Other Minds Concert 2: Subotnick Still At It

Last night in the Taube Atrium Theatre in the Veterans Building, Other Minds presented the second of the four concert programs prepared for Festival 27. The first half of the program was devoted to a single composition by Morton Subotnick, “As I Live & Breathe,” performed in a setting of projected images designed and realized by Lillevan. Subotnick and Lillevan have been taking this production on tour, and last night served as the conclusion of that tour.

Subotnick is one of the pioneers of the migration of electronic music into the domain of digital computers. Mind you, one of the earliest efforts took place at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, when a mainframe IBM computer generated a digital output that reproduced audible sound waves. The high point of that effort was the creation of a large digital file, which, when processed by a digital-to-analog converter, reproduced the sound of a voice singing “Daisy Bell” (better known to many as “Bicycle Built for Two”) with modest instrumental accompaniment. (Stanley Kubrick immortalized that achievement by reproducing it in 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

The Buchla 100 series modular synthesizer that Morton Subotnick probably used in his studio in lower Manhattan (from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

I first met Subotnick in lower Manhattan when I was working on my doctoral thesis, exploring how the emerging technique of parallel processing could enable software synthesizing polyphonic music. At that time he was working with Leon Kirchner, whose third string quartet included an obligato “voice” of electronic music recorded on tape. Kirchner invited my advisor, Marvin Minsky, and I to visit Subotnick’s studio for a discussion about computer-based synthesis. Kirchner’s quartet would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize. Subotnick would become an “icon” of popular electronic music with the release of Silver Apples of the Moon.

Subotnick’s technology consisted primarily of Buchla Electronic Musical Instruments. He first became acquainted with them while working at the San Francisco Tape Music Center with Ramon Sender. They provided the “nuts and bolts” for his studio in Manhattan when he synthesized the tape accompaniment for Kirchner’s quartet. Last night I was delighted to see that Subotnick was still working with the functionality of that gear, but he could now realize his efforts with an Apple laptop computer. (Lillevan had a similar computer for providing the images.)

It should now be evident to the reader that watching Subotnick at work opened the gates for a flood of memories. Nevertheless, there was a freshness to the experience, perhaps due to the environment of images evoked by Lillevan. My guess is that, had I the opportunity to experience a second performance of “As I Live & Breathe,” I would find it as fresh a journey of discovery as my encounter last night had disclosed.

Sadly, freshness did not carry over to the set following the intermission. Three compositions by Linda Bouchard, “Murmuration,” “Pandemonium,” and “Gathering,” were performed by Ensemble TriOcular +, for which they were all composed. As can be guessed, this is a trio; but it is a rather unconventional one. Two of the members are clarinetists, François Houle on the familiar B-flat instrument and Lori Freedman playing bass and contrabass clarinet. They are joined by Charlotte Hug on viola, who is also a vocalist.

While this was a full-set performance, it did not take long (less than ten minutes?) for my attentiveness to be summarized as, “Yep, I get it!” Needless to say, the set lasted for more than ten minutes; and, where my “subjective time” was concerned, it felt like it went on forever. While Subotnick could transition smoothly across the diversities of both sonority and thematic content, Bouchard’s compositions were disconcertingly static and repetitive. As was the case on Wednesday evening, this was another performance that had little to say and took far too much time to say it.