A morning In Berlin with Morton Subotnick: "Be more of yourself, push yourself to be as human as possible!"

An infatiguable poet of sounds, is the way we describe Morton’s Subotnick’s ethos of more than 50 years in music and arts.

His milestone record, the classic “Silver Apples of the Moon”, is an amazing musical artifact; it’s title made hippies happy and journalists intrigued. It was numerous times compared with an expression of electronic music inertia, the “Switched-on Bach”, an historic electronic record sell, the famous industry exciter from 1968.

Morton Subotnick inspires a way to push things forward in in a context of moral, ethical and philosophically challenging times for music and artists. His story fascinates movie makers, artists and music enthusiasts. We notice more and more music and music business need for change today. They are forced to during these days; it’s also fair to admit that there is no such thing as “independent music” for music is a social miracle. We’re all dependent to keep the equilibrium in a vulnerable floating stage similar with the one from Morton Subotnick’s “Jacob’s room” opera.

We’re vulnerable alone these days in our homes, due to a pandemic that is challenging our ways of living. The days we’re living can be described with Morton’s words from 2017, during Inertia Movement interview in Berlin:

The tragedy to me, is the end of “Jacob’s Room”, when we’re standing alone, his awareness, he’s still aware, but we didn’t do it, we lost it.
He did it, he’s there, but what it is, is a tragedy, is a tragedy of humanity, but the individual tragedy is “I did it” or “I didn’t do it”.

We’re in fact alone, this the world today and maybe the “social” word should be changed with “togetherness”.

A comparison of the two records mentioned above is relevant to us, here at Inertia Movement, from a very spcific perspective, not one of coast, musicality or genre, but one of time and space dialectics and maybe even metanoia. What is he difference, really?

Choosing to look towards the future backwards or forward in time, and modeling the empty world of the future, it is a significant ethos dimension, or otherwise said, we are looking at the two directions in music: the state of cumulated inertia vs the dynamics of creation and movement. Without being speculative it maybe that is the challenge of our days.

Morton’s milestone record is coming from Yeats’ poem, “The Song of Wondering Aengus”, which sums out the quest of harvesting sounds, the unheard apples:

“.. walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.”

It is under no circumstance a coincidence that a wave of enthusiasm in music has been growing in the latest years within the technically challenging world of Eurorack, a DYI world of geeks and researchers of music making circuits and wires. The community or circuits attraction it is sometimes viewed as a hype by many established musicians, however it represents a serious phenomenon of a meditation with sounds and a sounds creation process with electronic circuits and connections that are not meant to be predictive or necessarily musical.

Morton’s visionary identity has contributed over the years to the development of the electronic sound processor and generator as a real instrument, to a transition from acoustic and resonant media, to sound electronic modeling, in a way that truly made a difference in electronic music, performance and recording.

The synthesizer - the CPU or the network of amplifier and transistors and other electronic circuits processing signals and creating sounds - is one of the most used instruments today, having produced audible sounds to our ears for 100 years now.

It had numerous shapes and facets as a computing power that alters the mechanical audio spectra we hear, or we believe we hear; it evolved from very rudimentary large components and a history of trial and error, enthusiasm and conservationism to amazing possibilities, almost infinite from today’s world.

Used in many facets, producing music from sonification to algorithmic drones, from compositions and installations, some very symbolic and very creative to improvisation and fantastic performance, it is an instrument that pushed the boundaries of beauty and humanity.

It created the soundtrack of the vision of the future with its "other world" sounds of the 60’s and 70’s sci-fi and new music, and got into the popular culture through the sounds of the commercials and movies. Sometimes was correlated by the press with psychedelia, either reasonable or going with the culture of the times. How many of us didn’t heard about the “Forbidden Planet”? However how many of us heard about “Sound Blocks: An Heroic Vision”? How many of use know that the sounds of Coca-Cola logo “Pop & Poor” was made by Suzanne Ciani, one of the pioneers of Buchla instrument, initially conceived by Morton Subotnick?

What we tag and call history today, it has been lived by humans in the past. Their qualitative stories are the only way to guide the present to the future through the time dimension. Morton Subotnick has a half century journey in the amazing world of electronic music, a visionary energy who wanted an easel to paint with sounds. 

The last years evolution of the technology have been amazing, enabling the telharmonium invented close to 1900 which used to consumed 670 kilowatts of power in its early days, to be squeezed today in a standard way in a 14hp Eurorack space with 12V supply, a rack of synthesizer modules called modular rack.

It's difficult in today’s context for many people to imagine that in the early days you would need entire train wagons to transport it!

And indeed is the technology that brought us here and the ethos and vision of people who had a great role in imagining and building science and instruments. Enabling instruments, non-generative and generative artifacts, personalized tools. How are all the tools developed that we use impact the future we create?

The hole history of electronics and electrification, the development of the transistor and decades of experimentation with tape recordings enabled the production of first electronic modules in 1962-64 or what we called Buchla 100, a modular synthesizer initially developed by the talented Donald Buchla for Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.

The events that allowed this are lost in the past: Edwin Howard Armstrong’s first oscillator circuits based on triodes in 1908, then the first radio signals being transmitted in air by Frank Conrad in 1913 to Edwin Armstrong’s frequency modulation in 1933, to the invention of the transistor in 1948 by Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain. The 50s made advances in the transmission of signals and lead to the the development of the amplifier circuits and transistors in the 60s; modular circuits were on the cutting edge of technology and telecommunications.

What ended to be branded after as the legendary Buchla instrument was a passionate San Francisco enthusiastic experiment with cutting edge technology.

The first ideas would come from the artists at the San Francisco Tape Music Center founded by Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnick, Terry Reilly and Pauline Oliveros, a non-profit entity that used to experiment with the sonic qualities of the magnetic tape.

The legendary Buchla 200 and later, 200e in the 90s, followed Buchla 100 in which the amazing mind and soul of Don Buchla, a former NASA engineer further developed the ideas of the voltage control and sound possibilities from Morton Subotnick into amazing physical circuit modules, synthesizer modules.

Morton Subotnick is from the very beginning part of the history of electronic music and composing with concepts of sound and time evolution on the “Silver Apples of the Moon”, released in 1967 at “Nonsuch Records”; the methods, the concepts and the building work blocks and collaborations will become the Buchla synthesizer.

Curtis Roads would sculpt in the “Computer Music Journal” magazine in spring 1988 Morton’s image as “one of the most active composers in the music scene today”, a pioneer of electronic music.

In 2017 Suzanne Ciani, one of the major figures in sound design and the creator of Coca-Cola’s musical logo with “Pop’n Pour’”, a true master musician of Buchla 200e, would remark the same thing, but through a different media, closer to today’s information age, on Google’s Youtube, describing Morton as “irreplaceable”, admiring his presence as an active artist performing, with a “high level of artistry” and “continuous exploration of new technology”.

Most of all she captures the story of the performing media, the black and white keyboard hijacking the core of the modular synthesizer as a living system since the early days, or the Moog release, the inertia vs the dynamics of movement as we mentioned above.

In fact, Morton Subotnick highlights the importance of the continuous paradigm shift of the medium of expression and this is the key to his entire work:

"Not drag the instruments of the history into the future so we can have new messages from new medium".

IM: What would you say that music today can be defined as? If a definition is not fantastic as it creates boundaries, nevertheless, the definition guides towards an experience and a construct.  

MS: I wouldn’t give it a definition, I mean “A” definition of music. I have thought about, obviously, a lot... It’s such a big issue..

Let’s start with an analogy.

We have a clear picture of when we’re young, or at any age really, in schools, or when we’re growing up, we understand that we need our bodies, it’s important, to be able to move them and so forth. So we have a physical education, we use our body in all sorts of ways. One of the things that we do sometimes is when we want children to use their bodies and get good use of their bodies, we have them play sports, sports like soccer, where you’re running all the time or where you’re using most of your body.

But you could play a sport like, similar to our baseball where you sit most of the time, you do this, or you throw the ball, but you’re not dealing with your body in the same way. You’re not really doing the whole body exercise, you’re doing a sport, right?

Music has to be thought of that way too, because everything we do is, if you define music as sound, it’s one of the basic things that has to have sound, right? And the sound has to have some form of pitch. It could be noise to pure pitch and it has time, these are the dimensions of it. The same as sports and physical education.

IM: And timbre and so on.

MS: Yes. We make a differentiation between general use of the body and the specific use in a particular kind of sport. You could just exercise, work or whatever you could do as sport. And we communicate with our bodies too, in all kinds of ways.

Sound or use of sound is very specific with that when you make a sound you’re always using all the elements of music. We express ourselves musically because music is made of all those things.

So, if I say, if I ask you the question, I say: Do you like what you do? (I use both my body and my thinking), You could say yes or no.

But if I ask the question: Do you LIKE what you do? Then you can’t answer it that way. It becomes very different.

So it’s not just the words, it’s the shape of it in time. And that’s not music but it’s musical. Those are the elements of music.

Musicality is what we do all the time. Music is a particular thing we do with it that we decide, is agreed between us.

My dog, plays a game: she brings us the ball and then you throw it but if you don’t throw it in a particular way she just barks at you and waits until you do the right thing. She’s got her own thing. It’s an actual sport but we don’t know the rules to this sport. And we have to agree on that to make that a sport. We have to give it a name, “catch the ball” or what you’re gonna give it the name.

If we don’t agree on it, it’s not...music, is the artifact, a cultural artifact of musicality, of the use of music, but musicality is everything we do and that we use to communicate.

The reason you can’t define it is that it gets defined not by you or me, it gets defined by the culture.

I could say: “I’m making music”.

Well: “If you don’t get it it’s not music to you, it’s only music to me”.

Someone else gets it… we have it, that’s music to us, but if no one gets it…

We used to hear the term anyway: “That’s not music!”. You don’t hear that so much anymore.

So you get back to today, music seems to be slightly different in the concept.

Music is simply what we agree is music...

IM: Yes, it’s a common agreement in society.

MS: If we don’t agree on it it’s not music. It’s a cultural agreement.

Here’s the difference now with today and yesterday. There was a time way back, the musicality, in the past, back all the way that we know historically, the kinds of things we agreed on was music was, you know… the church. This was music.

Probably singing when you’re taking a shower or a bath, it doesn’t need the name at all but most things that we did were agreed upon in some kind of a way. There was a judgement, I think it was in Aristotle that wrote this; it would be true, it was true for a long time, he said very well, he said there are lots of things you could do with music: you could use music to sleep to, to read to, to dance to.

We do these things together and there’s nothing wrong with it but we wouldn’t teach that because it’s already there, we’ve agreed, it became music because we agreed on it so you don’t have to go learn to make music to dance to. If you dance to it it’s already music so there’s nothing to do. The only thing we should do is if you wanna go beyond what’s agreed on and do something that takes you to a plane that you don’t know, then we have to work at it.

Today almost everything we do we agree on because you don’t hear it. Up until 1960 you could only go to a concert, you could only hear music if you went somewhere. Once you went somewhere it was music, right?

That was already agreed, it was sort of a non question at that point. So, everything you choose to say: “well I’m gonna go hear that music”, it’s already musical. It doesn’t matter what it is. You may not understand it, you may go to it and say it’s not music for me, I’ll never go to that again, but somebody had agreed on it because it’s already there. It’s a sort of a non issue in a sort of way.

Morton Subotnick:

“The bigger issue for me, this is when I started electronics, there was the question that is it music or isn’t it? To use electronics at all, it was a big issue, but I got into it because I was playing with the San Francisco symphony and we were making avant-garde concerts, writing music, but mostly for instruments.”

Today anyone can put anything out and as soon as anyone listens to it and listens to it a second time it becomes part of the landscape of culture, the whole culture is changed since 1960.

We have so many different kinds of music now. Not just to sleep to or to dance to, but it’s actually very simple. It becomes so ubiquitous because it’s out there. The very fact of this particular thing, that’s the easiest example. There is no such thing as history, because when you look in the sky, the stars have been there for billions of years, but the only way you see them is because they’re there now for us to see. We know that they’re a billion years old and maybe it took a billion years for it to get there.

It takes time for us to see each other, but it’s so fast we don’t know that time has passed. So, history is everything we know in the present but there are things that we don’t know that we only think happened.

IM: We are history as well, now, for the stars, for anything looking from the future to us.

MS: For everything, but also, we’re trying to discover our past and as we do discover our past it becomes knowable and it’s no longer in the past. It’s knowable because it’s in the future. It’s history because we’ve got it.

So music is there because you’re listening to it and we redefine it all the time.

The bigger issue for me, this is when I started electronics, there was the question that is it music or isn’t it?

To use electronics at all, it was a big issue, but I got into it because I was playing with the San Francisco symphony and we were making avantgarde concerts, writing music, but mostly for instruments. Then, as the electronics came I was not so interested in getting involved, I wanted to know about it but I wasn’t so interested at the very beginnings of electronic music from the start because it was music as we knew it, I mean the first examples of Stockhausen were pure pitch of things, the Mark II (n. edit. Harvard Mark II), the big Columbia-Princeton computer that was used in New York, Milton Babbitt and those people.

It was a big music computer made in 1957 or 1958. They were using it to make music that you already made for instruments, with machines and that seemed interesting, but I wasn’t so interested, I could play music with my hand and need to be seen to play music.

The big issue was, in 1959 the transistor was first used in a commercial object. The transistor is nothing but dirt, it’s cheap. And the other thing that happened at the same time was Bank America produced the first credit cards. Suddenly it was like a...

IM: Technology inflection points.

Morton Subotnick:

“The control voltage was the brush, how you move that’s the envelope, loudness and it was a part of your body. No black and white keyboard which is something you have to learn to do it, yet there’s something that had to come directly from your body, pushing your fingers.”

MS: That moment, before the Buchla, those two things together were like the elements of a big explosion in my mind.

To me, this was the moment equivalent to the printing press. The printing press to language. I thought to myself, this is the moment that music now will undergo the scene, gigantic change that happened to the whole world because of the printing press.

And why? Because in the printing press, it was a simple metaphor - I had no idea whether it was correct or not but it seem correct - the real element that made the printing press so important is that you could only get someone’s ideas verbally, if you were there, or if they wrote it down and you could go get it written down but you’d have to go to Alexandria, Egypt, in order to get it. It wasn’t available.

Once it became available to every person, everything with ideas would be altered.

And music, to be literate with music comes from the ear. So, instead of having to go to hear the music everyone would be able to hear with, I thought, 100 - 150 years, that this would make it possible because of the cheapness of it and its ability to be able to mass produce.

So, it occurred to me at that moment, I was, maybe, about 25 years old, it occurred to me that I was at that moment in time, and even today, when I say it, my stomach gets, you know...what an exciting idea:" I’m in this moment and I’m a musician and a composer!”.

I started music when I was 6 - 7 years old and I spent maybe 7 - 8 hours a day my whole life playing music or writing music up until that point. It’s a long story, but I didn’t play much, I didn’t have many friends and we moved all the time, and that was my life.

I loved doing it and I didn’t even feel complete unless I did that everyday. So, not everybody feels that way. You get to be 18, 19, 20 years old and you decide: “gosh, I’d like to play the violin”, I could play concertos with an art, no possibility. You could learn to play the violin, but you could never do it in that way. To write music means you had to master the notation, it takes a long time, it’s huge.

IM: Yes, it’s a complex process and then it’s exercise in practicing.

MS: That means that even in a wonderful society you wouldn’t be able to get that if you haven’t done it when you were young. Maybe some people could, but the large majority of people would not be able to be creative with the musical world, except maybe just sing a little better or something.

But this meant that everybody could, suddenly not just hear it but be creative with it.

And then I realized, the tools that are made are gonna be the way in which people are creative.

If you suddenly said “everybody could now play the piano” you would end up with piano music, with the tuning. And there was another thought to me which is that all the stuff we had to do, handed down in every culture, from generation to generation, we know by looking at all these cultures that music is very different from one to another:

“What would happen if you give people only the tools of the past, then you’d bring the past to the future.”

The same time I was reading, a group of us got a hold of some manuscript, a lecture that Marshall McLuhan.

The three years before the first book came out, this was going to be in the book, later, we didn’t know that, and one of the things he said was (and I’ve never forgotten it), I don’t know the exact words but it’s something like: “we walk into the future, backwards, looking through a rear-view mirror”.

We take the past and we move forward.

And I thought: how do we avoid that?

If the tools that the future generations are gonna use are made by mathematicians and technology people, if making music will be made with their language the best they’ll do is bring the past to the future, but they’re not going to invent a new way cause they’re not musicians.

It would be like if the mathematicians invented all of our language today, how long would it take to make poetry?

And what kind of poetry would it be? How long would it take us to fulfill the potential of the poetic quality of the human race?

Morton Subotnick:

“What would happen if you give people only the tools of the past, then you’d bring the past to the future!?”

I realized, by 1961 that I didn’t have the capacity to do something like that.

I would need somebody to deal with the technology. I tried finding objects to bring together, that would allow me to do it, and as I did that I realized there was no way that I was gonna be able to do that.

So I put an add in the paper and eventually got (Don) Buchla and the whole formation of it was to create something that, to create something that wasn’t bringing the past into the future but that would be neutral enough and strong enough to be able to offer to people, future generations, ways to think musically.

IM: How did you envision this, how did you look at the new instrument? What would be the features of it?

Obviously there’s Marshall McLuhan and “medium is the message” (or the massage) and the interaction with the artefact is what your’re describing.

The Buchla had no classical interaction compared to what was done before and one of the paradigms of creating it was scraping out the black and white keyboard. However there are components of interaction that Buchla brought new: there were the sophisticated keyboards, the patching, the feedback mechanisms, the control voltages. How all did these features came to life?

MS: I’m gonna tell you. When I got together with him I didn’t know what this machine was gonna be. I knew that it had to have all the elements, the dimensions of music so that you could manipulate them, but I wasn’t thinking of it as a performance instrument, I was thinking of it as a creative tool. That’s important!

There’s no way you could perform this new music if you didn’t have the Buchla. The only performance instrument you could make would be dependent on the music you wanted to make with it, so a creation had to come first.

You had to first conceptualize what that music is going to be and you can’t do that because everything you’re trying to conceptualize is based on what you know. So, I decided to make a tool...

It was 45000 years ago, the human being - as far as we can tell archaeologically - changed, and it became more like us, we were always this way, except that we started painting, doing these things and it came at the moment.. the first major thing we’ve seen that we hadn’t seen with neanderthals were tools.

All kinds of animals had simple tools, we used them even better. But we made a tool to make tools at that point. And once they did that, they not only made their old tools but they could make new tools. It brought them new ideas and it went “pfoo”, like that.

IM: Exactly.

MS: And so, that’s what I was after...

IM: That’s what’s happening now.

MS: That’s what I was trying to do. So, the one thing you didn’t wanna do was give them our old tool. You wanted to make a tool to make tools. That’s what the idea was. And the metaphor I used was the painter, with a blank canvas, a brush and the painting. And then you do the cave wall, right?

You can draw on anything... but what you need is the pigment or the materials to be able to do it. And so I thought of it and called it a musical easel, electronic musical easel, something that would allow you to deal with all these.

The control voltage was the brush, how you move that’s the envelope, loudness and it was a part of your body. No black and white keyboard which is something you have to learn to do it, yet there’s something that had to come directly from your body, pushing your fingers.

In short, a lot of things were left out at the beginning because we had to work for almost two years without seeing or hearing anything, just on paper.

When the first one, the Buchla 100 came out, when I did “Silver Apples”, I found while I was working all kinds of things we didn’t do and so I kept calling him (Don Buchla) - I was, by then, in New York and he was in San Francisco - I kept calling and I would say I need such and such.

He would make a new thing. Then he would start going, he would say: “Would you like something like that?”. I mean: “yeah”. He’d go: “ok, it’s on its way”.

It was an amazing couple of years.

By 1969 I had an envelope follower which, I don’t know that there was one, I’ve looked, I can’t find one anywhere.

That may have been the first one but, I didn’t know an envelope follower: “I said we left out the voice, I can’t use my voice as a control voltage. I only can use the fingerprints”. Fingerprints was pretty important.

It was only control voltage, the patching, all of those things were part of the painting metaphor.

It was a great metaphor because it kept me from (anything that I was familiar with).. I didn’t blow on it. That’s why it never occurred to me cause I played the clarinet so I didn’t wanna blow on it, but then I realized: “That’s pure control voltage, this is great!”.

Had I done that, I would have put keys on it and it would have been like a keyboard. I realized that there’s a difference because, the violin...it’s the pressure, you know. And I think the finger pressure is probably better than that because you have to learn to do it. This one, we’ve already learned to do.

It was so natural. The thing we left out was the most natural thing. The envelope follower today we’re just learning to do that, but that was the main part by then. All the pieces after my second one were determined a lot by my voice.

A lot of my performances are made with my voice or the air.

It was very exciting, I mean you could even tell now, even while I talk about it now it’s still exciting. Amazing moment, amazing 3 or 4 or 5 years.

IM: An honorable engineering as well.

MS: He was amazing. I didn’t even know I was doing amazing things, I just was really excited, but I also didn’t know that.

Maybe there are billions of people out there that couldn’t do it either, I couldn’t do it, but now, looking back, he was just amazing, he was one of a kind: because he understood.

Don didn’t communicate very well, verbally. I had to learn everything to be able to communicate with him. He was never good talking to people.

IM: Well, engineers are not very good at talking in general.

MS: Yeah, perhaps, but he certainly wasn’t. It wasn’t like I would say something and he would: “Oh I understand.” then do it and then say: “That’s not what I had in mind". It was always exactly what I had in mind, he was really intuitive.

Morton Subotnick:

“Sometimes people would ask me: was I disappointed? I wasn’t disappointed, I was excited when “Switched on Bach” came up because what I was doing was important and if you find you’re doing something important like if you help people get well because you’re a good doctor, you would be staying being a good doctor, right? And so I just stayed at it getting it going as best I could, keeping it moving until I had goals that I had.”

1967 was the release of “Silver Apples of the Moon” and I wasn’t satisfied, that’s why I went on with the envelope followers.

I wasn’t satisfied that I had done really everything I wanted to do, but 1968, “Switched on Bach” came out; was a big thing, it was the beginning of the Moog. “Silver Apples” was a big seller at the time, it was on the charts and things. It sold 10000 records in one year. For classical music that was huge. Even the “Boston Pops” didn’t sell that much in those days. But “Switched on Bach” sold like popular music. It sold 50 to 100 thousand in the first year. It made it gold record at one point. It was huge, and it was Bach.

Because it was switched on, it was electronic (big laugh).

And I realized at that moment when that came out, that not only was it exciting what I did, but I had been absolutely right because we’re gonna walk into the future using the rear-view mirror.

How could you be more of a rear-view mirror: “I’m going into “switched on” world, when Bach already happened 150 years old?

It was in a way a big moment, because up until then I could have stopped at that point because I had done it. My idea was that if I was right, fine, if it helped, good, but at least I did it. I didn’t just say: “if I had only done it”.

When that came I realized how correct I was, it wasn’t just an idea that maybe wasn’t working. I knew I was absolutely correct.

Sometimes people would ask me: “was I disappointed?”.

I wasn’t disappointed, I was excited when “Switched on Bach” came up because what I was doing was important and if you find you’re doing something important like if you help people get well because you’re a good doctor, you would be staying being a good doctor, right?

And so I just stayed at it getting it going as best I could, keeping it moving until I had goals that I had.

IM: There are obviously inflection points in music and also in electronics. Could you correlate the ones you would think are important?

We already correlated some, there’s obviously some revolutions that have happened.

We enjoy today all the electronic software, the studios, the instruments. The electronics, technology developed quite strongly in the latest years, almost overwhelming in a way: in the 50’s the transistor was a cutting edge way of using a diode, the amplifier, the comparator. There are microchips and micro PCs and powerful quantum and binary computing.

How would you say that these inflection points of technology, and really the artifact correlates with points in the evolution of music we reference, and music democratization really, cause that’s what you started from?
MS: I’m writing a book now, trying to finish it, at the MIT; that’s about my trip through this whole thing. I’d like to get it fixed and I’d like to write a book about what you’re talking about cause it’s a big subject.

Our humanness it’s the passing down of information and it’s important.

But the question you’re asking about, the objects, the tools and all the applications; every time you come to an object, it has to do with that initial moment, it’s part of this initial thought that I had in ’59 - ’60. With all of these things, everybody can be creative musically with it. They can go beyond just their voice, there’s no problem with that!

Give somebody a comb and a piece of paper and they could make music!

With the electronics it gives them an opportunity to go beyond that because maybe they don’t have to think just in terms of imitating another song with a comb, they could make their own thing and it allows for creativity. There’s nothing wrong with that, that’s great!

What I didn’t anticipate - I had no idea because I was living in that world and it didn’t happen yet - It’s that it existed in a world we all lived in forever but we never noticed it, I didn’t notice it, maybe other people did that.

Your first question, everything is music only because someone did it and we accept it, right? And as soon as you’re on Facebook and you do something and a million people accept it, it’s “IT”, but it may be: “oh”, “ohh”, “ahhh...”.

IM: Exactly.

MS: So everybody’s going: “oh, ohh...”.

If you accept that as the new thing, while we’re doing this with these people on Youtube would do these things and they become “multi million people are following”. I mean it’s cute, it’s nice but it’s not the Beethoven fifth symphony. It’s not a Bach mass. It’s not a cathedral.

There’s nothing wrong that it’s not, but if you substitute that for what is possible to do with this machinery and be satisfied with it, it creates..

Morton Subotnick:

“What young people, especially, don’t understand is that they’re not gonna have this exciting period of creativity all their life. They’re gonna be stuck in ten years, not everybody but most people would get stuck and whatever they do, whatever job they have or whatever, maybe they’ll have this midlife crisis where they say: “I’m halfway through my life but what am I still doing at this point?”! They’re gonna be doing loops and one day they’ll say: “well, that was fun!”.

But where did it take them? It took them farther than they were but does it allow you to keep going?”

You might end up electing a man like Trump as president, because you don’t have any notion of what you can do when you’re in that position. This is serious!

It’s very serious. It’s not to put this down, it’s a wonderful thing that everybody could do these days. You don’t wanna stop that, but it can’t substitute for machines.

Now, when you take the applications.. I took an electric course at NYU and, eventually I want to write this book. This is what we do, we look at pieces of software. At first I go with this whole opening thing. In the second half of the semester they’re working with different software. What does the software, what is it good for, and what does it not let you do?

You could say: “Oh, I’ve got this great thing and I’m gonna make loops”.. “All your music is loops, that’s fine, it’s fun, it’s great, but how much more can you do?

What young people, especially, don’t understand is that they’re not gonna have this exciting period of creativity all their life.

They’re gonna be stuck in ten years, not everybody, but most people would get stuck and whatever they do, whatever job they have or whatever, maybe they’ll have this midlife crisis where they say: “I’m halfway through my life but what am I still doing at this point?”! They’re gonna be doing loops and one day they’ll say: “well, that was fun!”.

But where did it take them?

It took them further than they were but does it allow you to keep going? I’m not sure what the answer is to that because all the stuff out there is like the Australian indigenous people with the didgeridoo.

IM: It’s like an alphorn...it looks like a long tube and it has a low frequency timbre.

MS: Yes.

IM: It’s all around Europe, It used to be utilized for communication but now it’s disappearing because people have mobile phones ubiquitously now, thus the practical usage of that is no there anymore.

Morton Subotnick:

“What I was trying to deal with is the inclusiveness of pushing the human being further. Each person that had the opportunity, not everybody is gonna do that but they would have the opportunity to do it, to be able to push them to become more human, not less human.”

MS: Yes, but using overtones you can use it like a trumpet, propel on it.

It’s a wonderful musical instrument but if you’re a culture that only had that, that’s all they had, you could make your wonderful music with it but how far could you go with it?

You can’t make a Beethoven fifth symphony. We can’t belittle what these people did with these elite art forms, I mean these are phenomenal. It’s a shame that we don’t experience them. It takes more than “tuu-tuu-tuu” to be able to understand the complexity of the thinking of it.

I remember giving a lecture to a group of students. I was gonna give a course about 19th century music at CalArts. These were all pretty wild kids, even painters doing art song, you know, from the 19th century.

But I thought, it was important that they understand something very different from what they had. And I was talking about the fact that this music was based on their cultural thing at the time.

One of the big things was unrequited love where you love somebody but you could never be near them.

I was talking about this and kids were laughing, it was funny to them. And I said wait a minute, I said Goethe wrote a novel in 1774, “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, I don’t know if you know that but it was famous.

It was very important at that time, in Germany. It was about this young man that falls in love with this woman, but she’s married and everything he does is to be near her but he realizes that he can never fulfill his love. He commits suicide. And there was a rash of suicides after reading the book: generals, in armies. I mean it’s hard for us to understand. This is the way they lived.

And so I said to the group, Robert Schumann wrote this song that we were looking at, for the woman he loved. He eventually married her.

And I said: “When was the last time you cried, not because you got hurt but because you felt so sad that someone left you?”

It was still snickers in the room and I said: “Well, don’t come back to my lecture next week until you listen to this song and understand how it felt and get the feeling of what it might have felt like to be so sad that you would wanna commit suicide”. They did come back and we had a nice semester!

To me, the tragedy is the loss of humanity.

What I was trying to deal with is the inclusiveness of pushing the human being further. Each person that had the opportunity, not everybody is gonna do that but they would have the opportunity to do it, to be able to push them to become more human, not less human.

IM: There is a question here about a philosophical current that is happening now and it’s about the philosophy of trans-humanism which dealing with the fact that we, as humans, more and more, will be conditioned by the new artefact, by the technology that we interact with the nature and between us.

Does it change anything of ourselves, of the humanity, and how that would probably impact the future music?

MS: I’m delighted to hear that that is what people are thinking cause it’s important. It is what’s happening and that’s the tragedy.

That’s why a person like Trump could even get that far, is because we don’t think beyond what we’re being conditioned by this. It’s the glue instinct. We carry this into the future.

We don’t look at the future as a vast empty space. With all its, possibilities it’s too hard to make your own space and to become more human, not less.

You know Marcuse’s book, the “One - Dimensional Man”?

He was actually Austrian or German but he lived in the United States because of The Second World War. He was a Marxist philosopher but he was against social realism and all. He was a critic of the way in which that was being used.

He liked the idea that of all the technology that was being developed but he was afraid that this would then become the only thing they’ll do in life and interact this trans-human thing where they would become two - dimensional.

He wrote another book he called “The Aesthetic Dimension”, which is a smaller book. The aesthetic dimension is that in which he felt that art was the possibility and artists being creative and moving beyond what you have everyday. It was one of the most powerful ways that we can transform into multidimensions and not be stuck.

IM: That’s what we’re doing. In Romania, Europe and America a big percentage of the people are emerged into information consuming...

MS: Exactly, we become consumers of information and everything else. That was his point.

What was interesting and why I mentioned him is that his book, the “One - Dimensional Man” which suggested the problem and he wrote the third one much later, which was “The Aesthetic Dimension” but he essentially stated the problem of this static way in which humans would become one - dimensionalised by being consumers and being satisfied (as opposed to the dialectics, n.edit), that was the end.

That we have to constantly revolt against the present not with guns but to to question and to be creative.

It came from the protest movements in the late 60’s in The United States. The Black Panthers, Angela Davis... All that whole group are the followers of him and they used the “One - Dimensional Man” as their bible for this thing.

IM: Your opera, “Jacob’s Room”, it’s an aggregation of your beliefs in terms of interaction, total theater and pushing the boundaries of space.

Other components are related to the story in itself, would you explain some of the main ideas in and if you’re still having any performance with it?

MS: I get offers about once a year. People want do it. Either two versions. There’s an earlier version that was just three people and then the bigger one that we did here, in Berlin.

The bigger one can be done, the Frankfurt opera wanted to do it. The production was two years of the making and we worked together with the singers for four months here. That was where I was saying I was commuting. I worked every day for four months with them after they knew the music and it’s really really hard to do. I’m sure someday someone will do it.

I wasn’t thinking I was making things that were to be shared. I didn’t really think I was doing important music. I was just doing important things and I shared how I did it and it was there, on the record, or somewhere, to see and to hear. I didn’t realize that people would want to reproduce this in some way.

It’s a major effort, trying to do it, but the idea was part of the original 1961 idea which was that you could be creative with a new medium, of just listening. And there, and this is the misunderstanding of the Buchla.

The Buchla was not - in fact I’ve had to explain this to Suzanne (Ciani) from time to time cause she came on it much later when it was already full-grown and everything - not an instrument to be played in public, it was an easel you don’t need a book for.

I mean some people do so, you know, you could go on and do something.

Morton Subotnick:

“You do things you could even be sent to jail for doing something because you’re doing it cause you really believe in it. You don’t do it because you’re gonna get flowers and make a lot of money or something.

That to me is the most important ingredient of to be human: is to really believe honestly, for yourself and other people and you need to fulfill it whether it’s true or whether it isn’t true.”

It was 1961. I had tried, as I said, from 1959, 1960, to do it myself so I realized it was bigger than I could do and that I needed an engineer to work with me. And I was very very energized by all this.

I was playing the clarinet, at that point I had one child, the second one was on the way. I could make a living playing the clarinet, I was a very good clarinetist and I couldn’t make a living as a composer but I was already getting commissions.

Between that I had a career but I realized there was no way I could keep that career. This was very important to me cause it’s a real important moment.

I wasn’t going to throw all this away unless I really had the aptitude that I could do something with it, so I decided, I conceptualized the world 150 years, not what it would be like but sort of the kind of thing it would be, and decided to make a piece that would be the kind of thing people would do with technology on the stage, in public, 150 years from that moment.

So I made a piece called “Sound Blocks: An Heroic Vision”. The idea of the hero of “Vision” as a hero is you’re a hero if you do something in spite of everything.

When Halley predicted when the comet was gonna come by, long after he’s dead, he wouldn’t know whether he was right or not. He knew he would not know because he could never live that long, but he did the prediction anyway. It turned out he was right so he’s a hero.

You do things you could even be sent to jail for doing something, because you’re doing it cause you really believe in it. You don’t do it because you’re gonna get flowers and make a lot of money or something.

That to me is the most important ingredient of to be human: is to really believe honestly, for yourself and other people and you need to fulfill it whether it’s true or whether it isn’t true.

In order to give up the clarinet and this whole thing I made a piece - this is 1961, the fall of 1961 - it had 4 loud speakers in the room, I used two track tape recorders and I made sounds from just using - we had contact microphones then, they were for things like harmonicas, you would stick them in the harmonicas so you could amplify the harmonica - I used contact microphones on things that you couldn’t hear and made music from things you couldn’t hear; there wasn’t much you could do with it but backwards and forwards and cut it out and so forth.

I know I remember making rhythm things with an ashtray, we were all smoked in those days.

IM: It’s like noise sound.

MS: Yes, the things you would not be able to hear with your ear which would be amplified.

I had seen Cocteau, the french filmmaker from the twenties, he did a film, “Orpheus”, in which Orpheus is trying to get Eurydice, his wife, his lover, back from Hades. But he’s in the 20th century and he’s in a car listening to shortwave radio to get to Hades.

He’s getting these signals and he’s taking not the radio itself but the static between; that is a wonderful scene. So I used shortwave radio and I got ministers, different yelling and all kinds of things that were sort of hallucinatory. So the tape was that.

I had four musicians around the space and lighting things behind of them. I was working in the theater in those days, writing music for the theater as well as other things and so we used these lighting flats where he could change; using primary colors we could make images and shapes out of these things. This is 1961, in San Francisco.

There’s no way I was gonna know the Beatles were gonna be there and there will be drugs 3 or 4 years, we’ll gonna have psychedelic world four years from then.

I’d had no way to know that, that’s not what I was thinking: 150 years.. I made this piece, the newspaper said: “a new art form has been born”; and it was like this thing, and I thought (Morton laughs) well: “I guess I have the aptitude”. That’s when I put the add in the paper, after I knew I had the aptitude.

Morton Subotnick:

“My idea was that the public performance, in its largest form, had to have this new music whatever that was. It had to have movement and image and it had to have idea.”

I decided it’s never been done again, that piece, I’ve saved it because it had history, I’ve never take it out, but I didn’t think it was good. It was obviously profound and a profound experience for people, but the piece itself wasn’t that good. It wasn’t what I would like to do.

I was trying to go further than that. I used Michael McClure; the poet, was a close friend of mine - is still close, he’s still alive (n. edit. died May the 5th in 2020) - and he spoke in it, towards the end in “The Flowers of Politics”, or something important at the end; and that was clear, an idea.

My idea was that the public performance, in its largest form - this was what I was after at that moment and then go back and pick up the pieces after once I could do it - had to have this new music whatever that was. It had to have movement and image and it had to have idea. So I began.

Over a period of time, the first thing was pure music, that was the record. The next thing was to start, when I finished the records, which took me a lot longer than I thought, it was like fifteen years by the time I got the last of the records done, 1961, I stopped in 1977 or ’78 when I finally said I’ve done it with records. Then I started adding instruments, the ghost pieces. And then I started doing large scale pieces using images and I did three or four of them but I still didn’t have words.

Morton Subotnick

“Over a period of time, the first thing was pure music, that was the record. The next thing was to start, when I finished the records, which took me a lot longer than I thought, it was fifteen years by the time I got the last of the records done, 1961, I stopped in 1977 or ’78 when I finally said I’ve done it with records. Then I started adding instruments, the ghost pieces. And then I started doing large scale pieces using images and I did three or four of them but I still didn’t have words.”

I had really wonderful, big multimedia pieces. I was ready then to do, that’s when Jacob’s came in to be. It had to have ideas, using language for idea. They had to be important cause I was only gonna do one piece. These were all examples, it wasn’t a lifetime of making pieces. I thought I’d be finished in ten years, with everything. I’m almost done now.

With “Jacob’s Room”, the first version was hugely technological, but it was done in such a way that it was only one person on the stage.

I did a piece later using disco mirrors with that, a man and light beams and you didn’t see the light beams but you saw him; and he played two disco mirrors that were on the stage, with his hands, in the midair. This piano he would play with this hand, this piano he would play with this hand, and images that were controlled by his hands. He would play and then images would play.

IM: How was called?

MS: That was done for the Lincoln Center. It was called “Intimate Immensity”. It was done in Karlsruhe at the ZKM.

But I realized that as the more important the message was, verbally, the less you wanted to see the technology. It had to fold into the background.

When I got to the final version of “Jacob’s Room”, that we developed here, most of that disappeared. There’s a lot of technology in it.

The stage, which was the most important thing, which is floating. Part of the reasons, they had to memorize everything, but also use their bodies. They’re moving their bodies, there’s no mechanical thing..

IM: Counter-balance, and to be able to perform...

MS: Yes, to be able to perform, and know all that and sing while they’re moving on the stage. The ideas came from the images of the Holocaust, what the piece was about itself, and it was not a piece that was depicting the Holocaust, it was not a Holocaust piece in that sense.

It was about the loss of humanity, the fragileness of our inner communication thing that allows us to share rules and laws.

Religions get out of hand, laws could get out of hand, but without them, if you just get rid of them, you have anarchy, and anarchy is back for us, even worse than the jungle cause we weren’t made from the jungle, we were made from groups via ten people, they hold it; and if anyone disturbs it you kick them out.

And now we’re in this world where the ten people are the world, and when you do it, the total tragedy is not just the inhumanity of killing three million people, that’s huge, but it’s so huge you say that’s the whole tragedy. It’s not the whole tragedy.

The whole tragedy is that you break that fabric, you could no longer believe in laws, you could no longer have a religion, you could no longer have these things which are just fabrics; they’re fabrics that hold us together, and somehow we know for instance, we know, in spite of the fact there’s no way that we can see it, we know that the Earth is round, but you can’t work with it in everyday life, it’s just not possible.

That’s the whole existential philosophy that came from the 20th century. It’s hard to live with being existential. Jean Paul Sartre couldn’t accept the Nobel literature prize because that was against his philosophy.

You are what you are and you don’t become more than that or less than that, at any given moment.

It’s that quality, it’s tenuous, and you have to know; that that’s why absurd theater is called absurd theater.

Because You know what you’re doing is not real, the laws aren’t real, none of this is real, we’re holding it together, but if you don’t, that’s the absurdity.

We hold everything together knowing that there’s no.. you know, that’s why we invented religion because it’s bigger than us so it makes us feel better.

It’s like, your father tells you to do something, you feel better, you know, but there’s a part of you that doesn’t want, but you know that if you don’t do it, when you’re a little kid, what your parents say, you’re very vulnerable, so you hang on to this, but you have to hang on to that absurdity as you go.

So, the real tragedy is: we’re the only group evidently on Earth that can know that we’re alone.

And we would know that aloneness, so that was the island that she made and that you experience the aloneness of these people on the stage that is never spoken. The irony was that once I got that piece, I did a final piece with that whole thing that doesn’t show any technology at all (big laugh).

IM: It’s just the natural progression of what it became. It had a soul already..

What went wrong for you, as a person and as a musician and what went good and most of all what did you learn, as an advice to young musicians today?

MS: I wouldn’t advise anyone. I don’t know what to advise them to.

I think the only advice would be to try to be what you can be. I can’t give you advice for individuals because I don’t know if the advice has to be particular to that person.

But for individuals together, artists, young people who are striving in some way is: to be more of yourself, to push yourself, to be as human as possible.

You’ve got these few years that awareness; it is a special gift to be aware!

I mean every creature is aware, but in such a tiny form usually, it’s just the moment to moment, to moment, to moment.

Our awareness, the one thing that we’ve evolved to is this awareness that brings billions of years into focus of the past, and maybe even dreams of billions of years into the future, at these moments, the moments like a dog sniffing on the street. This is enormous, it’s an enormous thing, that’s who we are.

I don’t know what dogs can necessarily do, but humans can do this. We don’t make use of it as a one-dimensional man, if we don’t make use of that we’ve lost a gift and we should pass that on for other people.

The advice is, because, at that moment, that last moment of the big sleep, when no consciousness will be there anymore, as you’re going, that breath that comes out will be: I did it.

The tragedy to me, is the end of “Jacob’s Room”, when we’re standing alone, his awareness, he’s still aware, but we didn’t do it, we lost it. He did it, he’s there, but what it is is a tragedy, is a tragedy of humanity, but the individual tragedy is “I did it” or “I didn’t do it”.

That’s the only advice, that’s the human advice, there’s nothing special about a musician, or a composer, or artist, we’re just people. So, the only advice is for a person, and if you wanna be a painter then that’s what you do.

IM: Nice way of ending it. Thank you very much for the interview.

Morton Subotnick:

“It was about the loss of humanity, the fragileness of our inner communication thing that allows us to share rules and laws. Religions get out of hand, laws could get out of hand, but without them, if you just get rid of them, you have anarchy, and anarchy is back for us, even worse than the jungle cause we weren’t made from the jungle, we were made from groups via ten people, they hold it; and if anyone disturbs it you kick them out.”