Morton Subotnick

Morton Subotnick ( born April 14, 1933, Los Angeles ) is an American avant-garde musician, composer and music educator. He is one of the pioneers of electronic music.

Life

Subotnick taught in the early 1960s at Mills College in Oakland. Together with Pauline Oliveros, and Ramon Sender 1961 he founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center ( SFTMC ). At this time he worked with Anna Halprin, a representative of modern dance, together. From this, the works were three legged stool and Parades and Changes. Subotnick became musical director of the Actors Workshop in San Francisco. 1963 began his work with Don Buchla at the development of an "electronic black box or Electric Music Box", an early analog synthesizer. The device, Buchla Series 100, which was completed a year before Robert Moog 's pioneering keyboard synthesizer ( Moog synthesizer ), but found no commercial use, is now in the Smithsonian Museum.

1966 Subotnick was able to obtain grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, which made it possible to combine the SFTMC with the Chamber Orchestra of Mills College. Finally Subotnick Tapecenter was an integral part of Mills College, and moved to Oakland. Subotnick, however, went to New York, where he was chief conductor of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Together with Len Lye, he was Artist in Residence at the newly founded Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. The School of the Arts enabled him to set up his own studio and the purchase of a Buchla synthesizer. Subotnick has been artistic director of the New York avant-garde nightclubs Electric Circus, a forerunner of modern disco and developed to the concert series Electric Ear. In 1967 Subotnick until today known work Silver Apples of the Moon, a commissioned work for the label Nonesuch Records and the first purely electronic composition, which was released as recordings. The minimum pioneers Silver Apples named themselves after this piece.

In 1969 Subotnick the invitation to Los Angeles to join a group of artists who were planning a new school. With Mel Powell as Dean of the School of Music and Subotnick as Vice Dean and a team of four other pairs of artists a new direction of music teaching at the fledgling California Institute of the Arts was born. Subotnick remained four years at the Institute, then resigned as associate dean and became head of the Composition program, which was expanded in the following years to the disciplines of new media and interactive technologies. 1978 produced Subotnick with Roger Reynolds and Bernard Rands five internationally acclaimed New Music Festival.

With the factory Ascent Into Air Subotnick reached in 1981 a high point in the history of live listed electronic music programming: On the digital audio processor 4C of the IRCAM in Paris, he presented a number of innovative techniques, experiments with quadraphonic and instrument tunings as well as its so-called electronic ghost scores (electronic "ghost scores " ). An attention was paid to the use of traditional musical instruments in conjunction with computer-generated sounds and in the control of the computer by the actors as living control Voltages (see control voltage).

Away from the electronic music composed Subotnick numerous " classic " works for symphony and chamber orchestras, theater and multimedia productions. Its stage play The Double Life of Amphibians, a collaboration with the director Lee Breuer and visual artist Irving Petlin, based on the interaction of singers and instrumentalists with the computer. The piece was premiered at the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles.

With his wife, the singer and composer Joan La Barbara, Subotnick has three children: the animation artist Steven Subotnick, the sound engineer Jacob Subotnick and the social worker Tamara Winer.

Known disciple of Subotnick are Rhys Chatham, Sidney Corbett, Orm Finnendahl, Aaron Jay Kernis and Guy Klucevsek.

Works

CD

• Morton's Music paintbox. The first music - drawing program for children. (CD -ROM for Mac and PC) Systhema Verlag, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-634-43012-5.