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Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports

Online ISBN:
9780190497330
Print ISBN:
9780190497293
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
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Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports

John T. Lysaker
John T. Lysaker

Professor of Philosophy, Department Chair

Professor of Philosophy, Department Chair, Emory University
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Published online:
22 November 2018
Published in print:
27 December 2018
Online ISBN:
9780190497330
Print ISBN:
9780190497293
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This study situates Eno’s ambient masterpiece, Music For Airports, within various avant-garde trends in order to underscore its multiple dimensions. In the manner of Satie, it aims to tint living situations without demanding that listeners give the album their full attention. In the manner of Cage, and with La Monte Young’s feel for the textures of individual tones, it arranges the activity of sounds outside traditional Euro-American musical conventions, and in a manner that can spark a kind of thoughtful reverie, thus bringing art into vital, possibly transformative contact with everyday life. Finally, like some of Steve Reich’s works, Music for Airports functions as a piece of conceptual art, facilitating sustained reflections on creativity, listening, and the overall ecology of human activity and meaning, including its technological variability. Because the album has these three distinct dimensions, it requires “prismatic listening,” which switches between distinct modes of attention in the knowledge that these dimensions cannot be heard simultaneously.

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