July 24 - more New Music New York 1979 - The "other/same" Brian Eno Lecture Transcription
The transcript of the audio I provide match this time.
photo from Wiki Commons by Jørund Føreland Pedersen
Turns out that my initial posting on June 15 of Brian Eno’s lecture during New Music New York 1979 has become the most clicked-on substack so far, essentially a transcript and an audio link.
Both refer to a lecture titled “The Recording Studio as a Compositional Tool” delivered by Brian Eno. It is confirmed that he delivered the lecture during New Music New York 1979, but there is no confirmation that the link I found to an audio and the transcript of a different version were that from the festival. This is the link I included for this audio version of the lecture:
but back on that date, I posted a transcript which I discovered was the same script but a different lecture. What follows today is the transcript that goes with the above audio link, with a couple of the tracks he talks about also featured. Now, this is my transcript and the audio has a few gaps in it.
What seems to have been dropped is the end of his opening historical context, so if you want to see the full transcript of that other lecture, go to http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/downbeat79.htm
which is credited as having come from Downbeat, “probably 1979”. Kindly typed & supplied by David Bass.
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You tube comments indicate there were still witnesses around when this was posted, but curiously one attributes the lecture to being in Berkeley, quite possible.
Posted on y2b by Steen Dressler – at 20230723 it has 12701 views
Description: Originally premiered at The Kitchen, New Music America “New Music New York” 1979, 4th performance, unknown location. Recording incomplete, and songs removed due to copyright claims.
Response by “@GoingProWithTarot” 2017: “I was there for part of this lecture. At that time, I had an electronic music radio program on the UCSC station, KZSC, featuring electronic music, called “Varying Ambiance.” Of course, Brian Eno was a favorite recording/studio artist.”
Response by “@JamesBritt” 2015: “As I recall Eno played segments of R.A. F. (to demonstrate creating a sense of space) as well as No One Receiving and some track from Music for Films that used the same bass line but at half-speed. But it’s been a long time J
Response by “@ebrahmanebrahman1063” 2021: “The venue of the lecture is, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley.”
Response by “xxyya” 2015: “I was there”
Response by “@imCleverArtistName” 2022: “Me too”
Response by “@troutmask6800” 2023: “Same. Robert Fripp gave a lecture shortly after this, but don’t remember any of it.”
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Brian Eno 1979
The Recording Studio as Compositional Tool
Applause
0:07
Good evening. Can you all hear me?
[Audience mutters yes]
Thank you for coming. Um, this lecture has a title which I don’t think was publicized, and the title is “The Recording Studio as a Compositional Tool”.
0:24
Ah, as you know I spend far too much of my life in recording studios and have therefore been given to reflect for some time on what they do to music and what changes and attitudes they’ve ah created among composers.
0:42
In this lecture, I want to indicate that recorded music in certain of its aspects is an entirely different art form from traditional music and that the contemporary composer, people like me, um, those who work directly in relation to studios and ah to multi-tracking facilities and in relation to recording tape are in fact engaged in a different, a radically different business, um, from the traditional composers.
I’ve given this lecture now ah four times I guess, so (chuckles) if any of you heard any of the others, you’ll be quite bored because it’s going to be pretty much the same.
1:35
Um, the problem with it is that one is dealing with four sequences of events that are all historically concurrent. And unfortunately one has to deal with them in sequence.
I shall first of all deal with the history of recording. But at the same time, you must bear in mind that it was not only the history, or technological history, or technological series of changes that were taking place, um, there was also a change in concept of what music was for. And that concept has been changing for I would say for the last hundred years or so.
And of course there was also a change in concept of what instruments were for and what the role of virtuosity was, and whether or not virtuosity was necessary. And coupled with that the recording industry itself created a mass market and that mass market in turn made new musical demands.
Now, all of these, these four convergent patterns actually interact together. Um, they’re not separate and they modify each other. So this first is a historical section and which I shall go quickly over the academic, ah, and purely chronological sequence of how we got to recording with tape recorders and tape.
3:11
Um, the first recordings were made by Thomas Edison, the first viable recordings, that is, on a cylinder (mic sound) in I believe 1888. Um, he used a very simple of a, a sound activated stylus making impressions in tinfoil. The recording quality was quite poor. I recently heard Sir Arthur Sullivan talking about what a great invention this was. (imitates with heavy accent a warbled sound) “This was a great invention” (normal) he said.
(audience chuckles)
Um, and he – he also said something that proved to be absolutely true, he said the only thing I fear is that um, the world will now be flooded with bad music forever.
(chuckles, audience chuckles)
Um, Edison was working on cylinders which were a difficult medium because they weren’t easy to – to mass produce. Cylinders were difficult to stamp and to press, and – but even by the turn of the century there was already a – a fairly large catalogue of, ah, music recorded on cylinders.
4:21
Around about the turn of the century, there was a transition to discs, which were much easier to cut, and to press, and also much easier to score. Um, but initially their quality was not so good, but they were so much cheaper and so much easier to handle in every way, but they quickly caught on and even by about 1910 it was possible for a collector of classical music records to listen to more Beethoven in one week for instance, than his grandfather would have heard in a lifetime.
4:57
Um, so even very early in this century there was a, a considerable change in the way people viewed music. Music was suddenly a fairly available thing, um, rather than being a special unique and transitory event.
Now, the effect of – the effect of recording at this time was mainly on audiences and secondarily on performers. Ah, as I said, audiences had become aware of a wide cultural history and also were beginning to become aware of music that wasn’t confined to their localities.
Um, so whereas thirty years before it would have been the case that you may have seen a concert a week if you were a very keen concert-goer. Now, you would have a collection of records as well as seeing a concert a week.
5:53
Um, this naturally modified people’s assumptions about music. At the same time, it started to modify performers’ assumptions about music. Um, and it seems to be the case that technical standards of performance, um, rose considerably during the early years of recording. This was because um a record being durable ah any accident is there for keeps. In classical music, you don’t want accidents. It’s different in the music we make we were tend (chuckles) to capitalize on them and pretend we intended that all the time.
(audience chuckles)
6:31
Um, in classical music, there, - there was a considerable um, raising of standards t-, in terms of virtuosity. This like all blessings was a mixed one in that it created the – the academic orchestral tradition that we still have now and in a sense, it signaled the beginning of the end of that kind of music. It – it ceased to be a – a very lively tradition I think, um, and in some ways, as Henry Pleasants points out in his book the - the liveliness of music moved into popular music.
7:16
The first popular music that it really, that recording as such really affected I believe was jazz. Improvisations worked very well when they were repeated a number of times. It’s a basic rule of improvising, which all blues musicians know, if you make a mistake, repeat it and then everyone will assume you meant it the first time as well.
(audience chuckles) (♪ Harold Budd – maybe – can be heard in the background)
And there’s a drawing equivalent to that – if you, which every first year art student knows – if you do a scribble like this and then you put a big black line around all the lines, which is to say, to amplify the scribble, it suddenly looks like it was an intended encapsulated thing.
Now, in a similar sense, the fact that a record is a repeatable experience, it’s something you can assume a listener is going to hear maybe twenty times or a hundred times. Um, you can take liberties in your playing that you might not do otherwise, if, if you regarded the record as transitory.
That is to say that whereas um, whereas Beethoven or Bach for instance filled into their pieces a great deal of redundancy – numerous repetitions of ideas, slight modifications of them, um, it became possible with recording and with jazz particularly from the thirties onwards, to allow the singularity into the record, so a singular unique strange event which one knew would gradually fall into a perceptual order, um, over repeated listenings.
9:00
Now, ah, until the thirties, until the late thirties in fact, recording wasn’t making a great deal of difference to composers. In fact in terms of – in the presentation of a recording piece, it really wasn’t making much difference to anything, except those things I’ve indicated.
Um, the way records were recorded, at that time was that the group of musicians would stand in front of a – first of all a horn, an acoustic horn and then a microphone. Now, the musicians were arranged in a pyramidal fashion back from the microphone. If you – if you ever see early photographs of this you’ll see the singers are very close to whatever are picking up the noise, and then the melody instruments are behind them and then the rhythm and percussion instruments are behind them.
And this is exactly the same acoustic hierarchy that existed in classical music, it was an exact repetition of that. Ah, and in fact listening to early jazz records, one of the things that for me hindered jazz for many many years was the um, the – the degree to which the rhythm instruments were lost, among the mix. It was all melody and no rhythm, it seemed to me.
10:25
Um, what begun happening during the thirties was that people started using multiple microphones, so that they didn’t have to arrange people all around this central focal point. They could for instance have a, a second microphone on the bass and one on the drums if they wanted to, and a man called the “engineer” entered the picture.
The engineer’s job was to, um, to try to balance these narrow separate events and to put them on a record, and he also had the option if he wanted to, of featuring certain instruments at certain times. Also at this time, um, there was a beginning of a - the use of echo. That is to say synthetic studio echo.
Um, to recreate the impression of some other space from what the music was being recorded in. So these are the very first moves in, away from strict realism in recording towards a kind of um, a very very played down and discrete whimsicality in the way one recorded.
11:46
In 1938, BasF, the German company, were experimenting with a new substance which was a plastic backing covered with ferrous-oxide coating. This, um, would stop during the war and DuPont, who were the American subsidiary, or American relation of BasF, took up this um, study after the war and they came up with the first version of what we call recording tape.
This is really the first important revolution in recording, I think. Um, records as they had existed previously were discrete and complete units. There’s not much you can do to a gramaphone record although once some composers like Varèse did try mixing large numbers of ah, records being played simultaneously. But it was essentially a very fixed and um, a form in which one couldn’t interfere much.
12:52
As soon as tape was invented, something quite different happened. Tape turned music from being a phenomenon in time to being a phenomenon in space. Um, as soon as sound is put on tape, it becomes a plastic medium. Ah, you can do things with tape. You can cut it. You can shift the order of things, you can play it backwards, you can slow it down, you can speed it up and you can feed it through further electronics to treat it.
13:23
Now, this is again one of those situations where suddenly there are a number of divergent paths, which periodically cross and I have to talk at that – [...] in turn again. There was, there were two developments. There was the development of the tape recorder and the development of the studio along with it.
But also there was the development for devices for amplifying musical instruments. First of all, it – first of all I’ll deal with the um, tape situation.
13:54
I don’t know why I keep looking at these notes. They got no use – (chuckles) they have nothing on these pieces of paper hardly, (chuckles) but it’s just this light is a bit bright in my eyes.
14:10
Um, the first tape recorders were single track tape recorders. What that means is that a piece of tapes past a little magnet – oh, thank you very much – and the magnets um encoded the tape, in fact it caused a repolarization of the oxide particles. Um, and thus when that tape was played back on another part of the machine, um, it caused a certain electrical excitement which is conveyed to a large speaker and came out as music.
Now, the earliest tape recorders as I said just had one magnet and whatever went into them, all appeared finally on the – on the one track of tape. Um, shortly after the one track tape recorder was invented, the two-track tape recorder came into being. Instead of having one head, it had one head with two magnets in, and these were separate from one another.
The recording tape passed through these and it was possible to encode a separate message through each of these heads. Um, therefore you could if you wished to uh record, for instance, your drums and bass on here and your melody and vocal instruments on here. And this would give you certain options as to how you mixed after that. Options that you wouldn’t have if you’d fixed it into, onto a single track machine.
15:44
Um, concurrent with the development of the tape recorder, was the development of the studio which dealt with the tape recorder. As soon as you have two tracks you have to have a, a system for mixing them and you will naturally want to have a system for slightly modifying the sound of them, for instance, well this track had the bass on it, have a bit more bass in it. This track has the voice on, let’s put some high frequencies in it.
So we start seeing early recording called consoles around about the early fifties. Um, there was a quick rapid development then. Things went to three-track, which is a curious hybrid that didn’t last long, and then to four track, which lasted for a surprisingly long time. For instance, the um, even until 1967 and 68, four track was still very commonly in use. And ah, Sgt. Pepper was for instance recorded on four track, an outstanding technical achievement in – for the time. And lots of the early psychedelic records were – in fact lots of the later ones were as well, it didn’t last that long! (Chuckles)
17:01
Was early and late in a six month span.
(audience laughter)
Um, after the four-track, there was a very quick succession of eight track, sixteen track and twenty-four track. Now, twenty-four track is the current but not by any means not the ultimate level of development. There are also thirty-two and forty-eight track machines and there are techniques for synching together large numbers of machines so that you can have theoretically an infinite number of tracks.
Um, the condition we’re in at the moment is as I say generally twenty-four track, but most people who are in any way sane still consider that enough to make an album with. There are however those who have to (chuckles) stretch to forty-eight tracks to squeeze that other string section in. But generally, it’s twenty-four track. What twenty-four track means is that you have twenty-four magnets, one on top of the each other within a two inch recording head and the tape is now two inches wide, it’s very thick tape.
Um, these technical details will seem naïve to those who work with tape recorders, I ask you to bear in mind that there are some people in the world who don’t still… (off mic) I met someone who…
[there may be a gap in the audio as at this point the muffled sound is followed by what seems to be a different topic and off the history of tape… - gd]
18:33
…and we’ve been working on some things that continue this junk yard aesthetic. In a – in what I figure is an interesting way. Um, I’ve got – it’s in the tape that I haven’t played yet, and I include this slightly earlier than ones I’m playing now. (chuckles)
Well, in fact there are two confirmed I think in these materials. The first concern is to try and make some noise with a bunch of cardboard boxes, and the second one is to try to make some kind of musical statement that uses vocal materials that are uncommon as well.
Um, I’ve been quite disenchanted with the progress of singing over the past few years and again, disco music has pointed out for me the bankruptcy of songwriting at the moment. They’re just – ordinary Western singing is really not very interesting.
19:31
Um, a few years ago I became – I started to become more and more aware of how people in other cultures sang and used their voices. And I thought they were so much more interesting that I was too embarrassed to almost – to ever open my mouth again near a microphone.
In fact, I just recently got my confidence back, ah…
(audience chuckles)
…the thing, traditions of other countries are very very interesting, simply because the voice is and always has been the primary instrument there and it’s constantly received a much longer evolution and degree of attention than we have. This piece has Prairie Prince on drums, myself on bass (chuckles) and you’ll hear one note that happens many times…
(audience laughter)
…whenever on one of my songs you hear one note, it’s me.
(audience laughter)
If there’s two, it’s someone else. And has David on guitar, and there’s an Ethiopian man telling a story. Ah, this is a very early version and a rough mix of an early version, so don’t judge it too harshly yet.
[cut in tape – presumed that was from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts]
20:39
Okay now, I’ll play you something else in that same line of work, which I shall have to find because it’s on the same – on the same tape… um, one of the interesting features of the recording studio and one that really hasn’t been exploited that much is that you can put together material that never belonged together, and was never conceived as belonging together, and you can somehow juggle it so that it fits.
This next piece is called Mea Culpa and this is actually, it’s just got two things on there, the synthesizer and the two voices. Um, has an interesting background. I – I was listening to a talk show with a view to recording some voices on it - I – I listen to the radio a lot because I’m – I like American voices and the range of them is interesting.
21:37
And I was looking for some material to use on a song. And suddenly this hysterical Jewish man from Brooklyn came on…
(audience chuckles)
…telephoning about Congressman Fred Richmond who, who just confessed to having sex with a sixteen year old boy…
(nervous audience chuckles)
…and the Jewish man was (chuckles)… is that for Fred Richmond or sex?
(audience chuckles)
…(chuckles) or sixteen year old boys?
(audience chuckles)
22:07
Um, um, the Jewish man was defending Fred Richmond saying, well, he made a mistake, he said he was sorry, he asked for our forgiveness, he made his mea culpa, he beat his breast – (thumps) and his voice is hysterical and anguished. On the talk show was a politician, an extremely oily and obsequious man…
(audience chuckles)
…um, who was then asked an embarrassing question about this incident and who answered, as most politicians do, with “I, uh, and uh, and uh, I, ah…” like that and he did actually say a few words but they were immaterial, so I chopped them out…
(audience laughs, then applauds)
He talked about – the word “issues” came up a lot as it often does in American political discussion though you never actually hear what they are, you just…
(audience laughs)
…you just hear about the “issue” all the time. And so what I’ve done in this is to – as I say this is its very first form, it’s since gone a little bit further than it does here. Um, what I’ve done in this is to have a conversation between these two people.
23:24
There’s first of all the, the anguished man and then there’s the oily man and ah, they occur on alternate verses. I hope.
[cut from the lecture audio] studio version of Mea Culpa
23:39
Yes, I – I think that piece will race up the charts, slight [...]
(audience laughs)
…and further to my already enormous empire. Um, now this third one is the – actually the original garbage piece. I recorded this in New York with five other musicians, David Byrne, David Byrne, Bill Laswell playing bass, Tim Wright from DNA also playing bass, David Van Tiegham on drums and yes, that’s it, that’s the lot. Here they are. Oh, and the girl from Washington Square Park playing percussion, that’s right, but she doesn’t appear in this mix, this is another rough mix, um, rough and I like it. This is my disco song.
[piece cut out of the audio]
24:38
You never thought I’d stoop so low, did you? (Chuckles) Um, thank you (audience chuckles, smattering of applause)
What, what you hear there is what was initially quite, quite an ordinary backing track sent through quite a lot of electronics so that it gets a kind of squelchy quality that I’m very fond of.
Now, one of the interesting things about this kind of recording and another thing that reggae producers have exploited more than any others is the way in which you can make one piece of material come out in a number of different ways.
Um, I started doing this a few years ago when people started asking me to make film soundtracks and being kind of lazy, I decided that I would do it just by remixing stuff I already had. So first of all you’ll hear, um, this is a piece called Skysaw from Another Green World, and…
(audience applauds)
…thank you. And ah, after that, you’ll hear a piece which is called Patrolling Wire Borders off Music for Films and they’re exactly the same piece, there is nothing added, nothing taken away but there are considerable changes made, electronically, both in the relative dynamics of instruments and in the sounds they have and in the echoes that are being used.
So here’s the original as it appeared on the record.
[edited out of the audio]
Skysaw:
Patrolling Wire Borders:
26:14 (this part’s sound is a bit muffled)
You can see there’s quite a difference there. Now, I think most musicians when they go into a studio, they wipe their brows and breathe a sigh of relief when they actually get something on tape. To me, that’s the easiest part of the problem.
The, if you examine the range of difference between those two instruments I played there, um, what’s conventionally called mixing which is all that was happening there, um, is actually a very very wide and fairly unexplored territory. If you’re dealing in musical material that was abstract rather than refers to some kind of performance that existed and most recorded music now doesn’t refer to any real performance – you accept that all of your ranges are infinite, ah, that’s to say your sound palette is infinite, your dynamic ranges are infinite, in the sense that can be as loud as it’s possible to be, or not there at all, and each of the things have range.
27:22
So you have a very wide set of problems to deal with when you come to the so-called mixing stage which I now call the processing stage because that’s actually what happens there.
Um, the person that used to be called the producer um, and I suppose in many cases still is, was traditionally a man who had some idea of how to talk the engineer’s language but also um, more importantly, had some imagination about this procedure, the processing procedure.
The first of the great rock producers I suppose was Phil Spector, who went to quite absurd limits with um, his – his own mixes. Um, bass drums that were so loud for instance or snare drums that were so loud that they dominated the whole mix. Four pianos used to get a single sound, that kind of thing.
At the time, this was quite dramatic and revolutionary. Nowadays, it’s fairly commonplace but what still hasn’t seeped through to most people is they are making synthetic music. Now, where this is clear with a band like Kraftwerk, or [Crystal], the German groups or someone like Jean-Michel Jarre or people who use synthesizers.
It’s not so clear with a band. Bands still are strung between this problem with, well can we perform it live? Well, you can’t anyway – anything you do in a recording studio is unique to that situation, so any live performance of it is an approximation. So you might as well decide to be really approximate and just forget about any fidelity, I figure.
(audience chuckles)
29:20
Um, in fact most of the pieces I’ve played here as my own, most of my own pieces have never been performed in any sense whatsoever, not even in the studio. Um, they were ma-, they were built up, you know. I would put on a piano one day, come in the next day put on a guitar and maybe something else,
On the third day, I’d erase the piano put something else on, build – built-up in a very slow way and no two instruments in many cases were played at the same time.
This piece, which is another forerunner piece for me of what I’m doing now, it’s called R.A.F. It was, uh, well, released isn’t the word, it’s “accidentally slipped out” in England (chuckles) and I never even got a copy myself I think. The record company didn’t send me one. And it was banned in Germany because it was about the Bader-Meinhof terrorists and I don’t think it was ever released here either. So it’s a kind of a rare record, um, - what? You? Yeah, I’ll buy it off you! I’ve only got, I’ve only got this cassette of it!
R.A.F. was a – was a piece that had an interesting genesis. It had nothing to do with Genesis, actually. (Chuckles) Except that Phil Collins was the drummer on it. (Chuckles) And (applause) the backing track for this – that’s to say the bass and drums, I think – yeah, just the bass and drums, were recorded almost a year before the rest of the material was put on and furthermore they are from two different songs. But I fitted them together.
Then the – the first voices that you hear are recorded off the telephone in Germany, and they’re the voices first of all of a police woman saying, “good evening ladies and gentlemen, and this is the Minister of Police. What you are about to hear are the voices of the Bader-Meinhof terrorists, or the Red Army Faction if you want, if you can identify any of them please, ah, ring this number and so on.” And then you hear the manic voices, and you hear her voice coming and saying “example four”, “example five”.
Then so that was put on – I did this with um two girls called “Snatch”, Judy Nylon and Patti Pelligan who are both American and their – the whole vocal thing was their idea, the whole – they said to me, “do you have a backing track we could use for this idea?” and I put this backing track together.
32:11
Then we switched to the airplane in Mogadishu, um, and I tried to make some alteration in the acoustic space here so we go from a frenzied outdoor space to a sudden very dry inside of an airplane with almost no echo. Last night when I played this, the speakers were out of phase so Judy’s voice, which I’ve been talking about, at some point which occurs right in the middle of the stereo, which is entirely accidental. (Chuckles) And I was waiting for it to come up so I could just – there it is, and there it was. I’m assured tonight we’re in phase. [A perfect journalist thing] based on that and one of the world’s great bass players I think. Thank you, but you’ll never hear again… (tape ends)
Brian Eno with “Snatch”: R. A. F.