Brian eno his music and the vertical color of sound

Eno’s Artistic Intent

In his progressive rock music, Eno was attempting a synthesis of avant-garde artistic concepts with the stylistic forms of rock music, up to around 1974 he was unflinching in his declaration that “rock is the most important art form right now.”¹⁶⁴ The quality that was to bind everything together was what he called his “idiot energy” – a kind of gleeful abandon, a revelling in the possibilities of such a synthesis and in the improbable results that sometimes ensued. Shortly after he left Roxy Music, he explained his position:

What it [Roxy’s first album without Eno] lacks for me is one of the most important elements of my musical life, which is insanity. I’m interested in things being absurd and there was something really exciting in Roxy at one time. We were juxtaposing things that didn’t naturally sit together.¹⁶⁵

Roxy’s early work held for Eno the attraction of “the element of clumsiness and grotesqueness ... There was terrific tension at one stage in the music, which I really enjoyed.”¹⁶⁶ Exactly how Eno succeeded in working the qualities of insanity, absurdity, clumsiness, and grotesqueness into his progressive rock music is the subject of Chapter 9. Such qualities contrast sharply with the qualities of mystery, wonder, seductiveness, and transparent beauty that characterize the intent of his ambient music. But even in his early career Eno was interested in more than making a specific kind of rock music:

My role in rock music isn’t to come on with New Musical Ideas in any strict sense. It’s to come on with new concepts about how you might generate music. It’s always time to question what has become standard and established. I figure that in a way, my contribution ... will be more on a theoretical basis, about suggesting greater freedom in the way people approach music.¹⁶⁷

The complexity of this intent should always be borne in mind when considering Eno’s music. If his belief that music is about other music cannot be held to be true for all music, it certainly does apply to much of his own. There has always been this element of distancing in Eno’s relationship to his own music, it is as though he has never been quite willing to say of his music, “Here it is, this is it, this is my music and that’s all there is to it.” His intent encompasses a larger conceptual territory than that of just simply making music for its own sake, his ambivalent, paradoxical statement quoted above about calling his ambient works music at all bears this out.

If Eno has been anxious that his listeners understand his work in a large historical and conceptual context, however, he is decidedly uninterested in being identified with any particular school of musical practice, whether inside rock or out. As we have already seen, he has criticized progressive rock for its “Gothic” tendencies and technological excesses. On the other hand he has not been anxious to identify completely with the avant-garde. Not even the ideas of Cage have met with his unconditional approval or endorsement. At the same time, Eno does not wish to get stuck in some extreme artistic fringe, but rather wants his music to be rooted in the real world of real listeners. Furthermore, he acknowledges, both explicitly (in verbal statements) and implicitly (in the character of his music), the active and ongoing relationship of his music with other musical traditions. The complexity of Eno’s debt to other traditions, though, should be evident. In the interview with Eno and Cage, the latter said:

When I was just beginning there were only two things you could do: one was to follow Schoenberg and the other was to follow Stravinsky. If you want to be a modern composer now, there are so many things to do, and people do them ... It’s a changed world. It’s not a world in which we are obliged to follow a mainstream, represented by X or Y.

Eno readily concurred: “That’s right, you don’t have to belong to a pantheon or even know about it.”¹⁶⁸

“I want to make things that put me in the position of innocence, that recreate the feeling of innocence in you.”¹⁶⁹ Eno has said this in different ways on many different occasions. The emotional component of his work is extremely strong, even if in his ambient music its range is somewhat limited. Wonder, mystery, melancholy, subdued joy, and a sense of the strange-yet-familiar are what he has systematically been trying to acheive in his wordless ambient music. If the emotional component is strong, however, it is usually present as a kind of deep undercurrent: it does not burst from the surface of the music nor confront the listener with unambiguous, expressionistic intent. This is, by and large, as true of his progressive rock as of his ambient music, and can be seen as reflecting a “classical” – as opposed to “romantic” – strain in Eno’s temperament. In 1978 he criticized

bands who want to give the illusion by their music that the music itself is the result of incredible, seething passions and turmoil from within, and all this music comes out as a direct result of that. It’s a case of, “Boy, are we in a sort of emotional turmoil, here it all comes.”

The way I work, and the way a lot of other people work, is to create music that creates a feeling in you. You set out in a rather deliberate way to do this by carefully constructing a piece that will evoke in you the feeling that you want. It’s not the other way round, where you have all these feelings that then suddenly force this piece to exist in whatever form it takes.¹⁷⁰

Eno’s “classicism” does not necessarily imply unambiguous, direct expression, part of the sense of mystery arises from the listener’s uncertainty as regards the precise nature of the music’s emotional content. Eno is apt to throw up barriers to interpreting any given piece in any one single way, the veiled, multiple, obscure, or discreet intention is part of his whole aesthetic. Even in the lyrics to his progressive rock songs, Eno was at pains not to make his emotional statements too explicit, too prone to any one interpretation. To him, that would defeat the purpose of making a musical statement at all. For instance, although has written songs that appear to be more or less about lust (“The Great Pretender”) and about male/female companionship (“St. Elmo’s Fire,” “Julie with...”), he has not produced anything that could indisputably be called a “love song” in the popular music or rock traditions. In 1979 Eno was asked, “But isn’t it difficult and mysterious enough to try to understand why you love a certain person? Isn’t that feeling worth writing about?” He responded:

No, not for me. I’m not interested in it. I mean, I’m not interested in writing about it. It’s certainly not something that I would ever use music to discuss, at least not in clear terms like that. You see, he problem is that people, particularly people who write, assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I even remember the words, actually, let alone think that those are the center of the meaning. For me, music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones of those, or point up certain others that aren’t really in there, or aren’t worth saying, or something.¹⁷¹

Another aspect of intent involves what making music means to Eno personally. What attracts him to being a composer, and what keeps him at it? Eno has often discussed the fact that his earliest musical experiences came without a context: one reason that do-wop and big-band jazz seemed so wonderful to him was that such music appeared completely “alien,” totally other: he had as yet acquired no inner historical framework. Increased knowledge inevitably led to a certain disillusionment, diffusing some of the music’s mystery, and it is precisely that sense of mystery that he wishes to put back into the music he makes, by deliberately dismantling or shifting the stylistic contexts of the materials he works with.¹⁷²

Composing also takes on the aspect of an introspective search – a search for undiscovered territory within the self:

I think the trait common to most artists is an attraction towards the thrill of uncertainty, and an impulse to again and again put themselves in a precarious position, even if it’s in a very insulated way. Making records doesn’t threaten your life. If you fuck it up you’re not gonna die, but nonetheless, the thrill is to do something that takes you by surprise, that makes you wonder, god, what in me does this concept connect with? What part of me have I discovered now?¹⁷³

The element of risk is important to Eno in creative as well as day-to-day situations. In 1976 he told an interviewer, “My interest in danger is at a peak. The real risks are the ones which threaten your mental stability – I mean which threaten your ability to have a ready answer.”¹⁷⁴ Indeed, many if not most of Eno’s compositions are begun without a clear idea of what they will ultimately end up sounding like – quite a different process from that in which Mozart is said to have “seen” entire symphonic movements, fully orchestrated, in moments of blinding illumination.