23
piece of music I ever performed publicly"
38
by playing large clusters of notes with both
forearms once a second for a period of an hour. He later philosophized on what the piece had
taught him:
Now, until one became accustomed to this fifty-odd note cluster, the
resultant sound was fairly boring. But after that first ten minutes, it be-
came progressively more absorbing. This was reflected in the rate at
which people left the room those who didn't leave within ten min-
utes stayed for the whole performance. One began to notice the most
minute variations from one crash to the next. The subtraction of one
note by the right elbow missing its top key was immediately and dra-
matically obvious. The slight variations of timing became major com-
positional changes, and the constant changes within the odd beat fre-
quencies being formed by all the discords began to develop into me-
lodic lines. This was, for me, a new use of the error principle and led
me to codify a little law that has since informed much of my work
"Repetition is a form of change."
39
38
Aikin, "Eno," 60.
39
Brian Eno, text for a lecture to Trent Polytechnic, 1974, quoted in Brian Eno and Russell
Mills, More Dark Than Shark, commentaries by Rick Poynor, designed by Malcolm Garrett,
photography by Martin Axon, additional photography by David Buckland (London: Faber and
Faber, 1986), 43.