Morton Subotnick is a little amused and a little alarmed. He's about to turn 70 and he's hearing too much about "grandfathers" and "gurus," as in "Morton Subotnick, grandfather of electronica" or "Morton Subotnick, guru of electronic music."
"I don't know about 'guru' or 'grandfather,' " he says by phone from Manhattan, one half of his home bases (the other is in Newhall).
"We're talking about my 70th birthday. I used to think that was old. I know that it's far along in one's life in the sense that you have fewer years to live than you've lived. But outside of that, I don't feel old. I feel a part of everything that is going on. I feel great," he says, laughing.
Subotnick is one of classical music's most determined forward thinkers, and now as always, he would rather be aimed at whatever comes next. He is headed to Phoenix to monitor a test group of children trying out his third interactive music-education CD-ROM, "Hearing Music." (On his related Creating Music Web site, he appears as a kindly cartoon visage, half-mad scientist, half-mad conductor.)
Then on to California Institute of the Arts -- where he teaches every fall in the music school he co-founded -- and a concert Wednesday in celebration of his April 14 birthday. Like his other birthday concerts (another comes in May with the E.A.R. Unit in L.A.), this one will offer a look back at works from the past but, always, also a look ahead. In this case, a homage from a former student will have its premiere and Subotnick will show off a snippet of a computer-aided work in progress, "Gestures." In finished form, "Gestures" will be one of the opening attractions at CalArts' REDCAT space at Walt Disney Concert Hall in November.
Just beyond that, Subotnick is trying, as he has for a few years, to perfect playing music on all kinds of instruments by remote control, the art of being in two places at once.
In fact, the thing that keeps Subotnick going is the pointed pursuit of his own imagination. Every once in a while, musical technology catches up to what he's been dreaming about.
"What I'm doing is sitting around with this parcel of ideas, starting in 1961. They keep coming. It doesn't end: Ideas pop into my head of where I would like to go with technology and then waiting for the technology to get there."
"Experiment is art" might not be too strong a credo for Subotnick. To find your own voice, he counsels, "go to the edge, to the areas that haven't been touched."
An experimental bent
Subotnick is an L.A. native, the son of a mandolinist. He studied clarinet and 12-tone theory while still at North Hollywood High, then went on to USC and later to Mills College, where he studied with the boundary-crossing, ever-theatrical Darius Milhaud. He points to 1961 -- by then he was teaching at Mills and about to co-found the San Francisco Tape Music Center -- as the point at which he took a left turn from the musical mainstream and never looked back. The world of physical instruments and markings on manuscript paper seemed obsolete, and Subotnick traded it in for early synthesizers, tape loops and "sound and light" experiments.
He zoomed into public consciousness with "Silver Apples of the Moon" in 1967, the first commercially widely available all-electronic record, commissioned by Nonesuch Records. By then he was doing multimedia experiments in an art space in New York City and for Lincoln Center. The success of "Silver Apples," created on the relatively prehistoric Buchla modular synthesizer, sealed his fate as a musical futurist.
"It was a big success in a very small place," he says, referring to the esoteric world of electronic music, "but there were reviews. People were saying things like 'This is a new art form.' "
His vision he says, "got validated. It was a moment that allowed that whole thing to crystallize for me."
Subotnick looks back at the landmark work as his grappling with the medium of the LP. At the same time, he was never content -- "not from Day One" -- with "tape music," electronic effects created and recorded in the studio, then played back in a dark concert hall. Instead, he wanted to mix live "natural" sound with electronics, to make the new medium an instrument among instruments, to create sound theater.
Subotnick has been there, done that with all kinds of sound breakthroughs: using what's called SMPTE code to sync sound to film, playing with the connectivity of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), moving into laptops and using the interactive power of the Internet.
One habit is to take one work and keep evolving it as the technology evolves. "Jacob's Room," one of his most important pieces, began in 1985 as a piece for one voice plus the Kronos Quartet. By 1993 it was a multimedia experiment in "languages" -- traditional musical languages, abstract sounds on tape and manipulated through computer, live sung language, and visual language, in the form of video.
