The Ambient Century : From Mahler to Moby–The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age
Mark Prendergast
2003
Bloombury USA
$19.95
500 pp.

Ambient Century is an encyclopedic history of ambient music that actually lives up to the media snippets on the jacket. The lengthy history is encylopedic because it both exhaustively traces the evolution of ambient music and the information is presented in entry form, with each entry explaining a specific musician or band. As the title suggests, it begins with Mahler and closes with Moby, which should be enough range, temporarlly and musically, to satisfy anyone interested in this distinctively 20th century type of music.

The book is laid out in four sections, with both the sections and their entries proceeding in mostly chronological order. The first section, “The Electronic Landscape,” begins with Mahler and leads into the 1960s. Entries are excellently written, aiming to provide historical and personal context for each musician, but focusing on the intellectual/theoretical and technological contributions that advance ambient music’s history. This approach makes the book’s first section the strongest and most informative.

The second section covers the most interesting period of ambient music, namely the 1960s through the 1980s when minimalism matured and blossomed. This is perhaps the most interesting section, with the writing, ideas, and explanations of the innovations flowing. The only criticism I have of the section is Pendergast’s love for Eno’s work becomes particularly visible in this section. But to suggest that Eno’s importance is overstated is dangerous and so I prefer to sit quiety wishing that the other minimalists’ influences were better carried through the rest of the book.

The third section is titled “Ambience In the Rock Era.” The most disappointing section, Prendergast mostly abandons tracing the innovations of the music and, instead, focuses on describing the sounds used during this era. While this could have been connected to the serialists introduced earlier, making for a neatly packaged account, he does not. Instead, readers are left with long entries on acts whose connection and reason for multiple mentions is unexplained. A particularly bad, for Pendergast, example of this is The Rolling Stones, whose primary contribution to ambient music was Mick Jagger’s purchase of an early Moog synthesizer, which he did nothing with but it later ended up in the hands of Christoph Franke (Tangerine Dream). Tedious connections like these belong in a trivia book, not a serious text.

Furthermore, we are introduced to Prendergast’s ego in this chapter, as he routinely makes it known that he interviewed this or that person and this is what he (there are few shes in this story) said or did. Pendergast’s conflating of music history and autobiography reaches a highpoint in the entry introducing “Krautrock” bands. Correctly criticizing the use and generally accepted history of the term, Pendragast goes too far by reflaming an old fire between he and other music journalists of the period. During this chapter, readers are left wondering if they’ve left a sober account of a music’s teenage years for an axe grinding session about a period and music that has long since passed.

The book’s slide continues in the shortest and last section,”House, Techno, And Twenty-First-Century Ambience” (he never does reach the twenty-first century, though). Although Pendergast returns to the music’s history, rather than the blips and whirs being used in it, the section reads as a race to the finish (perhaps the author was facing a looming deadline?). Despite this, he manages to re-engage readers by focusing on the specific conditions (e.g., historic period and geographic region) that shaped ambient music and it’s offshoots. This cultural, rather than intellectual/theoretical (e.g., the first section) or sound-based (e.g., the second section), narrative is effective and could have added to the second section.

The fourth section’s shortness is not as detrimental as it might seem, mainly because entries switch from primarily being about individual acts to bringing out the history and background to ambient’s sub-genres and offshoots. This provides a much less in-depth narrative, but is preferred to the shallow and self-centered approach taken in the third section of the book. The last issue with this third section is that the musicians tend be commercial successes and/or well known. I wonder whether there was a commercial motive behind the lack of attention on less-popular artists and movements.

The criticisms of the book, however, should not take away from Pendergast’s exhaustive account of a century of music. His writing is solid and knowledge fantastic. Because the book is laid out in encylcopedic form, it makes skimming through the weaker sections and concentrating on the first section and particular bands or periods easy. Furthermore, Pendergrast provides a “Listening” section for most entries, so you can follow up and listen to that band’s most important or best material without doing the legwork yourself.

All in all, the book was a solid read and exceeded my expectations, often because the music was presented in an unpretentious and hipster manner–something most music books can not do. The greatest and most accurate compliment, however, can be found among the numerous review quotes on the book’s cover, where a Boston Globe review concludes that “The Ambient Century does what the best music books should do: It makes you hungry to hear the notes again.”