THE NEW TONALISTS

Composers advance into past

By T.L. Ponick
SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES

    It's hard to believe, but just 150 years ago, classical composers and musicians were
the pop stars of their day. Pianists such as Franz Liszt had their own groupies swooning
in the aisles. Society matrons would kill to have Chopin tickle the ivories at one of their
soirees. Startling new works like Berlioz's opium-inspired "Symphonie Fantastique" had
college students loudly demonstrating their enthusiasm from the balconies, much to the
chagrin of their scandalized elders in the better seats below.   And you didn't have to be
rich to get in on the fun. Astute composers such as Chopin soon had their latest gems
published in sheet-music form, and families of a new and growing middle class regularly
learned them on the parlor piano. Meanwhile, plumbers and carpenters eagerly followed
the world of opera and lustily belted out Verdi's latest hits on their way to work. People in
all walks of life closely followed the glamorous and sometimes scandalous lives of high
culture's superstars.

This situation largely persisted until World War I, when the horrors of that conflict
forever changed the landscape of the arts in the West. Modernism and its offshoots
gradually took hold, including surrealism and dadaism in painting, stream of
consciousness in fiction, and increasingly undisciplined free verse in poetry.
    In music, modernists embarked on a disastrous 20th-century experiment in atonality
or serialism, basing new music not on harmonious theme and development, but on the
mathematical patterns of the 12-tone row. For theorists such as Arnold Schoenberg, the
scientific purity of notation far outweighed any consideration of audience.
    European serialists and their successors, such as the Americans Milton Babbitt and
Elliott Carter, also went out of their way to lump instrumental choirs into tone clusters,
creating cacophonous works of surpassing ugliness. Avant-garde composers such as John
Cage made a mockery out of serious music itself, directing musicians to rap their music
stands with their bows and stare down the audience in stony silence while playing
nothing.
    This rebelliousness, combined with utter disdain for the audience, led to the rapid
decline in the popularity of classical music after World War II. What once was a top-down
system, in which high culture provided the inspiration for popular culture, rapidly
disintegrated.
    The reason for this was simple. Until serialism fastened its death grip on classical
music, the music of high culture had been an inspiration to middlebrow and lowbrow
culture, which liberally borrowed from it or stole its tunes outright, smithing them into
popular songs in an earlier, low-tech version of today's hotly contested MP-3 music file-
swapping services. Then, with the dawn of jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock 'n' roll, pop
music, particularly in America, struck out on its own, sweeping baby-boomer audiences
along on a new and revolutionary musical ride. Popular music no longer needed direction
or approval from an increasingly isolated and irrelevant higher culture.
    Things change. By the 1970s, the 12-tone row had run its course, as modernism
collapsed into a tired and cynical postmodernism that declared structure, meaning, form
and hope had come to an end. Alternatively, some symphony orchestras tried adopting
the music of young "minimalist" composers such as the Americans Philip Glass, Steve
Reich and John Adams and the Estonian Arvo Part.

The minimalists had returned to tonality, but just barely, by employing short tonal
motifs that they then tortured to death for the next three hours, producing a trancelike
effect on audiences not unlike the similar effect of New Age music. Such static dullness
was hardly an advance, but it did seem to avoid Romantic overstatement and seemed to
suffice — for a while.

 Almost at the same time, something potentially more daring was brewing. Slowly,
stealthily, a "new tonalism" has crept into classical music over the past 15 years or so.
Younger classical composers and musicians, craving the kind of audiences that embraced
the last generation's rock stars, have begun to embrace fully, sometimes noisily, Western
musical tradition — including melody — once again. If they want to get somewhere, they
might take a closer look at what's going on in popular music.

Pop composers, singers and instrumentalists alike have been involved for at least two
decades in a struggle to create some form of new "fusion" or "crossover" music that
blends elements of traditional classical music, jazz, Celtic, folk, post-punk, country and
other strains that have a broad appeal beyond the usual niche audience. Each happening
in this world is a surprise.
  Stars in this crossover pop environment are as varied as they are interesting.
Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, highly opinionated as a jazz scholar, is nonetheless a
consummate classical musician and a wizard of the baroque trumpet. Norah Jones has
come out of nowhere with her astonishing interpretations of old cafe classics, blowing the
minds of a cynical recording industry while attracting twentysomethings to
eightysomethings as new fans.

    Locally, the artists on the Annapolis-based Maggie's Music label — Ceoltoiri, Karen
Ashbrook, Bonnie Rideout and the consummate 12-string guitarist Al Petteway — have
become underground and above-ground classics of the Celtic revival, which in turn owes
a great deal of its success to its fusion with New Age music — which is at times hard to
distinguish from minimalism. You get the drift. Younger popular musicians are only too
happy to mix genres and explore their options.

  Even more interesting than these horizontal linkages across genre lines is this surprising
fact: The interesting stuff is percolating from the bottom up rather than trickling from the
top down.    Classical composers have been slower to change, but now, a little
uncertainly, some are making their moves.

  Stefania de Kenessey, a music professor at the New School, is one example. Her
humorously named Derriere Guard salons in New York welcome new tonalists,
expansive/new formalist poets, neo-traditional architects and representational painters to
join forces by returning to their artistic roots without forgetting the need to adapt them
to 21st-century sensibilities.

  James Grant, a free-lance new tonalist, recently mounted a highly successful Kennedy
Center premiere of his massive new Civil War-based choral work, "Such Was the War,"
proving that grand, large works still move an audience. Across the Atlantic, businessman-
composer Rene Gruss has created New Bohemia (www.newbohemia.net), a Web site
intended as a meeting place for new tonalists and other fellow travelers.
    The new tonalists, however, have run smack into a formidable obstacle in their
commendable campaign to compose tonal music for modern audiences: They have
forgotten how. Many of these composers have lost their roots in the Western tradition
and no longer know how to compose melodies as plush as Puccini's or as provocative as
Prokofiev's. They have been attempting to break out of this cycle, but with limited
success. Miss De Kenessey, for example, has composed some charming and vigorous
works in differing tonal modes, often echoing the folk traditions of Bela Bartok, but she
has yet to create a breakthrough hit.

 More recently, D.C. area new tonalist composer Arnold Saltzman, the cantor of the
Adas Israel Congregation, premiered his "American Symphony" on Father's Day at the
Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland. Scored for full
orchestra, Mr. Saltzman's symphony boldly and faithfully embraces the traditional four-
movement form and is infused with a number of charming and occasionally martial
themes honoring the founding presidents of America. Unabashedly patriotic in a
contemporary musical environment that frequently discourages love of country, Mr.
Saltzman's symphony is a unique tribute to traditional American values and was warmly
appreciated by the audience in a way that 12-tone works never are. Yet Mr. Saltzman's
working through of motifs was at times incomplete and did not advance the direction of
serious music in a substantive way. Like his fellow new tonalists, Mr. Saltzman is still
trying to grasp the direction that an evolving new tonal musical landscape will assume.

While young architects are displaying a new enthusiasm for received traditions; while
expansive poets are returning verse to the arts of meter, rhyme and storytelling; while
sculptors such as the late Frederick Hart, who created the moving statue at the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial, have taken plastic form in a new direction, the new tonalists remain a
relatively timid lot. Perhaps it will take more encouragement from crossover musicians in
popular culture, along with their tempting arc of success, to lead younger classical
composers out of the wilderness in which the modernists and postmodernists have
stranded them.

  First, though, the new tonalists will have to break openly with a stodgy and elitist
academy while washing their collective hands of residual minimalist tendencies. The new
tonalists have taken a step in the right direction. Their music is being heard and often
admired, but they have yet to create compelling new compositions that will lodge in the
repertoire, because they are afraid to soar.
 Generative Music

"Evolving metaphors, in my opinion, is what artists do."

A talk delivered in San Francisco, June 8, 1996

by Brian Eno

The following talk was given by Brian Eno at

the Imagination Conference in San Francsico,
June 8, 1996. Billed as a progressive
interactive event featuring original multimedia
presentations the Imagination conference
featured musician and artist Brian Eno, movie
producer and director Spike Lee, and
performance artist and musician Laurie
Anderson. Each of the three presented their
work and ideas in their own way. Brian Eno
spoke about a new form of music - Generative
Music - and traced its roots and the
development of his ideas on it from the mid-
sixties until now. For a biography of Brian Eno
and description of some of his current work -
click here. For Spike Lee's talk click here.
Laurie Anderson played music and
sang/performed a set arranged for the evening.
In Motion Magazine thanks Capretta Communications in San Francisco for all their help
in getting us into the conference and providing materials for this coverage. If you'd like to
listen to these talks go to HotWired magazine

What I am talking about tonight is an idea that really began for me about 25 years ago
and has pretty much obsessed me ever since. It began as a musical idea, it began as
something I heard in music and gradually I realized that in fact it was an idea that was
occurring in all sorts of areas. In the course of this talk what I would like to do is to trace
the history of the idea in my own work and in the work of some other people and also to
show how the idea suddenly branches out, opens up, and becomes a metaphor for what I
consider a very important new body of thinking. I have 45 minutes to do this and I have a
clock here as well.

In the mid-sixties, something happened in modern music which really made a division
between what had happened prior to that and what was now starting to happen. At the
time it was called the new tonalism, or the new tonality. It was a movement away from
the classical tradition which had sort of defined progress with becoming more atonal,
becoming more chaotic and in a sense becoming less musical in the sense that ordinary
people would understand the word music.

In the mid-sixties, Terry Reilly, Steve Reich, Philip Glass and several others began
working with tonal music again. Simple chords, simple intervals, rhythms that you could
follow that weren't in 15/8 and things like that (laughter). Music in fact you could almost
dance to.
At the time, the distinguishing characteristic of that music seemed to be that it was tonal,
as opposed to atonal. Over the course of time, since then I think another important
characteristic has emerged. It was very clear in the first major piece of Terry Reilly called
In C. Most of you probably know of this piece or some of you probably know it, and
many of you may have played it. It's a very famous piece of music. It consists of 52 bars
of music written in the key of C. And the instructions to the musicians are "proceed
through those bars at any speed you choose". So you can begin on bar one, play that for
as many times as you want, 20 or 30 times, then move to bar 2, if you don't like that
much just play it once, go on to bar three.

The important thing is each musician move through it at his or her own speed. The effect
of that of course is to create a very complicated work of quite unpredictable
combinations. If this is performed with a lot of musicians you get a very dense and
fascinating web of sound as a result. It's actually a beautiful piece and having listened to
it again recently I think it's stood the test of time very well. That piece however was not
the one which blew my socks off.

That dubious credit goes to another piece of music by a composer called Steve Reich. I
think it was his earliest recorded piece. It's a piece called It's Gonna Rain, and I would
like to listen to a bit of that now. (It's Gonna Rain played.)

For many years I was the only person I knew who thought that was a beautiful piece of
music (laughter). It's quite a long piece, it's about 17 minutes long. It's produced by a
very, very simple process. It's a loop of a preacher saying "It's gonna rain". Identical
copies of the loop are being played on two machines at once. Because of the
inconsistency of the speed of the machines they gradually slip out of sync with one
another. They start to sound like an echo. Then they sound like a cannon, and gradually
they start to sound like all sorts of things.

The piece is very, very interesting because it's tremendously simple. It's a piece of music
that anybody could of made. But the results, sonically, are very complex. What happens
when you listen to that piece is that your listening brain becomes habituated in the same
way that your eye does if you stare at something for a very long time. If you stare at
something for a very long time your eye very quickly cancels the common information,
stops seeing it, and only notices the differences. This is what happens with that piece of
music.
Quite soon you start hearing very exotic details of the recording itself. For instance you
are aware after several minutes that there are thousands of trumpets in there - this is
without drugs. With drugs there would probably be millions (laughter). You also become
aware that there are birds, there really are birds -- in the original loop of tape there are
some pigeons or something and they become very prominent as the thing goes on. Most
of all, if you know how the piece is made, what you become aware of is that you are
getting a huge amount of material and experience from a very, very simple starting point.
Now this completely intrigued me. Partly because I"ve always been lazy, I guess. So I've
always wanted to set things in motion that would produce far more than I had predicted.
Now the Reich piece is really a ... what would be called visually a moire pattern.
Can I have the over-head projector please?
Now a moire pattern is when you overlay two identical grids with one another. Here's
one, here's the other. Now when I overlay them, see what happens, you get a very
complicated interaction. you get something that actually you wouldn't have predicted
from these two original identical sheets of paper. This is actually a very good analog of
the Steve Reich piece in action. Something happens because of one's perception rather
than because of anything physically happening to these two sheets of plastic which
produce an effect that you simply couldn't have expected or predicted.
I was so impressed by this as a way of composing that I made many, many pieces of
music using more complex variations of that. In fact all of the stuff that is called ambient
music really -- sorry, all the stuff I released called ambient music (laughter), not the stuff
those other 2 1/2 million people released called ambient music, -- all of my ambient
music I should say, really was based on that kind of principle, on the idea that it's
possible to think of a system or a set of rules which once set in motion will create music
for you.

Now the wonderful thing about that is that it starts to create music that you've never
heard before. This is an important point I think. If you move away from the idea of the
composer as someone who creates a complete image and then steps back from it, there's a
different way of composing. It's putting in motion something and letting it make the thing
for you.

One of the first pieces I did like that is called "Music for Airports" (applause), thank you
very much. (Shows graphic of Music for Airports). This is in fact a picture of the alien
fleet that abducted me last time I was in San Francisco (laughter), and that's the mother
ship just there. It was an awfull experience because they stole all my hair (laughter). In
fact this really a diagram of Music for Airports.
.
Music for Airports, at least one of the pieces on there, is structurally very, very simple.
There are sung notes, sung by three women and my self. One of the notes repeats every
23 1/2 seconds. It is in fact a long loop running around a series of tubular aluminum
chairs in Conny Plank's studio. The next lowest loop repeats every 25 7/8 seconds or
something like that. The third one every 29 15/16 seconds or something. What I mean is
they all repeat in cycles that are called incommensurable -- they are not likely to come
back into sync again.

So this is the piece moving along in time. Your experience of the piece of course is a
moment in time, there. So as the piece progresses, what you hear are the various
clusterings and configurations of these six basic elements. The basic elements in that
particular piece never change. They stay the same. But the piece does appear to have
quite a lot of variety. In fact it's about eight minutes long on that record, but I did have a
thirty minute version which I would bore friends who would listen to it.
The thing about pieces like this of course is that they are actually of almost infinite length
if the numbers involved are complex enough. They simply don't ever re-configure in the
same way again. This is music for free in a sense. The considerations that are important,
then, become questions of how the system works and most important of all what you feed
into the system.
I think that the classical composers who came to this way of composing have not thought
it about very much. They accepted given instruments and invented systems to reconfigure
them. To me that was an important part of it. I think coming from pop music, which of
course is a music more than anything else about sound, and about the possibilities of
sound in studios, coming to doing this from that background, I think I was well equipped
for that.
Music for Airports came out in 1978 to howls of neglect (laughter) in fact it didn't do at
all well in England. But it did do quite well here by comparison. I have an eternal debt to
the United States for actually cheering me up a little bit when that record came out. In
fact I was so depressed about the response to the record and the other stuff I'd been doing
in England that I decided to move to America for a few years, which might be the sign of
a weak-willed person who lives off flattery but, you know, there you go (laughter).

One of the first places I came to was San Francisco, I lived here for a while. In fact I
practically lived in the Exploratorium. (laughter and applause) I have my exploratorium
instant moire in my pocket (laughter). If you haven't visited the exploratorium in the last
month you should go -- it's really a good place. If every city had one of those the world
would be a much better place.
In the exploratorium the thing that absolutely hooked me in the same way as the Steve
Reich piece had hooked me was a simple computer demonstration. It was the first thing
I'd ever seen on a computer actually, of a game invented by an English mathematician
called John Conway. The game was called Life. Modest title for a game.
Life is a very simple game, unlike the one we're in. It only actually has a few rules, which
I will now tell you. You divide up an area into squares. You won't see the squares on the
demonstration I'm about to do. And a square can either be dead or alive. There's a live
square. Here's another one. There's another one. There's another one there.

The rules are very simple. In the next generation, the next click of the clock, the squares
are going to change statuses in some way or another. The square which has one or zero
neighbors is going to die, a live square that has one or zero neighbors is going to die. A
square which has two neighbors is going to survive. A square with three neighbors is
going to give birth, is going to come alive, if it isn't already alive. A square with four or
more neighbors is going to die of over crowding.

These are terribly simple rules and you would think it probably couldn't produce anything
very interesting. Conway spent apparently about a year finessing these simple rules. They
started out much more complicated than that. He found that those were all the rules you
needed to produce something that appeared life-like.
What I have over here, if you can now go to this Mac computer, please. I have a little
group of live squares up there. When I hit go I hope they are going to start behaving
according to those rules. There they go. I'm sure a lot of you have seen this before.
What's interesting about this is that so much happens. The rules are very, very simple, but
this little population here will reconfigure itself, form beautiful patterns, collapse, open
up again, do all sorts of things. It will have little pieces that wander around, like this one
over here. Little things that never stop blinking, like these ones. What is very interesting
is that this is extremely sensitive to the conditions in which you started. If I had drawn it
one dot different it would have had a totally different history. This is I think counter-
intuitive. One's intuition doesn't lead you to believe that something like this would
happen. Okay that's now settled (looking at screen), that will never change from that. It's
settled to a fixed condition. I'll just show you another one. I'll show you this one in color
because it looks nice. A little treat. (Laughter).
At the Exploratorium, I spent literally weeks playing with this thing. Which just goes to
show how idle you can be if you're unemployed. I was so fascinated, I wanted to train my
intuition to grasp this. I wanted this to become intuitive to me. I wanted to be able to
understand this message that I'd found in the Steve Reich piece, in the Reilly piece, in my
own work, and now in this. Very, very simple rules, clustering together, can produce very
complex and actually rather beautiful results. I wanted to do that because I felt that this
was the most important new idea of the time. Since then I have become more convinced
of that, and actually I hope I can partly convince you of that tonight.
Life was the first thing I ever saw on a computer that interested me. Almost the last
actually, as well. (laughter). For many, many years I didn't see anything else. I saw all
sorts of work being done on computers, that I thought was basically a reiteration of things
that had been better done in other ways. Or that were pointlessly elaborate. I didn't see
many things that had this degree of class to them. A very simple beginnings and a very
complex endings.

At the same time as I was working with Life I was also starting to some new pieces of
music that used the moire principle, but in a much more sophisticated way. So now I have
go back to the overhead (screen). What I started to do was make moires of different types
of elements. Not only of single notes or similar sounds, but moires of basically rules
about how sounds were made. This gave me some very much more interesting results. As
you can see (manipualating lines and shapes on the overhead) Here's two simple cycles
going out of phase, here's a wiggly one going out of phase, and then halleluja - New Age
music (laughter) for which I am consistently being blamed (laughter).

You can start to build very beautifully complex webs of things from very simple initial
ingredients. What I would like to do is play you a piece called Neroli which was released
five years ago or something which was another version of this way of working. I've only
ever had one idea really, and that was this, and everything I'm going to play was a version
of this idea. Can you put on Neroli please. I'll leave this running because it's a very good
piece to talk over.
Can you now put on this Mac, please.

The next thing I ever saw on a computer that really astonished me was a screen-saver by
a local lad called Gene Tantra. I don't now if he's here tonight I really wanted to invite
him but I didn't have his number. He made a screen-saver for the aptly named Dim
company After Dark. This screen-saver which they only released in one of their files
because it's clearly much too good to come out very often was called Stained Glass.
Stained Glass unlike almost all other screen-savers looks at its own history. Stained
Glass generates images, then it sucks them out, multiplies them, chops them about,
collages them together in different ways.
I realized that if you put other screen-savers in the center of Stained Glass, then it would
do the same thing to them. What you have is a visual generative piece. I've got three
versions of Stained Glass. There's one along the top there (pointing to overhead screen),
this square is another. And then this oblong is a third. At the center of these two is a
different screen-saver called Doodles. Now someone in a London magazine, when I said
I'd spent a long time looking at screen-savers described this as "rather sad" (laughter)
with that infallible cynicism that we English are so good at.

But the reason I was looking at them so closely was because again they picked up that
thread of something that uses a tiny amount of information, a minute amount of your
computer's processing power, and produces something that for me is thirty times as
beautiful as anything I've seen off a huge clunky CD ROM.
I quickly realized that for me this was the future for computers. Computers seen not as
ways of crunching huge quantities of data or storing enormous ready-made forests of
material, but computers are the way of growing little seeds.

This piece here, this Stained Glass is a very small seed, in fact I think it's something like
25 K, now for those of you who know what a K is will know that 25 of them isn't very
many (laughter). This is the kind of precise scientific language you can expect this
evening (laughter). Just to give you an impression, a CD ROM is, oh, very much bigger
than that (laughter). I've never actually worked this out. Something like 30,000 times
more information on a CD ROM, I suppose, than is needed to make this work. I think this
is about 30,000 times as interesting actually. Partly because it never repeats itself. This
thing will go on generating like this, and it will stay pretty much the same, but it will
never be identical. This suits me fine. I don't want big surprises. *I want a certain level of
surprise - I'm too old for big surprises, now. (laughter) - after those aliens.
 I thought this has got to be the future of computer music. I've seen so
many things done on computers that were hopelessly overwrought and
complicated and in the end sounded like what I call bubble and squeak
music. Or on the other hand, sounded like typical sequencer music,
sequencer music where everything is bolted together and it's all
completely, rigidly locked. It would have been great in the 1930s, I'm
sure, that music. I wanted something that had an organic quality to it.
Had some sense of movement and change. Every time you played it something slightly
different happened.
So, screen-savers. In fact Gene Tantra's, as I was saying was the first thing that I saw like
that. Subsequently I saw another one by another local lad called Greg Jarvit which is
called Bliss, which is another very very interesting system. Both of those things really
impressed me. Mostly because they were economical. I am so thrilled my anything
economical. It's so easy not to be economical and anything that uses a very small amount
of information smartly impresses me.

I came to California a couple of years ago with the idea that the right approach to using
this new medium called CD ROM was to actually use it not as a way of, as I said storing
forests which you then, tediously navigate through. It takes you four minutes to see
another bottom on the Prince video (laughter), but I thought how much more exciting it
would be to see something that happened like that, immediately, and furthermore
happened in a way that you'd never seen it happen before. It seemed to me that this was
the answer. To some how use the CD ROM as a way of planting seeds into your
computer, and then using the computer to grow those seeds for you.
In fact, although this abstract, Tai Roberts from ION proved to me that it could also be
done figuratively, it doesn't have to be abstract. I don't have an example of that, in an
afternoon Tai managed to put together an animation of a figure which was a generative
animation, that's to say it didn't rely on calling up a stored video, it relied on having a
very small seed and then performing certain operations. They were actually twists and
turns from Photoshop performed live on to this seed. In a sense the theory was
vindicated, but only in a sense because it never got made in that way.
I went back to England not really having seen the musical thing I'd hoped to find. I had
come with a whole proposal for how to make a sort of generative musical system in a
computer. It was a muddled proposal because I don't know enough about computers to
frame it properly. But it was fairly detailed and fairly accurate to what has since
happened.
When I got back to England, about a year afterwards a letter came through from some
people called Sseyo, a company called Sseyo, located in exotic, sunless Beaconsfield,
which is about 25 miles north of London. I had been imagining that I would find the
answer in San Francisco, but in fact these guys were working just up the M1 (laughter).
They sent me a demo of something they had done. It was a music generating system. I
listened to this CD and there were a couple of pieces on it that were clearly in my style.
In fact it turned out that they were followers of my music. The interesting thing to me
was that the pieces that were in my style were actually very good examples of my style.
In fact they were rather better than any I had recently done (laughter). I was rather
impressed by this.

I got in touch with them and the next example is really the center of this talk - which is
lucky because I'm about half-way through on the clock. Now I need the PC please (to the
control room) - it's only available on PC, I'm sorry to say. (Hissing from audience.) Yes I
thoroughly agree, the people from Sseyo are here tonight - hiss louder. We have one
supporter of the PC system in the front row here - he's wearing a white t-shirt ...
(laughter).

This is a very, very interesting system. It allows you to specify a set of instruments. I
should first tell you a little about it technically. This is a computer (laughter). In there
there's a sound card -- that's to say a little synthesizer. And this computer tells that little
synthesizer what to play according to the rules that I've set in here. Now these rules cover
all sorts of things that you might want to do musically. They cover very obvious things
like what scale is the piece in. And just to show what that looks like ... this is slightly re-
configured since I last looked at it. These are scales. Now if I want to have a little bit of
minor second in my scale I can do that. A little of this, a bit of that, and a little bit of that,
and some of that, and some more of that, and so on and so on. I show you that to indicate
that all of the rules are probablistic -- that is to say they are rules that define a kind of
envelope of possibilities. The machine is going to improvise within a set of rules, which
is to say there's a greater chance that it's going to play a fifth, than a flat fifth for example.
And so on and so on.
There are rules concerning harmony, that is to say, and a second harmony, play a flat fifth
harmony. There are rules concerning how it would move from note to note. Will it move
in big steps, or small steps, and in fact in this piece here I have some of the instruments
are going to move by big steps, and some by quite small steps. There are a hundred and
fifty of these kinds of rules. They govern major considerations like the basic quality of
the piece to quite minor ones like exactly how the note wobbles. I'll play you a bit - is this
thing up? - He cried to the empty void (laughter).
This piece of music, which is quite unpredictable and sometimes has quite large gaps in
it, as it has chosen to do right now, it's embarrassing, this music is making itself now. It is
not a recording, and I have never heard it play exactly this before. If you don't believe me
I'll start it again. See. It will start.
This piece, I guess I've listened to for a couple of hundred hours or so. I often have it
running in my studio, while I'm making records. It's a very satisfying piece of music. It
carries on rebuilding itself. It sometimes pulls a surprise, like this. There's one very exotic
harmony that can only occur under particular conditions and occasionally it pulls it out.
What interesting to me is that again it's very economical. You can use the computer in
many other ways while you're doing this. If you want to use it as a word processor, it'll
carry on making the music in the background.
I'll play you a part of another piece just to show you that it can do other things. They are
so unpredictable, it's very difficult just to play to people because you can switch it on and
say listen to this, and nothing happens.
Having started working with this system I am so thrilled by it. I think there are other
generative music systems, but I happen to understand this one and I know it's a good one.
I'm so thrilled by it that it is very difficult for me to listen to records anymore. Putting on
a record and knowing I'm going to hear the same thing I did last time has actually become
a little bit irksome. It feels quite Victorian to do that (laughter). I think this has really
moved up into a new phase of music.
You know up until about a hundred years ago people never heard the same music twice.
Of course it was always different. When recording appeared, suddenly you had the
wonderful luxury of being able to play music wherever you wanted to, and control it in
various ways. But of course it was always the same thing. And now you have this thing
which is kind of a new hybrid where you can play the music wherever you want just like
a record, but it won't be the same thing each time. This is actually very thrilling I think.

Now whether you like the music or not is another issue. This just happens to be the music
I make. It doesn't have to sound like this, just to console you (laughter). It's very good for
making techno and all that sort of thing as well. I was informed on the radio the other day
that I was the father of industrial music - which is not something I've been accused of
before. (laughter).
I started thinking about the differences between generative and what I would call
classical or symphonic music - I have not really decided on a name for the rest of it. And
these are the differences. It's not either or. Music can be anywhere along a line between
these two.
Classical music, like classical architecture, like many other classical forms, specifies an
entity in advance and then builds it. Generative music doesn't do that, it specifies a set of
rules and then lets them make the thing. In the words of Kevin Kelly's great book,
generative music is out of control, classical music is under control.
Now, out of control means you don't know quite what it's apt to do. It has it's own life.
Generative music is unpredictable, classical music is predicted. Generative unrepeatable,
classical, repeatable. Generative music is unfinished, that's to say, when you use
generative you implicitly don't know what the end of this is. This is an idea from
architects also, from a book called How Buildings Learn, the move of architecture away
from the job of making finished monumental entities toward the job of making things that
would then be finished by the users, constantly refinished in fact by the users. This is a
more humble and much more interesting job for the architect.
Generative music is sensitive to circumstances, that is to say it will react differently
depending on its initial condition, on where it's happening and so on. Where classical
music seeks to subdue them. By that I mean classical music seeks a neutral battleground,
the flat field. It won't be comfortable -- with a fixed reverberation, -- not too many
emergencies, and people who don't cough during the music basically.
Generative forms in general are multi-centered. There's not a single chain of command
which runs from the top of the pyramid to the rank and file below. There are many, many,
many web-like modes which become more or less active. You might notice the
resemblance here to the difference between broadcasting and the Internet, for example.

You never know who made it. With this generative music that I played you, am I the
composer? Are you if you buy the system the composer? Is Jim Coles (?) and his brother
who wrote the software the composer? -- Who actually composes music like this? Can
you describe it as composition exactly when you don't know what it's going to be?
Why does an idea like this grab my attention so much? I said at the beginning that what I
thought was important about this idea was that it keeps opening out. This notion of a self-
generating system, or organisms, keeps becoming a richer and richer idea for me. I see it
happening in more and more places.
I think what artists do, and what people who make culture do, is somehow produce
simulators where new ideas like this can be explored. If you start to accept the idea of
generative music, if you take home one of my not-available-in-the-foyer packs and play it
at home, and you know that this is how this thing is made, you start to change your
concept about how things can be organized. What you've done is moved into a new kind
of metaphor. How things are made, and how they evolve. How they look after
themselves.

Evolving metaphors, in my opinion, is what artists do. They produce work that gives you
the chance to experience in a safe environment, because nothing really happens to you
when you looking at artwork, they give you the chance to experience what might be quite
dangerous and radical new ideas. They give you a chance to step out of real life into
simulator life. A metaphor is a way of explaining something that we've experienced in a
set of terms, a different set of terms.
There's a very interesting book by Lakoff and Johnson, that famous thirties singing team,
it's a book about metaphor, it's called Metaphors We Live By. They give a very clear
example of the effect of metaphor. They say we use in our culture the metaphor,
argument is war. All of our language about argument "she defeated him", "he attacked
her position", so on and so on, they are all arguments that relate to fighting.

When we think about the process of arguing, we tend to then reconstruct our possibilities
in terms of that metaphor. What Lakoff and Johnson say is suppose that somebody had
said argument is dance, suppose that was the dominant metaphor. So instead of it being
seen you have the process where one person defeats another, it becomes a process where
two people together make something beautiful between them. We could have that
metaphor for argument, we don't.
But do you understand that a shift of that kind produces an entirely different kind of
discourse. How the shift from one way of dealing in activity that we all engage in to
another changes that activity. Suddenly our language of possibilities is renewed and
different.

What I'm saying, I suppose, when I talk about these things here (on his chart of the
differences between generative and classical musics), I'm saying we're saddled with a
whole set of metaphors that belong over here. Those are our metaphors about how the
world works, how things organize themselves, how things are controlled, what
possibilities there are. Generative art in general is a way of not throwing those out, we
don't get rid of old metaphors, we expand them to include more. These things still have
value, but we want to include these things as well.
My feeling about artists is that we are metaphor explorers of some kind. ... An object of
culture does all of the following, it innovates, it recycles, it clearly and explicitly rejects,
and it ignores. Any artist's work that is doing all those four things and is doing all those
four things through the metaphors that dominate our thinking.

Published inMotion Magazine - July 7, 1996

http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/eno1.html