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A question of backgrounds: Sites of listening

In 1951 John Cage entered an anechoic chamber at the University of Harvard. He expected to hear silence; what he heard has now become a legendary anecdote about this experience. Twenty-four years later from his sick bed, Brian Eno had a revelatory experience of listening to music through a broken hi-fi while confined to a hospital bed. Although several years apart, these two individual experiences both stimulated new modes of engaging with, creating, listening to and understanding music. These two distinct creation myths (to use Seth Kim-Cohen’s description1) are reference points from which the discussions in this chapter develop. The intent in this chapter is to examine the site of listening in which these two events took place, not the physical locus itself, but as the contextual site in which these two events took place: namely, the ‘background’. The discussion of ambient music will be centred around Brian Eno’s Discreet Music (1975) and Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978). Ambient 1 was the first mention of the term ‘ambient music’, yet the roots of what led to this development are evident in Discreet Music. All references to ambient music will be based on Eno’s liner notes from these two albums. By focussing on the background, we can pose several questions: How can we understand the sonic foreground if we do not consider or disregard the sonic background? What role has the background for the contextual perception of what is in the foreground? I will argue that the background is the context which supports our listening, and that this contextual presence is