Brian eno his music and the vertical color of sound

On Listening

Classical music works around a body of “refined” sounds – sounds that are separate from the sounds of the world, pure and musical. There is a sharp distinction between “music” and “noise,” just as there is a distinction between the musician and the audience. I like blurring those distinctions – I like to work with all the complex sounds on the way out to the horizon, to pure noise, like the hum of London. If you sit in Hyde Park just far enough away from the traffic so that you don’t perceive any of its specific details, you just hear the average of the whole thing. And it’s such a beautiful sound. For me that’s as good as going to a concert hall at night.¹²¹

Eno’s ideas about listening to the environment as music are shared by modern composer Pauline Oliveros, who has used such concepts as the basis of actual pieces. The instructions for the fifth of her Sonic Meditations (1974) read as follows: “Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” Sonic Meditations XVII is somewhat similar: “1. Enhance or paraphrase the auditory environment so perfectly that a listener cannot distinguish between the real sounds of the environment and the performed sounds. 2. Become performers by not performing.”¹²²

The concept of “the environment as art” reached its height in the 1960s and early 1970s. Andy Warhol’s putting Brillo boxes in a museum was perhaps the most celebrated example of an artist encouraging his audience to take a closer look at the sensuous qualities of everyday objects, though the painter Robert Rauschenberg had done something similar much earlier with his “white paintings” – monochromatic canvases that invited the viewer to become involved in the play of light and shadow on the “empty” surface. The most direct musical analog to these experiments is John Cage’s “silent” piece, 4’33”, in which a performer takes the stage and does nothing for the duration: the audience is given the opportunity to experience the ambient sounds of the hall as music. Eno clearly took the lessons of such experiments to heart: he is a person who has spent a great deal of time simply listening, and it shows in much of his ambient music, which is a music of understated inner strength and few outwardly vigorous events.

Much of Eno’s music is constructed on a vertical basis: to a great extent, it is music concerned with the sheer color of sound, rather than with the linear (horizontal) growth of melodies. Each moment in Eno’s music presents certain tone colors or timbres, and the interest lies in the relationships between these colors – rather than in the evolution of thematic material, which has been the norm in in most Western art music for centuries. What Eno hears sitting in Hyde Park is a composite, geographical, ambient music, with no need of horizontal teleology or the logic of linear development. Such vertically-oriented musical experiences can be had using conventional instruments, also. In 1985 he cited the grand piano, the tambura (the four-stringed Indian drone instrument) and the electric bass guitar as his favorite instruments. It was the piano which he held in highest esteem:

I like it because of the complexity of its sound. If you hold the sustain pedal down, strike a note and just listen ... that’s one of my favourite musical experiences. I often sit at the piano for an hour or two, and just go “bung!” and listen to the note dying. Each piano does it in a different way. You find all these exotic harmonies drifting in and drifting out again, and one that will appear and disappear many times. There’ll be fast-moving ones and slow-moving ones. That’s spellbinding, for me.¹²³

Eno discussed what he hears in piano harmonics in terms of equal temperament (“There are a lot of books about this. It’s an interesting subject.”),¹²⁴ explaining that the slight out-of-tuneness of piano fifths,

thirds, and so on, make for an extraordinary richness in the vertical dimension. He went on to say:

I used to think: Piano? Compromise? Pathetic instrument, can’t be tuned. But now I think what makes a piano so interesting is that it’s generating so much complex information ... Because of the problem of Equal Temperament and Just Intonation, because you can’t tune a piano perfectly, you never have such a simple interval [as a pure fifth, 2:3]. There are much more complex numbers than these involved with a piano, and that means you get some much more exotic harmonics, which really are very transitory. It’s the most extraordinary instrument for that.¹²⁵

What we are dealing with here are different modes of perception and receptivity. Expectations – often unconscious – have a great deal to do with how we listen. Beethoven’s fifth Symphony is, aside from all of its programmatic “Fate” connotations, a piece of music about the unfolding of a brief melodic fragment in time: the first four notes, G-G-G-Eb, with their characteristic rhythm, appear in all four movements of the Symphony in different guises. The sound of a single piano tone struck with the sustain pedal down, or the sounds of the hum of London in Hyde Park, on the other hand, are, or have the potential to become, purely timbral, though unexpectedly complex musical experiences. One cannot approach Beethoven’s Fifth in the Hyde Park mode of perception, or vice versa. One cannot approach a Bach fugue from the “frog’s eye” perspective, nor can one approach Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain from the Western, linear-ear perspective. There is an analogy in the visual arts, in the growing field of video art-works. If in his music Eno is interested in cultivating a radically different approach to the listening process, in his video works a similar concern comes into play with regard to the video screen itself. In 1986 he criticized some of the videos shown at “The Luminous Image” exhibition at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam in precisely these terms: “Most of the pieces had a narrative structure, so you ended up looking at the screen, and looking at a screen is a different experience from looking at an object. You look into a screen, and by doing so you accept all its visual conventions.”¹²⁶

One of the things Eno is after, then, is using the senses – vision and hearing – in new ways, ways that have little to do with traditional artistic conventions. When he speaks as a critic, he is especially preoccupied with innovative uses of conventions, with the vertical color of sound, and with engineering aspects of the work of art.