Best quotes by Brian Eno on Music

Checkout quotes by Brian Eno on Music

• ‟ In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

  - Brian Eno
  

• ‟ People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

  - Brian Eno
  

• ‟ I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.

  - Brian Eno
  

• ‟ When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

  - Brian Eno
  

• ‟ People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

  - Brian Eno
  

• ‟ Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.

  - Brian Eno
  

• ‟ You can't really imagine music without technology.

  - Brian Eno
  

• ‟ The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can't afford to own it. So it isn't really part of their life in the way that music can be.

  - Brian Eno
  

• ‟ I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn't want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. 'Discreet Music' was like that, and 'Music for Airports.' What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.

  - Brian Eno
  

• ‟ With recording, everything changed. The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture. It's an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music.

  - Brian Eno
  

• ‟ I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.

  - Brian Eno
  

• ‟ At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

  - Brian Eno
  

• ‟ A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn't. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist.

  - Brian Eno