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Though David Robert Jones, the boy from Brixton, is no longer with us, David Bowie, the artist, through his music, films, plays, paintings, and explorations of gender, sexuality, religion, love, fear, and death, remains.

The post David Bowie: Everything has changed, he changed everything appeared first on OUPblog.

(RE-POST: This piece was originally posted on June 7, 2011.)

I’ve admitted it more than once: I know my work is going well when I have ideas in the shower. That is, those times when I’m thinking that I’m not thinking.

By the way, whenever I think about the creative process, and the difficulty of forcing ideas, I think of this classic Sesame Street sketch featuring Don Music: “I’ll never get it, never, argh!”

I’m posting today to direct your attention to this piece from the fascinating 99% blog by Scott McDowell, “Developing Your Creative Practice: Tips from Brian Eno.”

It does not hurt that I have been a big Eno fan since the 70’s.

Read the opening quote from McDowell’s piece and you’ll see why it grabbed my attention . . .

Current neuroscience research confirms what creatives intuitively know about being innovative: that it usually happens in the shower. After focusing intently on a project or problem, the brain needs to fully disengage and relax in order for a “Eureka!” moment to arise. It’s often the mundane activities like taking a shower, driving, or taking a walk that lure great ideas to the surface. Composer Steve Reich, for instance, would ride the subway around New York when he was stuck.

Comments Eno:

The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times. It’s the equivalent of the dream time, in your daily life, times when things get sorted out and reshuffled. If you’re constantly awake work-wise you don’t allow that to happen. One of the reasons I have to take distinct breaks when I work is to allow the momentum of a particular direction to run down, so that another one can establish itself.

The 99% piece references a July, 2008 article that I recall reading in The New Yorker, written by Jonah Lehrer, in which he investigates the nature of ideas, “The Eureeka Hunt.” Lehrer brought joy to procrastinators everywhere when he opined:

The relaxation phase is crucial. That’s why so many insights happen during warm showers. … One of the surprising lessons of this research is that trying to force an insight can actually prevent the insight.

Always an intellectual with a lively mind, Brian Eno, along with Peter Schmidt, developed a deck of cards in the 1970’s called Oblique Strategies, a series of prompts intended to help push people through periods of creative block. Now the Strategies are available for FREE on your iPhone or iTouch — just click here.

To close, here’s a cool fan video of Eno’s beautiful “By This River,” taken from the disk, Before and After Science. The album, by the way, has very distinct sides to it — something that’s lost in today’s CD era. For Side 1, Eno delivers traditional pop structures. But Side 2 plays like a series of dream songs, lullabies, hinting at the ambient sounds he’ll explore more fully on later disks.

By Cecilia Sun

Brian Eno turns 66 today. It has become a cliché to start every profile of Eno by noting the eclecticism and longevity of his musical career. After all, here is a man who made his performance debut smashing a piece of wood against an open piano frame (La Monte Young, X (Any Integer) for Henry Flynt) and went on to produce award-winning albums for chart-topping bands. Nonetheless, it is still startling to realize that a quick game of One Degree of Brian Eno can bring together musicians as diverse as Cornelius Cardew, Luciano Pavarotti, Nico, Karl Hyde, and Coldplay. Eno’s credits include composer, singer, keyboardist, producer, clarinetist, video artist, and app designer; his music has been heard in concert halls, arenas, airports, movie theaters, and art galleries. Thanks to the start-up sounds he wrote for Windows 95, Eno might well have been the most-played composer of the 1990s. Not bad for someone who has embraced the label of “non-musician.”

It is impossible to give a brief yet coherent overview of a career that continues to be so rich and wide-ranging. Instead, and in honor of his 66th birthday, here are six of my favorite Eno contributions to our musical world.

(1)   Richard Strauss, Also sprach Zarathustra from Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics

Click here to view the embedded video.

Formed in 1970 by composer Gavin Bryars, the Portsmouth Sinfonia opened its membership to all–instrumental competence is not required. Its distinctive sounds come from the resulting mix of complete neophytes and trained musicians. Eno played the clarinet with them on and off for four years, and produced two of their three albums. The Sinfonia’s performance of Also sprach Zarathustra is typical in its chaotic, yet recognizable, attempt to play only the most famous part of Strauss’s half-hour tone poem.

(2)   Eno, Discreet Music (1975)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Discreet Music is Eno’s first foray into what he would later call “ambient music.” In a now-famous anecdote, Eno claims its genesis in a failure of technology. While recovering at home after a serious accident, Eno was left with a recording that was playing too softly and only out of one channel. Unable to get up to fix the sound, he listened to barely audible output and discovered a new way of hearing. After Discreet, music no longer had to be the center of attention. It could be loops of deliberately simple music that become “part of the ambience of the environment just as the color of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience.”

(3)   Penguin Café Orchestra, “Chartered Flight,” from Music from the Penguin Café (released in 1976 on Obscure; Eno, executive producer)

Click here to view the embedded video.

In 1975, following the success of Eno’s solo albums, Island Records created the Obscure label for him. Although short-lived (ten albums in three years), Obscure gave Eno the opportunity to introduce to a wider audience music they might not otherwise encounter. The quirky and charming Music from Penguin Café Orchestra was Obscure 7.

(4)   U2, “The Unforgettable Fire” from The Unforgettable Fire, produced by Eno and Daniel Lanois (1984)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Given the critical and commercial enormous success Eno and U2 have enjoyed together, it is easy to forget that many–including Eno himself–found this an odd and risky collaboration when they first came together on The Unforgettable Fire. U2 famously brought Eno in so his “arty” and “weird” influence could change the band’s sound. (Bono: “We didn’t go to art school, we went to Brian.”) The album’s title track shows Eno’s introduction of a more atmospheric soundscape to U2’s previously straight-forward anthemic rock style.

(5)   Eno, “This” from Another Day on Earth (2005)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another Day on Earth was Eno’s first solo album of songs since the 1970s. Appropriately for Eno’s first album as a soloist for over a quarter of a century, the opening track “This” features not just his voice, but his voice multi-tracked as he intones the title over thirty times in this three-minute song. The result is an impossibly catchy tune that pairs Eno’s solemn, almost hypnotic singing with an infectiously catchy rhythmic accompaniment.

(6)   Eno and Peter Chilvers, “Bloom” (2008)

“Bloom” brings Eno’s interests in ambient music and generative music to the iPhone. Billed as “an endless music machine” and a “music box for the 21st century,” this app allows you to create soundscapes reminiscent of Eno’s ambient experiments of the 1970s and 1980s by simply tapping on the screen. If you so choose, you can also experience your musical creation as a part of your ambience by allowing a generative player to take over. “Bloom” manages to be both addictive and soothing at the same time.

Happy birthday, Brian Eno. Our current musical landscape would be so much less interesting without you.

Cecilia Sun is an Assistant Professor of musicology in the Department of Music at the University of California, Irvine. She updated the Brian Eno entry for The Grove Dictionary of American Music, and she has an essay on Eno and the experimental tradition in the forthcoming collection Brian Eno: Oblique Strategies.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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The post Brian Eno, the influential “non-musician” at 66 appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Oblique Strategies is a deck of cards created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt after thinking about approaches to their own work as artist and musician. Each card presents a question, dilemma, or new way of attacking the work you are doing as an artist. By drawing a card, you are given the chance to rethink your process.

Sample cards include:

• Don’t avoid what is easy.
• Humanize something that is free of error.
• What do you do? Now, what do you do best?
• Do the last thing first.
• Use an unacceptable colour.

On a fan site devoted to the cards, Brian Eno is quoted as saying:

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn’t the case - it’s just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, “Don’t forget that you could adopt *this* attitude,” or “Don’t forget you could adopt *that* attitude.”

You can purchase the deck from Brian Eno’s site, but if you are as avid a Twitter user as I am, I recommend following Oblique Chirps. One of the cards’ text is randomly tweeted on the hour, which gives you many unexpected (and often much-needed) opportunities to re-evaluate your own creative process.

Update:
kfwinona mentions in the comments that Brian Eno himself is now Twittering and most of his updates are Oblique Strategies. Awesome!

Update 2:
Kim, in the comments, says there’s an Oblique Strategies Dashboard Widget for Mac users, and on a whim I just searched Apple’s App Store for “oblique” and there is also an iPhone/iPod Touch app available.