson, “On Music: Tell George Orwell the News,” Westways 72 (Jan. 1980), 70. 316 Arthur Lubow, “Eno, Before and After Roxy,” New Times 10 (6 March 1978), 72. 317 Demorest, “Discreet Charm of Eno,” 84-5. 318 Mikal Gilmore, “Record Reviews: Another Green World, Discreet Music, Evening Star,” Down Beat 43 (21 Oct. 1976), 26. 319 Jon Pareles, “Records: Another Green World,” Crawdaddy (June 1976), 78. 320 Lester Bangs, “Eno Sings with the Fishes,” Village Voice 23 (3 Apr. 1978), 49. Bangs eventually came around to a much more positive view of even Eno’s most quiet, non-foreground music, see his “Eno,” Musician, Player & Listener 21 (Nov. 1979). In fact, Eno became something of an obsession for him, Robert Fripp informed me that Bangs was working on a book about Eno at the time of his death. 321 Joe Fernbacher, “Records: Before and After Science,” Creem 9 (Apr. 1978), 67. 322 Mitchell Schneider, “Brave New Eno: Before and After Science,” Crawdaddy 84 (May 1978), 64. 324 Brian Eno and Russell Mills, More Dark than Shark (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 16. 325 The biblical quotation is from Matthew 19:24. The translation of Lao-Tzu is from R.H. Blyth, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics (New York: Dutton, 1960), 141. 326 Eno and Mills, More Dark than Shark, 14. 327 Jon Pareles and Patricia Romanowski, eds., The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (New York: Rolling Stone Press/Summit Books, 983), 437. 328 Glenn O’Brien, “Eno at the Edge of Rock,” Andy Warhol’s Interview 8 (June 1978), 31. 329 Dagnal, “Eno and the Jets: Controlled Chaos,” 16. 330 Bangs, “Records: Here Come the Warm Jets,” 62. 331 Eno and Mills, More Dark than Shark, 22. 332 In my harmonic abbreviations, upper-case Roman numerals normally stand for major triads, lower-case for minor. In this case, where the texture at the beginning of the song is highly active and contrapuntal, nterpretation of the pillars of the harmonic framework as “major” or “minor” is moot. At the beginning, an implied minor mode appears to be governing the lines, when the text enters, the mode swings to major. 333 See Peter Winkler, “The Harmonic Language of Rock,” abstract of unpublished paper first delivered to the Keele University/Sonneck Society conference on American and British Music, Keele, England, 5 July 1983. 334 Brian Eno, “Pro Session: The Studio as Compositional Tool,” Down Beat 50 (Aug. 1983), 51. 335 Quoted in James Mansback Brody, liner notes to Iannis Xenakis: Electro-Acoustic Music, Nonesuch H-71246, n.d. 336 Frank Rose, “Four Conversations with Brian Eno,” Village Voice 22 (28 Mar. 1977), 72. 337 Bangs, “Eno,” 40. 338 See Roman Kozak, “Rock’n’Rolling: Flo & Eddie, Eno & Phil, Godley & Creme Visited,” Billboard 94 (3 Apr. 1982), 72. 339 Joe Zawinul (b. 1932) is a jazz composer, keyboard player, and band leader. 340 Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, 2nd ed., s.v. “ambient.” 341 Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, s.v. “ambiance.” The dictionaries I have checked do indeed spell it this way. “Ambience” with an “e” has not only a different pronunciation (ambience vs. ahmbiance, but somewhat different connotations; read on. 342 Rod Smith, “What Is Spacemusic!,” FM 91 Public Radio (Feb. 1987), 6. 343 Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, s.v. “ambitendency.” 344 Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, s.v. “ambitendency.” 345 Amirkhanian, “Eno at KPFA,” 6. 346 Brian Eno, liner notes to Discreet Music, Editions EG EGS 303, 1975. 347 Eno, liner notes to Discreet Music. 348 Glenn O’Brien, “Eno at the Edge of Rock,” Andy Warhol’s Interview 8 (June 1978), 31. 349 O’Brien, “Eno at Edge of Rock,” 31. 350 Eno, liner notes to Discreet Music. 351 For an account of the La Guardia audio-visual installation, see Gregory Miller, “The Arts: Video,” Omni 3 (Nov. 1980), 28-9. 352 Brian Eno, liner notes to Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Editions EG EGS 201, 1978. 353 Rob Tannenbaum, “A Meeting of Sound Minds: John Cage and Brian Eno,” Musician 83 (Sept. 1985), 68. 354 For detailed comments by Eno on the genesis of Music for Airports in a Cologne airport waiting room, see Anthony Korner, “Aurora Musicalis,” Artforum 24:10 (Summer 1986), 77. For an account of how Eno organized the 22 tape loops used in “1/2,” see O’Brien, “Eno at Edge of Rock,” 31. For details on the making of “1/1,” a piece co-composed with Robert Wyatt and Rhett Davies, and more improvisational than serial in nature, see Brian Eno, “Pro Session: The Studio as Compositional Tool – Part II,” Down Beat (Aug. 1983), 53. 355 John Hutchinson, “Brian Eno: Place #13,” color brochure (Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery, 1986), n.p. This probably contains Eno’s most complete statement on the development and aims of his video works. 356 Brian Eno, “Works Constructed with Sound and Light: Extracts from a talk given by Brian Eno following the opening of his video installation, Copenhagen, January 1986,” color brochure (London: Opal, Ltd., 1986), n.p. 357 Eno, “Works Constructed with Sound and Light,” n.p. 358 Hutchinson, “Eno: Place #13,” n.p. 359 Tannenbaum, “Cage and Eno,” 69. 360 Anthea Norman-Taylor and Lin Barkass, “Brian Eno,” Opal Information 3 (Dec. 1986), 11. 361 For critical accounts of audio-video installations by Eno, see: Craig Bromberg, “Brian Eno at Concord,” Art in America 71:8 (Sept. 1983), 173-4, Kevin Concannon, “Michael Chandler and Brian Eno, Institute of Contemporary Art,” Artforum 22 (Apr. 1984), 85-6, Ursula Frohne, “Review: Brian Eno: Tegel Airport, Institut Unzeit, Berlin,” Flash Art (Apr./May 1984) 42-3, C. Furlong, “AFI Frames the Field: The National Video Festival,” Afterimage 9:5 (Oct. 1981), 4-5, Kim Levin, “The Waiting Room,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 5, Dorine Mignot, “‘The Luminous Image’: 22 Video-Installationen im Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam,” Kunstforum International 9/10 (Jan./Feb. 1985), 59-83, David Ross, “Brian Eno,” Matrix/Berkeley 44 (June/July 1981), n.p, and Pier Luigi Tazzi, “Milan: Brian Eno, Chiesa di S. Carpoforo,” Artforum 23 (Feb. 1985), 97-8. 362 Alan Jensen, “The Sound of Silence: A Thursday Afternoon with Brian Eno,” Electronics & Music Maker (Dec. 1985), 21. 363 Mikal Gilmore, “Record Reviews: Another Green World, Discreet Music, Evening Star,” Down Beat 43 (21 Oct. 1976), 26. 364 James Wolcott, “Records: Nearer My Eno to Thee: Another Green World, Discreet Music,” Creem 7 (Apr. 1976), 60. 365 Michael Bloom, “Records: Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” Rolling Stone 296 (26 July 1979), 60-1. 367 Tom Johnson, “Music: The New Tonality,” Village Voice 23 (16 Oct. 1978), 115-6. 368 Tom Johnson, “New Music, New York, New Institution,” Village Voice 24 (2 July 1979), 88-9. 369 Hull, Tom, “Eno Races Toward the New World,” Village Voice 21 (12 Apr. 1976), 87. 370 Liner notes to Music for Films, boxed set version, Editions EG EGBS2, 1983. It is on this version that I base my comments. 371 Liner notes to Music for Films. 372 Michael Davis, “Records: Music for Films,” Creem 10 (Apr. 1979), 61. 373 Jon Pareles, “Riffs: Eno Uncaged,” Village Voice 27 (4 May 1982), 77-8. 374 Mark Peel, “Disc and Tape Reviews: Ambient #4 – On Land,” Stereo Review 47 (Nov. 1982), 105. 375 George Rush, “Brian Eno: Rock’s Svengali Pursues Silence,” Esquire 98 (Dec. 1982), 132. 376 Robert Payes, “Review: On Land,” Trouser Press 9 (Aug. 1982), 41, Glen O’Brien, Glen, “Glenn O’Brien’s Beat: My Mother the Ear,” Andy Warhol’s Interview 12 (Sept. 1982), 107-8. 377 Liner notes to Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks, Editions EG Eno 5, 1983. 378 Liner notes to Music for Films, Vol. II, Editions EG EGSP-2, 1983. 379 ADSR stands for attack-decay-sustain-release. Taken together, these characteristics of a given note or sound describe its “envelope,” or amplitude profile in time. It is generally thought that a sound’s envelope has just as great an impact on the perception of its character as its harmonic spectrum. Envelope and harmonic spectrum are the two primary determinants of timbre. 380 Korner, “Aurora Musicalis,” 76-9. 381 Interview broadcast from KFOG San Francisco, 12 Nov. 1986. 382 September 9 is given as the date of recording of Side One on the album cover. Elsewhere, Fripp has said that the recording session took place in July of the same year: see inner liner notes to Robert Fripp, God Save the Queen, Polydor MPF 1298, 1980. 383 Charles Amirkhanian, “Brian Eno interviewed 2/2/80 for KPFA Marathon by C. Amirkhanian, transcribed 10/29/83 [by] S. Stone,” unpublished typescript, 16. 384 Allan Jones, “Caught in the Act: Fripp and Eno: Formal Beauty,” Melody Maker 50 (14 June 1975), 49. 385 The “Frippertronics” style that grew out of this tour represented a streamlining of the Eno/Fripp approach to the signal-loop situation. The primary published recording representing this style is Let the Power Fall: An Album of Frippertronics, Editions EG EGS 110, 1981. 386 Stephen Demorest, “The Discreet Charm of Brian Eno: An English Pop Theorist Seeks to Redefine Music,” Horizon 21 (June 1978), 83-4. 387 Pareles and Romanowski, Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, 61. 388 The significance of Bowie’s impact on Britain in the early 1970s is especially well treated in Iain Chambers discussion of “glam rock,” in his Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985), 128-38. See also Kevin Cann, David Bowie: A Chronology (London: Vermillion, 1983). 389 Kurt Loder, “Eno,” Synapse (Jan./Feb. 1979), 26. 390 O’Brien, “Eno at Edge of Rock,” 32. 391 Charles Amirkhanian, “Brian Eno interviewed 2/2/80 for KPFA Marathon by C. Amirkhanian, transcribed 10/29/83 [by] S. Stone,” unpublished typescript, 27. 392 O’Brien, “Eno at Edge of Rock,” 32. 393 O’Brien, “Eno at Edge of Rock,” 32. 394 O’Brien, “Eno at Edge of Rock,” 32. 395 Amirkhanian, “Eno at KPFA,” 27-8. 396 John Rockwell, All American Music: Composition in the Late 20th Century (New York: Knopf, 1983), 244. 397 Loder, “Eno,” 24. 398 Amirkhanian, “Eno at KPFA,” 11. 399 Milkowski, “Brian Eno: Excursions,” 57. 400 Kurt Loder, “Squawking Heads: Byrne and Eno in the Bush of Ghosts,” Rolling Stone 338 (5 March 1981), 46. 401 Amirkhanian, “Eno at KPFA,” 12. 402 Tangent Records TGS 131. 403 Jon Pareles, “Records: Does this Global Village Have Two-Way Traffic? My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, David Byrne and Brian Eno,” Rolling Stone 340 (2 April 1981), 60. 404 As far as I know, Eno and Byrne have suffered no legal repercussions related to the borrowings on the version of Ghosts that was eventually released. The estate of Kathryn Kuhlman, the faith healer and radio evangelist, did refuse them permission to use excerpts from a Kuhlman address taped off the air in Los Angeles. Kurt Loder, “Squawking Heads: Byrne and Eno in the Bush of Ghosts,” Rolling Stone 338 (5 March 1981), 45. For a brief summary of a scholarly conference at which a number of sessions and papers addressed the issue of the appropriation of music, see Ruth Stone, “From the Editors: Hijacking Music,” SEM Newsletter 21 (Jan. 1987), 2. 405 Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-nine Issues and Concepts (Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 21. “The Art of Combining Tones,” the chapter from which this quotation is taken, is a masterful and exhilarating treatment of the ontological question – which is also a semantic question – with as close to a global point of view as may be possible at the present time. 406 Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes, and Ken Tucker, Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll (New York: Rolling Stone/Summit, 1986), 490. 407 Advertisement for Berklee College of Music, College Musician 1 (Fall 1986), 37. 408 For an overview of “Improvisation, extemporization” in Western and non-Western cultures, see the article by Bruno Nettl in Don Randel, ed., The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1986), 392-4. 409 John Hutchinson, “Brian Eno: Place #13,” color brochure (Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery, 1986), n.p. 410 There is a creative element in the musical perceptions, attitudes and thoughts of all audiences, not simply in those of composers and performers. People do not take in music passively, no matter how rigid the current Western division of labor into musicians and non-musicians may appear. John Blacking, “Music in the Making: Problems in the Analysis of Musical Thought,” Bloch Lectures, University of California, Berkeley, 1986. 411 The cultural symbolism or mythology behind this state of affairs is so involved that I can do no more here than point the reader in its general direction. Among the works that have helped to guide my own thinking on this vast topic are Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964), a classic statement of the pervasiveness of efficiency-engendering yet creativity-strangling “technique” in every aspect of modern life, Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Rise of Human Intelligence (New York: Random House, 1977), which includes a discussion of “information” as a biological, genetic phenomenon that spilled over first into the brains of the higher mammals and is now filling up libraries and computer tape at an exponentially growing rate, John Shepherd, Phil Virden, Graham ulliamy, and Trevor Wishart, Whose Music? A Sociology of Musical Languages (London: Latimer, 1977), a multi-pronged set of Marxist arguments concerning, among other things, the relationships between media, social process, and music, culture-specific oral and visual orientational modes, tonality’s encoding of the industrial world sense, and the social stratification of 20th-century music, Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition, 2nd ed., Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 10, Bollingen Series 20 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), a probing series of essays in which the author applies to a wide range of modern issues and problems his insights and theories having to do with the functioning of the personal and collective unconscious, and E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), a plea for social, political, economic, and cultural decentralization in an age of dangerously powerful, technologically based modes of organization. 412 Conceptual pieces by Stockhausen from the 1960s, like Aus den Sieben Tagen, certainly belong to the whole process-art movement that so influenced Eno, yet so far as I know Enï has never mentioned Stockhausen in interviews or published works. The link between Stockhausen and Eno was no doubt Cornelius Cardew, yet the conceptual relationship between the three musicians is complicated – Cardew having gone through a violent break with Stockhausen, and Eno having rejected Cardew’s political stance. See Cardew, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, and Other Articles (London: Latimer New Dimensions, 1974). 413 Greg Armbruster, ed., The Art of Electronic Music: The Instruments, Designers, and Musicians Behind the Artistic and Popular Explosion of Electronic Music, compiled by Tom Darter (New York: Quill/Keyboard, 1984), is a valuable and detailed summary of the field, refreshing for its refusal to rigidly separate developments in rock, art music, film music, and new age music, it contains a sixty-four-page “History of Electronic Musical Instruments” and interview/profiles of nearly thirty leading designers and musicians. 414 Bob Doerschuk, ed., Rock Keyboard (New York: Quill/Keyboard, 1985), 157. Much of Doerschuk’s book, which consists of Keyboard magazine interviews with over two dozen musicians strung together by perceptive commentary, is organized around the classical/romantic idea, with chapter subtitles like “The Rock Organ Romantics,” “Advent of the New Romantics,” and “Electronics and the Classical Ethic.” Linear interpretations of the history of rock using concepts borrowed from art music have proven tempting to more than one writer. Compare Eric Salzman, Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 189, 191: “Rock rather quickly passed through its own classical period, the end of which was symbolized by the breakup of the Beatles ... The pop movement ... is passing quickly through a cycle of classicism, romanticism, experimentalism, neo-classicism, and revival – the same cycle which jazz took a few decades and traditional music a couple of centuries to pass through”, and John Rockwell, “Art Rock,” in Jim Miller, ed., The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll (New York: Rolling Stone/Random House, 1976), 322: “There is a morphology to artistic movements. They begin with a rude and innocent vigor, pass into a healthy adulthood and finally decline into an overwrought, feeble old age. Something of this process can be observed in the passage of rock and roll from the three-chord primitivism of the Fifties through the burgeoning vitality and experimentation of the Sixties to the hollow emptiness of the so-called progressive or ‘art’ rock of the Seventies.” 415 Doerschuk, Rock Keyboard, 149. 416 Billboard does not yet have an official chart for this kind of music, but has been running articles on its commercial development (e.g., Steven Dupler, “New Age Labels Seek New Angles,” in which record companies are said to be facing a “glutted” market, one label executive is quoted as saying that among the tasks of the current year is to “separate the crap from the real music”), and an anonymous agent has been running an advertisement called the “Monthly British New Age Chart.” See Billboard 99 (31 Jan. 1986), 1, 68. A nationally syndicated weekly public radio program, “Music from the Hearts of Space,” emanates from San Francisco, under the direction of Anna Turner and Stephen Hill, Eno has reportedly written a fan letter to the show, which reads in part, “If I’d been offered the chance to design a late night radio show, I don’t think I would have come up with anything closer to my own taste.” See Rod Smith, “What is Spacemusic!,” FM 91 Public Radio (California State University, Sacramento, Feb. 1987), 5. Anna Turner and Stephen Hill also publish the catalog Spacemusic: Music by Mail, 1986, a 97-page annotated listing of hundreds of LPs, CDs, and cassettes. The first issue of John Patrick Lamkin, ed., Music of the Spheres: A New Age Music & Art Quarterly (Taos, N.M., 1986), came out in early 1987. 417 A recent historical and theoretical discussion of Schoenberg’s famous movement is found in Wayne Slawson, Sound Color (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985), 3-21, in which the author, “motivated by the assumption that composition with sound color requires a theory,” examines and criticizes the major existing studies of timbre: Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968), Robert Erickson, Sound Structure in Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), and Robert Cogan and Pozzi Escot, Sonic Design: The Nature of Sound and Music (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1980), see also Slawson’s 18-page bibliography. Slawson’s own concept of “sound color,” which is exceedingly well thought-out and formally precise, is not concerned with “timbre” as such, which is a more general term encompassing such sound-characteristics as attack and decay, vibrato, and periodic and aperiodic fluctuations in pitch and amplitude, as well as the harmonic or overtone structure of sounds. Although tempted to borrow and broaden Slawson’s evocative term “sound color” for the purposes of this study, I have stuck with the traditional terms “timbre” and “tone color,” which I have used more or less interchangeably, relying on their accustomed if inexact connotations to carry the argument. 418 The concept of scientific research as a process conditioned by and heavily dependent on the invention of paradigms was advanced systematically by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). An analogous process can be seen to operate in music history. 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