We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
Brian EnoRead
Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Music conveys deep messages that words can either support or detract from.
In this quote, Brian Eno highlights the intricate nature of music as a medium of communication that transcends simple lyrics. He suggests that while words can enhance certain emotions or themes present in music, they can also overshadow or limit the broader, often more complex messages that the music itself imparts, emphasizing the rich tapestry of meaning found in the auditory experience.
Themes
MusicMessagesComplexityMeaningArt
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the impact of music on emotions, this quote can illustrate how vital music is beyond its lyrics.
More from Brian Eno
All quotes βI think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.
Brian EnoRead
When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.
Brian EnoRead
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 EnoRead
In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of 'their' works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.
Brian EnoRead
Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
Brian EnoRead
Similar quotes
With any part you play, there is a certain amount of yourself in it. There has to be, otherwise it's just not acting. It's lying.
Johnny DeppRead
True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At its best it is an emphasis of structure, a realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented
Frank Lloyd WrightRead
Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.
Allen GinsbergRead
I offer my performance as prayer for someone I've worked with as an actor or someone who has died. The image that comes into my head as I walk to the stage, I offer that performance up for that person.
Liam NeesonRead
Painting is the making of an analogy for something non-visual and incomprehensible - giving it form and bringing it within reach. And that is why good paintings are incomprehensible. Creating the incomprehensible has absolutely nothing to do with turning out any old bunkum, because bunkum is always comprehensible.
Gerhard RichterRead
There's a film you write, there's a film you shoot, and there's a film that you cut - and they're all different.
Paul GreengrassRead