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What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest – the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.

Brian Eno

All the best lyrics are written in ten minutes.
BRIAN ENO

Best Minutes Written
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.
BRIAN ENO

Attention Interesting Listening
In 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.
BRIAN ENO

Mean Musical Sound Writing
The seven white notes on the piano – each section of the piece (there are 12 sections) is five of those seven white notes.
BRIAN ENO

Piano Simple White
Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.
BRIAN ENO

Mind People Trying
When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.
BRIAN ENO

Decide Done Lying Teach Uncles
I’ve always thought that art is a lie, an interesting lie. And I’ll sort of listen to the “lie” and try to imagine the world which makes that lie true…what that world must be like, and what would have to happen for us to get from this world to that one.
BRIAN ENO

Art Imagine Interesting Lying
Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.
BRIAN ENO

Enthusiasm Everything Good
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

Historical Looks Writing
I’m very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.
BRIAN ENO

Fun People Technology
It’s easy to forget that your best work is done when your attention is fully engaged.
BRIAN ENO

Attention Done Forget
Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‘Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this’ – have become commonplace in films and music too.
BRIAN ENO

Earth Editing Film Sentence
The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.
BRIAN ENO

Easily Forgotten Important
If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.
BRIAN ENO

Fabulous Sound Use
The thing that obsesses me more than anything is waste – the waste of human intelligence and creativity.
BRIAN ENO

Creativity Humans Waste
But now you see the results of that in people who are completely crippled unless they know that they have the possibility of “cut and paste” and “undo.” And “undo” and “undo” and “undo” and “undo” and “undo” again.
BRIAN ENO

Criped People See Undo Unless

What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest – the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.

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Popular Authors

What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest – the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Brian Eno Quotes