“Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
Brian Eno – September 1978
Music for Airports is hardly ignorable. It has become a piece of music that has both alienated listeners as well as brought interested parties together. I’ve been able to see the music twice in my life; first at an installation at d.c. space in May of 1981 and lately, yesterday at the University of Maryland’s Bang on a Can Marathon.
The Maryland Bang on a Can Marathon is a first for the University, but hardly the first for Bang on a Can. In fact it is this type of marathon that they feel is the best way to experience the band. About 20 years ago the first such marathon was held at Exit Art in New York and the marathon has become a staple of their performance schedule ever since. A few years ago, Bang on a Can released a version of Music for Airports – created without tape loops (as the Eno version is) and have sporadically performed it live.
I admire the approach to staging the performance in the lobby of the Smith Center a location that is similar to an airport terminal – a transitional space within a larger structure, is an excellent choice of location. The performance is viewable from practically every angle in the building, and the music with it’s dreamlike sequences, make for a great foreground or backdrop to time spent in that space.
Bang on a Can’s performance was just as ignorable as the music they played, as well as just as unmistakable.
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3926729&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1
Endnote: I love the fact that if you refer to Bang on a Can as BOAC, you are also calling them the British Overseas Airways Corporation, one of England’s first commercial airlines, following a merger in the 70’s it is now known as British Airways.