Morton Subotnick - Biography
Morton Subotnick is a man of firsts. The career of this composer and electronic music pioneer has been shaped by, and has helped shape, the course of developments in audio technology. From his earliest and most famous records made with one of the first modular synthesizers, to work based on instruments controlled by voltage and MIDI information and on to later music made with interactive computer music systems, Subotnick has always sought to merge technology and artistry. Almost all of his music utilizes computers or live electronic processing to great effect.
Born April 13, 1933 in Los Angeles, CA, Morton Subotnick began playing the clarinet at an early age. By twelve-years-old he was composing his first pieces. He went on to earn his BA from the University of Denver while performing on clarinet with the Denver Symphony. Directly after Denver, Subotnick moved to San Francisco to attend Mills College where he received his MA. At Mills, he studied composition from the likes of Leon Kirchner and Darius Milhaud, but it was perhaps his fellow students that helped to steer Subotnick toward what he would later accomplish.
While at Mills in the late 1950’s, Subotnick plunged into his earliest experiments with musique concrete and tape composition. These pieces were composed mostly for the Ann Halprin Dance Company, and in addition to including the manipulation of pre-recorded sounds on tape, Subotnick employed many junk objects to create sounds. He used close-miked spring coils, broken piano soundboards and gas tanks filled with water to create astonishing sounds during live performances. It is in his work with the dance company, that Subotnick would begin his fascination with pulse and rhythm, something that was absent from the great majority of musique concrete and electronic music at the time.
Needless to say, the sight (and sound) of these wild students banging on metal and leaping into the air, ruffled the feathers of many conservative professors at Mills. Feeling the need for refuge, Subotnick and several other students including Ramon Sender and Pauline Oliveros, as well as a few like-minded dancers, filmmakers and poets, founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1961. The center has become legendary for housing the most daring and far-out music and performance art of its time. In addition to its founders, many giants of 20th century avant-garde composition had tenures there, including Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Riley’s minimalist watershed “In C” made its world premier at the center in 1964.
Subotnick and Sender envisioned the center as a place where genre boundaries were dissolved; where totally new approaches to composition and performance were investigated; where the stuffy tradition of classical music vanished into a heady mix of light projections, dance, spoken word and all types of sound diverted through tape machines, strange mixers and effects processors. It was a marriage of DIY folk-art, serious composition and the earliest audio technology.
One of the most unknown and most important figures involved in the San Francisco Tape Music Center was Don Buchla, inventor of the Buchla Box. Buchla designed the box in 1963 with suggestions from both Subotnick and Sender. A giant modular synthesizer, the box was capable of both generating and processing sound. It could modify pitch, timbre, amplitude and the spatial location of a sound. It was one of the earliest of its kind, along with the first Moog synths, and Subotnick would go on to make his first commercially available music with the Buchla Box.
Subotnick moved to New York City in 1966 to assume a teaching position at New York University. During this time he also gained some acclaim for providing electronic music to a dance club called The Electric Circus. This and the reputation surrounding the San Francisco Tape Music Center brought him to the attention of Nonesuch Records. What happened next is a story of firsts. Supposedly a representative of Nonesuch, then a fledgling record company, showed up at Subotnick’s apartment to offer him a $500 advance to commission a specifically electronic piece for a recording. Having never heard of Nonesuch, Subotnick asked the man to leave. Later Subotnick did some hunting and found out that Nonesuch was indeed a new record company. Luckily the man came back to offer the composer $1,000 for the recording. This deal marks the first time in history that a piece of music was commissioned and written specifically for a record as opposed to a performance. It was also the first work of entirely electronic music ever commissioned.
The resulting record is probably the most famous of Subotnick’s career. Silver Apples of the Moon (1967 Nonesuch) was a shock to the system in 1967 on many levels. Pulling electronic music, which at the time was more of a vague idea than a solidified genre, out of the traditionally non-musical scrapes and clangs of musique concrete, Subotnick gave birth to sounds with a more orchestral tonality yet were imbued with infinitely elastic options of pitch, timbre and duration. Taking its cue from Edgard Varese’s electronic tone poems, Silver Apples of the Moon wildly stretched what had come before in terms of electronic music. The textures are dense and very harmonically rich, often building up into torrents of whirling tones that come across like brass and string instruments with drastically altered potential for creating sound. Its not exactly psychedelic music, but more like an orchestra playing unreal instruments in an alien scale.
The most important and drastic new development found on Silver Apples of the Moon comes directly from the abilities of Don Buchla’s synthesizer. The Buchla Box was the first modular synthesizer with sequencing capabilities. This was huge. Most electronic music drifted along, only concerned with pitch and timbre. If musique concrete concerned itself with obvious rhythm, the pulse had to be constructed painstakingly by hand, splicing tape. Subotnick’s record is filled with rhythm and pulse. A gloriously woozy marching band stumbles its way through the second movement of the piece, only to succumb to a chorus of pulsating insects. Sections like this in the record mark the way for abstract dance music, techno and IDM to come. The relative ease that these rhythmic elements could be created was due to Buchla’s sequencer. This advancement is inconceivably influential on today’s electronic music.
Silver Apples of the Moon, with its electronic pulse and limitless timbre potential, helped to usher in the age of home listening, an age where the stereo and the living room become the orchestra (or band) and concert hall. This notion would have obvious impact on the development of ambient music still nearly ten years away. Subotnick worked toward producing more music specifically designed for the home stereo. A long line of forward thinking recordings would result, starting with The Wild Bull (1968 Nonesuch).
Subotnick furthers his break with the academic avant-garde on The Wild Bull by adding more focused and complex rhythmic passages. Listening to the recording now, its freshness is amazing. The music has a timeless quality in that, like the best abstract music, it seems out of touch with any time and it could stand head to head with today’s most complex and tech-minded composers like Autechre or The Black Dog. This record feels primitive and futurist at once, and is arguably the most emotive of Subotnick’s work. Although his next record Touch (1969 Columbia, reissued on Mode Records as a surround sound DVD in 2001), which was recorded in Quad sound, comes in at a very close second.
Due to the unexpected success of Silver Apples of the Moon and The Wild Bull, Subotnick was able to create more music using the Buchla Box that was later released to further acclaim; Sidewinder (1971 Columbia) and Until Spring (1976 Columbia) both took his imagination with the synthesizer to higher technical realms, although the early work still radiates a certain raw abandon and wide-eyed magic.
Always striving to advance the artistic potential of his technology, Subotnick began working on what he came to call Ghost Electronics. This was an effects processor intended for live use that was based on pre-recorded control voltages. The control voltages were stored on a tape and with an instrumental performer playing though the Ghost Electronics boxes the voltages could alter certain aspects of the sound, such as pitch. In effect, the control voltages stored on tape became a kind of score that the performer was made aware of and, through rehearsing coordinated events, could play along with. Many pieces were composed for the Ghost Electronics setup during the late 70’s but the first release of this work was Axolotl/The Wild Beasts (1981 Nonesuch). This technique of live effects processing would reach its peak in 1981 when Subotnick composed “Ascent Into Air” on the 4C computer at IRCAM studios in France.
Since 1985 Subotnick has used consumer MIDI gear and computers to write and perform new work that has steadily integrated a stronger melodic element. While he still mainly focuses on electronic based music, he has composed pieces for symphony orchestra and chamber ensemble, including collaborations with his wife, singer Joan La Barbara. Other recent work includes 3 CDROM releases: All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis (1994), Making Music (1996) and Making More Music (1998). Teaching at CalArts since 1969, Subotnick has also designed a series of creative music tools on CDROM for children.
Predating so many musical events so early, Morton Subotnick has been a pioneer throughout his long career. What makes him not only a pioneer but also an artist is his timeless sense of composition, whatever the means and the medium of expressing it.
