Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports
Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports
Professor of Philosophy, Department Chair
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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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Front Matter
- Introduction: White Noise, Seminal Sounds
- 1 A First Listen, or Through a Glass Lightly
- 2 Music for Airports and the Avant-Garde: The Activity of Sounds
- 3 Eno’s Journey from Art School to the Studio: Becoming a Non-Musician
- 4 Ambience
- 5 Between Hearing and Listening: Music for Airports as Conceptual Art
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End Matter
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