"Sometimes my contribution [as a record producer] might have been as minimal as just saying, 'Shall we stop for a few minutes?... And then of course, other times I work like a normal musician. I say, 'Why don’t we have a G major instead of that B minor' or whatever. In fact, I nearly always say that, 'Why don’t we have a major instead of a minor?' It’s part of my destroy-minor-chords crusade that has been going on for 50 years or so"
- Brian Eno
Questions for people who know music from a musician's point of view:
- why would Eno take against minor chords? (Is it because they connote a "subtlety" that he finds middebrow, a too easy signaling of sophistication?)
- does Eno in fact avoid minor chords in his work? I haven't inspected them with this in mind (and not wholly confident I would spot their presence) but I can't help thinking that the downbeat, dreamy-drifty songs on Another Green World and Before and After Science might feature some minor chords...
I lack the musical expertise to answer your question, I am afraid, but I love the quote. It reminds me of a great moment in the version of the aleatory Eno documentary that I saw, where David Bowie is being interviewed about him. He says (paraphrasing from memory): “You don’t write the music and lyrics: I do that. You don’t play the instruments: the band does that. You don’t do the production and engineering: Tony Visconti does that. So what do you do? Yeah, actually: what do you do?”
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