Eno's (& Cardew's) applied sci-fi & cybernetics (or "music of the spheres musique-monde non-stop"

Eno's (& Cardew's) applied sci-fi & cybernetics
or "music of the spheres musique-monde non-stop"

--> for your enjoyment & eduatainment,
herewith is a nice big healthy/juicy "text(ual) byte" [[with editorial
commentaries by yours truly here...]]
from an old _Keyboard_ magazine interview with Brian Eno,
British-born "non-musician" Ambient godfather [[i.e. _Music for Airports_,
_Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics_, _Another Green World_, _Before and
After Science_, etc.]] -&- over the years, highly-influential member and/or
producer of Genesis, Roxy Music, Devo, the seminal "NoWave" compilation _No New
York_, David Bowie, Talking Heads, U2, etc.:

"... [An] area that has interested Eno is cybernetics, the science that
describes the behavior of complex systems such as social systems and living
organisms. This might seem far afield from his musical concerns, but Eno has no
trouble seeing the connection. He has written several essays on the subject,
including one called 'Self-Regulation and Autopoiesis In Contemporary Music' for
a British volume called _Challenge to Paradigm_, which addresses the appli
cations to various disciplines. In a long discussion in _Synapse_ magazine (which
appears here in shortened form) he illustrates the application of
self-regulation to music by talking about an avant-garde piece by composer Cornelius
Cardew, 'Paragraph 7" from _The Great Learning_.

" 'His score is extremely simple; there's no notation, and very few
instructions. Somehow or other, the piece always comes out sounding very beautiful,
and very similar from one performance to the next [["The most beautiful order
is a heap of sweepings piled up at random." - Heraclitus, Greece, 5th Century
BCE]].

" 'I started trying to investigate why this piece worked as it did,
because there are many other pieces of modern music that try to do the same thing
and fail. I thought, 'How has he constructed this thing so that it regulates
itself in this way?' Because basically that's what it does. There's a whole
system of automatic regulators that come into being during a performance of the
piece. For example, one instruction says, 'Sing any note you can hear.' That
means that your choice of notes is governed by the available notes in the
environment, the notes the other people are singing.
" 'In any large space, you always get an acoustic resonance building up,
the resonant frequency of the room and if you have a lot of people singing,
the probability is that any note hitting the resonant frequency will sound
slightly louder than the other notes. So given that instruction, the chances are
slightly in favor of your singing that note [[in acoustics, Chaos Science and
other sciences, this is called "feedback"]].

" 'So what happens when this piece begins is that it very quickly settles
down around a drone, and the drone is on the resonant frequency of the room.
That's one of the things that happens, and it's not specified in the score.
Cardew probably didn't even know that it was going to happen."
" 'Cybernetics and systems theory are mechanisms by which you can explain
this piece. It has very strong parallels with biological systems, which again
aren't governed by external controls. How do systems like this keep
themselves intact? In fact, all systems of this nature are what's called autopoietic,
which means they tend to maintain their own identity [["Chance is the inner
rhythm of the world, & the soul of poetry." - Miguel de Unamuno]].

" 'In the old method of composing, you specify the result you want, and
then you present a number of exact instructions to get there. The Cardew piece
is radical because he doesn't do all that, and yet it happens. The behavior
remains governed. Political systems are all doing what the old composers were
doing. By a system of laws and constraints, they attempt to specify behavior.
They're all saying, 'What kind of society do we want?'
Then they say, 'All right, so let's constrain this behavior here, and let's
encourage this behavior here.' They're trying to govern a highly complex system
by rote [["...So what is life for? Life is for beauty and substance and sound
and colour; and even those are often forbidden by law [socio-cultural
conventions]. . .Why not be free and live your own life? Why follow other people's
rules and live to please others?..." ~Lieh-Tzu/Liezi, Taoist Sage (c. 450- 375
BCE)]].

" 'And you don't need to do that. Instead of trying to specify what you
want in full detail, you only specify somewhat; then you ride on the dynamics
of the system in the direction you want to go. There are certain organic
regulators; you don't have to come up with them, you just have to let them operate [[
"Taoism in a nutshell: Shit Happens. Roll with the Punches. Hang 10 - Go with
the Flow!"... or like St. Francis of Assisi's faith in God, that God will
provide... or realizing you have no real control over your own control-freak life
& must give up control to a Power higher, greater than yourself, if you wish
to have any iota or semblance of sanity and/or peace... a real vote of
confidence & roll of the dice in the Way of the Cosmos, a high-security feeling of
belonging in It and taking active creative part in It, too...]]

" 'One of the central ideas of cybernetics is that the system itself will
inevitably produce a certain class of results. Again, most political systems
don't recognize this [[nor dogmatic religions: "Religion is for those who are
afraid of Hell. Spirituality/Mysticism/Panentheism is for those who've been to
Hell and don't want to go back."]]

" 'When something different is required, there's a huge effort to
maneuver an existing institution to do the new thing. But it won't do it. It's in the
nature of systems to do one thing, and not something else. The structure of a
system governs its behavior. That's how simple it is.
" 'If you want to change the behavior, you have to change the structure.
' "

"Obviously, in this passage Eno is suggesting a type of compositional
process that is governed loosely and internally, by improvisation and intuition r
ather than by an externally imposed structure [[or hierarchy or dogma or
style]]. But beyond this, his remarks are worth considering because musicians and
other artists interact constantly with at least two types of systems - systems
of esthetics (moment-to-moment questions of what will sound good [[or bad or
ugly or nasty or...]], in addition to more abstract decisions dealing with what
type of music to work with [[or not...]]) and economic systems that reward
[[or "enslave"]], or fail to reward, their efforts.
"If you're confronting a set of results that you don't want, Eno's
arguement is implicitly that rather than trying to force the existing system to
yield up a different kind of results, you might better spend your energy creating
an alternative system. This could mean anything from establishing your own
concert outlet for non-commercial music to designing your own microtonal scale."

"The ramifications are far-reaching, but Eno is moving too fast to stop
and fill in the outline. He leaves us to do this for ourselves. He explicitly
denies, however, that he is proselytizing for any particular view. In the same
interview he goes on to say, 'Actually convincing someone doesn't work. If the
necessity for change isn't already within them, that means they don't see the
world the same way you do, so they won't change. The procedure of introducing
them to the world is quite different from evangelizing about it. You can't
predict results. They might come out with a system much better than yours,
actually. Or quite different.' "
"What Eno is doing with his music, more than anything else, is
introducing us to the world. It's a world of sound and other subtler resonances that
surrounds us, whether we're aware of it or not."

---|-----|--------|-------------|---------------------|
Hanuman Zhang, musical mad scientist:
Ars sine scientia nihil est. Ars imitatur Naturam in sua operatione.

"For 25 centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It
has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for
the hearing. It is not legible, but audible. ... Music is a herald, for change
is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society. ... Listening to
music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation & control is a
reflection of power, that is essentially political." - Jacques Attali, _Noise:
The Political Economy of Music_