Understanding Eno (part 3) - Eno on Steve Reich

Donald Judd Untitled (1990)

The interesting thing about minimalism is that it is secretly complex. Is this intentionally ironic? I don't believe so. Minimalism is about striping away at an idea or thought, until you expose just the frame work that props it up. It's the distilation of an idea. An omlette without any ingredients is an egg, and an egg uncracked is a white smooth orb like object. Minimalism is the egg. Simple sompared to an omlette, complex when you consider what is in it or what it can become. Just think of all teh recipes eggs are the catalyst for...

Here are Eno's thoughts on minimalist composer Steve Reich and his seminal piece of minimalist composition using tape delays It's Gonna Rain (1965), taken from an interview by Anthony Korner called "Aurora Musicalis," Artforum 24:10 (Summer 1986), 79.

"There's an essay called "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain,"
by Warren McCulloch, who discovered that a frog's eyes don't work
like ours. Ours are always moving: we blink, we scan. We move our
heads. But a frog fixes its eyes on a scene and leaves them there. It
stops seeing all the static parts of the environment, which become invisible,
but as soon as one element moves, which could be what it
wants to eat - the fly - it is seen in very high contrast to the rest of the
environment. It's the only thing the frog sees and the tongue comes out
and takes it. Well, I realized that what happens with the Reich piece is
that our ears behave like a frog's eyes. Since the material is common to
both tapes, what you begin to notice are not the repeating parts but the
sort of ephemeral interference patterns between them. Your ear telescopes
into more and more fine detail until you're hearing what to me
seems like atoms of sound. That piece absolutely thrilled me, because I
realized then that I understood what minimalism was about. The creative
operation is listening. It isn't just a question of a presentation
feeding into a passive audience. People will sometimes say about
Reich's piece, "Oh yes, that one with that voice which keeps hammer-

ing into your head," and indeed, if you're not especially listening to it
that's exactly what it is."

This comes courtesy of Eric Tamm's Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound

Here's a great piece Fresh Air did on Reich on his 70th birthday