Sound
“I’m not really trying to say anything in my music. I hope the music becomes an example, an instance that bridges more or less naturally to the absence of music. So that either you have the music or you don’t have it and in either case you have sounds. Hopefully, then people can learn to become attentive, with pleasure, to the world of sounds around us that are changing all the time.”
The musicians below are pioneers in the evolution of what has become known, since the 1970s, as ambient music. The term was coined by Brian Eno to describe music that “induces calm and a space to think – to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; (the music) must be as ignorable as it is interesting”. What these musicians (and many others) had in common was in the development of an abstract approach to sound, focused on its qualities of landscape, painterliness, colour and texture, eschewing the domination of melody, beat and lyric that exist to “engage you in a very particular way”. “They want to occupy your attention”.
Debussy | Satie | Cage | Stockhausen | Eno | Arnalds
Brian Eno does not lay claim to having invented ambient music. He did do much to popularise not just the term, but a certain conception of the form itself. To quote Eno, “For me, the central idea was about music as a place you go to, not a narrative, not a sequence that has some sort of teleological direction to it — verse, chorus, this, that, and the other. It’s really based on abstract expressionism: Instead of the picture being a structured perspective, where your eye is expected to go in certain directions, it’s a field, and you wander sonically over the field.”
The early 20th-century French composer Erik Satie was a direct influence on Eno, as was Cage, Debussy, Kandinsky, Stockhausen and others. The Guardian‘s Nick Shave, linking Eno to Satie, called Satie “the maverick who invented ‘furniture music,’ (Musique D’Ameublement) – sounds that were designed to be heard but not listened to.”
F.D. Leone of Musica Kaleidoskopea described Satie’s musique d’ameublement as “music which had no set form and sections could be re-arranged as a performer or conductor wished, much like furniture in a room, and to act as part of the ambiance or furnishings.” .
Though Satie would continue writing furniture music until just a couple of years before his death in 1925, much of it was never performed during his lifetime. Its revival came a few decades later, thanks to the arrival into the music world of a young composer intent on taking his art to places it had seldom gone before: John Cage. “He’s indispensable,” Cage once said of the still oft-derided Satie. Shave also describes Eno’s 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports a direct answer to Satie’s call for “(furniture) music that would be a part of the surrounding noises” yet serve to mask the awkward silences which otherwise emphasise the impinging clatter of knives and forks at dinner parties.
“I have always tried to move away from music as an object, moving toward music as a process that is without beginning, middle or end. So that instead of being like a table or chair, the music becomes like the weather.
In the early 1950s I began using chance operations to write my music, and after I became acquainted with the I Ching (The Chinese Book of Changes), I used it extensively. I apply chance operations to determine the frequency, amplitude, timbre, duration and placement of different elements in my music. The chance operations allow me to get away from the likes and dislikes of my ego so that I can become attentive to what is outside of my own psychology and memory. By using chance operations I am accepting what I obtain. Instead of expressing myself, I change myself. You might say I use chance operations instead of sitting meditation practice.”
In recent years Brian Eno has extended his music and art into improving Britain’s health care. He designed an ambient “healing environment” which will be incorporated into new British nursing homes. Patients will be able to recuperate to a backdrop of soothing light and sound. Eno, who had previously created an experimental soundtrack to subtly transform the airport experience for nervous fliers, was asked to provide installations by Robin Turner, a local surgeon, after this wife had spent two hours immersed in the quiet serenity of one of the producer’s installations.
One such hospital, the Montefiore in Essex, was the first to incorporate Eno’s installations, which aim to evoke a “serene atmosphere” and enhance the hospital’s “three dimensional, all-embracing means of treating patients”, in its architectural design. Eno has also created “Quiet Room for Montefiore”, a space available downstairs to patients, visitors and staff as a place to “escape” – “somewhere to think, take stock or simply relax.”
Architects IBI Nightingale said: “Creating a healing environment isn’t only about correct surgical procedures and the right technology but also about making an atmosphere where the patients feel able to relax enough to clearly think through their options, and to properly take part in the healing process themselves.” Research has provided evidence that the use of art and music can produce improved psychological, physiological and biological outcomes of clinical significance in patient care. The reception installation is designed to demonstrate that “patient care” starts as soon as staff and patients pass through the hospital doors.
It is said that Eno was directly inspired by Florence Nightingale, who observed in 1859 that “variety of form and brilliancy of colour in the objects presented to patients have a powerful effect and are actual means of recovery.”
These findings support the notion that the therapeutic value of ‘psychoanalytic treatment’ might be enhanced by the inclusion of environmental art and music. It also illustrates the way in which Satie, Cage and Eno have conceptualised the psychological function of sound, which can also be applied in the context of psychoanalysis. Cage’s wish to ‘free’ the music (of its narrative content); to ‘be itself’, is congruent with Freud’s requirement that the patient’s thoughts should be also allowed to ‘be themselves’ via the psychoanalytical process of free association.