Ambient Music

Pure presence of sound made into art is how we could describe so-called ambient music -- a term coined by Brian Eno in 1978. Rather than melodies, rhythms or harmonies going somewhere, Eno offers looms of sounds persisting in space, or as Mark Richardson of Pitchfork online music magazine has put it, 'this is music that seems not so much "played" as "allowed to exist."' Coupled with emotional coolness, offering subtle suggestions of moods instead of outward emotions, this very aural approach to music is what is today a well established genre of ambient music.

Brian Eno composed the first piece in this tradition before he actually coined the term -- it was a piece called "Discreet Music" from 1975. In this piece, gentle individual sounds and very simple themes (two of them, to be precise) appear in space, to then slowly fade away in a loop. But before a sound is thus lost in a distance, a new sound is brought to front to start living its life; on this way a tapestry of sounds that are interacting with each other is soon formed. The piece has no time signature, and no firm structure; it is created from "a small number of sounds that complement each other", "set loose in a space and allowed to move around in different configurations, with subtle patterns sometimes emerging from the randomness" (Mark Richardson, executive editor of Pitchfork magazine). Piece gives out only hints of melody but without ever becoming truly melodious; similarly, even the mood is set vague, never quite resolving, since new sounds are constantly being introduced before the existing ones manage to go anywhere. Still, the piece is quite beautiful, being enchantingly calm, and even hypnotic to a degree.

The unobtrusive effectiveness of this piece is what Brian Eno will soon consciously be after.

Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Brian Eno, Music for Airports liner notes

Brian Eno took care to differentiate his approach from already existing similar ones, such as so-called Muzak:

Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to 'brighten' the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. Brian Eno, Music for Airports liner notes

If there is a Brian Eno track that "induces calm and a space to think", it is Neroli: Thinking Music, Part IV from 1993. This track is in the best tradition of Eno's ambient -- emotionless but subtly effective.

This ambient logic is usually seen as utilitarian music. Ambient pieces are mostly meant to embrace everyday life in an non-intrusive, semi-structured music, that subtly create low-key atmospheres, remaining in background without trying to say too much.

An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres. Brian Eno, Music for Airports liner notes

Classical composer Eric Satie practically pioneered this approach in the first part of XX century with his "furniture music". Later, this kind of music will also be nick-named “acoustic wallpaper”. There was even a try to permanently embrace public spaces in ambient pieces, in that way treating soundspace as some ethereal sound chapel that is always surrounding us, like some spiritual air we breathe. But this is clearly abuse, since a piece of art is there to be stumbled upon, or reached for and came in contact with, and not something that we are permanently immersed in. Pieces of art silently wait for us, not embrace us.

Looking back, seeing music as an utilitarian form was growingly attractive to composers throughout XX century. Eminent classical composers such as Paul Hindemith liked to think about themselves as writers of utilitarian forms. During whole XX century utilitarian music was extending to all imaginable areas, starting with movies, to encompass TV commercials or computer environments –- for example, a sound that opened Windows operating systems is Brian Enos work.

With Brian Eno, ambient music approach became very popular and it is impossible to count all the ambient pieces that have been done until now. Some of the best still come from the man himself: pieces such as Under Stars and Singals from Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks from 1993. are vintage examples of Enos ambient approach. Jean Michel Jarre's “Waiting For Cousteau” minimal ambient track is also highly regarded (JM Jarre originally wrote it for himself as a soundtrack for his library, but than decided to publish it, incorporating it into “Waiting For Cousteau” album from 1990).

During late 1990s, ambient music became more fashionable than anyone ever hoped it could become. It became so well established, that soon there was a confusion created by musical writers who were presenting some universal features of synthesized music as being a property of ambient concept. Non-ambient music that also had those features was then sometimes termed as “ambiental”. While considering ambient music for some sort of a basis and the prototype of all modern music seems to have some foundation, since all modern music usually comes to us inside of our natural or urban environment, it is also a restriction since modern music must not necessarily insist on this sort of ethereal functioning. And most importantly, much of modern music, while being studio-oriented, is not intended to remain in background, and may reach levels of effectiveness and structure that make it closer to classical music than to what Brian Eno had in mind when he coined the etiquette. What term ambient should be tied for is loosely structured background pieces -– exactly how Brian Eno described them.

The reason for such popularity of ambient music was probably not only its musical potential, but its relative harmlessness towards classical music world. This music, unlike at the time vastly popular Jean Michel Jarre or Vangelis, didn’t have ambitions that could make classical tradition look belittled. It was the best tolerated electronic music scene from the side of existing musical establishment. There is an overview of XX century musical activity written from this angle, a book named Ambient Century.

Brian Eno is almost as well known as a musical thinker as he is as a musician. His deliberating ideas about what music is and how it is made proved to be even more influental than comparable accademic theories of previous generation of music experimentators. For example, in 1981 he told to Keyboard magazine:

“Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on — including your own incompetence.”

Sasha Frere-Jones writes in July 7, 2014 issue of The New Yorker magazine:

The genius of Eno is in removing the idea of genius. His work is rooted in the power of collaboration within systems: instructions, rules, and self-imposed limits. His methods are a rebuke to the assumption that a project can be powered by one person’s intent, or that intent is even worth worrying about. To this end, Eno has come up with words like “scenius,” which describes the power generated by a group of artists who gather in one place at one time. (“Genius is individual, scenius is communal,” Eno told the Guardian, in 2010.) It suggests that the quality of works produced in a certain time and place is more indebted to the friction between the people on hand than to the work of any single artist.

In the same article Sasha Frere-Jones hails one of Enos recent albums, Lux:

The most successfully ambient of Eno’s ambient albums is the 2012 release “Lux.” The core of the piece is twelve patterns, which use only the notes corresponding to the white keys on a keyboard. Eno brought an early version of the piece to a gallery in the Palace of Venaria, near Turin. He said that the gallery, a long space connecting two wings, is “all stone and glass, so it’s very echoey.” The first version of the piece didn’t work in the space, so Eno began reworking it. He used the “convolution reverb” feature of the popular music-programming software Logic Pro. It allows you to record a sound—like a handclap—in a space, and then produce a simulation of that space’s natural resonance. In the privacy of his London studio, Eno could play sounds “in” the Venaria gallery. He found a certain register, between three and five kilohertz, that “really seemed to sing in that space,” and directed the piece toward that range. The musician Leo Abrahams played a guitar-synthesizer hybrid, and the violinist Nell Catchpole played along to the original patterns. “The process of making the skeleton of it was generative, in the sense that I set in motion various processes and let them do their thing,” Eno told me. “But what was different this time was I thought, O.K., I’m going to listen to that, and I’m going to find out where the sort of moments are that something unusual happens, something you didn’t expect happens, and I’m going to work on them—so from a generative beginning I then went into composer mode, basically, which I haven’t ever done before. In the past, I’ve really let the thing just carry on, do its thing.” The result is both remarkable and almost impossible to remember. I’ve listened to “Lux” as often as any of Eno’s work, but I don’t think I could reproduce five sequential seconds, even by humming.

Although some people might get the idea that ambient music is some sort of easy listening music, these lines are hinting the different truth - Eno's ambient music more naturaly comunicates with an expirienced listener. Unlike Jean Michel Jarre or Vangelis who can easily pick up anyones ear, Eno's approach expects a somewhat prepared listener. To a degree, listening to ambient music has to be learned and practiced. Having said that, ambient is by no means a descendant of 'augen music', the modernist accademic music which expected a listener who learned musical theories before even trying to listen to the piece. "Learning to like" ambient music means simply to listen to the music more and then more, with maybe a few hints about how.

Although ambient music lacks the elemental power of the most popular electronic pieces, its depth and subtilety, and a novel mode of listening, certainly make it a quintessential addition to the modern music space.