Brian Eno's Another Green World Read Online Free Page A

did was present the students with a life model and say: “Just make lots of dots as quickly as possible and see if you can say something about the model.” Everybody did this very diligently and pretty boringly, with one exception. There was this strange blond boy in the corner who did millions of dots and then tore the whole thing up into the shape of a human being.
     
    For Eno, the “strange blond boy’’ in Phillips’ class, this dots exercise was the least of his worries. Ascott’s teaching philosophy involved countless mandatory group collaboration exercises—an echo of cybernetics’ emphasis on “systems learning”—and mental games. Very little of the teaching at Ipswich had anything to do with what the teenage Eno had ostensibly set out to do—study the fine arts. Instead of daubing canvases with oil paints, Eno and his fellow students were instructed to create “mindmaps’’ of each other.
    The extreme discombobulation of Ipswich left a deep impression on Eno, shaking up his most fundamental notions of what an artist was and what art could be. Ipswich was also where he began experimenting with tape recorders, delving into sound with Phillips’ encouragement. “I had links with a musical world Brian didn’t know,” Phillips recalled to
The Independent
. “I introduced him to Cage, for instance.Cage was what you’d nowadays call ‘empowering.’ He made you realize that there wasn’t a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn’t appreciated. When you’re a young artist, all you seek is license, and Cage had done that, shown that this gate was open. I remember a game emerged between me and Brian and a couple or others which was called ‘sound tennis.’ We went around Ipswich buying up old wrecked pianos and put them all round the room. Then we played a kind of hand tennis and scored according to the quality of noise we made when hitting a stripped piano. It was a rather good game.” Cage was a touchstone for legions of budding artists, and Eno was no exception. The 1961 anthology
Silence
, once jokingly described by the critic Rob Tannenbaum as “the
Das Kapital
of avant-garde composing,” packed Cage’s ideas into a wallop so heavy that it would send shockwaves reverberating through culture for decades to come. It was easy to see why Cage’s ideas were so engaging. In addition to Cage’s entreatment to open up our ears to the wide variety of sounds in our environment, he elevated the importance of the artistic process. A composition wasn’t simply about the finished product, but about the path it took to get there. He was also famously a proponent of “indeterminacy” and chance operations; his use of the ancient Chinese system, the I Ching,to make compositional decisions was a spiritual forefather of Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards. Cage’s ideas had obvious visual and literary appeal, too; his detailed instructions for his works were works of art unto themselves. He was a tremendous meta-thinker, with the canny ability to position his ideas within a larger cultural and theoretical context, and some might argue that his writings are more enjoyable than his music. Plus, Cage was a Renaissance man in his own life—in addition to being a world-famous composer, he was a painter, a printmaker, a writer, an avid mushroom collector, an amateur Zen philosopher, and a macrobiotic cook, among other things.
    Eno’s future friend and collaborator Harold Budd recalled Cage’s impact on his thinking at around the same time. “I went to a concert by Cage and David Tudor called ‘Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?’ It was not exactly a concert, but it was more like an installation/lecture/performance piece, and it really changed my mind immediately. I thought, Jesus Christ, I wanted to go in that direction. It seemed heavy with the art part, if you know what I mean. It was heavy anti-academic, anti-Germanic, anti-European modernism, which at the time we were all scared to