Altered Zones

By Max Burke

Morton Subotnick is a living legend. A composer, musician, and theorist, he is one of the pioneers of electronic music. His academic and artistic affiliations run deep and wide, from his role as a founding faculty member of the CalArts School of Music to his groundbreaking 1967 electronic LP, Silver Apples of the Moon, recently selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry. For over 50 years, Subotnick has exerted an incalculable influence on the development of new directions in computer music. I spoke to him just before his headlining, closing night performance at this year's Neon Marshmallow Festival in Chicago, where Subotnick performed alongside a lineup of outstanding current practitioners.

AZ: Can you tell me about your set-up for your current live show?

Morton: Well, I got in this afternoon and I'm using the Buchla 200e. It's about a forty-minute job patching it and so I spent this afternoon patching it here, getting everything started, and then I got some sleep. I flew in this morning and I have a plane at six o'clock tomorrow morning.

AZ: I saw the performance of Silver Apples of the Moon at Lincoln Center in New York for the Unsound Festival. That LP was originally commissioned and recorded specifically to fill two sides of an LP. You were asked to play the record live. How did you prepare for that?

Morton: Well, I didn't do that. I don't play it live, it's not a live performance. I use fragments from it, some long fragments. When I did Silver Apples, back in the '60s,  I was also doing public performances. I felt that the music on the record was for listening to in your living room and that what did in public would have to differentiate from that: a new music with a new medium. I decided that playing music live on electronics was sort of "retro" in a way, because you could play music with instruments; you didn't need electronics to play music. I'm talking 40, almost 50 years ago. So I was thinking about the future I would never see...

AZ: The future at the time you recorded Silver Apples of the Moon?

Morton: Yeah, looking at the future that I would never see, a hundred years down the line. What I thought was, what you can do spontaneously-- like in jazz, you have a chord structure and you're playing-- you could do, not as a performer, but as a composer-conductor. You could pre-compose, pre-create materials that you would spontaneously bring back. Not like a DJ, where you just decide what you're going to play and when, but literally materials that can be manipulated freely. So it's like the left hand of the conductor making it louder and softer, faster and slower, but in addition to that, stretching it, making it higher in pitch, modulating it, adding some materials. As I began to develop this over a period of time, I would have some materials that were underpinning [a given piece]; I would bring those in and make adjustments to them, and then weave other materials in and out on top of that.

AZ: This was your approach to playing recorded material live?

Morton: I never prepared a record for live performance. Live performance was always done the way I described. Then I stopped doing live performances because I felt the idea was good but I couldn't really develop it enough. I felt that I would end up having to use tape and I didn't want to bring tapes in an auditorium; what you could do with tapes wasn't all that much.

AZ: They couldn't be manipulated?

Morton: No, not all. Just barely. And there wasn't a computer around. Computers didn't come around until the '80s. I’m talking about the middle '60s through the '70s. So at the end of the '70s I decided I’d done as much as I could. The record part I felt I had done well, but the live part just wasn’t there technologically. So I went on and I started working with live instruments and large multimedia productions. Then, in the past 15 years the computer has gotten better and better and the potential has become much greater for it. So I started doing laptop stuff, but I felt that something was still missing.

AZ: It wasn't flexible enough?

Morton: It's flexible enough, but there was nothing really live. I tried to use virtual synths, but they're really not the same as what I was working with. The Buchla 200e was really it. In the last couple of years I’ve added the Buchla 200e, and I’m just getting a feel for it. I combine it with Ableton, and I decided the first thing to do was take my first record and my last record as the materials, and turn them into digital samples that I can manipulate in the program. I send them through the Buchla, and then add layers through the Buchla. So what I’m doing live is with the Buchla plus layering and the laptop-type stuff. I have a lot of new samples as well, but underneath the whole thing is a skeleton structure of Silver Apples of the Moon and A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur [1978] and other things I can bring in and out anytime. They’re just there and I have access to them with knobs and I can change the pitch and send them into the Buchla and pulse them along. Some of the stuff sounds like the original, although they are not the original, and some are part original, part new.

[Live at Neon Marshmallow Fest 2011; photo by Mike Shiflet]

AZ: When you were originally composing these pieces and you were frustrated with playing out live, did you ever imagine having the kind of technological set-up you're using tonight?

Morton: Yeah, I imagined they'd be there, and I talked about it at the time. Instead of improvising notes, or improvising the microcosm of the music. If you think about jazz, the whole structure is the tune, the chords. That's what Silver Apples and Sky of Cloudless Sulphur have become for me now. But what you're doing isn't simply playing off the chord structure. You're actually bringing new material in-- not microcosms of moments in a piece but the skeleton, a grand gesture that you get inspired by as you go along. What I dreamt of, what I saw, is a composer-conductor. It's not really that, but that's as close as I could think of. The important thing in live performance for me is you have to be spontaneously working, and that makes it very difficult. You prepare as much as you can-- like safety belts, things you can bring in when you need something and then move on.

AZ: But you have a familiar baseline to rely on?

Morton: Yeah, I break things into categories. The categories are based on aspects of Silver Apples: the beginning, part of the second side and then two or three moments of Sky of Cloudless Sulphur. I know where they are; they're on certain keys of my computer and I can bring them in whenever I need to. I don't have to do them in any order, but I've usually been working in the same order so far.

AZ: A lot of your career has been affiliated with institutions-- Mills College, CalArts, The San Francisco Tape Music Center – and the Neon Marhsmallow Fest is on the other end of the spectrum: a DIY, underground event in a rock music club. Did you ever imagine that you would be asked to headline a performance like this, on a bill with a lot of younger artists using modular synths and many of the technologies and techniques that you pioneered?

Morton: Well, it wasn't actually an academic career as such. It was more part-time. I was doing a lot of playing, really. But the scene right now is very different. I don't know exactly what it is, I can't put my finger on it. I did a tour-- six, seven, eight years ago-- when a couple of magazines said I was “the father of electronica.” I got picked up and went on a couple of electronica tours. It was the same kind of thing: big festivals in the US and Europe, but there wasn't a "scene." The closest I have done to this was the Knitting Factory in New York. The Knitting Factory invited me a number of years ago; I thought it was kind of an avant-garde pop scene, but they thought I was sort of a father figure for that. I don't know anything about the movements themselves and I was a little surprised when I got here. [The impetus for this current wave of shows] happened in Vienna; they were doing my opera, and they asked if I would do a performance, and it was similar to this-- in a club. Doing a set in an evening is something I'm not used to. I really don't understand it all [laughs]. I'm old enough to be some of these people's great-grandfathers. I feel like a time-traveler.

AZ: Did you imagine, 30 or 40 years ago, that your music would be heard and enjoyed by young people in this context?

Morton: No, I didn't expect it. I honestly did not. It's sort of interesting to me that it's happening. I thought at the time, in the '60s, that my vision was one of the future, but I didn't think it would happen so quickly. I thought it would be way off. I began to understand that it was going to be faster as time went on, but I was not expecting it to be quite this fast. My vision was for a generation that would grow up on a new technology down the line-- that was all I could talk about.

AZ: And that was the computer?

Morton: I didn't know exactly what it would be, but it was really the transistor and the ability to buy things cheaper. That meant that electronics were going to be in the hands of people who grew up with that technology. It wasn't necessarily gonna replace classical music or traditional music; that would continue, obviously. But for people who were left out, who were not interested in spending seven hours a day playing the piano and grew up with a different aesthetic-- new genres would arise. And my music would not be a model for that, I didn't think, because I grew up in a different world than the one they grew up in. I couldn't be what I thought would happen because my background was just too different. I was creating what I thought was a kind of singularity. I came out of a classical world, and I still am in that world, and I was creating a music that I liked out of that, but obviously with the sensibility of a trained musician. I couldn't be otherwise; that's what I was. So I am surprised that my music, actually, is meaningful to these people.

AZ: Is there any part of your sound or your outlook on music that you feel is distinctly Californian or West Coast?

Morton: Well, Silver Apples happened in New York. But the Buchla and all of that thinking early on in the late '50s […] My vision of music, my attitude probably grew more naturally on the West Coast. I think there is a difference, but I don't know what it is. I think there's more looseness about tradition in California-- and probably in Seattle, Portland, and the whole west Coast. You don't grow up with as much knowledge of tradition. I used to think that there was no real difference-- the difference was that in New York, anything you did would be talked about in the New York Times, and everybody read the Times; it imposes itself. But nobody really gives a darn what is said in the San Francisco Chronicle, or even the Los Angeles Times. I've read some terrible reviews I’ve got in the LA Times-- I won't mention his name, a music critic who gave everyone a hard time. It became a joke, and nobody paid any attention. Maybe people did, but the young artists didn't care. I think I thought that it mattered more in New York. But I'm beginning to think that probably was just my attitude, coming from California; I don't think it's really true.

AZ: That coastal insecurity works both ways.

Morton: I think there was a "big deal" about West Coast and East Coast in the '50s and '60s. When I got out of high school, I went to play in the Denver Symphony, so I was in the middle of the country and there I was-- 17, 18, 19, 20. Those years. I met Stan Brakhage, who had just gotten out of high school, and Jim Tenney had just gotten out of high school, and the three of us became like the Three Musketeers. Denver wasn't densely populated enough for a whole lot of people to come out of it, but we were doing a lot of really interesting things. That was 1951, '52. Looking back on it now, after that I went back to the West Coast to start the Tape Center. I was drafted and ended up in the Army there. There I met Pauline [Oliveros] and Ramon [Sender]and Terry Riley and La Monte Young. It sounds like a mantra of famous musicians, but they were just kids and we did our thing. All of us doing our individual thing, but we did our thing. Even Steve Reich, who is really a New Yorker, started in San Francisco and he was influenced no doubt by what was going on there with Terry and other people. He's really an East Coast composer but he happened to be on the West coast. John Cage did a lot of stuff on the West Coast, but I don't think of him as a West Coast composer. It may be that there is something there that makes it a little easier to do things. Maybe.