AMBIENT MUSIC

1

France, Turn of the Century

Claude Debussy (left) & Erik Satie (right)

Counterpoint to the drama of the late romantic period

Music as an environment rather than a dramatic structure

moving without a speci!c destination

France, Turn of the Century

Claude Debussy (left) & Erik Satie (right)

Counterpoint to the drama of the late romantic period

Music as an environment rather than a dramatic structure

moving without a speci!c destination

ERIK SATIE

Composer, preferred phonometrician

Dada

Listen: Gnossienne No. 3 - Lent (1893)

Gnossiennes are without time signatures or bar lines, free time.

ERIK SATIE

Composer, preferred phonometrician

Dada

Furniture Music:

not a centerpiece, but a backdrop

Listen:

Furniture Music, Part 2: Tapestry of Wrought Iron: for the arrival of the guests (Grand Entrance) (1917)

JOHN CAGE

4’33”

“[it is] more possible to live af!rmatively if you !nd the sound of the environment beautiful.”

Listen: Sonatas for Prepared Piano

LA MONTE YOUNG

Dreamhouse

Standing waves and static drone textures

LAURIE SPIEGEL

Early experiments with computers driving synthesizers, creating long works focus on texture

WENDY CARLOS

Sonic Seasonings

Mixed !eld recordings with modular synthesizers to create one of the !rst undoubtedly ‘ambient’ records.

MUZAK LLC

A company that created, arranged and sold background music

Became prominent in the 1930s, was still popular through the 60s, and still exists today! (bought by Mood Media)

Would ‘score’ the workday in an effort to maintain productivity (a technique it called "Stimulus Progression")

Company had it’s own orchestra

as of 2010, Muzak distributes 3 million commercially available original artist songs, over a 100 channels and types of programming

Brian Eno

Studied experimental and conceptual art.

Started using tape recorders to create sound art.

1969: Joined Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra

1972: played in the glitter rock band Roxy Music as their engineer, eventually playing synthesizer.

Tired of the commercial music scene, he left the band in 1973 and created dozens of solo and collaborative albums (David Bowie, David Byrne, John Cale, Talking Heads, U2, etc).

He is known as a visionary record producer, adding his unique sound and experimental approach to popular music.

Discreet Music (1975)

Eno began his exploration of ambient music with Discreet Music (1975), but his real breakthrough was with 1978‘s Ambient I: Music For Airports.

Excerpt from Discreet Music

MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS (1978)

Piano, arp, reverb... recorded musicians separately, cut them at random, looped them and mixed them together.

Listening: Brian Eno, “1/2,” Ambient 1: Music for Airports, 1978

"Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular: it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." - Eno

OBLIQUE STRATEGIES

Examples:

Honor thy error as a hidden intentionReverseGo Outside. Shut the doorEmphasize #awsOnce the search is in progress, something will be foundTake a breakRegard your limitations as secret strengths

In#uenced by Cage, Eno became interested in “Chance Operations”

Oblique Strategies are aphorisms on cards that are pulled up at random during recording sessions to "check the path of least resistance in the studio."

Eno published a set of 113 cards (with a painter friend). Participants in studio must follow the card’s advice.

Gets everyone in the studio away from obsessing about the particulars and details and gets them working on the level of concept.

Eno’s Ideas about Ambient Music

Eno contrasts canned music (or “muzak”), which tries to cover up surrounding sounds, with ambient music, which is intended to enhance the sounds of the environment.

Invites you into the space, incorporates

Mysterious, uncertain (and thus genuine interest)

Induces calm and a space to think

Blankets with sound, covers up the space

Strips away all sense of doubt and uncertainty

Brightens the environment, stimulating

Canned background music (Muzak) Ambient Music

vs.

so, what is ambient music?

and what does it have to do with music technology?

Producer as Artist

Eno thinks of himself as a technician rather than musician.

He has been brought in as a full artistic collaborator and producer for bands including Genesis (Lamb Lies Down on Broadway), Devo, Talking Heads (and later David Byrne), Laurie Anderson, U2, Coldplay, and Grace Jones.

Excerpt from “A Secret Life” from Eno and Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981)

In the late sixties, Bowie began to make experimental works with tape collage

He created the stage character Ziggy Stardust in 1972, exploring themes of alienation, gender, space travel and arti!cial intelligence.

Over the course of his career, Bowie moved between styles and in#uences, including rock, ambient, disco, avant garde, glam and punk

inspired by the Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk, Steve Reich, and of course, Eno

His !rst hit was Space Oddity in 1969...

DAVID BOWIE

performance persona in the early-mid 70s

Ziggy made Bowie a pop culture icon

Listen: Starman from the 1972 Album Ziggy Stardust

ZIGGY STARDUST

The Berlin Trilogy (1977-79)

In 1977, Bowie went to Berlin to kick a drug addiction

while there he made three in#uential albums with Brian Eno:

Low (1977) - Heroes (1977) - Lodger (1979)

Side B of “Low” contained primarily long electronic tracks without vocals.

Excerpt from Low’s “Subterraneans”

The Berlin Trilogy (1977-79)

“Low” peaked at #2 on the UK charts.

Phillip Glass used the album as inspiration for his 1992 “Low Symphony,” a collaboration with Bowie and Eno; later followed by “Heroes Symphony.”

Excerpt from Low’s “Weeping Wall”

The Berlin Trilogy (1977-79)

Heroes features guitarist Robert Fripp.

When John Lennon started working on on his Double Fantasy album, he was quoted as saying “I hope to do something as good as “Heroes”.”

The title track is one of Bowie’s best known songs.

Excerpt from “Heroes”

Ambient Music often focuses on the timbre, changes in the quality of the sound rather than the traditional focus of rhythm, melody and harmony.

Often evocative of a “place,” “atmosphere,” “visual” or “environment.”

“Not music from the environment but music for the environment” - Eno

It’s typically less-dramatic, and often non-linear, without clear directionality.

It has roots in the work of John Cage, Wendy Carlos, La Monte Young and the “minimalist” composers.

It spans aesthetics ranging from Sound Art to Dance Music

matured as a genre through the work and writing of Brian Eno

Ambient Music Recap

Since Eno, Ambient has grown and divided into more speci!c categories:

Industrial, Drone, Isolationism (post-metal), Ambient Dub, Space Music, chill-out, mellow dub, down-tempo, new-age music, meditation music, ethno/ambient.

Vangelis (!lm composer) and Jean-Michel Jarre (pop composer) were two of the most and proli!c later ambient composers.

Later lectures - Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream brought ambient ideas to the german scene in the 70s

Later and Current Ambient Music

JEAN MICHEL JARRE worked at the GRM Studios in Paris with Pierre Schaeffer in the late 60s where he leaned to tape manipulation techniques and discovered the Moog Synthesizer.

Later, worked in the Cologne Studio under the direction of Stockhausen.

He achieved international fame with his concept album, Oxygene. The six movements, simply titled I, II, II, etc., lasted the entire length of the record.Jarre composed the album using an array of synthesizers and an 8-track tape recorder set up in his kitchen.

Without titles, and a singer, no record label would touch it.

The album ended up #2 on the UK charts and sold 12 million copies, the best selling French recording of all time.

Combining ambient ideas with pop music, Part IV starts and ends with space atmospheres. It is the best known “single,” and a variation on Kingley’s “Popcorn.”

Excerpt from Oxygene IV

OXYGENE (1976)JEAN MICHEL JARRE

JEAN MICHEL JARRE

ARP Synthesizer, EMS Synthi AKS, VCS 3 Synthesizer (pictured), RMI Harmonic Synthesizer, Far!sa Professional Organ, Eminent 310U, Mellotron and the Rhythmin' Computer (later revealed to be a Korg Minipops-7 rhythm machine) & laser harp

His 1979 outdoor concert at the Place de Concord in Paris, celebrating Bastille Day, set a world record for attendance - over 1 million, with 100 million television viewers worldwide. Equinox

VANGELIS

Film composer and synth virtuoso

1981 academy award for Chariots of Fire score

declined an offer in 1974 to join Yes, after the departure of Rick Wakeman.

Proli!c composer: 52 albums, mostly of electronic music, and many !lm scores, including Chariots of Fire (Academy Award Winner), the PBS Cosmos series, and Blade Runner.

APHEX TWIN

Aphex Twin (Richard James) began building synthesizers and studying electronics at age 15.

1991, released his !rst EP, Analogue Bubblebath, which was acid house techno.

1992, released Selected Ambient Works 1985-92, which received critical praise.

Aphex Twin extended the limits of ambient music by adding beats and bass lines to lush textural tracks.

Excerpt from Selected Ambient Works' “Xtal”

RYUICHI SAKAMOTO

Began his music career with the Yellow Magic Orchestra

Composes music for !lms and games, and collaborates as a pianist and keyboardist with other composers and engineers

excerpt from Duoon, off the album Vrioon, collaboration with Alva Noto

NOVELLER (SARAH LIPSTATE)

Guitar-based Ambient/Drone/Noise/etc

Performs live using various pedals effects, delays and reverb, mic’s the amp.

Listen: St. Powers from the album Paint on the Shadows

TIM HECKER

Digital drone/ambient/noise

Performs live with a laptop

“First and foremost, I’m a studio musician. My main skill is making studio artifacts—recordings. Having said that, I enjoy playing live, and I do with great interest and intensity. It’s a totally different thing for me than making CDs.”

Listen: Hatred of Music from the album Ravedeath, 1972

CAROLINE PARK

Right here at Brown in the MEME program

Ambient process music combining automated systems with manual control, steering the system

Custom software built in Max/MSP

Listen: Octavluv (excerpt)

MIDTERM TEST ON 10.31 (SCARY, RIGHT?)

People/Groups (examples: John Cage, Delia Derbyshire, The Beach Boys, Wendy Carlos)

Technologies and Instruments (examples: Theremin, DX-7, Minimoog, Phonograph)

Terms and Concepts (examples: frequency, additive synthesis, low-pass !lter, sampling rate)

Listening (Artist/Group, Date (within 2 years either way), technological processes employed)