17
self. It would fill up those heavy silences that sometimes fall between
friends dining together. It would spare them the trouble of paying at-
tention to their own banal remarks. And at the same time it would neu-
tralize the street noises which so indiscretely enter into the play of
conversation. To make such music would be to respond to a need.
15
Eno's own philosophy of ambient music is not so peevish as Satie's, and Eno has been more
interested in enhancing and incorporating the environment's extraneous noises than in neutral-
izing them. Nonetheless,
the parallels are obvious. Cage's description of Satie's proto-
minimalist work Vexations a piece lasting, in Cage's estimate,
"twenty-four hours, 840 repetitions of a fifty-two beat piece itself in-
volving a repetitive structure: A, A1, A, A2, each A thirteen measures
long"
16
immediately brings to mind Eno's highly repetitive piece
"Discreet Music," in which a couple of short synthesizer melodies me-
ander, repeat, and randomly overlap over a period of thirty minutes,
and Eno's recent audio-visual installations, in which repeating, over-
lapping cycles can go on for as long as six weeks. In discussing Satie's
music to accompany the sounds of knives and forks, Cage says that "It
is evidently a question of bringing one's intended actions into relation
with the ambient unintended ones."
17
Although Eno has never publicly
said as much, this reference to "ambient" sounds is very likely the
genesis of Eno's own concept of ambient music, or at least the source
of his use of the word. Later on the same page, Cage characteristically
defines silence as "ambient noise." Cage quotes Satie again:
They will tell you I am not a musician. That's right ... Take the Fils des
Etoiles or the Morceaux en forme de poire, En habit de cheval or the
Sarabandes, it is clear no musical idea presided at the creation of these
works.
18
Again, although one may not be exactly sure how to interpret Satie's blend of irony, bitter-
ness, and wit, the statement "I am not a musician" was taken up eagerly by Eno in the 1970s,
and became almost his motto or credo, however numerous the misunderstandings to which it
has given rise may be. (I shall return to this issue in Chapter 3.) Eno specified that it was the
"systematic" Satie with whom he strongly identified: "He was a systems composer, you know,
planning chord changes by numerical techniques. In the midst of extraordinary chromatic
experimentalism, with everyone doing bizarre things, he just wrote these lovely little pieces of
music."
19
15
Cage, Silence, 76.
16
Cage, Silence, 78.
17
Cage, Silence, 80.
18
Cage, Silence, 79.
19
Stephen Demorest, "The Discreet Charm of Brian Eno: An English Pop Theorist Seeks to
Redefine Music," Horizon 21 (June 1978), 85.