13
he never seems to stray far from a sense of the inherent mystery of the world, and that sense
of mystery excites and motivates him. Eno's favorite adjective is "interested." The word de-
notes to him more than a merely intellectual flirtation with a passing idea, when he is inter-
ested in something, it has awakened that sense of wonder, and he is palpably "engaged" in it,
in the sense of full, existential, personal engagement.
Composers today have available to them the entire world of music: it is no further away than
the local library or record store. One consequence of this state of affairs is that to an ever-
increasing degree, the whole matter of "influences" is becoming less and less clear-cut.
Things were simpler in earlier periods, and the historian's task in dealing with earlier music is
rather different. It is one thing to note that Bach copied out Vivaldi scores by hand, or to trace
the history of the parody Mass in the sixteenth century: in those instances, the musical tradi-
tion in question was insular to a greater or lesser extent, the music available to the composers
was limited in quantity, style, and genre, and the biographical facts available to the researcher
are at a minimum, when "influences" can be positively proclaimed, it usually represents a
triumph of intrepid musicological sleuthing as well as a confirmation of the traditional, linear
interpretation of music history.
It is quite another thing to take note of the music that Eno has counted among his influences:
in his case, the point to be made is that he exemplifies a new type of composer whose musical
background is astonishingly diverse: he has exposed himself to a variety of traditions ranging
from rock to classical, from avant-garde to experimental, as well as to a variety of non-
Western musics such as Arabic, African, and Bulgarian. Today, the "chain of influence" is
more likely to be a complex network or web, with many points of intersection that can be-
come difficult or impossible to sort out. When the vast array of "influences" is processed and
re-processed in the mental melting pot of a modern composer like Eno, the resulting works
sometimes show definite ties with this or that tradition, but just as frequently, the individual
piece will manifest no certain origins, the input of the "influences" having been so completely
assimilated into the composer's personal voice that no outstanding traces are left. Perhaps
something similar may be said of some earlier composers, but this does not alter the radical
difference between the contemporary and historical musical situations.
Eno grew up in the English countryside, in the small Suffolk town of Woodbridge. The deci-
sive musical influences stemmed, however, not from indigenous folk or popular traditions, but
from two large U.S. air bases located within five miles of Woodbridge, which eventually
housed about 15,000 G.I.'s. The many local cafés had juke-boxes well-stocked with contem-
porary American popular music, and Eno had a sister who used to go to the PX stores and
"come back with all these really very interesting records that you never heard in England oth-
erwise. They never were on the radio."
2
It was a situation strikingly similar to that of the
young Beatles' Liverpool, where sailors brought in the latest American records, which at-
tracted young listeners for their contemporaneity as well as for their exotic quality. Eno has
described the curious mix of music he heard like this:
Feeble, weedy English pop music and then the American stuff, full of
what I still find to be menace and strangeness. I listened to Chuck
Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, I was a listener for a long, long time
2
Kurt Loder, "Eno," Synapse (Jan./Feb. 1979), 26-7.