20
speak, and so on. And it was that same thing again there's a lot of
space here, a lot of new territory. It's a territory that nobody had yet
had the time to say you couldn't do something.
28
Eno did homage to Cage in 1976 by producing an album that included performances of five
Cage pieces.
29
If there is a gulf that separates the two men, it ultimately has to do with age and
background. Cage is the elder statesman of the avant-garde, he studied with Schoenberg, and
his views on music, as summarized in Silence, revolve around developments in the Western
art music tradition indeed represent developments more or less specific to that tradition,
some of his chance music bears an aesthetic surface strikingly similar to that of serially-
composed music, to which it is so adamantly opposed at the philosophical level. Eno's musi-
cal roots are in popular music traditions, and this is reflected not only in his somewhat super-
ficial knowledge of the classical tradition and his disdain for its institutional infrastructure,
but in his music itself, which is generally by far more consonant and accessible than much of
Cage's, even when it is not outright rock.
Cage's influence on Eno has thus been far-reaching, but as is true of Cage's impact on many
composers, it has been more conceptual than specifically musical in nature. A more concrete
musical influence has been that of minimalist composers such as La Monte Young, Terry Ri-
ley, and Steve Reich, whose music has influenced Eno more than any other, with the possible
exception of the popular music of the 1950s already discussed. For Eno, minimalism repre-
sents the most significant and potentially fruitful aesthetic point of departure in the 20th cen-
tury a new musical meta-idea, so to speak, which promises untold riches not simply in the
development of compositional techniques, but in the development of new ways of listening.
The pre-history of minimalism goes back at least to Satie's Vexations. But one of the earliest
examples of minimalism proper is by Terry Riley (b. 1935), who, shortly after graduating
from the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in composition, wrote the seminal
work In C (1964). The score consists of fifty-three notated melodic fragments, which the per-
formers, who are variable in number, are to play one after the other, in synchronization with a
steadily repeated "pulse" on the top two C's of the piano keyboard, repeating any given frag-
ment an indeterminate number of times and pausing between fragments as they see fit. The
piece ends after everyone reaches the fifty-third fragment. Typical performances last between
forty-five and ninety minutes, though one In C marathon in Mexico City in 1982 lasted for
three hours. The effect of the music depends to a large extent upon the quality of the interac-
tion among the musicians in the ensemble. Thus a high degree of repetition and a requirement
of active listening by both performers and audience are built into the structure of the piece.
Although Eno has spoken with admiration of Riley's music, a more decisive minimalist influ-
ence on his work was Steve Reich's (b. 1936) phase tape pieces. In a 1985 interview he sin-
gled out Reich's It's Gonna Rain as "probably the most important piece that I heard, in that it
gave me an idea I've never ceased being fascinated with how variety can be generated by
very, very simple systems." Reich made short tape loops of a black preacher saying "It's
gonna rain," so that what we hear is this one phrase incessantly repeated over and over again.
The tape machines are running at slightly different speeds, however, so that as the piece pro-
gresses, the loops gradually shift out of phase with each other. Eno comments:
28
Tannenbaum, "Cage and Eno," 70.
29
Jan Steele and John Cage, Voices and Instruments, Obscure/Editions EG OBS 5, 1976.