CHAPTER FOUR: THE EAR OF THE NON-MUSICIAN

CHAPTER FOUR: THE EAR OF THE NON-MUSICIAN

Art School and Experimental Works, Process and Product

I guess that we were all united by one idea – that art school was the place where you would be able to express yourself, where the passionate and intuitive nature that you felt raged inside you would be set free and turned into art. As it happened, we couldn’t have been more wrong. The first term at Ipswich was devoted entirely to getting rid of these silly ideas about the nobility of the artist by a process of complete and relentless disorientation. We were set projects that we could not understand, criticized on bases that we did not even recognize as relevant.¹¹¹

The emphasis in Eno’s art school education was on “process over product”, it was the height of the 1960s avant-garde philosophy that the residue left by an artistic gesture was less important than the conceptual nature of the gesture itself. Under this set of ideological conditions, Eno thrived, producing a variety of student works completely consonant with the artistic climate of the times. With Ipswich’s taping facilities, he made his first musical piece by recording the sounds of striking a large metal lampshade and then altering the speed of the tape – a process which resulted in pronounced acoustical beats. He made “sound sculptures,” such as a vertical cylinder with a big loudspeaker mounted on top, with various objects placed on the speaker which moved themselves into different arrangements according to the nature of the vibrations shaking the membrane. Eno hung loudspeakers from trees in a park and piped different music into each one. He made a painting and placed it at the bottom of a river. Rarely did he work on making pictures for their own sake, he found himself too impatient to finish a canvas, and more interested in designing “scores” “to tell myself how to construct a painting. I looked for designs that would contravene ordinary decisions about whether something looked nice or didn’t look nice.”¹¹² Paintings became performance pieces. In one experiment,

I did a whole series ... that involved more than one person doing the painting. In one, I gave four people identical instructions of the type, “Make the canvas such-and-such square, make a mark 14 inches from the top right-hand corner, and then measure a line down at 83 degrees and find a point here ...,” and so on. Each instruction built on the one before. If there was any error, it would be compounded throughout the picture. I ended up with four canvases that were clearly related but different from each other, and they were stuck together to make one picture.¹¹³

The line between music and other forms of art was obscured in many such experiments, yet Eno became more and more attracted to music itself, since here was an art-form that had always been a “performance art” involving real-time processes. He found it increasingly difficult to finish his paintings, which tended to look “as if I’d got bored half-way through, which in fact is what had happened.” Music, on the other hand, offered an activity that was more immediate, that involved instantaneous feedback between process and product, Eno also felt that music was “an activity that has a more direct emotional appeal.”¹¹⁴ What ultimately intrigued him most in the musical realm, however, was not its performance aspect, but the possibilities of the tape recorder, which seemed to make composing directly analogous to painting: “I realized you could mess with time – storing it and then distorting it any way you wanted – and this made music into a plastic art. It instantly struck me as more interesting than painting.”¹¹⁵

Thus the processes involved in making art-works exerted a peculiar fascination over Eno: he saw them as valuable not only in terms of their ability to stimulate composition and to lend insight into craft, but as interesting ideas in themselves. His enthusiasm for talking about process has impressed most of the writers who have interviewed him, and indeed it is his acute awareness of the varieties of the creative process, and his ability and willingness to articulate his experiences with them, that set him apart from a host of progressive rock musicians of the early 1970s. (An occasional writer found Eno’s preoccupation with process irritating: Lester Bangs declared Eno’s much-discussed methods “boring as shit to talk about at much length and probably unnecessarily complicated, but they’ve given us some of the most amazing albums of the decade.”)¹¹⁶

However, by 1981, if not earlier, disillusioned by the proliferation of self-indulgent conceptual debris being passed off as art, and with a much clearer – and perhaps more traditional – conception of what is involved in making a piece of music, Eno had come round to the position that there were definite limits to the interest that could be sustained by an artist’s dwelling on process as a sort of artistic product in its own right:

I was taught in art school that process is everything, which is another way of saying that having an idea is enough. Since I’m basically lazy,I liked that idea, but I no longer think it’s true. The structure or process that I used in Discreet Music is almost identical to the structure of Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain, for example, but the sound of the two pieces is very different.¹¹⁷

The process is supposed to be interesting in itself. I don’t go for that. I think if something doesn’t jolt your senses, forget it. It’s got to be seductive.¹¹⁸

Eno has criticized such things as Nam June Paik’s multi-screen video installations and imitations of William Burroughs’s “cut-up” technique, in which random bits of text are selected and pasted together: “Sure, ‘cut-ups’ can be fascinating, but it does matter what the input is.” The idea “that as long as the process was interesting it didn’t really matter what went into it” was

part of the John Cage legacy. The failure of that inheritance is evident when you hear some pieces of systems music that you like, and others that don’t hold your attention at all. You come to the inevitable conclusion that the difference doesn’t lie in the differing degrees of elegance in the systems, but in their content.¹¹⁹