THE AMBIENT CENTURY

Music journalist Prendergast all but trips over himself in a rush to deliver his views on Ambient music in this vast and cogent treatment of the sound that changed the way we experience music.

For Prendergast, “the importance to twentieth-century music of atmospheric sound, its timbre and personality—indeed its ‘Ambience’—is a measure of how much innovative musical ideas intertwined with technological change.” It all started, he suggests, with Mahler’s leap from Romanticism to Modernism, and when Satie, Debussy, and others overthrew the sonata form and introduced a lighter touch, a harbinger of Ambience: “music that could take on the hues of the environment ‘just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain.’ ” The author tells this history through brief but information-laden vignettes of notable composers, musicians, and musical trends, each of which is followed by a particularly helpful list of important works available on CD. Prendergast evidently has listened long and hard to a lot of Ambient music, for he covers significant ground, from Charles Ives to Miles Davis’s “Cool” and its billowing clouds of music, the accidental beauty of Phillip Glass’s minimalism to the mainstreaming of the sound by Brian Eno, Mr. Ambient Music himself. There’s an appropriately lengthy investigation of rock music, including the Byrds, Country Joe, Pink Floyd, Van Morrison, and so many others for whom the ambience was often a state of recreational intoxication. Prendergast then voices savvy and voluble appreciations of Techno’s instrumental electronica, with its “darting keyboards and impatient rattling drums,” and of Trance music’s computer-generated repetitions. Remarkably, he keeps the flow of information bracing and keen, though his free use of musicological terms sometimes makes reading his text feel like walking through thigh-deep custard.

An exceptional piece of music history that will be as mightily thumbed by fans of Ambient music as the Physician’s Desk Reference is by hypochondriacs. (b&w photos)