Re: the function of some music

[Richard Zvonar <zvonar@zvonar.com>]

At 12:02 PM -0700 6/6/03, Tim Nelson wrote:

>Eno realized that the volume on the stereo was set much too low..As 
>he listened to the record, he could only hear the loudest notes, and 
>had a sort of epiphany regarding another way of listening to music 
>in the context of ambient sounds. It wasn't that he wasn't listening 
>attentively, but rather, the 'local soundscape' was an integral part 
>of the listening experience.

It seems to me that there are various interpretations of what 
"ambient" music is, and in the end it probably doesn't make a whole 
lot of difference. Still it's fun to debate and discuss nuances of 
meaning.

Part of Eno's observation could be construed as akin to what Pauline 
Oliveros calls "deep listening" and even to the type of aural 
awareness that John Cage called attention to (most famously in 
4'33"). One implication of this acute attention to all sounds, and 
the rejection of the idea of hierarchical importance of deliberately 
"musical" sounds over others, is that we should go through life with 
ears wide open (again, as Cage said, "we have no ear lids"). But 
another implication that is more composerly (and perhaps less 
philosophical) is that we can compose and perform music that IS and 
ambience. I think that despite Eno's observations much of the music 
he created under the "ambient" banner is actually music to be 
listened to for itself and not necessarily as a component of an 
ambient environment. Take "Music for Airports." This can certainly be 
used in a public environment and can function in a truly ambient 
manner, but it can also be listened to as a musical foreground. In 
such cases it certainly isn't ambient in the purist sense, but it is 
a sort of ambience in the sense of something that sounds continuously 
as a sonic environment. But I've also heard arrangements of this 
music performed in concert by the Bang on a Can All Stars. In that 
situation it was most definitely concert music.

So in the end, the term "ambient music" no longer has one specific 
meaning. It might be best for those who are intending to blend in 
with the local ambience to simply revert to Satie's terminology and 
call it "furniture music."

As a sidelight, there were a number of artists from the 1960s onward 
who created steady-state music that was not intended as ambient music 
in Eno's earliest sense of the term. I refer to La Monte Young's 
Theater of Eternal Music (the wellspring), Charlemagne Palestine's 
drone pieces, Maryanne Amacher's sound environments, some sound 
installations by Max Neuhaus.
-- 

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Richard Zvonar, PhD
(818) 788-2202
http://www.zvonar.com
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