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Now we can turn to the substantive connection between Eno's music and
Beer's cybernetics: what did Brian get from Stafford? Speaking of this con-
nection and apparently paraphrasing from
Brain of the Firm
, in his interview
with David Whittaker Eno said that “the phrase that probably crystallised it
[Eno's cybernetic approach to music] . . . says 'instead of specifying it in full
detail; you specify it only somewhat, you then ride on the dynamics of the
system in the direction you want to go.' That really became my idea of working
method” (57).
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And the easiest way to grasp this idea of riding the dynam-
ics of the system is, in the present context, ontologically. Beer's ontology of
exceedingly complex systems conjures up a lively world, continually capable
of generating novel performances. Eno, so to speak, picked up the other end
of the stick and focused on building musical worlds that would themselves
exhibit unpredictable, emergent becomings. And we can get at the substance
of this by following a genealogy of this approach that Eno laid out in a 1996
talk titled “Generative Music” (Eno 1996b). This begins with a piece called
In
C
by Terry Riley, first performed at the San Francisco Tape Music Center in
1964 (Eno 1996b, 2-3):
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 musi-
cian moves 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.
Here we find key elements of Eno's own work. The composer sets some initial
conditions for musical performance but leaves the details to be filled in by
the dynamics of the performing system—in this case a group of musicians
deciding on the spot which bars to play how often and thus how the overall
sound will evolve in time. Eno's second example is a different realization of
the same idea: Steve Reich's
It's Gonna Rain
, first performed in 1965, also at
the Tape Music Center.
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In this piece a loop of a preacher saying “It's gonna
rain” is played on two tape recorders simultaneously, producing strange aural
effects as the playbacks slowly fall out of phase: “Quite soon you start hear-
ing very exotic details of the recording itself. For instance you are aware after
several minutes that there are thousands of trumpets in there. . . . You also
