Eno語る - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

Paul Morley “On gospel, Abba and the death of the record: an audience with Brian Eno” http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/jan/17/brian-eno-interview-paul-morley

既に先月中旬の記事だが、ブライアン・イーノ *1へのインタヴュー。先ず前置きの部分におけるイーノのキャリアの紹介が凄い。名文だ。
イーノの発言を少し抜き書き。
「聴くこと（listening）」について。或いは空間とサウンドについて；

"If you think of the mid- to late-50swhen all of this started to happen for me, the experience of listening to sound was so different from now. Stereo didn't exist. If you listened to music outside of church, apart from live music, which was very rare, it was through tiny speakers. It was a nice experience but a very small experience. So to go into a church, which is a specially designed and echoey space, and it has an organ, and my grandfather built the organ in the church where we went, suddenly to hear music and singing was amazing. It was like hearing someone's album on a tiny transistor radio and then you go and see them in a 60,000-seater. It's huge by comparison. That had a lot to do with my feeling about sound and space, which became a big theme for me. How does space make a difference to sound, what's the difference between hearing something in this room and then another room. Can you imagine other rooms where you can hear music? It also made a difference to how I feel about the communality of music in that the music I liked the most, singing in church, was done by a group of people who were not skilled – they were just a group of people, I knew them in the rest of the week as the coal man and the baker."

最後の方に、「教会」の話が出てくるが、後でも述べられるように、イーノは（「無神論者」でありながら）地元の教会のゴスペル・グループに参加している。
ポップ・ミュージックと実験音楽の違いについて。ポップ・ミュージックは「結果」と「フィードバック」、実験音楽は「プロセス」；

(…) Pop was all about the results and the feedback. The experimental side was interested in process more than the actual result – the results just happened and there was often very little control over them, and very little feedback. Take Steve Reich. He was an important composer for me with his early tape pieces and his way of having musicians play a piece each at different speeds so that they slipped out of synch.
"But then when he comes to record a piece of his like, say, Drumming, he uses orchestral drums stiffly played and badly recorded. He's learnt nothing from the history of recorded music. Why not look at what the pop world is doing with recording, which is making incredible sounds with great musicians who really feel what they play. It's because in Reich's world there was no real feedback. What was interesting to them in that world was merely the diagram of the piece, the music merely existed as an indicator of a type of process. I can see the point of it in one way, that you just want to show the skeleton, you don't want a lot of fluff around it, you just want to show how you did what you did.As a listener who grew up listening to pop music I am interested in results. Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop. Did it work? No. We'll do it differently then. Did it sell? No. We'll do it differently then. So I wanted to bring the two sides together. I liked the processes and systems in the experimental world and the attitude to effect that there was in the pop, I wanted the ideas to be seductive but also the results."

ゴスペルについて；

"I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant. Ultimately, the message of gospel music is that everything's going to be all right. If you listen to millions of gospel records – and I have – and try to distil what they all have in common it's a sense that somehow we can triumph. There could be many thousands of things. But the message… well , there are two messages… one is a kind of optimism for the future rather than a pessimism. Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is. Gospel music is always about the possibility of transcendence, of things getting better. It's also about the loss of ego, that you will win through or get over things by losing yourself, becoming part of something better. Both those messages are completely universal and are nothing to do with religion or a particular religion. They're to do with basic human attitudes and you can have that attitude and therefore sing gospel even if you are not religious."

Abba *2について。イーノもまたAbbaのファンだった；

"In the 70s, no one would admit that they liked Abba. Now it's fine. It's so kitsch. Kitsch is an excuse to defend the fact that they feel a common emotion. If it is kitsch. you put a sort of frame around something – to suggest you are being ironic. Actually, you aren't. You are really enjoying it. I like Abba. I did then and I didn't admit it. The snobbery of the time wouldn't allow it. I did admit it when I heard 'Fernando'; I could not bear to keep the secret to myself anymore and also because I think there is a difference between Swedish sentimentality and LA sentimentality because the Swedish are so restrained emotionally. When they get sentimental it's rather sweet and charming. What we really got me with "Fernando" was what the lower singer was doing, I don't know her name. I spent months trying to learn that. It's so obscure what she's doing and very hard to sing. And then from being a sceptic I went over the top in the other direction. I really fell for them."

「録音された音楽（recorded music）」の終焉について；

"I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn't last, and now it's running out. I don't particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history's moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it."