“No, I haven’t, really. I can’t think of a time that I ever thought that, though I must have at one time. The only thing I wanted to find out, which I did find out, was what ‘modal’ meant, that was, I thought, a very interesting concept.”
18On another occasion, when an interviewer said, “You don’t know music theory and things of that sort,” Eno responded, “No, I don’t. Well, let’s say I know many theories about music, but I don’t know that particular one that has to do with notation.”19 By this “notation theory,” we can probably assume that Eno is referring music theory as taught in school: the fundamentals of notation and the principles of harmony, counterpoint, and voice-leading found in the so-called “common practice” period of music history, essentially the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When we look at Eno’s music, particularly his progressive rock albums, we shall see that, like many if not most popular musicians, he uses standard major, minor, and seventh chords in sometimes traditional, but equally as often unpredictable, “empirical” ways – ways that ignore the statistical tables of “common,” “less common,” “strong” and “weak” chord
17 Jensen, “Sound of Silence,” 23.
18 Lester Bangs, “Eno,” Musician, Player & Listener 21 (Nov. 1979), 40.
19 Aikin, “Brian Eno,” 52.
progressions sometimes found in standard harmony textbooks.20 Particularly striking in this regard is his almost complete avoidance of the tonic-dominant relationship, which almost inevitably brings with it the gravitational pull of functional tonality. (For instance, in a piece in C major, the dominant chord G7 feels like it is “pulling” the music towards the tonic chord of C, when G7 leads to C the listener feels a sense of tension followed by a resolution. Eno tends to avoid such “classical” tension/resolution chord pairs.)
One aspect of the rock tradition – indeed, part of the meaning of the rock tradition – has been its refusal to let arbitrary technical standards of musicianship interfere with the music-making process. Much of the joy of early rock’n’roll, and of the skiffle music in England that pre-ceded it, sprang from the fact that anybody could grab a guitar and yank a few sounds out of it: it was music by and for non-specialists in music, and a certain anti-elitism as far as instru-mental and vocal technique were concerned was part of its whole ideology.
The Beatles provided the most stunning early examples of how far one could go with a lim-ited, unexceptional technique. Like Eno, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were versatile but technically rather ordinary multi-instrumentalists who knew exactly what kinds of sounds they wanted to get out of the instruments they played – guitars, piano, other keyboards, as-sorted percussion, and bass. And when, like Eno, they moved into the modern recording stu-dio to produce such epochal albums as Revolver, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Abbey Road, the studio itself became their instrument, and their ears became much more important than their hands. Lennon once said that if one were to compare his guitar playing with that of blues great B.B. King, “I would feel silly. [But] I’m an artist and if you give me a tuba I’ll bring you something out of it.”21 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, of course, instru-mental virtuosity found a place in rock, with audiences responding to the pyrotechnics of gui-tarists like Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix and keyboard players like Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson much in the same way as nineteenth-century European audiences were ignited by the Paganinis of the day. And in their turn, the unschooled sounds of the punk and new-wave movements of the late 1970s represented another swing of the pendulum: once again, the point seemed to be that anybody with something to get off his chest could make music.
The contrast between “Inspiration and Gymnastics” is the subject of a chapter in Bruno Nettl’s recent book The Study of Ethnomusicology; there he shows how these two approaches to music-making have formed a major constituent of concepts about music in many different societies at many different times. “The concept of ‘divine inspiration’ (according to which music-making should be easy)” is contrasted with “the ‘athletic view’ of music (according to which music-making – composing, improvising, performing – must be difficult to be truly great).”22 Eno, the Beatles, and the new wavers fall into the “inspired” camp, Eric Clapton, Keith Emerson, and many progressive rockers are of the “gymnastic” musical type.
20 See, for instance, Walter Piston, Harmony, 3rd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962), 18, where the author offers a “Table of Usual Root Progressions”: “I is followed by IV or V, sometimes VI, less often II or III. II is followed by V, sometimes VI, less often I, III, or IV.
III is followed by ... “
21 Jann Wenner, Lennon Remembers: The Rolling Stone Interviews (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1971), 48.
22 Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts (Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 33.
Eno has talked about his ideas on craft (or the lack of it) and musicianship since the beginning of his public career. Just prior to the release of his first solo album, Here Come the Warm Jets, he said:
I’ll make a prediction here. I think, in fact, I shall be seen as a rock re-vivalist in a funny way, because the thing that people miss when they do their rock revival rubbish is the fact that early rock music was, in a lot of cases, the product of incompetence, not competence. There’s a misconception that these people were brilliant musicians and they weren’t. They were brilliant musicians in the spiritual sense. They had terrific ideas and a lot of balls or whatever. They knew what the physi-cal function of music was, but they weren’t virtuosi.
23Two years later he told an interviewer, “I’m an anti-musician. I don’t think the craft of music is relevant to the art of music.”24 “Anti-music” has a specific meaning for some critics, for instance David Cope, who in his book New Directions in Music discusses the following cate-gories in his chapter on “Antimusic”: danger music (involving physical or mental hazard to the performer and/or audience), minimal and concept music (Cage’s famous 4’33” represent-ing these genres’ archetypal qualities), biomusic (“music created by natural life functions rather than by necessarily conscious attempts at composition”), and soundscapes (typically involving the focussing of attention on manipulated or natural environmental sounds).25 Much of Eno’s music, particularly since around 1975, can certainly be seen in terms of these catego-ries, with the exception of “danger music.”
But I doubt that Eno, in referring to himself as an anti-musician, was intent on allying himself with any of these movements. Rather, he was making a specific statement about the way he deals with his own creativity. In 1981 he said, “I don’t consider myself a professional musi-cian, though I do consider myself a professional composer.”26 In one sense, Eno’s saying he is not a musician, or saying he is an anti-musician, is nothing radical: he is merely casting him-self in the role of the traditional composer whose function is to conceive the music and com-municate it to the audience in some way – without necessarily being competent to perform it himself. But there is a difference between Eno and the traditional composer. The composer’s final product is a musical score – a more or less conventional system of written signs that tell the performers what to do with more or less accuracy and completeness. Eno’s final product, on the other hand, is a sound recording that has only to be cued up on playback equipment to be heard – and up to the point of playback, Eno has had total control over the composition.
Eno, like many if not most popular musicians, does not read music. The exact ways in which he conceives and works with sound, and the ways in which he communicates his intentions to his performers, are the subject of the next chapter. Here it will suffice to quote Eno’s answer to an interviewer who asked him whether his not reading music was a deliberate choice:
23 Brown, “Eno’s Where It’s At,” 40.
24 S. Davy, “Eno: Non-Musician on Non-Art,” Beetle (Jan. 1975), n.p.
25 Cope, New Directions in Music, 196-222. The “Antimusic” chapter contains a useful bibli-ography of books and articles, recordings and publishers, and films.
26 Aikin, “Brian Eno,” 66.
It wouldn’t be very useful for me. There have been one or two occa-sions where I was stuck somewhere without my tape recorder and had an idea, tried to memorize it, and since a good idea nearly always re-lies on some unfamiliar nuance it is therefore automatically hard to remember. So on those very rare occasions I’ve thought, “God, if only I could write this down.” But in fact, quite a lot of what I do has to do with sound texture, and you can’t notate that anyway ... That’s because musical notation arose at a time when sound textures were limited. If you said violins and woodwind that defined the sound texture, if I say synthesizer and guitar it means nothing – you’re talking about 28,000 variables.
27Eno goes on to reflect on the “transmission losses” that inevitably occur when a traditional composer or pop arranger takes a sounding idea and fixes it in written form, musicians read the written form, and then play it, the potential for distortion of the original information is present at each stage of the process – a dilemma to the painfulness of which any composer who uses notation can attest.
Eno sees himself as having precisely the right amount of manual instrumental skill to do what he needs to do in order to make his music. He apparently does not feel that a higher level of instrumental technique might open the door for him to other kinds of musical expression. An interviewer asked him in 1981, “Do you ever practice things on a keyboard or a guitar in or-der to be able to execute them to your satisfaction?” He answered: “Not very often ... If I have a phrase that has a fast series of notes, I might break the phrase down into three simpler ones, and do them as overdubs.”28
This resolute lack of technique has become an integral part of Eno’s whole philosophical ap-proach to music-making. Whether out of inner or outer defensiveness, or out of honest self-examination, he has come up with a variety of justifications for remaining a “non-musician.”
One is that lack of technique almost forces one to be creative: it makes one confront one’s vulnerability. Eno explains: