Subotnick peforming in San Francisco. Images: Max Cherney
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Morton Subotnick: I’m taking materials from over 15 years; from Silver Apples of the Moon to A Sky of Cloudless Sulfur Revisited. I’m just finishing up Lucy, and it’s taken me four years.Lucy has to do with pitch—the ability to gesture with pitches, as an empathic meeting ground. Pitch is intimate, it draws you in, it has to do with direct communication.But Rhythm draws people into becoming one, you loose yourself, rather than finding yourself, and rhythm turns you into a large group. The large group becomes a single entity.The tension between those two things is essentially the tension between large cultural entities. Nations fighting nations. When they all march together like a machine, we’re like bees or ants, we’re drawn in. But we wouldn’t be where we are without the two of them.
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See Motherboard's video about Subotnick, which (trivia alert!) was one of the first videos we produced.
What’s happened to me with all the newer technology is that it makes the dream of a studio artist, and the journey I began in 1959, much easier.Sometimes it’ll alter what I’m doing too, because sometimes a technology will be very good at doing something that I haven’t thought of. But, it’s not like I’m coming at it as most people would—I know what I want to do today, so the question I have always had is what do you have that will allow me to do it?It’s been a wonderful time to see these things happen.That’s what I thought about the technological big bang, that the transistor was going to be cheap, that technology was going to be cheap.
Incidentally, when we were getting going in the 60s, Bank of America issued its first credit card at the time, so you didn’t even need money to buy technology, you could put it on credit.Have faster and efficient processors, RAM, etc. made it easier for you to achieve the goals you set out to achieve?What’s happened to me with all the newer technology is that it makes the dream of a studio artist, and the journey I began in 1959, much easier.
The vision I had was of an invisible technology, that it would be so straightforward that one would just sing and it would work. I did eventually get there, but it took a lot of work, a lot of wires.
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Subotnick's performance setup.
The black and white keyboard—even if I say “play anything you want,” you can only play what the instrument is capable of. A chromatic scale for example, and so on and so forth.The instrument evolved, and in hand with the music. The relationship between a normal instrument and sheet music is one to one, it’s as the Buchla [the machine, not the man] is to me. And so the music you write that does belong to the instrument. The role of electronics meant something else. It took a good 15 years to even understand what that might mean.
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I don’t have a fetish about analog versus digital. I mean, we didn’t have digital, so everything was analog. One of the things that focused me at the time was that I realized I was alive at a moment like when the printing press was invented, or writing, or language. Everything would be different.The point here is that I had an image of what I thought I wanted at that point—I started thinking about it in 1959, but I got very serious in the fall of 1961. Just really focused on a a particular idea of what a composer could be in what I call the “technological big bang.”
It sounds so obvious at this point but the new paradigm then allowed the composer to act, in effect, like a studio artist—a painter, for example. The composer wouldn’t have to write, and take it out to musicians to perform it for audience in order to hear his work. Through a recording you would have something like a painting.The concept then was to find some kind of machine to do it on. But at the time there wasn’t anything. We tried and tried with everything, putting things together, and working with engineers. But nothing worked. So it seemed like we were going to have to start from scratch and make something.Through a recording you would have something like a painting.