21
And a very interesting thing happens to your brain, which is that any
information which is common, after several repetitions, you cease to
hear. You reject the common information, rather like if you gaze at
something for a long time, you'll cease to really see it. You'll see any
aspect of it that's changing, but the static elements you won't see ...
The amount of material there is extremely limited, but the amount of
activity it triggers in you is very rich and complex.
30
Reich's It's Gonna Rain was a remarkable experiment in the psychology of musical percep-
tion: for although one could hear each individual voice one at a time if one tried, far more
fascinating was the composite, subtly changing, rhythmic texture that arose from the phase
shifts. New, unforeseen musical events were formed as it were out of the chinks between the
words, the listener's attention could be riveted by any one of a multitude of possible compos-
ite patterns, and flip back and forth between patterns of interpretation. A visual analog to such
flipping might be those diagrams used in experiments on perception that are open to different
interpretations: a vase in silhouette becomes two heads facing each other, or a rabbit becomes
a duck. The graphic artist M.C. Escher made such perceptual shifts a major component of his
style, for instance in his mind-bending, multiple-perspective stairway drawings.
31
In music,
Reich's phase shifts constituted a use of repetition inviting or requiring a new mode of listen-
ing, if one listened in the old way, all one heard was hundreds of boring repetitions of the
same phrase. Eno was aware of this, and even found an analogy in the biological world:
There's an essay called "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain,"
by Warren McCulloch, who discovered that a frog's eyes don't work
like ours. Ours are always moving: we blink, we scan. We move our
heads. But a frog fixes its eyes on a scene and leaves them there. It
stops seeing all the static parts of the environment, which become in-
visible, but as soon as one element moves, which could be what it
wants to eat the fly it is seen in very high contrast to the rest of the
environment. It's the only thing the frog sees and the tongue comes out
and takes it. Well, I realized that what happens with the Reich piece is
that our ears behave like a frog's eyes. Since the material is common to
both tapes, what you begin to notice are not the repeating parts but the
sort of ephemeral interference patterns between them. Your ear tele-
scopes into more and more fine detail until you're hearing what to me
seems like atoms of sound. That piece absolutely thrilled me, because I
realized then that I understood what minimalism was about. The crea-
tive operation is listening. It isn't just a question of a presentation
feeding into a passive audience. People will sometimes say about
Reich's piece, "Oh yes, that one with that voice which keeps hammer-
30
Tannenbaum, "Cage and Eno," 68.
31
See E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representa-
tion, the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1956, National Gallery of Art, Washington
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 5, 244.