42
those distinctions I like to work with all the complex sounds on the
way out to the horizon, to pure noise, like the hum of London. If you
sit in Hyde Park just far enough away from the traffic so that you don't
perceive any of its specific details, you just hear the average of the
whole thing. And it's such a beautiful sound. For me that's as good as
going to a concert hall at night.
11
Eno's ideas about listening to the environment as music are shared by modern composer
Pauline Oliveros, who has used such concepts as the basis of actual pieces. The instructions
for the fifth of her Sonic Meditations (1974) read as follows: "Take a walk at night. Walk so
silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears." Sonic Meditations XVII is somewhat simi-
lar: "1. Enhance or paraphrase the auditory environment so perfectly that a listener cannot
distinguish between the real sounds of the environment and the performed sounds. 2. Become
performers by not performing."
12
The concept of "the environment as art" reached its height in the 1960s and early 1970s. Andy
Warhol's putting Brillo boxes in a museum was perhaps the most celebrated example of an
artist encouraging his audience to take a closer look at the sensuous qualities of everyday ob-
jects, though the painter Robert Rauschenberg had done something similar much earlier with
his "white paintings" monochromatic canvases that invited the viewer to become involved
in the play of light and shadow on the "empty" surface. The most direct musical analog to
these experiments is John Cage's "silent" piece, 4'33", in which a performer takes the stage
and does nothing for the duration: the audience is given the opportunity to experience the am-
bient sounds of the hall as music. Eno clearly took the lessons of such experiments to heart:
he is a person who has spent a great deal of time simply listening, and it shows in much of his
ambient music, which is a music of understated inner strength and few outwardly vigorous
events.
Much of Eno's music is constructed on a vertical basis: to a great extent, it is music concerned
with the sheer color of sound, rather than with the linear (horizontal) growth of melodies.
Each moment in Eno's music presents certain tone colors or timbres, and the interest lies in
the relationships between these colors rather than in the evolution of thematic material,
which has been the norm in in most Western art music for centuries. What Eno hears sitting in
Hyde Park is a composite, geographical, ambient music, with no need of horizontal teleology
or the logic of linear development. Such vertically-oriented musical experiences can be had
using conventional instruments, also. In 1985 he cited the grand piano, the tambura (the four-
stringed Indian drone instrument) and the electric bass guitar as his favorite instruments. It
was the piano which he held in highest esteem:
I like it because of the complexity of its sound. If you hold the sustain
pedal down, strike a note and just listen ... that's one of my favourite
musical experiences. I often sit at the piano for an hour or two, and just
go "bung!" and listen to the note dying. Each piano does it in a differ-
ent way. You find all these exotic harmonies drifting in and drifting out
11
Anthony Korner, "Aurora Musicalis," Artforum 24:10 (Summer 1986), 77.
12
Quoted in David H. Cope, New Directions in Music, 2nd ed. (Dubuque, Iowa: Wm. C.
Brown, 1980), 211.