This links to the Liner Notes of Brian Eno from his assorted albums (Neroli, On Land, Ambient Speaker System, etc):
http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/liners.html
: NEROLI : (Thinking Music Part IV)
Composed and performed by Brian Eno
–from Eno Liner Notes |
http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/liners.html
Brian Eno’s experiments with ‘functional music’ really got under way
in 1975 with the release of “Discreet Music 1”, a thirty minute piece
formed from the cyclic overlay and resulting permutations of two
melodies of different duration.The result, in that case, was a
tapestry of shifting harmonic clusters – a moire’, simultaneously
static and changing. As a listening experience, it remains
distinctive: calm, still and deep, yet always slowly evolving,it gives
one the sensation of witnessing the unfolding of an organic process.
It was this organic quality of movement-in- stasis the Eno was to
develop in later pieces such as “Muisc For Airports” (1978) and
“Thursday Afternoon” (1985). All these pieces are systems based: that
is to say, their compositions are not specified in note-to-note
detail, but are the results of the operation of particular patterning
processes on particular materials. In this sense the works can be seen
as modelling themselves on natural processes, or as John Cage put
it,”imitating Nature in its manner of operation”.
Like many of Eno’s systems pieces, “Neroli” is modal. In this case the
mode is the Phrygian, whose flattened second evokes the Moorish
atmosphere alluded to in the title. In this mode the seventh is also
flattened, and the combination of these unusual intervals creates a
mysterious tonal ambiguity.This is further emphasised in “Neroli”,
because the rootnote of the mode is rarely played, whereas the fifth
of the scale is prominent. Together, the blurred tonality and the lack
of a distinct tonal centre give the piece a hovering, weightless
character. The melodic line, with little forward momentum and no sense
of pulse, disperses and coalesces into exotic new constellations. Eno
says: “I wanted to make a kind of music that existed on the cusp
between melody and texture, and whose musical logic was elusive enough
to reward attention, but not so strict as to demand it”. As with his
other works in this area, this music readily recedes into pure
texture, atmosphere, ambience. And it is in this space- “at the edge
of music”, as Eno describes it – that there exists the possibility of
another kind of music, and other ways of listening.
