The steady state theory: Recalibrating the quiddity of ambient music
University of Huddersfield Press eBooks · 2019
Plus ça change, plus c' est la même chose."-Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr 1 10.5920/beyondairports.05 music beyond airports 84 bang' theory.3 The latter has become firmly established as the most compatible with contemporary cosmological understanding, though arguments remain and further theories (including attempts to combine the steady state and big bang models) 4 continue to be proposed.5 It is perhaps not too fanciful a parallel to say that musical compositions can be regarded as sonic universes.They contain objects arranged and positioned in a particular way, distributed with varying densities, according to the most strict or arbitrary organisational rules and schemes.They surround and envelop us, our role as listeners becoming akin to travellers drifting and exploring their inner worlds.Within and around these worlds we are able to perceive everything from the gigantic to the infinitesimal, events that happen in the blink of an eye or which play out over extended periods of time.And while music is inevitably limited by being temporal, bound to and by time, it can in both its objective behaviour and subjective character suggest and evoke the infinite.Just as our understanding and interpretation of the universe is by necessity subject to continual scrutiny, challenge and revision, the same is true of music, and particularly true, arguably belatedly so, of ambient music.In the four decades since Brian Eno first coined the term 'ambient' to describe a particular kind of musical outlook and practice, what that term connotes has become increasingly simplified, assumption-laden and formulaic.Greek musician Vangelis has complained that it "gave the opportunity for untalented people 8 cf.Mark Prendergast, The Ambient Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 6; Paul Morley, Op. cit., 33; Alan Licht, "Sound Art: Origins, development and ambiguities," Organised Sound, 14(1) (2009), 3-10; Eliot Bates, "Ambient Music" (Masters diss., Wesleyan University, 1997), 152.There are innumerable such examples in the literature; indeed, it would probably be easier to cite cases that do not mention Satie than those that do.