36
lage Voice on Eno's lecture delivered at the "New Music, New York" festival hosted by the
Kitchen in 1979, wrote: "He told us that experimental music involves too much intellect and
not enough sensuality, that creating charisma is a useful and even necessary thing, and that
experimental composers should think more about marketing their work.
46
For all his own use of technology's array of music-making and recording equipment, Eno has
consistently been critical of electronic music without a heart. This brings us back to rock,
which Eno was still touting in 1980 for its conceptual attractiveness:
Rock music has always been teetering on two borderlines. One is the
borderline of a very advanced technology, and the other is a borderline
of people using it who don't have a clue of what to do with it ... The
big problem with computer music is that everyone knows how to use it
too well. It just doesn't have the idiosyncratic, human element. You
can't imagine anything in computer music like [Elvis Presley's
"Heartbreak Hotel"]. No one would dare do it.
47
Likewise, Eno has professed to be "totally bored" with the electronic realizations of classical
scores, such as Wendy Carlos' ground-breaking album Switched-on Bach of 1968.
48
If, as Eno has said, the entire world of music is available to the modern composer, what are
some of the types of music Eno has heard from beyond the confines of the Western popular,
classical, and avant-garde traditions? In 1986, he recounted how hearing a gospel record on
the radio in the Bahamas during a Talking Heads recording session "changed my life." His
subsequent search for the record led him into gospel shops and I found about 200 other great
gospel albums, and
finally the one I was looking for, but in my search I had discovered
what an incredible musical form gospel is. You have this very simple
formula that's been ornamented in such original and moving ways. It's
so alive, and keeps changing new styles come up, while the tradi-
tional style still goes on. I'm quite religious about listening to it, actu-
ally, in the sense that on Sunday I put on gospel records. It's strange
sometimes I don't even know that it's Sunday and I'll be working and
I'll put on Mahalia Jackson, start singing to it, and then I realize, "Oh
yes, it's Sunday."
49
Eno is on record as admiring unspecified "folk music." Almost predictably, one of the things
he likes about folk singing is its sense of casual harmonic randomness. Created by untrained
musicians, the music often contains
strange and lovely harmonies that are actually inadvertent. They result
from the fact that somebody can't sing in the register that the main
46
Tom Johnson, "New Music, New York, New Institution," Village Voice 24 (2 July 1979),
89.
47
Amirkhanian, "Eno at KPFA," 19.
48
Geoff Brown, "Eno's Where It's At," Melody Maker 48 (10 Nov. 1973),41.
49
Korner, "Aurora Musicalis," 78.