Angels In The Architecture: An Essay On Ambience

WHAT IS AMBIENT MUSIC?

The term "ambient" is tossed around so lightly these days in music criticism that it has come to describe any music that has a little bit of echo to it. Ambient music is not so easily defined. Whereas techno music is its own genre, and hip-hop music is its own genre, there are very few CD's that can rightly be called pure ambient. Ambient music is more like a dye that permeates other musical genres to greater or lesser degrees, and in so doing colors them. Enya is ambient neo-Celtic, De La Soul has been called ambient trip-hop. All this is just wonderful, but we still haven't answered the question, "What is ambient music?" In order to do so, we need to return to the source of ambient music. Before there was Enya, Aphex Twin, or My Bloody Valentine, there was Brian Eno.

If James Brown is the godfather of soul then Brian Eno is the god of ambience. Brian Eno has also become the default spokesperson and the steward of all things ambient. Eno began his career with the art rock band Roxy Music. He left Roxy Music in the early ‘70s and began recording solo pop albums that are really quite bizarre (Cf: Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy)). With his 1975 release Another Green World Eno departed the world of wacky pop and entered the world of ambient pop (although he hadn't really labeled it "ambient" yet). Eno's songs were becoming more spacey and tone-oriented; his lyrics were becoming more sparse and image-laden. In 1978, Brian Eno made a CD without drums, lyrics, or anything other than a synthesizer and a sampler. That CD has become the quintessential pure ambient CD by which all others are judged. It's called Ambient 1/Music for Airports, and we'll touch on it later in more detail. Shortly after Music for Airports was released, Eno was asked to define ambient music. His response is not only instructive; it is the foundation on which all subsequent discussions of ambient music must necessarily be based.

ART WITHOUT SCALE

I could take the above quotation and run with it for days, but I'll try to limit myself to the main point. Notice that Eno's definition mentions nothing about tone nor reverb nor echo nor any sort of special studio effect. Instead, ambient music, according to Eno, is defined largely by the subjective effect it has on its listener. To restate Eno's definition in more practical terms – if you can write a physics term paper while listening to a CD without being distracted by it, and then later listen to that same CD through your blaring headphones without being bored by it, then you've got yourself an ambient CD.

It might seem then that all classical music is ambient, but Brian Eno hated and still hates classical music. To Eno, most classical music passes neither the term paper test, nor the blaring headphones test. OK, so Handel's "Water Music" passes the term paper test (after all, it was composed to be ignorable), and Mozart's "Symphony #25 In G Minor" passes the blaring headphones test, but neither piece passes both tests.