Opinion | Brian Eno’s Creative Motivations

What are you doing with art? When I think of your library, it’s not all creating a world that you would like to live in. What is — you’ve given all these legible motivations for other people. Is your motivation as legible to yourself? I often start something by thinking: I wish there was a piece of music like this, whatever “this” means in my mind. For instance, one of my best known records is “Music for Airports,” and that came from a very direct experience like that, of sitting in a newly built airport in Germany, near Cologne, and everything about the airport was dazzlingly beautiful. It was a lovely structure and they had terrible German disco music —— playing really loud through the whole P.A. system in the airport. And I just thought: Nobody’s thought about this issue of what kind of music would belong in this place. We use music in public all the time, but does anybody actually sit down and think, seriously: What would be the best kind of music to have in this important place where people are arriving, leaving, going on to important new phases in their lives or going back to loved ones or whatever? It ought to be something a bit more … Anyway, a bit more. I started to think: What should it be more of? And so I started thinking and trying to make a kind of music that I thought would make the airport experience feel important and special. And there were quite a lot of technical considerations, like, obviously it mustn’t interfere with communication. People must be able to talk over it. It mustn’t keep stopping and starting. It must not matter if it gets interrupted. So it should be a continuum that you won’t feel like you’ve missed something if there’s an interruption. So on and so on. So that was a very conscious act of making a work of art. But most of what I do isn’t really motivated by such high-sounding ideas. Most of the time I’m fiddling around and something starts to happen. Something intrigues me or some feeling starts to happen. I think: I like that feeling. How can I make, how can I bring that forward. How can I make more of it. And I often don’t know why I’m doing that or how it will end up. I have an archive of about 11,000 unfinished pieces of music, and what I do occasionally is pull one of those out and suddenly I haven’t seen it for 15 years, maybe —— 11,000 unfinished pieces of music? That’s amazing.