Trained as a classical clarinetist, Morton Subotnick first dreamed up the idea of electronic music in the late 1950s, shortly after the invention of the transistor.
In the early 1960s, he helped found the San Francisco Tape Music Centre, "nonprofit cultural and educational corporation, the aim of which was to present concerts and offer a place to learn about work within the tape music medium," setting the stage for the idea of sampling. Along with his partner and friend, Don Buchla, he also helped create what has been called the first analog synthesizer. His 1967 album, Silver Apples of the Moon, was the first electronic work ever commissioned by a classical record label, Nonesuch Records. To talk to him about it, though, you'd think it was no big deal.
We caught up with Subotnick before his June 20 performance as part of Unsound Toronto.
How did you first get interested in electronic music?
I first got interested in the late 1950s, but it was around 1961 that I was trying to figure out how to deal with the new age that was about to unfold, with transistors and all that stuff. I tried to find some equipment I could use to sort of create — to try to mock up what I thought might be happening. I couldn’t do it, so I put an ad in the paper. One of the people that came was Don Buchla, and we designed a box for me, and for those of us at the Tape Center at the time, and so that was it. It’s often called the very first [synthesizer], but I don’t know.
You might have been involved in the creation of the first synthesizer?
It’s possible, I don’t know. One never knows. I was on a panel with Bob Moog, before he died, and I thought he had made his first, and he interrupted me as I was talking and said, "No, no, you were first." He had made some modules, but it was the first thought of putting everything together into one system, to be unified. That’s what he was giving us credit for.
So what were you looking for when you were putting together this possible first synth? What did you want it to do?
This thing happened at the end of the '50s, [the invention of] the transistor. ... And the Bank of America issued their first credit card around that period. So it was clear that something big was about to happen, vis-a-vis music, because everything was going to be really cheap, and if you didn’t have enough money, you could charge it. … So, what I was looking for was not to make new old music with electronics, because we already had instruments. ... Down the line, generations — 100, 150 years from that point, I figured, young people would grow up, using the technology, and creating yet another new music, that perhaps wouldn’t resemble anything we’d done before. It was a very exciting idea … the first thing I said to myself, and then to Buchla when we first started working together, was "I do not want a black-and-white keyboard." I don’t want the vestiges of an instrument from the past. I want to look at a brand new model for making music ... I didn’t call it a synthesizer, because I wasn’t synthesizing music. My name for it was an Electronic Music Easel.
That sounds like such a current idea How do you feel about electronic music now, and the equipment they’re using, and like, is this what you were kind of predicting, coming down the road, when you talked about this 50 years ago?
Well, I didn’t really try to predict anything. ... What I did know was that I wasn’t going to make the music that was going to be written down the line, because I was looking at people who didn’t start music when they were four years old, or five years old, that started music later and came up with a whole new paradigm for how to do it. But I couldn’t be that person, I was already completely inundated in the history of music and all of that stuff.
Following the release of [Silver Apples], I came up with the idea that what I really wanted to do was to be a kind of composer/performer in real time. Instead of playing the music directly, I would create a sound palette that I would then organize in real time, and add to it and change things as I’m going. Silver Apples was very successful, so I was invited places to play, and I didn’t have an idea of what a live performance would be, because I thought I would do it in my studio and it would go out as a record. ... So I started gathering up all the tapes, and various kinds of things, plus the Buchla, and I would organize things on the stage. I would have all the materials that I’d been working with, and sort of map out ways of organizing them spontaneously on the stage. What you end up with is a model for the DJ. The DJ doesn’t do much of playing music, he uses existing materials, stuff that he might or might not have made, and organizes them. But the concept is very similar to what you might think of as a DJ.
Morton Subotnick plays as part of Unsound Toronto on June 20.
by Chris Dart via Electronic RSS
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