- Morton Subotnick
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"Silver Apples of the Moon" redirects here. For the Laika album, see Silver Apples of the Moon (album).
Morton Subotnick (born April 14, 1933, in Los Angeles, California) is an American composer of electronic music, best known for his Silver Apples of the Moon, the first electronic work commissioned by a record company, Nonesuch. He was one of the founding members of California Institute of the Arts where he taught for many years.
Subotnick has also worked extensively with interactive electronics and multi-media, co-founding the San Francisco Tape Music Center with Ramon Sender, and often collaborating with his wife Joan La Barbara. His oldest son, Steven Subotnick, is an animator; his youngest son, Jacob Subotnick, is a sound designer and his daughter, Tamara Winer, is a psychiatric social worker. Students of his include Ingram Marshall, Mark Coniglio, Carl Stone, Rhys Chatham and Lois V Vierk.
Contents
Silver Apples of the Moon
Early electronic music was made using wave generators and tape-manipulated sounds. Subotnick was among the first composers to work with electronic instrument designer Don Buchla. Buchla's modular voltage-controlled synthesizer, which he called the Electric Music Box and which was constructed partly based on suggestions by Subotnick and Sender, was both more flexible and easier to use, and its sequencing ability was integral to Subotnick's music.
At a time when electronic music was highly abstract, largely concerned with pitch and timbre, with rhythm an afterthought or of no consequence and patterns largely avoided, Subotnick broke with the academic avant-gardists by including sections with regular rhythms. Both Silver Apples and 1968's The Wild Bull (another Nonesuch-commissioned work for tape; they have since been combined on a Wergo CD) have been choreographed by dance companies around the world.
Approach to music
Where previous electronic music had used non-traditional structures, Subotnick's electronic compositions are structured more like the classical music for acoustic instruments with which audiences are familiar, but with nontraditional timbres and pitch manipulations no orchestra could produce. He has also written for acoustic instruments, and studied with Darius Milhaud and Leon Kirchner at Mills College in Oakland, California.
Selected works
- Sonata for viola and piano (1958)
- Silver Apples of the Moon (1967)
- The Wild Bull (1968)
- Touch (1969)
- Sidewinder (1971)
- Four Butterflies (1973)
- Until Spring (1975)
- A Sky of Cloudless Sulfur (1978)
- An Arsenal of Defense for solo viola and "electronic ghost score" (1982)
- The Key to Songs (1985)
- Jacob's Room (1986)
- and the butterflies begin to sing (1988)
- All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis (1991)
- Gestures (1999-2001)
External links
- MortonSubotnick.com
- Morton Subotnick's Creating Music
- CalArts Faculty: Morton Subotnick
- http://www.inmc.org/Subotnick.html
- New Albion Artist: Morton Subotnick
- European American Music Distributors LLC: Morton Subotnick
- Morton Subotnick at Schott Music
- Malaspina Great Books: Morton Subotnick
- From Moog to Mark II, to MIDI to MAX By Kyle Gann for American Public Media
- Interview
- Interview with Peter Shea at the University of Minnesota
Listening
- Interview with Dublab
- Mars Millennium Project 2030: Artist: Morton Subotnick
- Morton Subotnick interview
- Art of the States: Morton Subotnick Echoes from the Silent Call of Girona (1998)
- Subotnick's The Double Life of Amphibians at the Internet Archive Avant Garde Project has FLAC files made from high-quality LP transcriptions (originally from the Avant Garde Project) available for free download.
Categories:- 1933 births
- Living people
- 20th-century classical composers
- 21st-century classical composers
- American electronic musicians
- Electroacoustic music composers
- Avant-garde keyboardists
- Nonesuch Records artists
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