In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
BRIAN ENOIn fact, quite a lot of what I do has to do with sound texture, and, you can’t notate that. You can’t notate the sound of “St. Elmo’s Fire.” There’s no way of writing that down. That’s because musical notation arose at a time when sound textures were limited.
More Brian Eno Quotes
-
-
I don’t like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
BRIAN ENO -
Painting, I think it’s like jazz.
BRIAN ENO -
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.
BRIAN ENO -
If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.
BRIAN ENO -
There are certain sounds that I’ve found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.
BRIAN ENO -
One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.
BRIAN ENO -
The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
BRIAN ENO -
I hate the rock music tradition. I can’t bear it!
BRIAN ENO -
I believe in singing.
BRIAN ENO -
I don’t like celebrity programmes – but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.
BRIAN ENO -
Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You’re glad someone’s done it but you don’t necessarily want to listen to it.
BRIAN ENO -
When you look back on a historical period of music, it seems so obvious to you what the characteristics of it are, but they’re not obvious at the time. So, when I look back at my own work.
BRIAN ENO -
One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.
BRIAN ENO -
We have two different ways of working. One is completely unstructured where somebody just starts playing and somebody joins in and then the other person joins in, and something starts to happen. That’s occasionally what happens.
BRIAN ENO -
I’m struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.
BRIAN ENO