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

death of; we were all scared to death of Boulez and Stockhausen. Anyway, Cage was not an antidote to that, but just a different monetary valuealtogether. Printed money in a strange language, which seemed more valuable than the old ones.”
    After two years at Ipswich, Eno switched to another art school called Winchester. His painting work got increasingly conceptual, and he became more and more invested in sound. He was getting obsessed with tape recorders, amassing dozens of reel-to-reel tape machines at thrift stores and garage sales. He experimented with building “sound sculptures,” and played in two bands—an experimental troupe called Merchant Taylor’s Simultaneous Cabinet, and a rock band, The Maxwell Demon. Performances by Eno during this time included a cover of George Brecht’s
Drip Music (Drip Event)
, a piece which instructs the performer to find an empty container and a source of dripping water, arranging it so that the water falls into the container.
    Brecht was a key member of the Fluxus movement, a ragtag group of conceptual artists in the 1960s and early 1970s who were heavily inspired by Cage. The group was most famous for staging “happenings,” but there were many other aspects to their work.
Drip Music
was a Fluxus “event score,” one of Brecht’s conceptual innovations. “Event scores” were usually pretty minimal; the score often involved nothing more than a card inscribed with a few lines of text and a title. Another Brecht event score, composed in
    1966, was titled
For a Drummer, Fluxversion 2
. The entire score read: “Performer drums with sticks over a leaking feather pillow, making the feathers escape the pillow.”
    At around the same time, Eno staged a performance of minimalist composer La Monte Young’s
X for Henry Flynt,
a composition which involves playing a sound, or group of sounds, for as long as the performer sees fit. Eno played
X for Henry Flynt
on a piano, slamming down on a cluster of keys 3,600 times. Though he tried to hit the same notes each time, he began noticing the minute variations from one crash of keys to the next, leading to the later maxim that “repetition is a form of change”—which later found its rightful place on an Oblique Strategies card.
    Soon after that, Eno briefly joined a group called the Scratch Orchestra, led by the late British avantgarde composer Cornelius Cardew. There was one Cardew piece that would be a formative experience for Eno—a piece known as “Paragraph 7,” part of a larger Cardew masterwork called
The Great Learning
. Explaining “Paragraph 7” could easily take up a book of its own.
    “Paragraph 7”’s score is designed to be performed by a group of singers, and it can be done by anyone, trained or untrained. The words are from a text by Confucius, broken up into 24 short chunks, each ofwhich has a number. There are only a few simple rules. The number tells the singer how many times to repeat that chunk of text; an additional number tells each singer how many times to repeat it loudly or softly. Each singer chooses a note with which to sing each chunk—any note—with the caveats to not hit the same note twice in a row, and to try to match notes with a note sung by someone else in the group. Each note is held “for the length of a breath,” and each singer goes through the text at his own pace. Despite the seeming vagueness of the score’s few instructions, the piece sounds very similar—and very beautiful— each time it is performed. It starts out in discord, but rapidly and predictably resolves into a tranquil pool of sound.
    “Paragraph 7,” and 1960s tape loop pieces like Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain,” sparked Eno’s fascination with music that wasn’t obsessively organized from the start, but instead grew and mutated in intriguing ways from a limited set of initial constraints. “Paragraph 7” also reinforced Eno’s interest in music compositions that seemed to have the capacity to