CHAPTER FIVE: LISTENERS AND AIMS

CHAPTER FIVE: LISTENERS AND AIMS

Eno’s Audience

Eno has constantly searched for a kind of middle ground between the rarefied realms of high art and the everyday ephemera of popular culture. It stands to reason that he would view his audience as people interested in that same territory. He tries to make his music accordingly, making pieces that “seduce people to the point where they start searching.” If a piece of music has a seductive sounding surface but no real content, or conversely, if the content of a piece is obscured by complicated and unattractive procedures on the surface, Eno believes the music has failed. What interests him is “sitting on that line” between seductive surface and meaningful content.¹⁵¹

Although Eno has made few concert appearances over the last decade, the sense of making music for an audience, however abstract, is important to him: “If I ever found I was doing work that nobody was interested in, I would seriously doubt it. I wouldn’t want to be in the position of not feeling connected anymore.”¹⁵² Thus unlike Milton Babbitt¹⁵³ and many another contemporary composer who sees his work as a kind of research and development in the cause of the advancement of music, not needing the approval or feedback of the public or any particular segment thereof, Eno is unable to be quite so detached about his work – his position is more traditional, in the sense of an artist doing work that his audience can appreciate and understand and even is willing to pay for. He makes, as Wayne Robins has put it, “music you can live with.”¹⁵⁴

Eno’s relationship to his primary chosen medium – the phonograph record – has been ambivalent in the 1980s. After a string of ambient solo albums and collaborations, he has recently been devoting much more time to his audio-visual installations. An interviewer asked him in 1983: “You mentioned that you’ve gotten very suspicious of records lately. Can you elaborate?” He replied:

I don’t like the form much anymore. I’ve become more and more interested in music that has a location of some kind, like gospel music – you go somewhere and you become part of something in order to experience the music. You enter a whole different social and acoustic setting. There’s a whole context that goes with the music. Just sitting in your living room and sticking on some record is a whole other thing.¹⁵⁵

As an analogy with the new music that is completely studio-produced, Eno recalls the birth of photography in the 19th century: initially, the new technology was used as a substitute for painting, to make inexpensive portraits, the desire to imitate painting went as far as the use of canvas-textured photographic paper. Similarly, the early history of filmmaking shows producers interested essentially in putting traditional dramatic ideas to work on celluloid. And with early sound recordings, the idea was to capture a live musical performance as faithfully as possible. With time, however,

a point was reached where it became realized that this medium had its own strengths and limitations, and therefore could become a different form through its own rules.

I think that’s true of records as well. They’ve got nothing to do now with performances. It’s now possible to make records that have music that was never performed or never could be performed and in fact doesn’t exist outside of that record. And if that’s the area you work in, then I think you really have to consider that as part of your working philosophy. So for quite a while now I’ve been thinking that if I make records, I want to think not in terms of evoking a memory of a performance, which never existed in fact, but to think in terms of making a piece of sound which is going to be heard in a type of location, usually someone’s house ... I assume [my listeners] are sitting very comfortably and not expecting to dance.¹⁵⁶

Discussing film on another occasion, Eno doubted whether “naturalism” was really possible:

The concept of naturalism in any of the recorded media is worthy of debate. Has a film got anything to do with real life? I don’t think it does ...

What do Fellini’s films have to do with naturalism? He works with the inaccuracies of memory. In Amacord there’s the tobacconist with the very big tits. In real life they were probably not that big. But they were his first big tits, and he remembers them as being very big. It’s the opposite direction from naturalism: elevating things to mythical, archetypal status. Make them more dreamlike. That’s a feeling I like a lot.¹⁵⁷

The conscious recognition that in his studio-created music he is dealing with an inherently non-naturalistic medium analogous to that of the art film, abstract painting, or modern photography has given Eno’s work a certain quality of depth consistent with its “mythical, archetypal” conception. Such ideas are not unique in modern music: electronic music composers since the 1950s have been confronted with the dilemmas of performerless and placeless music, though after the initial flirtations and experiments with synthesized sound and tape recorders had run their course, many composers gave up purely electronic music since something indeed seemed to be missing. Eno is unusual in how carefully he has thought through the whole matter, and in his courageous persistence in seeking an audience for this elusive music that is made, yet not performed. In speaking of what he termed the “landscape music” of ambient-style albums like On Land, he said, “I don’t quite know what it is. There isn’t any tradition for it ... The problem is always calling it music. I wish there were another word for it.”¹⁵⁸ This dissatisfaction with the traditional word is reminiscent of Edgar Varèse, who preferred the term “organized sound,” and of Igor Stravinsky, who in searching for a formulation for the sound of Anton Webern’s music, came up with the term “illuminated noise.”

Thus Eno is fully aware of the transformation in the meaning of music that results from the revolution in listening habits and environments made possible through the availability of inexpensive, high-quality playback equipment. He is fond of referring to Marshall McLuhan’s idea that all music is now all present – “not only is the whole history of our music with us now, in some sense, on record, but the whole global musical culture is also available.”¹⁵⁹ In this transformed aural habitat, what sort of meaning does Eno see for his own music? To what sorts of purposes does he imagine people putting it to use? With regard to these questions, Eno has been most forthcoming in connection with his ambient music. In a statement in 1982 which is worthwhile quoting in full, he discussed his ambient music and its uses:

I like it [“ambient music”] as an ambiguous term. It gives me a certain latitude.

It has two major meanings. One is the idea of music that allows you any listening position in relation to it. This has widely been misinterpreted by the press (in their infinite unsubtlety) as background music. I mean music that can be background or foreground or anywhere, which is a rather different idea.

Most music chooses its own position in terms of your listening to it. Muzak wants to be back there. Punk wants to be up front. Classical wants to be another place. I wanted to make something you could slip in and out of. You could pay attention or you could choose not to be distracted by it if you wanted to do something while it was on. I can’t read with a pop record playing, or with most classical records. They’re not intended to leave that part of the mind free – my mind, anyway. Ambient music allows many different types of attention.

The other meaning is more pronounced on On Land: creating an ambience, a sense of place that complements and alters your environment. Both meanings are contained in the word “ambient.”

Critics don’t like these records, but people do. The response has been really encouraging.

People are doing the most interesting things with the records. I got a letter from a woman in Cleveland who works with autistic children. She had one child who never spoke, he had never made a single vocal noise in his life. Another one wouldn’t sleep, he was ultra-nervous, in a wretched state. She put Discreet Music on one day, and the kid who had never slept just lay down on a concrete floor and went to sleep. So she went to the group where this other kid was, and she kept playing Discreet Music. And this little child – not only because of the record, I’m sure, though the other one was – started talking. I’m not claiming Discreet Music can make the dumb talk, but it’s nice to know it can be used as part of an atmosphere that produces physiological change in people, or seems to.

When Music for Airports came out and sold fairly well, I thought people assumed it was going to be another Before and After Science. It takes a long while to learn whether you’re selling on the momentum of your successes. I don’t think that’s so anymore. I’ve almost shifted audiences. I meet people who never knew I made a record of songs.

Critics can’t stand these records, by and large, because in their search for eternal adolescence they still want it all to be spunky and manic and witty. They come back to rock music again and again, expecting to feel like kids. That isn’t what I want from music anymore – not in quite that way. I’m interested in the idea of feeling like a very young child, but I’m not interested in feeling like a teenager.¹⁶⁰

The last paragraph in this quotation ties in with Eno’s many reservations about rock in general. Clearly, his ambient music has been aimed at a different audience than his progressive rock music, or at least at a different mode of receptivity. With his ambient works, Eno has explicitly tried to make music that is not too self-assertive, that does not intrude too much, that does not dare its audience to listen nor threaten them if they choose not to – yet at the same time, music that is complex and deep enough to sustain and reward close listening. His ambient music is designed to be played at low or medium volume, high volume settings do violence to the sense and spirit of the music. Close listening reveals a constantly changing soundscape, yet paradoxically the same music can seem static and uneventful, though benign enough, if one is not really paying attention. Critics of Eno’s ambient works have often complained that nothing much happens in the music. He answers such criticism by comparing his musical works to paintings, in their aspect as “a sort of continuous part of the environment” that one can choose to notice or to ignore:

If a painting is hanging on a wall where we live, we don’t feel that we’re missing something by not paying attention to it ... Yet with music and video, we still have the expectation of some kind of drama. My music and videos do change, but they change slowly. And they change in such a way that it doesn’t matter if you miss a bit ... The conventional commercial notion that people want a lot of stimulus and constant change simply isn’t true. In the world I come from, the pop world, there’s always this notion that the public is basically very lazy and has to be prodded all the time. So everything is loaded with so-called surprises and changes.¹⁶¹