Craft and the Non-Musician

Craft and the Non-Musician

Eno’s knowledge of traditional music theory is at least as limited as his manual skills. Lester Bangs asked him in 1979, “Have you ever had any formal music or theory training at all?”

“No.”

“Have you ever felt the pressure that you should get some?”

On another occasion, when an interviewer said, “You don’t know music theory and things of that sort,” Eno responded, “No, I don’t. Well, let’s say I know many theories about music, but I don’t know that particular one that has to do with notation.”¹²⁹ By this “notation theory,” we can probably assume that Eno is referring music theory as taught in school: the fundamentals of notation and the principles of harmony, counterpoint, and voice-leading found in the so-called “common practice” period of music history, essentially the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When we look at Eno’s music, particularly his progressive rock albums, we shall see that, like many if not most popular musicians, he uses standard major, minor, and seventh chords in sometimes traditional, but equally as often unpredictable, “empirical” ways – ways that ignore the statistical tables of “common,” “less common,” “strong” and “weak” chord progressions sometimes found in standard harmony textbooks.¹³⁰ Particularly striking in this regard is his almost complete avoidance of the tonic-dominant relationship, which almost inevitably brings with it the gravitational pull of functional tonality. (For instance, in a piece in C major, the dominant chord G7 feels like it is “pulling” the music towards the tonic chord of C, when G7 leads to C the listener feels a sense of tension followed by a resolution. Eno tends to avoid such “classical” tension/resolution chord pairs.)

One aspect of the rock tradition – indeed, part of the meaning of the rock tradition – has been its refusal to let arbitrary technical standards of musicianship interfere with the music-making process. Much of the joy of early rock’n’roll, and of the skiffle music in England that preceded it, sprang from the fact that anybody could grab a guitar and yank a few sounds out of it: it was music by and for non-specialists in music, and a certain anti-elitism as far as instrumental and vocal technique were concerned was part of its whole ideology.

The Beatles provided the most stunning early examples of how far one could go with a limited, unexceptional technique. Like Eno, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were versatile but technically rather ordinary multi-instrumentalists who knew exactly what kinds of sounds they wanted to get out of the instruments they played – guitars, piano, other keyboards, assorted percussion, and bass. And when, like Eno, they moved into the modern recording studio to produce such epochal albums as Revolver, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Abbey Road, the studio itself became their instrument, and their ears became much more important than their hands. Lennon once said that if one were to compare his guitar playing with that of blues great B.B. King, “I would feel silly. [But] I’m an artist and if you give me a tuba I’ll bring you something out of it.”¹³¹ In the late 1960s and early 1970s, of course, instrumental virtuosity found a place in rock, with audiences responding to the pyrotechnics of guitarists like Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix and keyboard players like Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson much in the same way as nineteenth-century European audiences were ignited by the Paganinis of the day. And in their turn, the unschooled sounds of the punk and new-wave movements of the late 1970s represented another swing of the pendulum: once again, the point seemed to be that anybody with something to get off his chest could make music.

The contrast between “Inspiration and Gymnastics” is the subject of a chapter in Bruno Nettl’s recent book The Study of Ethnomusicology; there he shows how these two approaches to music-making have formed a major constituent of concepts about music in many different societies at many different times. “The concept of ‘divine inspiration’ (according to which music-making should be easy)” is contrasted with “the ‘athletic view’ of music (according to which music-making – composing, improvising, performing – must be difficult to be truly great).”¹³² Eno, the Beatles, and the new wavers fall into the “inspired” camp, Eric Clapton, Keith Emerson, and many progressive rockers are of the “gymnastic” musical type.

Eno has talked about his ideas on craft (or the lack of it) and musicianship since the beginning of his public career. Just prior to the release of his first solo album, Here Come the Warm Jets, he said:

I’ll make a prediction here. I think, in fact, I shall be seen as a rock revivalist in a funny way, because the thing that people miss when they do their rock revival rubbish is the fact that early rock music was, in a lot of cases, the product of incompetence, not competence. There’s a misconception that these people were brilliant musicians and they weren’t. They were brilliant musicians in the spiritual sense. They had terrific ideas and a lot of balls or whatever. They knew what the physical function of music was, but they weren’t virtuosi.¹³³

Two years later he told an interviewer, “I’m an anti-musician. I don’t think the craft of music is relevant to the art of music.”¹³⁴ “Anti-music” has a specific meaning for some critics, for instance David Cope, who in his book New Directions in Music discusses the following categories in his chapter on “Antimusic”: danger music (involving physical or mental hazard to the performer and/or audience), minimal and concept music (Cage’s famous 4’33” representing these genres’ archetypal qualities), biomusic (“music created by natural life functions rather than by necessarily conscious attempts at composition”), and soundscapes (typically involving the focussing of attention on manipulated or natural environmental sounds).¹³⁵ Much of Eno’s music, particularly since around 1975, can certainly be seen in terms of these categories, with the exception of “danger music.”

But I doubt that Eno, in referring to himself as an anti-musician, was intent on allying himself with any of these movements. Rather, he was making a specific statement about the way he deals with his own creativity. In 1981 he said, “I don’t consider myself a professional musician, though I do consider myself a professional composer.”¹³⁶ In one sense, Eno’s saying he is not a musician, or saying he is an anti-musician, is nothing radical: he is merely casting himself in the role of the traditional composer whose function is to conceive the music and communicate it to the audience in some way – without necessarily being competent to perform it himself. But there is a difference between Eno and the traditional composer. The composer’s final product is a musical score – a more or less conventional system of written signs that tell the performers what to do with more or less accuracy and completeness. Eno’s final product, on the other hand, is a sound recording that has only to be cued up on playback equipment to be heard – and up to the point of playback, Eno has had total control over the composition. Eno, like many if not most popular musicians, does not read music. The exact ways in which he conceives and works with sound, and the ways in which he communicates his intentions to his performers, are the subject of the next chapter. Here it will suffice to quote Eno’s answer to an interviewer who asked him whether his not reading music was a deliberate choice:

It wouldn’t be very useful for me. There have been one or two occasions where I was stuck somewhere without my tape recorder and had an idea, tried to memorize it, and since a good idea nearly always relies on some unfamiliar nuance it is therefore automatically hard to remember. So on those very rare occasions I’ve thought, “God, if only I could write this down.” But in fact, quite a lot of what I do has to do with sound texture, and you can’t notate that anyway ... That’s because musical notation arose at a time when sound textures were limited. If you said violins and woodwind that defined the sound texture, if I say synthesizer and guitar it means nothing – you’re talking about 28,000 variables.¹³⁷

Eno goes on to reflect on the “transmission losses” that inevitably occur when a traditional composer or pop arranger takes a sounding idea and fixes it in written form, musicians read the written form, and then play it, the potential for distortion of the original information is present at each stage of the process – a dilemma to the painfulness of which any composer who uses notation can attest.
Eno sees himself as having precisely the right amount of manual instrumental skill to do what he needs to do in order to make his music. He apparently does not feel that a higher level of instrumental technique might open the door for him to other kinds of musical expression. An interviewer asked him in 1981, “Do you ever practice things on a keyboard or a guitar in order to be able to execute them to your satisfaction?” He answered: “Not very often ... If I have a phrase that has a fast series of notes, I might break the phrase down into three simpler ones, and do them as overdubs.”¹³⁸

This resolute lack of technique has become an integral part of Eno’s whole philosophical approach to music-making. Whether out of inner or outer defensiveness, or out of honest self-examination, he has come up with a variety of justifications for remaining a “non-musician.” One is that lack of technique almost forces one to be creative: it makes one confront one’s vulnerability. Eno explains:

I’ve seen musicians stuck for an idea, and what they’ll do between takes is just diddle around, playing the blues or whatever, just to reassure themselves that, “Hey, I’m not useless. Look, I can do this.” But I believe that to have that [technique] to fall back on is an illusion. It’s better to say, “I’m useless,” and start from that position. I think the way technique gets in the way is by fooling you into thinking that you are doing something when you actually are not.¹³⁹

Robert Fripp – who is, however, one of the most technically proficient and polished guitarists in rock – has built his approach to music-making around a similar idea. Fripp has said:

You have to be there – with attention. And if you are, your state is changed from the normal and dozy condition we wander around within. And in the condition of heightened sensitivity and awareness, music is possible. You see, for a good player to just play licks, running on automatic, there’s no music there. It only seems to be music. There is what we would call musical sound and forms of organization, but there’s no quality. It’s only mechanical.¹⁴⁰

Eno and Fripp arrive at the same point from opposite directions. As Eno has said, “The reason Fripp and I have always had a good rapport is because we stand at two ends of that spectrum. He’s the virtuoso and I’m the idiot savant, if you like. The middle territory of pointless displays of skill and obvious next moves doesn’t interest either of us.”¹⁴¹

For Eno, another positive aspect of his lack of instrumental and theoretical proficiency is that it can lead to results that a trained musician would have ruled out or might not have even considered. He illustrates this point by recalling a recording session in which Fripp had called him in to work on one of his albums. Fripp asked Eno what could be added to a particular song, and Eno said he had in mind a melodic part and some harmonic backing. Fripp asked what kind of harmonies, and Eno said, “I won’t know until I play them.” From that point, Eno proceeded empirically, building up the song track by track. Fripp listened to the final result and said, “That’s very interesting, because nobody would have arrived at that harmony by writing it out. There’s a wrong chord in it.” Eno concludes: “Had I known that [there was a ‘wrong’ chord], I probably would have dismissed it as a possibility, even though it sounded good. Retaining my lack of proficiency to a certain extent allows me to make interesting mistakes.”¹⁴²

One of the Oblique Strategies cards says, “Honor thy mistake as a hidden intention.” And indeed one of the most delightful aspects of Eno’s creative personality is his inclination to take the idea of this oracle seriously, whether in searching empirically for the right harmonies by laying track after track on top of each other, whether in accepting the piano’s equal temperament as its most beautiful characteristic, or in sometimes finding charm and wonder in an out-of-tune live recording. In speaking of the live album he did with Kevin Ayers, John Cale, and Nico, June 1, 1974, he describes their encore performance of his song, “Baby’s on Fire,” in glowing terms:

The instruments were incredibly out of tune, so out of tune you wouldn’t believe it. But it sounds fantastic. There’s one little bit in it where there’s a riff between the guitar and one of the bassists, and they’re so out of tune it sounds like cellos. Amazing! I mean if you tried to make that sound in the studio it would have taken you ages. You wouldn’t have thought of making it, in fact, it’s such a bizarre sound. And the piano and guitar are quite well out of tune as well. Ha!¹⁴³

This quality or discipline, which might be called “retroactive creativity” – consisting in the confident affirmation that a mistake worked out for the best – forms an important part of Eno’s work. Still another benefit that Eno has derived from his lack of manual technique is an abiding love of the simple and an ear for realizing the potential for the marvelous in the most rudimentary of musical materials. This has created problems in studio situations, where the skillful musicians he works with sometimes can’t help but produce complex musical ideas in their effort to be creative. Paradoxically, if an idea is musically complex to begin with – containing a lot of fast notes or difficult harmonies, for instance – Eno feels he can do less with it: his creative options are limited. “So the problem with musicians is always telling them to have confidence in a simple and beautiful thing, to know that there’s a whole world that can be extracted from a simple sound ... It’s not that because it’s simple, any idiot can do it. There’s sensitivity in the way you can strike just one note.”¹⁴⁴

As we have already seen, some of the musicians Eno admires most are those who have realized that “there are really distinct advantages to working within a quite restricted range of possibilities.”¹⁴⁶ Ultimately, this line of thought can become a transformational philosophy applicable to the whole of life, not just to musical composition. As Eno has advised, “Regard your limitations as secret strengths. Or as constraints that you can make use of.”¹⁴⁷

By 1981, if not before, Eno had come to the conclusion that the recording studio and the empirical method of composing has created a new art form, a whole new kind of “music”: “In some sense it’s so different that it really should be called by a different name. The only similarity is that people listen to it, so it enters through the same sense, but in the way it’s made it’s really a different thing.”¹⁴⁸

Since Eno came to these conclusions, the music world has been transformed by the application of computer technology to musical instruments and music data storage methods. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) has been invented and nowadays different brands of synthesizers and computers happily talk to each other in a common language. A composer or rock band can create complex multi-track music on a MIDI sequencer, store it on floppy disk, edit it by computer, and print it out in notated form or play it back in a flawless “performance” at the touch of a button. The new digital music technology is a non-musician’s dream, that is, one needs very little traditional musicianly skill in order to produce impressive-sounding masses of sound. As prices come down, more and more musicians and amateurs are getting their hands on electronic equipment, building little home studios, and experiencing first-hand the kind of empirical compositional process Eno has described in detail. Even if we still call it music, the medthods by which sounding substances are made and thought about have been changed radically, perhaps forever.