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Velvets' approach with the more soulful sound of Afro-American music a musical marriage
of the "stiff, totalitarian" aspect of rock with the "fluid, sensual quality of black music":

I think it would make a saleable combination if Kraftwerk employed
Parliament, or the other way around. It would be interesting if you had
the Parliament group playing bass, and Kraftwerk playing the drums.
There would be a cross-cultural hybrid, especially if everybody stuck
to their guns.

Although Eno played clarinet with the Portsmouth Sinfonia, and although he has systemati-
cally attacked the "pyramidical" social structure of the classical orchestra (in a crucial article
treated in Chapter 4), he seldom discusses Western European art music in interviews. If he
owes a debt to that tradition, it is to its avant-garde, experimental factions that rallied to John
Cage's proclamation in the 1950s and 1960s that "everything we do is music," and to the
group of composers who have followed paths set out by La Monte Young and Terry Riley and
have come to be called "minimalists."

Eno read Cage's epochal book Silence

in the 1960s. Glancing through its contents today, one

is struck by the frequency of passages that presage Eno's own approach to music and the phi-
losophy of music. Cage quotes from an article by Christian Wolff:

Notable qualities of this music, whether electronic or not, are monot-
ony and the irritation that accompanies it. The monotony may lie in
simplicity or delicacy, strength or complexity. Complexity tends to
reach a point of neutralization: continuous change results in a certain
sameness. It goes in no particular direction. There is no necessary con-
cern with time as a measure of distance from a point in the past to a
point in the future, with linear continuity alone. It is not a question of
getting anywhere, of making progress, or having come from anywhere
in particular, of tradition or futurism. There is neither nostalgia nor an-
ticipation. Often the structure of a piece is circular.

Though the sounding surfaces of Wolff's examples Pousseur's Exercises de Piano and
Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI are about as diametrically opposed to Eno's ambient music
as conceiveably possible, the writer could be describing any number of Eno pieces written
since 1975, and it is easy to imagine Eno in the 1960s reading such a passage and turning it
over in his mind. Cage's essay on Erik Satie likewise contains quotations that could almost
have appeared in the liner notes to an album like Music for Airports, an album that is in a
sense a response to the Frenchman's challenge. Cage quotes Satie:

Nevertheless, we must bring about a music which is like furniture a
music, that is, which will be part of the noises of the environment, will
take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the
noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing it-

Roman Kozak, "Math Qualities of Music Interest Eno," Billboard 90 (13 May 1978), 51.

John Cage, Silence (Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1976, first published

1961).

Cage, Silence, 54.