Sitting listening to Rapoon this morning I started to contemplate sound, and compositional intention. In my mind’s ear I recalled many of my experiences and experiments. I thought about the various live presentations of ambient music, recordings, collaborations, and the variety of things that I’ve done in the last decade. I’ve come back to my past work more and more lately, as I’ve been pooling ambient music and acoustic ecology writings that are available online with the intention of posting them in a repository here at mattborghi.com. In going over these writings I’ve come across Brian Eno’s original liner notes to Discreet Music, and what many believe to be the conceptual beginnings of ambient music many, many times (Read them here). I’ve also been refreshing my understanding of R.Murray Schafer, and the acoustic ecology movement that evolved out of his 1977 book – The Tuning of the World.
In reviewing these two perspectives of ambient music (whether self-described or not) I’ve come to more closely understand my own intentions. Years ago after first learning about Eno’s sonic wallpaper, and Schafer’s soundscape of natural environmental noises I was inspired to write Life Musik, which was my attempt at encapsulating what I had learned from Eno, Schafer, Satie, and Cage. I felt then (2003), and still feel that compositionally, I hit the mark in creating a hybrid theoretical concept of Eno’s ambient music, Schafer’s soundscape of natural sound, and my own belief that some combination of the former and the latter could be juxtaposed over one another, thus allowing us to tune our sonic environment. However, with Life Musik, I still felt as though there was something that I wasn’t getting. Something still felt like it was missing. On the one hand, there was the music, on the other hand was the poetics of experience, and a conceptual framework, even still there were presentations of the sound and the concept that took place all over the world. However, something was still lost. I shelved the project, and considered it only a partial success.
In the last six months I’ve started to pick that project up again. Time has allowed me to frame my own work, the work of Satie, Eno, Cage and Schafer in a way that I couldn’t have seen before. I realized that the one component that was missing was that of a pure experiential perspective. I tried to wrap this aspect of it into my Life Musik paper, but my thoughts in this area were abstract and still needed to be refined. I felt that my feelings, with regard to present moment listening from a Vipassana Buddhist perspective satisfied the experiential component of my theoretical framework. I felt that was true for a long time, until I actually moved away from writing, and music composition, and instead truly focused on the experience of listening and space. I realized that the experiential aspect that was missing was that of creating an experience for the listener.
It could be argued that through recordings and live presentations of sound I’ve created an experience for the listener. However, I wouldn’t agreed with that argument. I feel that if one is to truly set up and experience for the listener, then that must be undertaken with an integrated approach that includes a pre-selected space, a composition that’s been crafted for that space, and possibly a conceptual position that’s been established so that a listener has an idea of the listening direction; the latter could be as brief or as elaborate the composition or anticipated experience dictates. I also want to make it clear that sometimes, perhaps even often times, a conceptual position is meant more for me, as the composer, and what my feelings are, rather than providing a road map for what I feel a listener and/or participant should be experiencing.
So with all this said, I have some ideas, and I look forward to the journey and the exploration with this new approach and new perspective. I imagine this will yield more recordings and experiments which will yield more releases on our Slo.Bor Media label. I also hope to get active in working on site-specific ambient music compositions that marry space and sound, and sound and space.
