Between Hearing and Listening

Abstract

Chapter 5 treats Music for Airports as a work of conceptual art and compares it to the work of Steve Reich, arguing that the album, like Eno’s visual art, provides a sonic image of the ecological character of human activity and meaning. The chapter also tracks how the album’s ambient function changes when it is reproduced through differing technologies, and how it becomes an entirely different kind of artwork when scored for and performed on traditional instruments by Bang on a Can. Because the album proves to have three distinct dimensions, it requires “prismatic listening.” Prismatic listening switches between distinct modes of attention, in this case between the album’s ambient function, its exploration of the activity of sounds, and its standing as conceptual art. And it does so in the knowledge that these dimensions cannot be heard simultaneously.