Ambient Music / John Cage

Brian Eno is an experimental music musician, so far covered in class for his use of and heavy contributions to ambient music. Apart from that Eno has worked on other minimalist music, glam and art rock acts, electronic music among others. He's worked with David Bowie (popularizing minimalism), David Byrne (apparently this song was used in the recent Wall Street movie), among others. His composition Ambient 1/Music for Airports, came to be in an attempt to make soothing, obstructive ambient music that can diffuse the tense atmosphere of airports.

In class it was mentioned that this piece was designed to also be something that can be easily interrupted, and continue playing without the abruptness of inserting a pause in the middle of a pop song, and the sudden change in tempo between the announcer talking and the song. I tried this myself using the YouTube clip that was played in class, and noticed how certain this is. While a straight cut (clicking on a different point in the timeline of the clip) doesn't work when it occurs just after a new note is played, it never fails when the clip starts playing again regardless of where I start from. In fact, the music falls to the background so easily, that if instead of going back to where the first cut was, going ahead to another portion would most likely go unnoticed by people in airports. The abruptness of the initial cut (from music to interruption) can easily be diffused by having a one second fade or a crossfade into the tone that signals that a message is about to be announced.

Eno also designed the Windows startup sound for Windows 95. Here's a video that has all the windows startup sounds up to 7, and in my opinion, the best ones are Windows 95 and 98, surprisingly enough, the Vista/7 sound sounds very uninspired.

Somewhere where I read about minimalism John Cage came up, so I read about him and realized he was the composer of 4'33". I didn't know the name of it at the time, but had heard from many teachers and professors about a composer whose composition consisted of the performing sitting at a piano and not playing, but rather that the "music" or sound of the performance was that made by people as they shuffled in their chairs, coughed, or talked as time went by and the performer "didn't do anything." I realized "ohh this is the guy," and after reading about him I'm not surprised it is so.

Going off that type of composition (which he revisted twice as 0'00"/4'33" #2 and in One³), comes a link between him and ambient music. 4'33" pretty much presented ambient sounds to an audience, its own ambient sounds that its members would produce under such circumstances. As in Brian Eno's Music for Airports, where it's designed for it not have any active listeners, Cage's 4'33" has the opposite, extremely seeking listeners, at least on that first performace, evidenced by the fact that some people left the theater. Ironically at the same time, these first listeners were also extremely passive, as in their search for music or the hint of any musical sound, most, or at least the ones that left, were completely passive to the ambient sounds of the hall, the coughs and shuffles, making 4'33" an ambient composition.