Encounters: Suzanne Ciani & Morton Subotnick

RBMA Radio’s Encounters is a series of conversations pairing artists that wouldn’t normally connect. Following on from RBMA’s 2013 book For The Record, we find that when artists meet up, they often find out that they have more in common than they might think. For this edition of Encounters, we invited two titans of early electronic music – the composers Morton Subotnick and Suzanne Ciani, whose pioneering efforts in the field and extensive careers often saw them working in adjacent philosophical and creative lanes – to discuss their initial work with the Buchla synthesizer, experiences battling uninformed audiences and striving to create a truly new form of music.

Don Buchla

Morton Subotnick

I saw the possibility that you wouldn’t need [a classical] education, because you would be like a painter. You would have everything in your studio. That didn’t exist. I thought, well, here I am: If I can think this, I should do it. I wanted to be in at the very beginning and develop something that was not new old music, but a new music. I called the whole technique “studio art,” music as studio art. This is second nature now, but this was a brand new idea. I tried every piece of equipment. Put everything together. I didn’t know anything about electronics, but I was learning fast. I put an ad in the paper. I said the only way I’m going to do it is to get someone to build something. The first requisite was that there was no black and white keyboard because that would make you do, immediately, new old music. I wanted a brand new thing.

Don Buchla came in and introduced himself. I just assumed he had read the ad in the paper, so I give him this big spiel. He hadn’t. But he said “Yeah, I think I could do something like that.” He came in the next day. I won’t tell you what the thing was – it was really silly – but it worked.

Suzanne Ciani

He apparently invented a transistor on his own. That’s what I always heard, that he had invented a transistor as a child.

Morton Subotnick

I don’t know. In any case, he’s brilliant. We worked together for almost a year and the idea was he was making it for me. This was at the [San Francisco] Tape Center. It was going to be mine, and he could do whatever he wanted after.

Suzanne Ciani

That explains, by the way, the years of difficulty that I had getting any kind of attention from Don, because I hadn’t realized how deeply connected you were. I knew he was always talking about Mort. Mort this and Mort that.

Morton Subotnick

When was that?

Suzanne Ciani

I went out to Berkeley in 1968. I had the 100 that was at Mills, the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which you’re also responsible for, right? I’d stay up there all night, every night. Then I went to work for Don. I gradually earned enough to start. It was modular, so you could build it up. The big mistake was that I moved to New York. What happened was that every time I had a problem with the system... First of all, I couldn’t get his attention, because he only cared about Mort.

Morton Subotnick

You’re going blame this on me?

Suzanne Ciani

You know what, you deserve the attention. You’re the one. You were his muse. Anyway, I would ship it out to the West Coast. He would fix it. He would ship it back and it would arrive broken, because of the shipping. It’s so fragile.

Morton Subotnick

He probably never fixed it.

Suzanne Ciani

No, no, no. It would get smashed.

Morton Subotnick

You were talking about tuning earlier. I didn’t know anything about technology back then. I mean, I knew about it, but I didn’t know the details of it. He’s asking me questions, because he’s building this by my design, right? He said, “Well, how stable should an oscillator be?” I said, “You mean how long should it stay in tune?”

Suzanne Ciani

Forever. Forever.

Morton Subotnick

I called my friend Nate Rubin, who had a very good violin. I said, “Come over and bring your violin.” I said, “Tune it and start playing.” I’m sitting there with a watch and I see in about ten minutes it starts getting out of tune. I said, “Ten minutes.”

I said, “Listen, if this guy’s got an $800,000 violin and it goes out of tune in ten minutes, if you can make an oscillator stay that long... I don’t want it to go completely out of tune, but it doesn’t have to be that stable.” That meant that everything was going to be really cheap. It was a dynamite moment, because we could have something that was 1/10th of what the Moog oscillator was going to cost later.

Suzanne Ciani

You know what, the Moog oscillator was not stable. At all.

Morton Subotnick

Well, it was supposed to be.

Suzanne Ciani

I remember, I’d tune it, I’d go hit record on the tape machine, and as I walked across the room to hit record, it would go out of tune. Then, I felt like a rat in a maze. I was going back and forth: tune, record, tune.

Morton Subotnick

The 100 was worse, I can tell you that. I did both Silver Apples and The Wild Bull on the 100. To this day, I’m not quite sure how I did it. I worked for 13 months on Silver Apples of the Moon that way.

Suzanne Ciani

Let me ask you a conceptual question, because I was proselytized by Buchla. I worked there. I came under his spell. The idea that I got from him is that he was building a performance instrument.

Morton Subotnick

That’s right.

Suzanne Ciani

I took that to heart, so my first ten years of the Buchla had nothing to do with layering a recording or anything. It was live. I did only live.

Morton Subotnick

This is interesting. This was an argument that Don and I had from day one. He wanted to make a musical instrument. I said, “This is not a musical instrument. This is, at best, an instrument to make instruments. It’s to paint.” He didn’t understand the nature of an instrument. He said, “I’m going to make musical instruments.” I said, “Who’s going to play them? How are they going to learn to play them?”

Suzanne Ciani

I’m the sucker that ended up playing it. They just released two live recordings from 1975 that I did on the Buchla. I went into the vault and found this old degraded tape and I thought, “Who wants to hear that?” I listen to it now and there’s no way that I could do that today. I mean, I would rehearse for months and months and do this thing live.

Morton Subotnick

I didn’t want to reproduce the old way to make music, which was pitch-based orientation. I wanted it to be gesture-based. The 200 came as a result of all the changes that we had to make. He kept building modules. The 200 is the Stradivarius of that.

Suzanne Ciani

It is. There’s nothing close to it.

Morton Subotnick

Then he wanted to go back to keyboards and I said, “Go your own way. I can’t go with you on this.” We didn’t part as far as people, but we no longer collaborated in that sense.

Becoming A Composer

Suzanne Ciani

When I was an undergraduate at Wellesley College, our brother school was MIT, and we had a very tiny music department, four or five people. One night we went to MIT to a seminar and it was just a shock, because the MIT professor had used a budget intended for something else and he was secretly trying to make his computer make a sound. This was in 1965 or so. I heard that little sound and that was the first thing that triggered this forward motion in me that I had this idea, and I had to find it. When I went out to the West Coast and I was studying traditional music composition, I hated it. Composing was a dreadful occupation because most composers died without ever hearing their music. If you’re a female composer, forget it. I remember just saying, “This is all so hopeless.”

I think that awareness of the future for me being a composer as a woman, and when I met Don and I entered this room of walls of toys and all those things, just crystallized that this was my path. I could be independent. I could do it. I didn’t need anybody else, I didn’t depend on the political system, I didn’t have to please anybody. All I had to do was make enough money to get one of those things. I think that dynamic hasn’t even changed today.

Morton Subotnick

Your story is exactly what I had imagined. I didn’t imagine that people were going to make music like I did. My idea was to make my music. My idea was to make a new music, and to prove that this equipment could do it. In fact, I didn’t teach composition for years, because I didn’t think of myself as a composer. I thought of myself as this kid who had this idea and I was sharing it with everyone, and showing them. You don’t have to have these torturous years of doing counterpoint and all that stuff.

Suzanne Ciani

We both did that. Isn’t that weird that we both had the torturous years of counterpoint and harmony?

Morton Subotnick

I know, but now you could compose independent of that.

Suzanne Ciani

I think it’s the distinction that’s important.

Morton Subotnick

You were taking about how you were unempowered as a woman, this whole thing, and you walked in and you realized you could do it. You didn’t need that superstructure, you didn’t need an orchestra, you didn’t need all that stuff: You could do it. This is what I was looking at. You saw it from your standpoint, but think of a kid who who comes to music at 20 years old. They’ve no background, but they can feel empowered. They couldn’t have possibly felt empowered up until the ’60s.

Suzanne Ciani

Couldn’t you feel empowered playing a violin, though?

Morton Subotnick

How are you going to play a violin at 28 years old?

Suzanne Ciani

With the Buchla, I concentrated on that for ten solid years to develop techniques for live performance. You don’t do that in a minute.

Morton Subotnick

No, you don’t, but you also don’t do the violin in ten years at 28 years old, because the complexities of that are very different. The manual, the dexterity of the design, is the finetuning of the body. To this day, when I hear a note on the clarinet I get a feeling in my right thumb of how hard I had to hold it and what the fingering was. I haven’t played the clarinet in almost 50 years at this point.

Suzanne Ciani

There are people who have natural abilities, also.

Morton Subotnick

Yeah, there are certain exceptions. I’m talking about all the people in the world who are unempowered. Whatever they grew up with, they don’t have much. Now they grow up with everything, they have that as a child, they’re hearing things they never heard before. This in the long run has to be good – it has to be. If good means that the human being is more human, is using more of their capacity than they were using before, then it’s good.

Suzanne Ciani

The subjective senses that we have – seeing and hearing – what are you really accessing? If I go to a museum with my sister, who’s an artist, I can look at a painting and I see it, but when I see it through her eyes I get more connected to it because she’s deeply connected. She’ll say, “Do you see that? They just started doing that, that type of perspective. That was the first time they used that paint,“ ochre, whatever. There’s so much information that allows you to get handles on the experience. I used to listen to Indian music, and it just washed over me, a wonderful wash. Then I studied Indian music, I started to hear the microtones, and I started to hear the different rhythms. I think the training enhances your experience, whatever it is. The deeper you go, the more connected you are.

Humans and Technology

Suzanne Ciani

I had that Buchla on for ten years and it sat in my room blinking and worrying and purring and doing what it did. My story about this is that I was in love with that machine, and I was embarrassed about this. When I first got to New York, believe it or not, I met a guy, Bill Parada, who was going to book me to do live Buchla concerts. I thought, “This is insane. Why would anybody do that?” But he wanted to work with me and he said “If we’re going to work together, I would like you to take this weekend course. That way we’ll communicate better in our work.” I said “No problem.” I took this weekend course. It turned out to be the EST training. I had no idea what it was.

Morton Subotnick

It’s sort of brainwashing.

Suzanne Ciani

It wasn’t really brainwashing. If you’ve done it, then you have a different perspective.

Morton Subotnick

I didn’t do it.

Suzanne Ciani

From the outside, it looks like brainwashing. From the inside, it looks different.

There was a lot of offshoots of this. Now, basically what they do is corporate trainings. All of these people graduated from these personal things, and now they’re the ones that are training the Four Seasons, other big businesses. It’s entered our culture in a consistent way, but the punchline at this seminar was, in the end, human beings are machines. They have their operating systems. If you were given the tools to impact that human technology, you would make progress. In the end I said, “Oh my God, I’m in love with the machine. Humans are just machines, so I’m okay.”

[A machine] is alive. It talks back to you. It’s so responsive. You do something, it does something back. It’s a conversation. It’s an interaction. Machines are wonderful, especially when they have a certain dependability and you can trust them, and then they have that other side, which is they might just not work at all.

Morton Subotnick

By the time I got out of high school, I could literally write music in any style. I used to love a blank piece of paper and I’d draw five lines and then put notes in it and the page would come to life. To this day, when I teach I say, “If you’re writing music on paper, you listen to it and let it talk to you, because it speaks. It tells you what it wants.” You wrote it, but it says “I want an Eb here or I don’t want to hold this note now. I want something like this.” It will talk to you eventually.

The machine is automatic that way because it’s real. You don’t need to have that kind of background to write music in any style. You can just turn the machine on, get a note going, and you made that note. No one else made that note, even though it seems like you didn’t do anything. Immediately, it speaks to you because it is you.

We don’t have empathy in the sense that we know what someone else is feeling. We’re feeling what it looks like they’re feeling: That’s all we’ve got. It’s all inside, but that’s the point. What you said really characterizes what I was after, that you don’t need to get as good as I was on a piece of paper to be able to walk into a room and start making music, because it will speak to you without the training.

Confusing Audiences

Suzanne Ciani

When I was doing live Buchla concerts and I was in Berkeley and I was doing things at the museum or whatever, I was so frustrated, because nobody understood where the sound was coming from or what was going on. I would do an installation in the museum, and the Buchla would be there, the lights flashing in rhythmic synchronicity, and clearly this is what was going on. People just couldn’t get it. “Where’s the tape recorder? Where is that? What’s going on?” There was a huge gap even when I was playing – this was in ’69,’70 – and it just drove me crazy. I used to have to stop and talk to people and be very patient and explain. Did you have to do that?

Morton Subotnick

In those early days I had a fantastic review in the New York Times. It was really fantastic, two pages with a picture and everything. The headline was “Morton Subotnick wants to destroy everything we know about music.” When I did the Vivian Beaumont [Theater], I went back after the premiere and I saw Time magazine. I pulled out Time magazine, I look, and there is a review of the thing and it says, “Morton Subotnick is a tone-deaf mute.” I went back and picked up all the Time magazines and sat on them on the airplane because I didn’t want anyone to read.

I did a piece for orchestra and electronics, an all new music thing – I was the avant-garde composer. I came in to hear Mel Powell rehearsing with the St. Louis Symphony. I walked in and there is no rehearsal going. There is a guy on the podium and they’re talking about me. He says, “Did we spend all these years learning our instruments to play this? No. Let’s send Subotnick back to San Francisco.” They all go, “Hurrah.” I walk out, and they don’t know I’m there. I walk out into the lobby and people are taking pictures of me and they’re asking, “What are you going to do, Mr. Subotnick?”

I said, “I’m going to get an airplane and go back to San Francisco.” I get back to the hotel room and a call comes, because now the orchestra knows this is happening. He said, “We heard that you think we don’t like your music?” And I said, “I know you don’t like my music. I was there today.” He said, “I’ll call you back.” The symphony orchestra players hated me.

There was this sense, not just that they didn’t know where it was coming from, but the ones who did know where it was coming from were frightened to death. The musicians thought they were going to be replaced by electronic music, and I kept telling them this isn’t the case, this is a new thing.

Suzanne Ciani

It was a tough time. Because I worked in New York I had to be in the union, and I said, “Well, I’m a synthesist,” and they said, “Well, we don’t have that category.” Then they said, “What is that?” Then they said, “Sorry, you can’t join the union because we won’t have that.”

Morton Subotnick

Yeah. “You’re going to take the place of musicians.”

Suzanne Ciani

Eventually they did make a category. They were so threatened that we would replace other people that they made a special rule that every time you played something you had to be paid as another musician. In the end it worked for me, because I’d go in and record and get paid as eight people as I overdubbed. I have a wonderful pension now because of that rule.

Morton Subotnick

I had this whole fight with the union in 1965 in New York.

Suzanne Ciani

Ten years ahead of me the whole time.

Morton Subotnick

The theater had to have three or four musicians a night, and I said, “This is crazy.” I think that’s 25 musicians over the season. I said, “This is what we’ll do: We will pay 25 people to play but I’ll make music. Two evenings or three evenings we’ll use a lot of musicians, and let the rest of it be electronic and you’ll get the same number of people but it will be meaningful.”

Suzanne Ciani

What electronics were you using?

Morton Subotnick

The Buchla actually hadn’t finished yet. This is 1964. Buchla 100 didn’t get done until the end of 1964 – we were just on the edge of getting it done. It wasn’t a sequencer. It was a timbral thing made by an engineer at the University of Illinois in Urbana. It was to deal with overtones and things, but I converted it. I used it as if it were a sequencer. By then I knew what a sequencer was, because we were making one, so I used it and it was actually quite lovely. It was a dream scene in the theater and it was very nice, as a matter of fact, even though I was a deaf-mute by Time magazine.

They’re not hearing anything musical, they are just hearing noise. A year later, when I’m living in New York, my older son, who was about seven at the time, came running in. He said, “Dad, they’re playing your music on television.” I thought, “This kid doesn’t know my music from a hole in the wall.”

I went in, and sure enough there is the music from Danton’s Death, which I’m a tone-deaf mute for. It was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea – you remember that?

This guy is hallucinating on some drug or something in a submarine, and they’re using my music. I call my publisher. I got, like, $7,000, the publisher took $7,000. They settled out of court. I had to make a score to copyright it, and I used these little stick figures showing sine tones.

Suzanne Ciani

Right. In those days there was no recording copyright. I had that same problem.

Morton Subotnick

A year later – whenever Sputnik went up – everybody got interested in space. Western Union called me and they wanted one minute of space music. I said, “Well, what do I have that’s commercial?” I thought, “This.” So I sold it again. I made something like $30,000 over a period of four years on the tone-deaf music.

Suzanne Ciani

Poetic justice.