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
Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results
Interpretation
The quote reflects a preference for planning and creating systems that function independently, allowing for observation rather than active involvement.
Brian Eno suggests that he has a strong inclination toward designing and setting up systems that can operate autonomously to produce art, particularly music, with minimal input from himself after their initiation. This perspective highlights the value of planning and programming in creative endeavors, where the creator can step back and appreciate the outcomes of their own designs.
In practice
In a discussion about creativity, I might quote Eno to highlight the importance of planning 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.
Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don't want it.
Often as a poet I find that I am somewhat outside an experience I want to hold onto, consciously taking mental notes or writing them down in my journal - for fear that I will forget. It's not unlike being on a trip and taking pictures, your face behind a camera the whole time - the entire experience mediated by a lens.
I didn't get interested in music. It was a gift from God.
I don't ... like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.'
Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.
By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.
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