After the show, there was to be a question & answer session, preceded by a brief gap allowing those who wished to leave to do so. During this gap, I spotted someone moving up from the back of the Dress Circle balcony to the now-vacated seats at the front, presumably to get a better view. I recognized this person as Richard Howarth, an AI grad student that I had met at a Summer School in Aix-en-Provence a few years ago. Pleased by the surprise of meeting by chance someone I knew, in London of all places, I moved over to a seat near his and said hello.
We didn't talk much, because we were listening to the questions & answers, and because I was formulating the question I was going to ask about Laurie's participation in Peter Gabriel's Real World Experience Park. She gave an informative and humourous extended answer.
As the lights came up after the session, I turned to exchange pleasantries with Richard, but he was already in motion. "I want to talk to Eno", he said as he squeezed past my seat.
Now I had suspected that Brian Eno might be there that evening. I think a friend and co-worker, Matthew Elton had even speculated as much earlier that day at work when I had told him I was going. It was predictable, really: In addition to similar artistic interests, Eno had just produced Anderson's then-about-to-be-released album, Bright Red. And when I first arrived, I actively scanned the Dress Circle for any signs of him. I had to put the long-haired, leopard-skin-clad images of his dynamic early days with Roxy Music out of my mind, and focus on the two glimpses I had caught of his current, rather ordinary look: a brief interview on a late-night music programme, and his brief appearance in video segments on Peter Gabriel's Xplora1 CD ROM.
But I must have stopped scanning too quickly. Thank goodness Richard hadn't. Now I knew the real reason why he had moved forward to just that row of the balcony, and why he was moving now. I looked where he was headed and sure enough, Eno was there, in respectable tweed jacket, a few seats away to the right, in the row in front of mine. Before I could gather my things and get over there, Richard had already elicited an autograph from the master of the Oblique Strategies: Eno signed Richard's copy of "Stories From the Nerve Bible", Anderson's latest book which he had purchased in the lobby before the show, as had I.
The best I could do at this point was offer "Brian: I hear that you were visting one of my old haunts a few weeks ago. CCRMA, at Stanford?" It was true. My friend Avery Wang had emailed me about it: Eno had visited the Stanford Center for Computer Research into Music and Acoustics, where I once studied, and where Avery was now completing his PhD.
"Oh yes, yes. I had a great time there. Wonderful place." And with a smile, Eno and his companion moved away.
Still a bit shocked, I dithered. I saw Richard looking at the florid mark in the front of his book, and wondered if I should ask Eno to sign mine as well. Forget the fact that he had nothing to do with the book per se; I wanted his autograph. Or rather, I wanted an excuse to chat some more.
But by now, Eno was almost to the staircase down. Richard and I kept up, making sure we didn't lose him. We heard Eno comment on an imposing 17th century painting hanging on one of the staircase walls, "Yes, it is Rowan Atkinson". I looked and smiled with agreement. Especially in the white attire, it was a striking resemblance to the priest Rowan recently played in the hit film "Four Weddings and a Funeral".
Fortunately, Eno stopped at the first landing, ostensibly waiting for someone. I made my move, asking him to sign my book also. I again brought up CCRMA, asking if he had met Bill Shotstaedt, a computer-music composer there. Eno had not met him. I asked about John Chowning; Eno had met him, and that was one of the main reasons why he wanted to visit. He wanted to meet the man behind the DX-7 keyboard, which was the result of Chowning's pioneering work in FM synthesis. "I told him that I was still using the original DX-7 model", Eno said.
"But surely you didn't tell him why, right?"
One of the interests of the Philosophy of Cognitive Science group at the University Sussex, of which I am a member, is creativity. In particular, Matthew Elton has dicussed Eno's views on the creative process, especially his inclusion of chance elements into music as a means of facilitating creativity. The basic idea is: creativity is not so much in coming up with creations, as being able to select the good creations from the bad. So one can even use randomness to help come up with new works, as long as one is willing to search through the haystack of dross, in order to find the creative needle, so to speak.
Eno liked the original DX-7 because it was flawed: it would behave unpredictably. But this, for Eno, made what would have been an otherwise sterile, digital tool into an exciting and unpredictable source of creativity.
I thought maybe Eno would be reluctant to emphasize the DX-7's early flaws when meeting Chowning, the man behind the DX-7, but I was wrong.
Inwardly recalling Chowning's amiable disposition and generous nature, I asked: "Isn't John a sweetie?" Eno agreed. I then told Eno that at Stanford, the royalties from patents are divided three ways: one third goes to the university, one third to the inventors' department, and one third to the inventors themselves. Eno was sufficiently aware of the enormous wealth generated by FM synthesis in Yamaha keyboards to be impressed by Chowning's generosity when I told him that Chowning had donated his third to his department, to CCRMA.
I didn't want to intrude further on Eno's evening, so I pulled Richard away from him and said goodbye.