MUSIC BEYOND AIRPORTS: APPRAISING AMBIENT MUSIC by Edited by Monty Adkins & Simon Cummings

Author:Edited by Monty Adkins & Simon Cummings
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: ISBN: 978-1-86218-162-5
Publisher: University of Huddersfield Press
Published: 2019-07-24T23:00:00+00:00

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1 Les Guêpes January 1849 (6th series, 1859), in Oxford Essential Quotations, Sixth Edition, ed. Susan Ratcliffe (Oxford University Press, 2018).

2 These twin elements are what constitutes the cosmological principle, originally asserted by Isaac Newton.

3 For an introduction to the steady state model see F. Hoyle, “A new model for the expanding universe,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 108(5) (1948) and H. Bondi, T. Gold, “The Steady-State Theory of the Expanding Universe,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 108(3) (1948). A commentary on the origins of the big bang theory can be found in Jean-Pierre Luminet, “Editorial note to: George Lemaître, The beginning of the world from the point of view of quantum theory,” General Relativity and Gravitation, 43(10) (2011): 2911–2928.

4 The so-called ‘steady bang’ model; see F. Hoyle, G. Burbidge, J. V. Narlikar, “A Quasi-Steady State Cosmological Model with Creation of Matter,” The Astrophysical Journal 410 (1993): 437–457.

5 For an excellent overview of the history and arguments, see Helge Kragh, “Cosmology and the origin of the universe: Historical and conceptual perspectives,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.00726 (2017).

6 Peter Culshaw, “My Greek odyssey with Alexander,” The Guardian, January 6, 2005, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/3634447/My-Greek-odyssey-with-Alexander.html.

7 Brian Eno, “Ambient Music”, liner notes from Ambient 1: Music for Airports (PVC 7908 (AMB 001), 1978), accessed March 20, 2019, http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/MFA-txt.html.

8 cf. Mark Prendergast, The Ambient Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 6; Paul Morley, Op. cit., 33; Alan Licht, “Sound Art: Origins, development and ambiguities,” Organised Sound, 14(1) (2009), 3–10; Eliot Bates, “Ambient Music” (Masters diss., Wesleyan University, 1997), 152. There are innumerable such examples in the literature; indeed, it would probably be easier to cite cases that do not mention Satie than those that do.

9 I do not consider accidental considerations such as minor performance variations caused by performer fatigue or the occasional presence of mistakes as meaningful instances of ‘change’ in this context.

10 Dylan Trigg, “Furniture music, hotel lobbies, and banality: Can we speak of a disinterested space?,” Space and Culture, 9(4) (2006): 7.

11 Nicola Bernardini, “Erik Satie’s Musique d’Ameublement, some ninety years later,” in Furniture Music (Venice: Blauerhase), 22.

12 Ibid., 23.

13 In the preface to the score, Riley states the most desirable number of players to be approximately 35.

14 The simple title of Paul Horn’s Inside can be read as a double meaning, beyond its immediate reference to the Taj Mahal, hinting at a connection to an inner world of contemplation.

15 Alexander C. Harden, “Kosmische Musik and Its Techno-Social Context,” Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music Vol. 6, No. 2 (2016): 161–2.

16 Though aspiring to a very different musical aesthetic, and inspired more by things terrestrial than cosmic, an identical approach can be heard on Kraftwerk’s 1974 track ‘Autobahn’, where varying combinations of repetitive beats and basslines form the firmament (or, in this case, ‘highway’) over which transient ideas pass by. Their 1977 track ‘Trans-Europe Express’ is arguably an even more austere version of this same idea.

17 Considering where Eno’s ambient musical explorations would subsequently lead, the title’s implications of landscape are also noteworthy.

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