Brian Eno: Composers as Gardeners

https://www.edge.org/conversation/brian_eno-composers-as-gardeners

by GuiA • 9 years ago

102 35 9 years ago

bitwize• 9 years ago

Ah, Edge.org, the Medium of the late nineties.

badmadrad• 9 years ago

As someone who makes music from the bottom up. I find its not really a black as white as bottom up vs top down. Sometimes I go into a composition with an idea of what I want to do and the sound I want to create. However, I find in the execution small nuances and details present themselves somehow completely alter the creative direction. In short, unlike building a physical building music is fluid enough to react to the the chaos and randomness of creativity very elegantly.

thirteenfingers2• 9 years ago

Fellow composer here - I completely agree, and I suspect the great classical composers often felt as much, that their own musical ideas led them in a totally different direction than they originally intended.

My personal feeling about Eno's approach is that it almost deserves a different label than "composing" - maybe "incubating" (you know, like a startup incubator). For me, and I suspect for a great many music lovers, "composing" implies a process that may be evolutionary to some degree but is still overseen and directed from beginning to end by a particular artist. Contrast that with the case of traditional music from $REGIONAL_CULTURE where the process is more truly evolutionary as songs are passed from one generation of bards to another.

(I don't mean to say that Eno's approach to making music is somehow less legitimate than any other. It just seems better described by some other word.)

TheOtherHobbes• 9 years ago

Coincidentally I was pulling apart a generative music app when I saw this post.

I think you make a very good point - which is that in the bigger picture, music is inherently evolutionary in a way that generative music isn't.

Having some experience with generative apps, I know that they absolutely do not make music spontaneously. You have to invent them, build them, and tune them - all by hand/ear.

It's more like building an instrument - i.e. a machine - and tuning/debugging it than cultivating a garden.

Music as a whole is much more free. When it's loose in a culture, it can evolve in weird, unexpected directions that no individual composer would ever be able to imagine, and no app today would come close to copying.

beat3• 9 years ago

It's worth mentioning the recording process as well. I feel recording has taken over some of that "this is what this is" role from the rigid structures of classical composition. One can improvise and develop the music "on tape", and often does, but in the end, you cut a master and send it out into the world.

I also feel this has given listeners a narrow and unrealistic view of what music actually is. For example, complaining if the lead guitarist in concert doesn't play the guitar solo from the record note-for-note, even though that player improvised the studio solo and might have real difficulty replicating it - not to mention little interest in doing so.

This also leads to the phenomenon of "cover bands" that simply do live note-for-note versions of someone else's record. As a musician, the idea of doing that seems utterly bizarre to me, but it's obviously popular!

S_A_P• 9 years ago

Agreed re: note for note covers. I have covered other songs, and while I strive to play the original composition mostly note for note, it may be in a different key or have some other approach taken. Often the drums are changed, because a) recording drums in my music room is time consuming b) I'm a barely serviceable drummer and c) I can't always make that much noise for as long as it would take to get right without upsetting the wife and kids.

Also to your first point, DAW software is now akin to a canvas and recording can also be part of the creative process. I used to try to record in stages, write, rehearse, record, produce, master. Now I find that I'm kind of doing it all at once and the results don't end up any worse except for one thing. The compositions are usually less complicated without having the time to think about it and practice it.

drzaiusapelord• 9 years ago

To be fair, you inherited Eno's world. This is a recent article but it reflects his thoughts from the 1970s and if you look at music and the charts back then you'd see a lot of very structured 'top-down' approaches and that's how I imagine music was taught back then. Even 'freewheeling' folk, rock, and psychedelic music followed pretty simple patterns.

The problem is when guys like Eno talk, we dismiss it as a little obvious and perhaps a little old fashioned, only because we're so much past that and largely due to guys like him. A bit like reading about what computer geeks were excited about in the 80s and chuckling a little how simplistic or ordinary it seems now. Back then, it was cutting edge thinking.

beat3• 9 years ago

As an improvising musician, I think "composition" is viewed very narrowly, through a classical lens. In classical music, the performer's duty is merely to interpret the piece as closely as possible to what someone perceives to be the composer's intent. But in improvisational music, the composition isn't an explicit instruction for performance, but rather a framework within which the performers are free to move. It's a set of constraints, agreed upon.

I don't think that's either architecture or gardening. It's more like community-building.

thirteenfingers2• 9 years ago

Classical composer and performer here. You just hit upon the one aspect of my chosen genre that drives me batshit insane.

I've had countless arguments with other performers about how rigid one has to be when performing any given classical composition. I'm told over and over again that, for example, Glenn Gould's unorthodox interpretations "aren't musical", but when I press my interlocutors for a justification of that statement, all they can offer is "it's not what the composer intended", which only begs the question. Composers aren't infallible, and they definitely don't always see or hear all the possibilities inherent in their own music.

The whole division-of-labor between composer and performer is, I think, both a strength and a weakness in classical music. It's a strength because it's allowed composers to concentrate on exploring the possibilities of musical ideas and working out something marvelously and intricately crafted in advance. It's a weakness because it encourages this hard-set absolute-textual-fidelity mentality among performers, and discourages them from really leaving their individual mark on a performance (unlike in jazz). The great classical composers are among my heroes, but they weren't gods, and performers shouldn't treat them as such.

Neeek• 9 years ago

Weren't most big name composers from all "classical" periods prolific improvisers also? Stories of Bach's fugue battles come to mind so I don't think the two have to be mutually exclusive. I think it's more that transcribed music is as close as we have to recorded music from periods before vinyl which inevitably draws a certain crowd of purist. To me it feels like a subculture within the classical space.

jb1991• 9 years ago

You grossly misunderstand and under-appreciate the role of a classical performer. It is true that they strive to honor the wishes of the composer. But if they all did this the same way, there would be no need for musicians. Instead, each interprets the world of the composer through the lens of their own individual creativity. Performing music is as much of a creative art as composing music. There is nothing narrow, closed, or "merely" about it.

beat3• 9 years ago

The need for musicians in classical music was because they didn't have any other way to play it. I imagine most of the classical composers would have loved modern recording, and not bothered with composing for other musicians, if they could have avoided it.

I think of Conlon Noncarrow, who composed mostly for player pianos. Human beings couldn't play his compositions. He was driven to the player piano by the limitations of human performers.

hammock2• 9 years ago

I see what you are saying, however the best classical performers are well-known for their own personal characteristics they impart to the music they perform.

Perhaps a violin in an orchestra is supposed to do what they're told, but they are told what to do by the conductor, who himself interprets a composition in the way he wants. And the best conductors are known for their brilliant interpretations, not their fidelity to the composer's intent.

Perhaps classical music has this reputation because there are a lot of really terribly uncreative musicians who would sound awful if given rein to improvise within looser constraints. I have met many musicians who are excellent ordertakers but not what I would call "musical" outside of that.

stevehiehn3• 9 years ago

That makes sense. I think 'gardening' is a metaphor for composition at an abstraction level where and artist's paint is semi/non deterministic algorithms

nyolfen• 9 years ago

here's my favorite eno quote that i break out at any opportunity:

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

― Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

pmoriarty• 9 years ago

To add to this list: television and radio static, the sound of a vinyl record skipping, the dial tone of a phone.

All these annoying sounds have been used in music (and other media).

hammock2• 9 years ago

I would add that the distortion, the voice crack, the grain of the image - these bring the medium itself to light. Without them the medium is (more or less) invisible. These defects represent the interaction, the connection between a metaphysical work of art and the physical reality.

miceeatnicerice2• 9 years ago

Also - the glistening of jewellery.

pcmaffey• 9 years ago

The mutability of javascript, the endless libraries, browsers running everywhere...

Nition• 9 years ago

This is a great quote. One thing I want to point out, although it doesn't affect the overall meaning of the quote: When he says "8-bit" he's referring to 8-bit audio, as in audio with 8 bits per sample. Like a CD has 16-bit audio for instance.

That might seem obvious but I've seen several people post that quote assuming he means audio made on 8-bit game consoles, including a Kotaku article[1].

[1] https://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/06/brian-eno-of-all-people-ex...

smrtinsert• 9 years ago

I agree with this statement. Whereas previously composers had to conceptualize layering in their minds prior to hiring the orchestra to play it, composers these days can select from an unlimited supply of synthesizer presets for instant timbre and mood.

On one hand I think it contributes the diversity and range of modern music, but at the other end it definitely enables some lazy music making.

hosh• 9 years ago

Tangent:

I've been reading about Christopher Alexander's work, particularly his keynote for the 1996 OOPSLA conference. Alexander introduced the idea of pattern languages to architecture in the 70s, and it has influenced computer science. However, reading further, it doesn't look like Alexander's deeper work ever caught on: his follow up work (in The Nature of Order) speaks about things that makes architecture more like a gardener.

Alexander talked about it in that OOPSLA keynote, how he and his collaborators discovered pattern languages that guarantees cohesive design. By iterating it, a design would emerge that is in harmony within context. He likens it that use of pattern languages to DNA. (He then found 15 'deep patterns' in which all pattern languages that guarantee cohesiveness in design shares ...) I understood this to mean, the architecture is in the DNA, the "deep patterns", while at the same time, the design are grown like a gardener. At that point, there is no dichotomy of architect vs. gardener.

Ironic, I think, one of the most influential architects and philosopher was speaking on things that got co-opted into reaffirming that dichotomy. "Patterns" came to be used as a way of creating rigid, dead designs. I don't know of many people practicing this in fullness in either building architecture or software architecture.

centrinoblue• 9 years ago

This echo's some thoughts I've had about application development lately especially wrt TDD.

My preferred style of app. development is much more about exploring what is possible and what works as opposed to implementing a fully fledged concept of the finished application.

I find the application begins to take on it's finished state only after I have had time to explore new ideas and techniques that I don't necessarily understand completely when I begin.

TDD seems to be tailored towards the architectural / fully conceptualized application whereas the gardening metaphor seems more appropriate for the way I tend to approach app development. I find it counter-productive to try to write tests for code before I even figure out what it will do yet. YMMV.

Thanks again Brian.

nicklaf• 9 years ago

I recently came across an improvement to a Frank Zappa quote that Butler Lampson included in slide from a 2014 presentation titled "Hints and Principles for Computer System Design".[1]

"[Data is not information, ] Information is not knowledge, Knowledge is not wisdom, Wisdom is not truth, Truth is not beauty, Beauty is not love, Love is not music and Music is THE BEST” --Frank Zappa

I find it interesting that some of the greater computer architects decide to spend their later years immersed more in music than in programming (L Peter Deutsch comes to mind here).

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

smnscu• 9 years ago

My favourite piece on Brain Eno from my favourite music reviewer: http://starling.rinet.ru/music/eno.htm

If there is anybody in this world who could really penetrate into the very nature of SOUND itself and analyze it with the sharpest scalpel, yet leaving no traces of rude treatment upon its delicate soul, it is Mr Brian Eno.

DonHopkins2• 9 years ago

Sauce Faucet is my all time favorite Heavy Metal Brian Eno Cover Band. (Well actually, they did one cover album, and I don't know of any other Heavy Metal Brian Eno Cover Bands, but it's uniquely awesome!)

http://www.saucefaucet.com/tiger.html

30th Anniversary remake of Brian Eno's 1974 Classic!!!

Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy)

This is a heavy handed recreation of Brian Eno’s 1974 masterpiece. Oddly enough, Eno was one of the first people to hear it, and commented "I am deeply moved by your versions of my songs". "I like it very, very much!"

We were just making this cd for ourselves for the fun of it. We're big fans. It's amazing how it's all worked out, and now you can hear it too!

These versions lack some of the finesse and subtleties of the original, but retain the arrangements, and add a joyously aggressive rock edge.

It's as if we remade the whole album with me playing everything and Caroleen singing. Yay!

It sure was a lot of fun to make. I hope you enjoy it too.

Please listen to Brian Eno's music.

Thanks to Mr. Eno for creating such a great collection of songs that have endured the test of time, still great today.

A phone call from Eno: http://www.saucefaucet.com/enomessage.mp3

Liner notes: http://www.saucefaucet.com/dug_notes.html

big_spammer• 9 years ago

The relevant quote from this article is:

"we're so used to dignifying controllers that we forget to dignify surrenderers."

swayvil2• 9 years ago

The #1 "gardening club" (generative art forum) on the planet if anybody's interested : http://reddit.com/r/generative

stevehiehn3• 9 years ago

nice link, thx

stevehiehn3• 9 years ago

I can relate to this. I often think musicians of the past looked to the future for inspiration. It seems that many now look to just recreate the past. I really believe that interactive procedural music is around the corner. I predict once you can interact with music in settings like VR/AR it will render pop bands as we know them nearly obsolete.

swayvil2• 9 years ago

My favorite Brian Eno song ever : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K50nzcEhPKg

It's 3AM in fairyland

Brian Eno: Composers as Gardeners

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