Interview With Morton Subotnick

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Interview with Morton SubotnickAuthor(s): Curtis Roads and Morton SubotnickSource: Computer Music Journal, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 9-18Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3679833 .

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Morton Subotnick at theBleecker Street Studio,New York, 1967. Photo-graph by Jules Fischer.

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it accepted or did you have to fight for legitimacy?Subotnick: The tape music was actually fairly wellaccepted at that time because it had been codified byEurope and by the work being done at the Columbia-Princeton electronic music studio. But I was doingthings that were electronic and also theatrical. Thecombination of the electronic and theatrical causedthe most furor. We were literally kicked out of theSan Francisco Conservatory at that time.Roads: What year was this?

Subotnick: Around 1959.Roads: And from that experience with tape musicand theater, what did you do when you were kickedout of the Conservatory?Subotnick: I wasn't kicked out of the Conservatorypersonally. Pauline Oliveros, Ramon Sender, and Istarted a studio there. The electronic music studiowas kicked out.Roads: It was called the San Francisco Tape MusicCenter?Subotnick: Not yet. Our departure rom the Con-servatory was our reason for founding the San Fran-

cisco Tape Music Center. We were kicked out ofthe Conservatory and had to find our own way.Roads: What would you say was the common aes-thetic thread that linked you at that time? Whatmade it different, for example, from the CologneStudio?Subotnick: Our collaboration was not in creativeworks, but in the studio tself-a center or thecreation of new works. The mutual thread betweenus was a distinct break rom the post-Webern erialtradition as we saw it at that time. The group n-

cluded loose network fpeople:Ramon ender,Terry Riley, SteveReich, myself and a few otherpeople. John Chowning was a peripheral memberof this group.Roads: I didn't know he had any involvement withthe San Francisco Tape Music Center.Subotnick: He was a percussionist and he played invarious performances of works by members of thegroup.Roads: What pieces did you compose during yourSan Francisco period?Subotnick: They were all multimedia pieces. The

first one I did at the Tape Center was originally calledTheater Piece After Petrarch's Sonnet Number 47.The piece was written for two dancers, a child, anda grand piano that does not play. It was the firstpublic use of a light show based on liquidprojections.Roads: Was this the era of the famous"Happenings"?Subotnick: Yes.Roads: How does your long association with the-atrical productions affect your music aesthetics?Subotnick: My first theater piece, even before the

Petrarch work, was Sound Blocks-An Heroic Vi-sion. Working on that piece altered my musical per-ception. It was a large, full evening work that usedlighting, an actor, several musicians, and tapemusic playing on two tape recorders. The process ofworking on it and the relationship with the audi-ence and the performance aspects completely moldedmy vision-up through my present work.Roads: Indeed. You're urrently working on an operathat involves multimedia?Subotnick: Right. Hungers is being premiered inSeptember 1987 at the Los Angeles Festival. It has

10 Computer Music Journal

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Morton Subotnick settingup the Ritual Game Room,1974. Photograph by JohnMillaire.

Morton Subotnick inBleecker Street Studio,New York where the TheWild Bull was created(1968).

Joan La Barbara s the soloist, a Balinese dancer,three musicians, and is a collaboration with videoartist Ed Emshwiller.

The New York Period

Roads: After the San Francisco period, you movedto New York. How did this happen?Subotnick: Starting n the late 1950s I'd becomemusic director of the Actor's Workshop. I was alsomusic director of the Ann Halprin Dance Companyin San Francisco. When Lincoln Center opened inNew York n 1965, the Actor's Workshop peoplewere asked to come and start the Repertory Theaterat Lincoln Center. They asked me to be the musicdirector n New York. They put together a packagefor me as music director at the Repertory Theater

and artist-in-residence at the New York UniversitySchool of the Arts. At first I commuted betweenSan Francisco and New York. In 1966 I finallymoved to New York.Roads: What was the new music climate like inNew York at that time?Subotnick: It seemed to me that the distinction be-tween the "uptown" and "downtown" scenes wasvery strong. The downtown environment was verymodest at the time compared to what it is now.John Cage and his friends were working but there

was not a lot of other activity. The Kitchen had notyet started.Roads: Did you fit into either of the groupscomfortably?Subotnick: I was friends with Mario Davidovskyand Vladimir Ussachevsky, so I had no problemswith the Columbia-Princeton studio. But I did notfeel comfortable with the so-called post-Webernmovement, which was very strong at that time.

I was associated with the downtown scene. I notonly felt comfortable with it, I was a part of thewhole "McLuhanesque" world around the Electric

Roads 11







Morton Subotnick, LosAngeles (1986). Photo-graph by Keith Holzman.

Circus. It was not just fine art music, but also afeeling of integrating with the public, which is oneof the hallmarks of the downtown movement.Roads: Tell us more about the Electric Circus.What was happening there?Subotnick: The Electric Circus followed what wehad done at the San Francisco Tape Music Centerfor the Fillmore West. The multimedia shows forFillmore West were realized by members of theTape Music Center, especially the visuals by TonyMartin.

By the time I went to New York, the Electric Cir-cus was about to open. It was as if there was a five-year time lag The multimedia aspect of what wasgoing on in San Francisco for five years was aboutto hit New York. I was asked if I could put togethera group to help them coordinate the technology forboth the light show and the sound. I brought TonyMartin to New York to do the light show. We alsobrought Donald Buchla.

Collaboration ith Donald Buchla

Roads: When did your collaboration with DonaldBuchla begin?Roads: In 1962. We began working on what we(Ramon Sender and I) thought was going to be the"composer's blackbox."Roads: What was the feeling in that time? Wasthere a feeling that you were at the dawn of a newera and that this instrument was the most powerfulinstrument ever created?Subotnick: We knew that it was the beginning of anera. We also knew that those synthesizers were not

the most powerful instruments that could be cre-ated. We also knew that the era was evolving be-yond pure studio work like cutting tape.

If you look at the first Buchla synthesizer thatwas used at Mills College-the ones I used inSilver Apples of the Moon and The Wild Bull are aduplicate of that one-you see that the sequencerwas built into the whole concept.

My keyboard was not a black-and-white keyboardbut was a programmable keyboard right from thebeginning. The sequencer was conceived as a pro-gramming device. I used three sequencers: two 16-

stage and one 8-stage sequencer. They were inter-connected in long elaborate patches that were notloose and unstructured, but rather forward-movingprogrammed processes.

At that time my feeling about the technologywas that we were at a threshold of a new age. Butwhat we were doing with the analog synthesizerwas, in effect, simply a stopgap measure until sucha time that it would be more complete. We couldvisualize today's situation without difficulty. Wedidn't know how much time it would take to real-ize it, but one could see where the vision was goingto be. It's been very exciting to me. I've been elatedfor the last several years. I was able to step into thenew MIDI technology with ideas that have notbeen tested, since I was already thinking alongthese lines 20 years ago.








Morton Subotnick workingin home studio, SantaMonica, California, 1984.Buchla 400 synthesizer inthe background. Photo-graph by Koji Takei.

Early Electronic Music Pieces

Roads: Can you tell us a bit about your early elec-tronic music pieces with the Buchla synthesizer,beginning with Silver Apples of the Moon and TheWild Bull?Subotnick: At that time I was working on what Iconsider to be "studio art." I was trying to createwhat was particular to the new way of working inone studio-to create a complete piece, ready to beplayed by anyone. When you finished it was not

goingto be

interpreted bya

performer.I knew this was chamber music of some sort, be-cause it was not public in the sense that it wasgoing to be performed anywhere. It would exist ona record. My approach o composition was to go tomy studio every day, six days a week, twelve hoursa day, and simply create. All the works somehowcame together through editing andsplicing andthinking and then I would have a piece that wasthat year's work.

That is the way Silver Apples of the Moon, TheWild Bull, and Touch were realized. I had no designon a

large piece.It took me months and months be-

fore I began to get any sense that there was a pieceemerging.Roads: What is the relation between the text andthe music in The Wild Bull?Subotnick: The text came after the music. I was inChicago. The music had to have a title. I am veryinterested in anthropology so I went to an archeo-logical museum and found this text. It seemed ab-solutely perfect for the music. I went back andadded the first sounds of the piece after reading thetext: the cry of the wild bull. Other than that, the

piece was already complete.

Touch

Roads: ould ou describe he structure fyourwork Touch?Subotnick: The Wild Bull, then Touch, and everypiece thereafter took the form of the long-play (LP)record: they were two-part forms, side one and sidetwo.

In The Wild Bull, I had a male side and a female

side. In Touch it was a little more structural inthat side one was essentially an inside-out versionof side two. Side one goes fast-slow-fast; the otherside goes slow-fast-slow. The idea came to me totake the materials and somehow expand them ac-cording to this structure.

I had a mystical view of the record, like it had

some kind of spiritual force and was very magical.I always thought I was in the 29th Century whenyou put this record on and like in the film Forbid-den Planet the entire front part of your living roomlights up with sound. The spirit of the artist is inthat record. Turning over the record was going in-side another part of the being.'

The other aspect of Touch was that the wordTouch itself had terrific connotations. It had theidea of touching and not touching, of becomingclose and not becoming close, making contact withpeople and not making contact with people, and the

word had a three-part orm: t-ou-ch. It has the sibi-lance of the "ch," the vowel "ou," and the strikingquality of "t." So one side is "t-ou-ch," and theother side puts "t" in the middle. All the thingsthat touch meant gradually became the piece.

CalArts

Roads: What led you to California Institute of theArts?Subotnick: I was at the New York University

Roads 13







Morton Subotnick duringthe recording of Jacob'sRoom, Metamusic studio,Los Angeles, July 1987.Photograph by CurtisRoads.

School of the Arts and the Dean, Robert Corrigan,was going to become head of a new school for the

arts in California. They offered me the opportunityto come to Los Angeles o help plan the instituteitself-an institute of the arts, and not a school ofthe arts. There was no institute like what I thoughtthere should be. It was an opportunity to put mythoughts nto action.

I worked hard at it. What was different bout CalArts was that it was designed as an institute andnot a school, with grades and degrees and so on.Working artists would be provided with facilitiesand young artists would come and work alongsidethem in a kind of wonderful tmosphere. That was

the vision that most of us shared at that time. Theclosest thing to it was Black Mountain College, butthat was only a summer institute.Roads: What made you decide o leave Cal Arts andmove to New Mexico?Subotnick: I never intended to stay at Cal Arts. Theconcept of the institute was that no one would stay.Artists would come and go.

I never believed n earning my living doing otherthan music. Eventually found hat Cal Arts tooktoo much of my time and that living in a major city

meant earning more money than I could afford tofrom my own devices. You wind up teaching anddoing other jobs just to live in the city. Joan La Bar-bara, my wife, earns her money primarily from con-certizing and I earn money from commissions andappearances. We wanted o be in an environmentthat we loved and he overhead ad o be ow enoughto let us live from our music.

Composing or Ephemeral nstruments

Roads: When I studied with you in the 1970s youwere working with analog ynthesizers ontrolledby voltages stored on tape and ed into the syn-thesizers. As the years go by it is becoming moredifficult o reproduce he setup required or yourpieces of that era. The same situation s happeningtoday with rapidly-evolving igital nstruments.Given the rapid pace of technological bsolescence,are you concerned bout he obsolescence f yourscores?Subotnick: No. I think it is very possible hat someof my scores will become obsolete. This can be thecase with any score though, and f something sstrong and significant we find a way to put it backtogether. But I don't compose music to be heard na billion years. My urge s to create an expressiveart, with the technology of our time.

In our time, with the global changes hat are oc-curring, we are at the threshold of a new way ofliving together. t's not that I know what the newway is. But with global rends of overpopulation,pollution, and the breakdown f social and geopo-litical boundaries, major hange s inevitable. tmay be much worse than now or it may be moreutopian. My art expresses my feelings about humanpotential and the human spirit. Mastering he tech-nology for aesthetic and spiritual nds s one waythat the turnaround an be made more utopian,rather han a horror tory.

Jacob's Room

Roads: Tell us about your new composition Jacob'sRoom.








Subotnick: Jacob's Room is a monodrama writtenespecially for Joan La Barbara. t was originallycommissioned by Betty Freeman, a long-time sup-porter, for the Kronos Quartet and Joan. I had spenta lot of time with pure tape pieces and pure instru-mental pieces, and I was ready to move back tomore theatrical things. I was looking for a naturaltext to create a monodrama.

Our little boy Jacob was going to be born. Weknew he was going to be a boy and we knew hewas going to be called Jacob. For some reason, we

thought we could read a lot of books while waitingfor the baby to be born in the hospital. So we tooka lot to the hospital. Among them was VirginiaWoolf's Jacob's Room, and it was obviously thepiece. I had not read it yet. The Kronos Quartetwanted the program notes a year in advance, so Igave them the title Jacob's Room and read the bookafterwards. read it three times and realized therewas nothing in it that could lend itself to a text.

I finally came to a passage, which, in its implicitinability to recognize reality, led to the use of mul-tiple texts. The novel deals with western civiliza-tion entirely from the standpoint of the intellect,nonvisceral, noncontact intellect.Roads: Tell us about the plot of the monodrama.Subotnick: The drama of Jacob's Room starts in theBritish Museum. It moves out the window and intothe street. Virginia Woolf lets us know that Jacobwas unaware that things were going on out there.

Part two of the drama goes on to a text drawnfrom Nicholas Gage's Eleni where a little boylearns of his mother's death at the hands of theGreek communists. It moves on to a point whereanother little boy in a railroad car on the way to theNazi death camps sees a man killed by his own sonover a piece of bread. This was adapted from ElieWiesel's book Night.

The final part of the drama returns to Jacob'sroom and finds Jacob reading Phaedrus, which talksabout "perfect justice." I took this kernel passagefrom Plato's Symposium to pit the irony of perfectjustice against the reality of the deaths that havejust taken place. Virginia Woolf says, in an under-stated fashion, "Jacob walks to the window andsees clearly for the first time that it is raining." So

Jacob sees, for the first time, that something doesgo on outside.

Jacob's Room: The Opera

Roads: Your atest project is a large-scale operabased on the chamber work.Subotnick: Yes. I added a cellist (Erika Duke) forthe compact disk version of the monodrama andthe opera uses the chamber work as the openingand part of the ending. The orchestration of theopera has changed from a string quartet to com-puter-controlled synthesizer and three cellos. Theopera features Joan and eight other singers, includ-ing a young boy.

In some respects, this is the most interestingwork with technology that I have done to date.Through the music, I sought a direct attack on themeaning of the text. The conductor leads the com-puter with a baton, and the cellos and singer followalong as well. The digitally-synthesized instru-ments are all trying to achieve the twangs ofMiddle-Eastern nstruments. I find these instru-ments interesting because they imitate the voice,with their cries and nasal qualities.

I'm proud of the creation of those instruments,and in performance, he technology becomes trans-parent. I can make it sound as though there is notechnology. It's very expressive and you often losesight of the fact that it is all electronic. It harksback to detuned instruments, wails, cries, andplucked sounds.Roads: So you are taking advantage of the technol-ogy's spatial and timbral manipulations but you aremerging these possibilities with the expressivitythat is now possible.Subotnick: Yes. I am using the technology in twoways that makes the digital instruments more ex-pressive than traditional instruments. One is that Ican program hem myself. I can bring my perfor-mance background o bear and perfect each gesturein the studio and store it on a MIDI sequencer. Sec-ond, the digital instruments are flexible enough togo beyond any individual traditional instrument.Sometimes they are vocal-like, sometimes they are

Roads 15







percussive, and sometimes they are string-like--and yet they still create the effect of emanatingfrom a single instrument.

Reflections n the Future

Roads: What is your musical direction after Jacob'sRoom?Subotnick: I'm working in one large direction, en-tailing two things. It all deals with performance. Iam building an integrated and responsive environ-ment that merges performance and technology. In itthe technology is aware of and responds to the per-formers. And I also am moving toward composi-tions that are large in scope-operatic is not theright word-but operatic in the sense of evening-long performances hat use large forces and dealwith major issues that affect many people. If theyare not theatrical in the primary sense, like mySaxophone Concerto, they are still large in scale.

I still go into my studio and just work. Part of thematerials I generate will be used in a saxophoneconcerto and other materials will go into anotherwork. I see composing like an archeological expedi-tion. Everything we can be is within us. There isnothing that we can be that is not already there. Weare genetically coded and complete. But the discov-ery of the coded fragments is a life-long pursuit.You search within yourself by working hard everyday and find these pieces and try to put them to-gether. I am trying to piece together the psyche ofMorton Subotnick, and I hope to finish before I die.

Appendix : Chronology f Works

1956 PRELUDE NO. 1 (The Blind Owl)for piano. (ms.) 7'

1596 PRELUDE NO. 2 (The Feast)for piano (ms.) 4'

1958 MR. AND MRS. DISCOBOLOSfor clarinet, violin, violoncello, narrator,mime and tape (ms.) 15'

1959 SERENADE NO. 1for clarinet, flute, vibraphone, violon-cello,

piano,and mandolin.

(ms.)11'

1960 THE BALCONYtape (incidental theater music)

1960 KING LEARtape (incidental theater music)

1961 SERENADE NO. 2for clarinet, horn, piano, and percussion.(ms.) 12'

1961 SOUND BLOCKSAn heroic vision for violin, violoncello,xylophone, marimba, tape, lights, andnarrator ms.) 50'

1961-63 MANDOLINfor viola, tape, and 16 mm film

1962 PRELUDE NO. 3for piano and tape

1963 THE FIVE-LEGGED TOOLtape (dance score)

1963 PLAY NO. 1for woodwind quintet, piano, tape, andfilm

1963 TENfor 10 instruments (revised 1976)

1964 GALILEOtape (incidental theater music)

1964 PLAY NO.2for orchestra, conductor, and tape

1965 THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLEfor male narrator-singer, female sing-ers, percussion, mandolin, and accordion(incidental theater music)

1965 PLAY NO. 3for pianist/mime, tape, and 16 mm film

1965 PLAY NO. 4for soprano, vibraphone, cello, 4 gameplayers, 2 game conductors, and two 16mm films

1965-66 DANTON'S DEATHtape (incidental theater music)

1966 PRELUDE NO. 4for piano and tape

1967 SILVER APPLES OF THE MOONtape

1967 LAMINATION FOR ORCHESTRAAND ELECTRONIC SOUNDS

1967 PARADES AND CHANGES

tape (dance score)








1968 REALITY I/II 1981tape

1968 SERENADE NO. 3for 4 players and tape 1981

1968 THE WILD BULLtape

1969 TOUCH 1981tape

1971 SIDEWINDERtape

1973 FOUR BUTTERFLIES 1982tape

1974 TWO BUTTERFLIESfor amplified orchestra 1982

1975 BEFORE THE BUTTERFLYfor orchestra and 7 amplifiedinstruments 1982

1975 UNTIL SPRINGtape

1977 LIQUID STRATA 1982version for piano and an electronic ghostscore

1977 TWO LIFE HISTORIES 1982for clarinet, male voice, and an elec-tronic ghost score

1978 THE LAST DREAM OF THE BEAST 1982from THE DOUBLE LIFEOF AMPHIBIANSversion for female voice and an elec- 1983tronic ghost score

1978 PARALLEL INES 1984for piccolo, an electronic ghost score,and 9 players 1985

1978 PASSAGES OF THE BEASTfor clarinet and an electronic ghost score

1978 A SKY OF CLOUDLESS SULPHUR 1986tape

1978 THE WILD BEASTS 1986for trombone, piano, and an electronicghost score

1979 AFTER THE BUTTERFLY 1986-87for trumpet, an electronic ghost score,and 7 players 1987

1979 PLACEfor orchestra

1980 THE FIRST DREAM OF LIGHTfor tuba and an electronic

ghostscore

ASCENT INTO AIR from THEDOUBLE LIFE OF AMPHIBIANSfor 11 instruments with computerAXOLOTLversion for solo cello and an electronicghost scoreTHE FLUTTERING OF WINGS fromTHE DOUBLE LIFE OF AMPHIBIANSfor string quartet with or without anelectronic ghost scoreAN ARSENAL OF DEFENSE

for solo viola and an electronic ghostscoreAXOLOTLversion for solo cello, an electronicghost score, and chamber orchestraAXOLOTLversion for solo cello, an electronicghost score, and chamber ensembleTHE LAST DREAM OF THE BEASTversion for soprano voice, an electronicghost score, and chamber orchestraTHE LAST DREAM OF THE BEASTversion for soprano voice, an electronicghost score, and chamber ensembleLIQUID STRATAversion for piano, an electronic ghostscore, and orchestraTREMBLINGviolin, piano, ghost scoreJACOB'S ROOMversion for string quartet and voiceTHE KEY TO SONGSchamber ensemble and digitalsynthesizerRETURNcomputer-controlled digital synthesizerJACOB'S ROOMversion for voice, cello, and computer-controlled digital synthesizerHUNGERSoperaIN TWO WORLDSsaxophone concerto

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Interview With Morton Subotnick

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