"Discreet Music" (30:35)
 Recorded at Brian Eno's studio 9-5-75
  
 Three Variations on the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachebel
 (i)   "Fullness of Wind" (9:57)
 (ii)  "French Catalogues" (5:18)
 (iii) "Brutal Ardour" (8:17)
 Performed by The Cockpit Ensemble, conducted by Gavin Bryars 
 (who also helped arrange the pieces)
 Recorded at Trident Studios 12-9-75
 Engineered by Peter Kelsey.
  
 Produced by Brian Eno
 1975 EG Records Ltd.
  
  
         Since I have always preferred making plans to 
 executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and
 systems that, once set into operation, could create music 
 with little or no intervention on my part.
         That is to say, I tend towards the roles of the 
 planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the 
 results.
         Two ways of satisfying this interest are exemplified 
 on this album.  "Discreet Music" is a technological approach 
 to the problem.  If there is any score for the piece, it must 
 be the operational diagram of the particular apparatus I used 
 for its production.  The key configuration here is the long 
 delay echo system with which I have experimented since I 
 became aware of the musical possibilities of tape recorders in 
 1964.  Having set up this apparatus, my degree of 
 participation in what it subsequently did was limited to (a) 
 providing an input (in this case, two simple and mutually 
 compatible melodic lines of different duration stored on a 
 digital recall system) and (b) occasionally altering the 
 timbre of the synthesizer's output by means of a graphic 
 equalizer.
         It is a point of discipline to accept this passive 
 role, and for once, to ignore the tendency to play the artist 
 by dabbling and interfering.  In this case, I was aided by the 
 idea that what I was making was simply a background for my 
 friend Robert Fripp to play over in a series of concerts we 
 had planned.  This notion of its future utility, coupled with 
 my own pleasure in "gradual processes" prevented me from 
 attempting to create surprises and less than predictable 
 changes in the piece.  I was trying to make a piece that could 
 be listened to and yet could be ignored... perhaps in the 
 spirit of Satie who wanted to make music that could "mingle 
 with the sound of the knives and forks at dinner."
         In January this year I had an accident.  I was not 
 seriously hurt, but I was confined to bed in a stiff and 
 static position.  My friend Judy Nylon visited me and brought 
 me a record of 18th century harp music.  After she had gone, 
 and with some considerable difficulty, I put on the record.  
 Having laid down, I realized that the amplifier was set at an 
 extremely low level, and that one channel of the stereo had 
 failed completely.  Since I hadn't the energy to get up and 
 improve matters, the record played on almost inaudibly.  This 
 presented what was for me a new way of hearing music - as part 
 of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the 
 light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience.  
 It is for this reason that I suggest listening to the piece at 
 comparatively low levels, even to the extent that it 
 frequently falls below the threshold of audibility.
         Another way of satisfying the interest in 
 self-regulating and self-generating systems is exemplified in 
 the 3 variations on the Pachebel Canon.  These take their 
 titles from the charmingly inaccurate translation of the 
 French cover notes for the "Erato" recording of the piece made 
 by the orchestra of Jean Francois Paillard.  That particular 
 recording inspired these pieces by its unashamedly romantic 
 rendition of a very systematic Renaissance canon.
         In this case the "system" is a group of performers 
 with a set of instructions - and the "input" is the fragment 
 of Pachebel.  Each variation takes a small section of the
 score (two or four bars) as its starting point, and permutates 
 the players' parts such that they overlay each other in ways 
 not suggested by the original score.  In "Fullness of Wind" 
 each player's tempo is decreased, the rate of decrease 
 governed by the pitch of his instrument (bass=slow).  "French 
 Catalogues" groups together sets of notes and melodies with 
 time directions gathered from other parts of the score.  In 
 "Brutal Ardour" each player has a sequence of notes related to 
 those of the other players, but the sequences are of different 
 lengths so that the original relationships quickly break down.
  
 London, September 1975  
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