AMG’s explanation of ambient music is a kind of electronic music with a sense of space, which often pays more attention to sound textures and repetitions, and has no lyrics or composition. To the casual listener of this music, they sound much the same, although the styles of the composers may be very different.
Maybe it sounds too esoteric to attract a large audience. Much ambient music is created by a group of musicians who are also involved in other music forms, all of whom have different traditions or backgrounds: academic experimental electronics, minimal music, spacemusic, dance music, ethnoelectronic music, gothic or industrial music Wait, this complexity of songwriter identity can easily lead to cross-"industry" assignments. The definition of Ambient Music was extremely vague from the beginning. Later, Ambient gradually moved away from the concrete sound it originally emphasized, and used a less clear and discernible method to process sound, paying more attention to the spatial sense of sound. Color and timbre are no longer limited to the presence or absence of background rhythm, discernible melody and harmonic structure.
Before Eno "Sounds that were not accepted in the past have been used in music creation, and the tranquility of the music industry has been disturbed since then" "The 20th century is an era of musical revolution" - "In Music New Directions" David Cope mentioned an instrument called the "Aeolian harp" in Homer's epic Odyssey. From a modern perspective, the music produced through it may be the earliest ambient music. Aeolian harps were usually hung outdoors and played automatically when air currents (wind) passed through the strings. Later, the music played by the church organ can also be regarded as ambient music. The purpose of playing the organ in the church is not to let the believers listen, but to make the believers more focused and help create the kind of music that should be done during the sermon. atmosphere. This kind of church music, which was intended to change a certain state of the participants, was very different in function from the music in music halls or private chamber music venues that were popular at the time. The concepts behind these long-existing music are very similar to today's Ambient Music.
Most of the early music only used fifth intervals, and more and more intervals were later allowed to be used, such as fourths, thirds, sixths, etc., to Schoenberg's 12-tone music ( In twelve-tone music, any interval is allowed. Of course, these developments are undoubtedly still carried out under the linear concept of musical sound, with a certain pitch and specific duration, etc. The breakthrough of Schoenberg and other composers of the same era, such as Debussy and Ravel, was to bring music one step closer from the inner subjective world (emotional world) to the outer objective world. Interestingly, this is the same as that of the composers of the same era. Impressionist painting took exactly the opposite route.
Basically at the same period, the concept of sound mass emerged, which no longer emphasized individual musical sounds, but combined regular and discernible rhythms, obvious melody and clear musical structure into the traditional concepts. The elements that were highly valued were weakened, and the music created under the guidance of this concept was often considered as noise (disharmonious music) by listeners at the time. It can be regarded as a controversy on how to divide early music and noise. Mahler and Stravinsky were the first two composers to use the concept of sound clusters, and later Gyorgy Ligeti made this concept the main focus of his creations. Although both Mahler and Ligeti still used musical notes, what was revolutionary about them was that musical notes began to be used to create discordant noises.
The concept of sound clusters is also reflected in the concrete composer Iannis Xenakis and others, but in a different way. They no longer just try to integrate individual sounds into the overall music, but use sound grains-sampled Trim the sound to obtain those sound fragments that can still represent the whole, usually only 5 to 40 milliseconds, that is, create through the combination of sound particles. At this time, the sound obtained through sampling is not just musical sound. Most of them are genuine fragmentary sounds.
Among the classical avant-garde composers who directly influenced ambient music were Claude Debussy and Erik Satie in the late 19th century. Debussy's Impressionist (not expressing emotions, only expressing sensory impressions) works "Afternoon of the Faun" and "The Sea" heralded the arrival of a new era of Western music through breakthroughs in the traditional major and minor system.
The concept of "furniture music" proposed by Satie is similar to the concept of Ambience proposed by Eno. He introduced the music he wrote for the opening of a gallery like this: "We ask that you do not pay attention to this music during the intermission, but please move around as if this music does not exist at all." He believes that this kind of music The value of it is that it is like "a painting or a chair, you can sit on it or not, so as to contribute to life." In his later work "Show Show", a typewriter was used as an embellished noise. Obviously, the values ??Satie holds here are different from the traditional elitist values ??where art is higher than life, and emphasizes music as a part of life.
In the mid-20th century, John Cage of the United States inherited and carried forward Satie's values ??to a large extent. At the same time, he was also deeply influenced by Eastern philosophies - Taoism, Zen Buddhism in China, Zen Buddhism in Japan, and Buddhism in India - —Influence, after listening to Suzuki Daijo’s lectures at Columbia University, I even connected the inspiration with music creation. The ideological foundation that cage obtained from Zen is to treat daily life as the "highest cause". Based on this, he believes that music creation should break human control; what is valuable is the world or life itself, not the value of them. explanation. This is exactly the embodiment of anti-artificial and anti-control ideas. In one of his books he writes "What is the purpose of making music? Not to deal with intentions, of course, but with sound. Or rather, the answer must take the form of an argument: meaningful meaninglessness or a The meaning of meaninglessness, however, is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order to chaos or to express the value of creation, but simply to draw our attention to the life we ??experience. How wonderful life will be once we don't interfere with life with our thoughts and wishes and let it take its course." Starting from this idea, the ideal composition method he found is accidental and random. He believed that adopting an accidental approach to composition would free his music from his own likes and dislikes. His most "infamous" work is "4 Minutes and 33 Seconds": the audience watching the performance only saw the pianist closing and opening the piano lid at 33 seconds and 2 minutes and 40 seconds, but did not play any notes. This is a silent work based on the concept of presenting natural sounds by eliminating any artificial sounds. The sound produced by the audience's own body (the sound of nervous system activity and the sound of blood flow, which can be heard in an extremely quiet anechoic chamber) plus the whispers or complaints caused by the audience's confusion also constitutes itself. This work. The creation purpose of "4 Minutes and 33 Seconds" is to let everyone listen to life. It not only removes artificial control of sound, but also dissolves the hierarchy that places art above life.
In terms of composition methods, he made extensive use of sampling and collage techniques with the assistance of electronic recording equipment. John Cage introduced the concept that "the sounds around us can be heard as music" into his creations, further alienating the linear structure of traditional composition models and tending to adopt natural fragmentary sounds.
His works and this concept (which of course also include electronic music pioneers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and figurative musicians such as Pierre Schaeffer) had a profound influence on the use of any sound in later ambient music creations.
After Cage, a group of American composers with classical music backgrounds began to explore minimal music in the 1960s. Whether played through symphony orchestras or electronic or non-Western instruments, they all emphasize subtle changes that are repeated but slowly unfolded over a long period of time, and these changes do not necessarily need to be obvious to the listener. Later this concept was used in different kinds of music such as Ambient, New age and Techno.
The 1960s was also the era when these pioneering ideas were absorbed into Rock. Rock in the late 1960s was greatly enriched by electronic technology, psychedelics, and avant-garde concepts from the neoclassical field. Art rock began to focus on the sense of auditory space starting from Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream. Many of their works were purely instrumental. , an impromptu long speech with a full sense of space. Rock also began to have its own avant-garde music school - Progressive rock. Music critics and fans at the time coined the terms "Spacerock" and "Cosmicrock" to describe groups with a strong sense of space in progressive rock. This type of music was later called spacemusic. It existed earlier than ambient music and developed in parallel with ambient music for a period of time (will be mentioned later).
When it comes to electronic music, the group that must be mentioned is Kraftwerk. Their status in the history of electronic music needs no elaboration. "Electronics transcend country and skin color... through electronic music, everything is possible. The only limitation is The composer himself” are their exact words in an interview. When we talk about synthesizers today, many people may not take it seriously, but in an era when guitars were all the rage, their use of synthesizers was undoubtedly revolutionary. Kraftwerk has an urban, technological and post-industrial vision. Their futuristic ideas and the future sounds they created had a profound impact on later generations - especially synthesizer Pop and black musicians in Detroit - and of course ambient. After entering 70 years, in 1974 to be exact, as Kraftwerk's 24-minute "Autobahn" became a hit, electronic music began to become independent. After that, electronic music began to be used as a means to produce pop music. In the late 1970s, the new dance music Disco began to become popular in the Western world. During the same period Brain Eno started creating ambient music. In 1978 Brian Eno released Ambient 1: Music for Airports. At the time when Disco was popular, this album was not taken seriously and was even criticized mercilessly. One of the comments was, "The reason why it makes people feel irritated is that it has no use at all. In fact, the entire album can be described as cold, if Listeners who accidentally paid five bucks for this nonsense music are going to get their own ass kicked” (Ed Naha, in Circus magazine). As time went on, the album showed itself to be increasingly important. The release of "Ambient 1: Music for Airports" is also recognized as the beginning of Ambient music. In fact, as early as 1972, Eno created the album "No Pussyfooting" with Robert Fripp. This was the first album that Brain Eno himself described as ambient music.
Comparing 1972's "No Pussyfooting" and 1978's "Ambient 1: Music for Airports", you will find that although they can both be called ambient music, their methods are different. This may be different from 1972's "Ambient 1: Music for Airports". It has something to do with the addition of Robert Fripp to the 2011 album, but it is undeniable that Eno’s creative thinking has changed in the past six years.
It is said that in 1975, Eno had just been discharged from the hospital after a car accident and was still unable to move easily, so he asked his friend Judy Nylo to bring him music to listen to. After she left, Eno put this piece of 18th-century harp music into the stereo. Since the amplifier output was set to very low at that time, and one channel of the stereo was completely broken, and he was unable to repair it, he had to make do with it. Music with minimal sound. It was raining at the time, and the sound of the rain was even louder than the music in the room. This was a completely new way of listening to Eno: putting the music into the environment, and the extremely low volume made the music itself not attract attention. At this time, the music and visual experience (Indoor light and color), the sound of rain outside the window all together constitute the environment in which he is. According to Eno afterwards, this feeling had a great influence on his later creative concepts, and he suggested that his works should be played at extremely low volumes. Listening below (even below the listening range) as a way of listening. The music Eno wants to create is the kind of music that can provide the listener with a space for introspection and imagination. Listening itself is not important. On the contrary, it requires the listener's attention not to be too distracted by the music itself. He emphasized this point repeatedly in the liner notes of different albums: "Ambient Music must be able to adapt to multiple levels of hearing without being able to be imposed on a specific level; it must be ignored when listening" (1978 album Ambient 1 ). "The music I create is right between melody and sound texture. My musical logic is that it should be a vague reward for hearing, rather than a direct need for hearing" (1993 album Neroli)
Eno's interpretation of ambient music - a form of music that is often used as a background rather than a form of music that requires subjective experience - is exactly the same as the aforementioned Satie concept, but has been more widely accepted since Eno. For example, David Toop and Max Eastly's work Buried Dreams requires performing at a volume that is just perceptible to the ear. This concept is a challenge to the old idea of ??isolating music from nature/environment. Similarly, in some multimedia arts with environmental characteristics, it does not require the person in it to concentrate on the experience, but emphasizes your understanding of the environment. The experience of the entire environment, that is to say, being in it is the most critical.
In fact, Klaus Schulze and Eno had an equally important influence on the overall formation of ambient aesthetics. The difference from Eno is that his European classical music background is deeper than Eno's. However, his early works were criticized for being too focused on sound texture. Later, Schulze focused more and more on technical proficiency and how to better integrate the works with the performance environment. His outstanding use of electronic sounds and highly conceptual composition methods serve as a good example for electronic music and academic music.
It is worth mentioning that at the same time as Eno, the industrial music movement, which used noise as a means and shock tactics, and aimed at anti-art, anti-music and anti-control, was also launched in Britain and Germany; after After several years of development, British Progressive Rock and Psychedelia have also broken away from the traditional Rock Band model and 3-minute song format. These three trends all come from British art schools in the 1960s and 1970s.
Of course, Ambient music does not only originate in the UK. In Germany, the United States and Canada, there are also many Spacerock/spacemusic groups that have developed simultaneously with Ambient music.
The usual concept of space is associated with outer space (which is indeed the case in some works), but this kind of music refers more to the space being heard at the moment, as well as the "inner space" of the audience. This kind of concert It involves many listeners' subconscious emotions, which is very different from Eno's original description of ambient - Spacemusic is positioned between "foreground music" and "background music", which confuses ambient music's original concept of using music as the background of daily life. . Of course, from today's perspective, spacemusic is an expansion of the original ambient muisc.
At this time, American minimalist composers began to collect more exotic music - such as extracting music from Indian raga (some traditional Indian tunes with unique intervals, rhythms and decorative sounds, etc.) elements, experimenting with modal systems and making greater use of electronic synthesizers in order to create meditative performance music that suited the popularity of the time.
With the development of Ambient music and the maturity of music with similar characteristics at that time (such as space music and minimal music), there has been a question among music critics and fans about "Ambient music should be used as a way of listening to music". In the discussion, some music fans put forward the idea of ??"auditory ritual" and believed that ambient, as a kind of music that changes the state of consciousness, has the ability of visual communication. Of course, the discussion also started at the level of composition mode. These discussions alone show that ambient music and the concepts behind it are beginning to be accepted by people.
Eno was not the first person to explore the concept of ambient music; deep in history, he may not have been the first to call this kind of music Ambiet music. His contribution to ambient music may not lie in its origin, but in the influence of his works on later generations. In 1983, house music was born at the Warehouse Club in Chicago; in 1985, Detroit native Juan Atkin released the first Techno record "No UFOs". The emergence of house and Techno greatly promoted dance music culture. In the late 1980s, acid house became popular in the UK. Alex Paterson, who had been in the British house scene for many years - the former tour manager of Killing joke - was hired by Paul Oakenfold as the DJ of Club Heaven. He played Chill on the second floor of the dance hall. The room plays music for tired dancers to chill out. Ambient House was born when his frequently played Eno's Ambient series and Tangerine Dream's 1970s material were mixed with the house beats wafting from the dance floor downstairs. What is different from the house dance music at that time is that it is a kind of electronic music created for hearing, not for moving the body.
Alex Paterson formed The Orb with Jimmy Cauty***, a member of the Scottish rap group JAMS, but they announced their disbandment less than a year after releasing their first album in 1989. Later Jimmy Cauty later formed the KLF with Bill Drummond. The Orb and KLF were both pioneers of house amnient at the time. So far, electronic music suitable for sitting and listening has become a branch of electronic music.
B12 is one of the few London duos that can take over the mantle of Detroit's Tchno aesthetic. Together with American groups Aphex Twin, the Black Dog, Higher Intelligence Agency, and Norway's Biosphere, they transform the blunt Techno into something unique. Ambient techno with crystal clear tones, minor melodies and bizarre samples.
Other important musicians include Mixmaster Morris (Irresistible Force) and Pete Namlook and artists on his label Fax Records.
The integration of post-dance music elements in the 1990s caused the meaning of ambient music to shift. At this time, ambient music mainly refers to the kind of ethereal melody/theme that has a psychedelic rhythm that is slower than dance music. , electronic music with diverse samples (mostly natural sounds), its purpose is no longer to make you ignore the music itself. In many cases, you will involuntarily swing your body while relaxing. This is very different from the rhythmless Ambient of the past.
From 1994 to the late 1990s, the release of The Future Sound of London's works lifeforms, ISDN and Dead City were important symbols of the rapid hybridization of European experimental electronics in the post-rave era.
The close relationship between chill room and Rave/or dance music culture means a lot to music. Borrowing elements from acid house and techno, hybrid terms such as ambient house, ambient techno, and ambient dub began to circulate. .
Around 2000, Chill out began to cover quite a lot of different types of downtempo music. Chill out music can be found everywhere from Ibiza beaches, lounge bars in Berlin to large outdoor parties everywhere. It is undeniable that chill out can easily become an insidious business tactic just like New Age back then. It is also true that major labels are flocking to release such albums. But the important thing is that Ambient music spreads its own genes through intermarriage and hybridization. Among other types of music, what it is called may not be so important at this time.