MORTON SUBOTNICK (born in Los Angeles, California, April 14, 1933) is
one of the acknowledged pioneers in the field of electronic music
and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media.
He was the first composer to be commissioned to write an electronic
composition expressly for the phonograph medium, Silver Apples
of the Moon (Nonesuch, 1967). [Photo of LP jacket is shown
farther down on this webpage.] This now classic work and The Wild
Bull (also an electronic commission for Nonesuch, 1968, shown
at right) have been choreographed by leading dance companies
throughout the world and remain in permanent repertory.
Bruce Duffie: We’ll start with a really easy question.
Where’s music going these days? [Both laugh]
BD: But it never caught on!
As co-founder (with Jules Irving) of The Actor's Workshop
in San Francisco (1952–1965) and co-director of the Repertory Theater
of Lincoln Center in New York City (1965–67), Blau introduced American
audiences to avant garde drama in some of the country's first
productions of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter including
the 1957 performance of Beckett's Waiting for Godot at California's
San Quentin State Prison. [Photo at right was taken during rehearsals
for a production of Jacob's Room at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,
early in 1994.] 
Subotnick: That was more of what they were expecting.
I finally felt that I had clearly seen my vision, and knew what I
needed to do. For me, that was a personal vision of merging language,
image, and music together into one thing. I did a theater piece
in San Francisco, about a forty or forty-five-minute work that just had
four lighting flats and four musicians, two tape recorders, and a person
who spoke. I used a Michael McClure poem called The Flower of
Politics, and it was extremely well-received. The audience loved
it. It was performed four times, and the San Francisco paper sent
their two critics, so each performance had a review. It was a real
smash, and I felt this was clearly what I needed to do. But I didn’t
have a handle on each of these things. The electronics were crude.
Lighting flats are really a crude way to do it, and so I decided I would
take the next several years and separate all the media, and do some film
work. Later it was video, and I tried to get the electronics more under
control. I wanted to see what instruments meant to me in the context
of the theater, rather than just a straight instrumental route and language.
Jacob’s Room is the culmination of those efforts. It’s
taken a long time, but I also did a number of theater pieces that were
very good. There were two big ones that included images, but they
didn’t include language. I felt that I wasn’t completing this gestalt
[an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts]
until I actually said something verbally. You can see that in the
5 Scenes [a slide show presented on the same Ravinia concert earlier
that evening]. There’s verbal content that has been the most difficult
for me to introduce into it, and still keep the integrity of the musical
experience. The visuals with Jacob’s Room are the language
of memory for me. When he says at the beginning, “When
perfect and fully winged, and the soul soars upward and puts order to
the whole world,” it took us four hours to get
the word ‘order’ recorded right. When he says the word ‘order’, there’s
a strange cloud in the sky at that moment in the theater. It’s
all black and white, but it hangs behind this black scrim. It’s just
sitting there, and he says the word ‘order’. The cloud turns, and
you see it’s a cloud from a bomb. Then you see people running underneath.
It’s about a five-second thing, and that sets
up the whole imagery for the piece. Then he’s trying to block this
out, but there are certain images you cannot block out. The memory
keeps coming no matter what the words say. It’s stuff that keeps coming
back, and I used the image as the language of memory throughout the entire
piece. The integration between all the stuff is really complete, and
I finally did it. Except for the lullaby at the beginning, she never
sings a word. She only speaks words, and when she sings a lot of people
don’t realize that that’s the truth because when it’s done, it all melts
together. In fact, she only speaks the stories, and she sings for
emotion. It’s this constant thing, and that was my way of treating
the words with a kind of dignity that they needed, and still having the
musical experience. You have the words, and you have the music
— which is almost the original concept in opera,
where all the important things were done over a recitative. Then you
sang your aria, in which you didn’t care what the words were. It was
the emotion that was going. Instead of breaking my work up into
arias and recitative, it’s all one fabric, but it’s back-and-forth all
the time. I can’t tell you how many people don’t realize it until
after they’ve seen the production, and I tell them. They say, “It’s
not true!”, which is good.
BD: Let me ask another easy question. What’s the
purpose of music?
A concert showcasing the multimedia works of composer Morton Subotnick is bound to be part-art and part-Consumer Electronics Show. Such was the case at Ravinia's Bennett Hall Monday night when the pioneer of electronic music unveiled for the first time in the Chicago area three of his latest computer-aided chamber events.
The first half was really a brief introduction to the newest tools of the trade for fellow travelers on the infobahn, with the 60-year-old Subotnick serving as Mr. Wizard cum salesman. His "Angel Concerto," a work-in-progress, called for a Macintosh Powerbook, a Yamaha Disclavier and lots of wires.
Subotnick, using sensors in his hands connected to the laptop computer, was able to manipulate the Yamaha's motorized keyboard. By waving his arms and clenching his fists, he electronically triggered the keystrokes without touching the Yamaha at all. The piano music he "conducted" and "played" sounded like a Bach partita filtered through the sensibility of an European serialist; the effect was controlled improvisation-and transparent gimmickery.
The same can be said of "5 Scenes from an Imaginary Ballet," a '60s slide show presented with '90s technology. Subotnick slid a CD-ROM into his computer console; out came images and sounds.
Flashed on the back-projection monitor was a montage of cryptic words and sentences juxtaposed with surrealist engravings by Max Ernst. Correspondingly, broadcast on the speakers was a series of bouncy synthesized musical passages interspersed with barely comprehensible utterances.
In the second half the concert presentation of Subotnick's 1985 chamber opera "Jacob's Room" showed how electronic gadgets could be pressed into the service of art. The title, taken from Virginia Woolf's novel, refers to the mind of a young man coming to grips with the brutality of the Holocaust and with the guilt over his own survival. In the course of the 45-minute monodrama, which contains obvious autobiographical elements, Jacob's mother (and conscience) describes in harrowing details the horrors of war yet cajoles him into accepting spiritual conciliation in the end.
Only two characters appear on the stage: the mother (sung by a soprano) and Jacob's alter ego (a cellist); Jacob is heard but not seen. The musical score is processed through a computer. But standing center stage was Joan La Barbara in the role of the mother; nearby was cellist Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick.
La Barbara was phenomenal. Duke-Kirkpatrick's morose and soulful cello playing, for the most part, counterpointed the emotional larcerations, as it should. The only thing missing was the images.
Subotnick: Right, and I didn’t ever expect
it really to happen. I have a piece, which I wrote for orchestra,
which uses the recording studio as a metaphor. It’s a very pretty
piece, and very difficult to perform. The Los Angeles Philharmonic
did it, and Zubin Mehta
conducted it. It divides the orchestra into small groups.
They’re on the stage in the usual way, but microphones are placed between
three to four people all the way through the orchestra. There are
twelve violins with practice mutes who are controlling their stations.
Each of them is controlling the amplification, so, at a certain moment,
when the conductor gives a down-beat, you can get the attack of a flute
and the after-effect and the decay of a harp. This is because
this violinist plucks at the same time the flautist plays, so you hear
the flute for the duration of a pluck, and then a crescendo on the harp
in another part. You never hear the violinists because they’ve got
these practice mutes on, but they’re literally controlling the electronics.
[Musing on the future] It won’t happen gradually... it will
happen suddenly, in probably ten or fifteen years, but when the electronics
are there, a lot of composers will say they have this idea. It’s a
perfectly logical idea, but the reason we haven’t thought about it now
is because people haven’t made the connection of where the technology is
going. It was clear to me at that time. I figured out these pieces
when I wrote them. They were all done. They were commissioned,
and I got them done, but they didn’t get played very much because of the
complication of trying to produce them. I figured once the technology
was there, fine. When I would go into an auditorium, I used to have
to fight the technology. I don’t do that anymore. The sound
is beautiful. I used to be killing people to get the right speakers,
and now every auditorium has them.
In the early 60s, Subotnick taught at Mills College and with Ramon
Sender, co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center. During this period
he collaborated with Anna 
