tone-poems

Brian Eno first collaboration with minimalist composer Harold Budd, Ambient 2: Plateau of Mirror, was a groundbreaking classic of ambient music. Budd and Eno created beautiful soundscapes, haunted by melancholy piano themes. There second CD, The Pearl, is even more beautiful.

The Pearl, released in 1984, is a set of tranquil piano tone poems. The music is simple modal music in an ambient style. What makes it so captivating is the way Eno creates evocative spaces for Budd to play within. This has the effect of making the spaces between notes as important as the notes themselves.

Budd is sensitive to this play between the notes and silence, and tailors his music to allow the notes to drift towards silence. Think of Satie played underwater, and you have an approximation of the effect of these pieces.

There are 11 pieces on the CD, each intriguingly titled; “Late October”, “A stream with bright fish”, or “An echo of night”, for example. The CD artwork captures the idea of the pieces perfectly, too. Irregular patches of glistening iridescent water shine against dark pebbles, almost drawing your eye away from a perfect pearl.

This music is understated, but masterful. It may lure you or lull you, but either way, it is irresistible.

This is a set of minimal tone poems that feature instruments combined with electronic arrangements. The pieces depict the skys of the composer’s northern home.

Mychael Danna is extremely prolific. His work includes dozens of film scores, including The Antwone Fisher Story, Monsoon Wedding, and many other art-house flicks.

Each of the movement is made up of small melodic or harmonic fragments that repeat in various combinations. In some respects, this reflects Brian Eno’s early ambient works, but with a more orchestral arrangement. On top of the minimal background, Danna adds solo instruments, resulting in an evocative orchestral feel.

This music could fall into the category of New Age, but it is new age without any of the cloying cheesiness that detracts from most of it. The ten movements work together to create a sustained mood that supports active listening or background ambience.

The mood on this album is largely dark and reflective. These pieces won’t leave you humming memorable melodies, but if you like new age minimalism, you’ll find yourself playing this often.

This classic is nothing short of amazing.

Each of Eno’s Ambient works has a different mood, with unique instrumentation and textures. On Ambient 2, Eno and Harold Budd create a intoxicating world that, once you’ve visited, you’ll want to return to.

Harold Budd creates slow piano works, reminiscent of some of Eric Satie’s more well-known work, or possibly Thomas de Hartmann’s. Budd treats his keyboards through effects, though, and adds reverberation, creating an unnatural context for the natural sounds. Eno processes Budd’s piano with phasers, tape loops, and backwards reverberation effects. Budd and Eno create sounds never heard before on Ambient 2.

The album is as listenable as it is ignorable, so it supports multiple levels of attention. Of Eno’s Ambient series, The Plateaux of Mirror is probably the most accessible. The pieces have clear melodies and form, less oblique than Ambient 1 or 4.

The pieces are slow and mellow, and their titles suggest quiet, contemplative places: “Wind in Lonely Fences”, or “The Chill Air”, for example. They are evocative and thought provoking. The pieces work together as a whole, also, because they have fairly consistent sound, pacing and mood throughout.

Ambient 2 is a great introduction to Eno’s ambient music. If you like this, you’d like his album The Pearl, also.

Morton Subotnick is one of the great living composers. He has been heavily involved in electronic music since the 1960’s, and created some works which helped define the world of academic electronica. He also has been an innovator in works that involve eletronics and acoustic instruments, acoustic instruments manipulated electronicly, and other multimedia combinations. His work often explores the way physical gestures of the performer can be manipulated elecronically, and the influence that electronic processing has on a performance.

His most famous work is from the late 1960’s, Silver Apples of the Moon. This is an electronic tone poem created using the Buchla modular synthesizer. The work was extremely experimental for its day, and to this day sounds innovative. In it, Subotnick applies modular control signals to all sorts of parameters of the sound, sending sounds careening through the left/right listening field, changing the timbre, controlling the speed of pulses and the pitch of sounds. It’s an electronic tour de force.

Silver Apples was written for the medium of the record, and features two “sides”. It was commissioned by Nonesuch Records, a label that specialized in new music. It is said to be the first large-scale recording commissioned for record.

For the next few years, Subotnick wrote many pieces for record, including The Wild Bull, Touch, and Until Spring. These were all created using modular synthesis on Buchla synthesizers.

In the late 70’s and 80’s, Subotnick explored the combination of live performance and electronics with many works. Some of his better known works from this period include The Key to Songs, and Ascent into Air. In these works, Subotnick focuses on how the gestures of live performers can be used to control various aspects of sounds. He lets the motion of the performer change the position of sounds for example.

His more recent work has combined orchestral ensembles with various electronic processing and sound generation. Jacob’s Room, a piece commissioned for the Kronos String Quartet and Joan La Barbara, a vocalist, is a sort of multimedia opera. Other works include interactive CD-Roms, and even computer music games for children.

Subotnick is still active as both a teacher and composer. His professional site provides a discography and details of his compositions.