We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
Brian EnoRead
My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the desire to create unique and novel music that is not currently available.
Brian Eno's quote emphasizes the artistic pursuit of innovation in music. He shares his personal motivation to compose sounds that transcend existing formats, illustrating the creative process as one of exploration and discovery. Eno highlights the importance of imagination in art, underscoring how artists can forge new paths by combining familiar elements to produce something entirely original and unheard.
In practice
During a lecture on creativity, I quoted Brian Eno to emphasize the importance of originality in artistic endeavors.
We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.
When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.
People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.
In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of 'their' works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.
Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.
Dance design is not simply one element; it is that without which ballet cannot exist. As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color to painting, so sequence in steps - their syntax, idiom, vocabulary - are the stuff of stage dancing.
Your best work is your expression of yourself.
No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.
One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?
I love singing jazz. I don't like the idea that classical music should be over here and jazz should be someplace else. It's all wonderful, and we should be open to enjoying it all.
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