James R. Hodkinson

Playing the Gallery. Time, Space and the Digital in Brian Eno’s Recent Installation Music

This essay considers the sound installation work of the British multimedia artist Brian Eno. Focusing on Eno’s so-called ‘ambient’ music, the essay asks to what extent this work can be read as an aesthetic intervention in contemporary cultures of musical listening that are driven and shaped by the instantaneous availability of music in digital formats. His sound installation 12 Seasons, written for the ‘Great Gallery’ of the Palace of Venaria Reala in Turin, is marked by slowly evolving melodic structures and textures that imply a culture of sustained listening. However, the installation process also saw Eno personally involved in the adaptation of the pre-recorded music to the acoustic properties of the gallery: this created a listening experience that could only be fully appreciated in the space for which the music was composed, given that the sound evolved as visitors moved through the gallery. Examining Eno’s compositional technique, installation practice and its underpinning musical theory, the essay asks to what extent 12 Seasons and similar works offer a spatially variable listening experience, which critiques the present trend of accessing music through lo-fidelity digital files and re-enforces the need for attentive listening over extended time. It asks, further, whether Eno is thus making a wider artistic protest against the contemporary hyper-consumption of cultural products, criticized by contemporary sociologists, which seems to value the acquisition of new aesthetic material over sustained engagement with it.