Ignorable and Interesting: Atmospheric and spatial relations in Music for Airports
Ambient Music; Noise; Silence; Soundscapes; Architectural Atmospheres
The research here addresses an important musical work of the twentieth century, the album Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), by English musician Brian Eno. Building on top of the concept of furniture music [musique d’ameublement] by French composer Erik Satie, Eno proposes, along with the album in question, an Ambient music. One that should be ‘as ignorable as it is interesting’. Interfering in space as to induce a state of calm and thought on listeners, even in confusing places. Eno’s realization is parallel, temporally, with Murray Schafer’s, influential researcher responsible for the development of the term ‘soundscapes’. Schafer understands the soundscape of his time as one filled with noises and lacking silences, by which he elevates the importance of listening, as to better select the sounds that should or not remain in the soundscapes. Here is proposed that Eno’s work, while on a similar context of Schafer’s, admits a different manner as to deal with their problematic soundscape, integrating itself with the sounds and noises of the space, without the need to impose. Eno’s proposal would then be acting in the aesthetic realm of atmospheres, the sensible expression and perception of spaces. One that could be threatened constantly by the practice of functional music like Muzak, that seek to regulate space’s atmospheres, based on premises of efficiency and productivity. This dissertation seeks to avail the qualities of the album Music for Airports, along with the texts of Brian Eno, that extrapolate the boundaries of music, edging closer to an architectural spatial practice, described mainly in terms of sounds, noises, silences and moods.