"I was trying to make a piece that could be listened to and yet could be ignored…" Brian Eno, 1975.
What is Ambient Music?
In the sleevenotes to "Discreet Music" (1975) Brian Eno described his Eureka moment when he 'discovered' the idea of ambient music. The story goes that a bed ridden Eno struggled to put on a record that a friend had brought him. After getting back to bed he was unable to adjust the volume, which was left very low, this he describes:
"…the record played on almost inaudibly. This presented me with a whole new way of hearing music - as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of the ambience"
Ambient music sinks into the background, subtlety influencing the room it is played in. "Discreet Music" is the defining ambient piece, b it set out the philosophy of ambient music. "Discreet Music" is a lush, beautiful soundscape that changes subtlety much like the weather. The system for creating this music was deceptively simple. . Eno programmed a synthesiser with two mutual melodies and letting them loop via two tape machines for 30 minutes.
Programming over Performance
When writing music by conventional means there is always a temptation to veer towards predictability and resolution. One way to overcome this is to take the performer and composer out of the equation Eno was fascinated with the idea of programming music, rather than necessarily performing it. This led him into the ambient direction.
I am also fascinated by the idea of creating art within dogmatic rules and structure. There are structures throughout art - the size of a canvass, the range of an instrument. I like the idea of limiting the ways of producing art to stimulate creativity, painting in black and white for example. The Dogme film group are a contemporary example, the automatic art movement of the 20's is an older one. Through rules the fat of artistic indulgence can be trimmed off.
My love of rules shouldn't be taken the wrong way, I love improvisation but this is an attempt to create pure, unreflexive art that expunges the artist from the equation. In the same way the Warhol film of the empire state building, simply films itself this music creates itself.
Another interesting thing about this piece is that its length is completely arbitrary. The law of probability is that despite the differing length of the four phrases they must converge at some point. A complex equation might even show us when this is and there would be the end of the piece, I suppose. I want this piece to be timeless, however, you can enter at any point and leave at any point. The music goes on creating itself. Didn't John Cage compose a piece that it would take 23 years to complete? I'm trying to make some kind of monolithic statement here. The decision to cut it off at 36 minutes was completely arbitrary. In its ideal setting this music would be in a permanent instillation, constantly playing.
Music for Four Horns - The piece itself
On Monday the 21st of October 2002 the rain was pouring down in Sheffield. With nothing better to do and lacking inspiration to do something proper I decided to embark on an experiment. Having dabbled with 'ambient' techniques - loops, delays, repetition etc. I have never fully committed myself to writing a proper ambient piece. Armed with a cup of strong tea I set out to follow Eno's blueprint and compose an ambient piece. Eno's recipe for an ambient piece is
1. An Input. (Melodies of Different Lengths) 2. A Loop System. 3. A Way of altering the timbre of the Input.
My input was four mutually compatible horn melodies, all in B flat major. For the sake of symmetry I played two on the trumpet and two on the French horn. The horns were recorded on my 4-track machine and sampled into my computer. My loop system is a tracker style computer sequencer that plays the samples, thankfully technology has moved on significantly since 'Discreet Music'. As for altering the timbre of the input, Eno did this in real time with a graphic equalizer. I decided to do nothing in real time. I did however, treat the horns with varying levels of analog delay to soften their sound and add interest.
The piece itself works because of the different lengths of the four melodic lines. All four are set off at different times and simply looped over and over. The loops converge at different times, creating both concord and discord and an array of harmonies.