Resisting the airport: Bang on a can performs Brian Eno

Abstract

In 1998, the New-York based, avant-garde collective Bang on a Can transcribed and recorded Brian Eno's ambient classic Music For Airports (1978). The project transformed what was the result of Eno's experimentations in the electronic studio into a showcase for live virtuosos. The CD is accompanied by Bang on a Can's typically polemical liner notes in which they take great pains to explain away Music for Airports' previous life—indeed its raison d'etre—as unobtrusive background music: ‘it is music that's carefully, beautifully, brilliantly constructed and its compositional techniques rival the most intricate of symphonies’. Although this kind of spin recites what are by now familiar modernist tropes, the simple binary of modern/postmodern cannot adequately explain the phenomenon of Bang on a Can's Music for Airports. From the point of view of modernism, Eno's original is incomprehensible; from a postmodern vantage point, Bang on a Can's transcription represents, at best, a tragic misreading, at worse, an inexcusable betrayal of everything Music for Airports stood for.

Fortunately, cultural theorists have begun to formulate more nuanced readings of the modern and postmodern epistemes. In this paper, I use French anthropologist Marc Augé's relatively new idea of ‘Supermodernism’ in conjunction with architecture critic Charles Jencks' more established notion of ‘Late Modernism’ to argue that Bang on a Can's performance of Music for Airports changes Eno's quintessentially supermodernist sonic soundscape into an archetypal late-modernist phenomenon. I base my arguments on both the changed circumstances of the piece—from background music, piped into La Guardia airport to a virtuosic tour de force taking center stage at Alice Tully Hall—and the actual details of Bang on a Can's performance: timbre, instrumentation, and style. In addition, I use Umberto Eco's formulation of hyperreality to explain the transformation from Eno's flat background music to Bang on a Can's vivid live performance.