Nurturing YoungComposers: MortonSubotnick’s Late-1960sStudio in New York City

Bob GluckUniversity at Albany, SUNYDepartment of MusicPAC 312, 1400 Washington AvenueAlbany, New York 12222, USAgluckr@albany.edu

Founding of the NYU Studio

During the 1960s and 1970s, the best-known site inNew York City for the development of new work byelectronic composers was the Columbia-PrincetonElectronic Music Center, founded in 1959 (Chadabe1997; Gluck 2007a, 2007b; Holmes 2008). Thewell-deserved prominence of this center, however,obscures a second, highly non-institutional studioloosely affiliated with New York University’s(NYU’s) School of the Arts (later named the TischSchool of the Arts). The studio was established ascomposer Morton Subotnick’s (b. 1933) personalworkspace, but, through his generosity and hispractice of utilizing studio assistants, it provideda nurturing environment for a cadre of importantyoung composers. Their work continued in asuccessor studio at NYU, following Subotnick’sdeparture to the newly founded California Schoolof the Arts (CalArts). Little documentation aboutthis studio exists, and few recordings have survived.Thus, I have conducted interviews, collecting first-hand accounts, reminiscences, and photographs,with the intention of beginning to craft a missingpart of the history of electronic music in New YorkCity.

Morton Subotnick’s New York City studio wasestablished during a transitional period in the historyof electronic music (Chadabe 1997; Holmes 2008).To offer the broadest overview, the composition oftape music, originating in the late 1940s and early1950s, continued in studios throughout the world.Computer music, initiated in the mid 1950s, was agrowing field. One of the new horizons in the earlyand mid 1960s was live electronic music, as JohnCage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and others began toexplore what had been largely a discipline rooted instudio composition. Tape music and live multimedia

Computer Music Journal, 36:1, pp. 65–80, Spring 2012c© 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

performance were the dual specialty areas of theSan Francisco Tape Music Studio, where MortonSubotnick was a founding figure. Another emergingarea was the development of voltage-controlledanalog synthesizers, such as those designed byRobert Moog and Donald Buchla (b. 1937). Buchla’sElectronic Music Box was designed in responseto Subotnick’s and Tape Music Center colleagueRamon Sender’s (b. 1934) desire for a compositionalinstrument that generated electronic sounds, andsequences of sounds, without the use of magnetictape.

The founding of Subotnick’s studio in New Yorkwas the result of unanticipated events. He hadmoved from San Francisco in 1966 to serve asMusic Director for Herbert Blau’s Lincoln CenterRepertory Theater at Vivian Beaumont Theater.The company was based at the newly opened artscomplex, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.Subotnick’s need for additional income resulted inhis decision to accept a supplementary positionas one of two Artists in Residence at NYU. Thearrangement was quite informal and offered himtremendous freedom to compose as he wished ina studio of his own design. Among the fruits ofthis new arrangement would be Subotnick’s twocompositions commissioned by Nonesuch Records,Silver Apples of the Moon (1967) and The WildBull (1968; Subotnick 1994). Subotnick recalls thecircumstances of the studio’s founding:

I met with [School of the Arts Dean] RobertCorrigan at Knickerbockers for dinner, andI told him what my conditions would be.He brought along the Ertegun Brothers fromAtlantic Records. Corrigan was supposed tobring my contract to read, but what he broughtwas a blank piece of paper on NYU stationarywith his signature at the bottom and he said:“You write it, include whatever you want todo.”

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Figure 1. MortonSubotnick in his NYUstudio on Bleecker Street.(Photograph from thecollection of MortonSubotnick.)

NYU agreed to locate the studio off campus: “Ididn’t want to be on campus or part of a university,so the idea was that they would give us each [therewere two resident artists] a studio above the BleeckerStreet Cinema, on the corner of LaGuardia Place,across from The Bitter End” (see Figure 1). The mainspace was just under 600 square feet in size, 24 × 24feet. Among its furnishings were two Ampex taperecorders (initially two-track, and by its third year,four-track), and newly available Bose speakers. Avisual arts studio was located on another floor.

The Buchla and Subotnick’s CompositionalMethod for Silver Apples of the Moon

At the core of the music studio was the Buchla Series100 (Modular Electronic Music System or “BuchlaBox”), one of the first modular analog electronicmusical instruments (Darter and Armbruster 1984;Pinch and Trocco 2002; Buchla and Associates 2010).The Buchla Box was designed by Buchla as an answerto an idea conceptualized between 1962 and 1963by Subotnick and his peers at the San FranciscoTape Music Center (Bernstein 2008). Subotnicksought to overcome the limitations of composingtape music and bridge the gap between composer,performer, and listener. He recalled the process ina conversation with Joel Chadabe (Chadabe 1993):

“We decided that this idea of cutting and splicingwas ridiculous, and we came up with the notionfrom our reading of an optical synthesizer, whereyou make up different sound waves and put themtogether...” Subotnick explained to me how theconcept evolved:

I really loved working in my studio and nothaving to go out on the stage and write formusicians. I loved that. But the technologywas really ratty. It was horrible. So I came upwith this idea I called the ”Electronic MusicEasel.“ Must have been like 1961. It wouldbe to create sound as if you were painting. Ihad a preliminary design. I got Ramon Senderinterested in this. But to this day, they all sortof relinquish it over to me because I was thedriving force behind it. We put an ad in the paperto find an engineer. It was prototyped on paper,but neither Ramon nor I knew enough aboutelectronics to build anything. We got a group ofpeople who came in and then finally, I think itwas [after the] better part of a year, Don Buchlaarrived. He took the idea and twenty-four hourslater he came back with a [circuit] board; it usedlight.

It wasn’t voltage control; it was a light wheel.As it spun, it would create different waveforms.So you could introduce different pictures andshapes and it would make a different sound onthe basis of that; and [also from] the speed ofthe wheel and the intensity of the light andthat kind of stuff. And it worked. The Wurlitzerelectric piano was working on that idea, too. Ihad one and I took it apart. That’s how I knewwhat was going on in there. So, Don built oneand it worked. Twenty-four hours later. Wewere really impressed! It did work! Amazing.Then he said: “This isn’t the way to go.” Heexplained transistors and integrated circuits; heexplained the whole thing to us. We said: “Well,let’s do it.” I commissioned him to make theElectronic Music Easel. [Music Easel becamethe name of a 1973 version.] Don didn’t playpiano. He wanted an instrument that peoplewho didn’t play an instrument could play. AndI was not interested in musical instruments. I

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Figure 2. MortonSubotnick with the Buchlain his NYU studio.(Photograph from thecollection of MortonSubotnick.)

was interested in this easel in the home, whichwas not designed to play a piece of music, butto create art with sound.

The new instrument would be “based on modu-larity, and everything was inter-connectable, so itwas like a giant computer” and was designed witha $500 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Al-though it was ready during the 1964–1965 season, itreceived limited compositional use until Subotnickmoved to New York (see Figure 2).

The goal was a new instrument that could gen-erate musical gestures that a composer/performercould shape in real-time. Among the features ofthe three-panel Buchla were a touch plate keyboardthat responded to finger pressure, and a sequencerthat allowed the composer/performer the ability toset a series of stages of voltage levels that couldbe applied as control voltages for any musicalattribute—for instance, frequency, filter parameters,or amplitude. Silicon rectifiers and lights allowedthe composer/performer to use control voltages toshape projected images and light.

Subotnick’s compositional method involvedcreative, intuitive use of the modules. He would setup an initial configuration of modules and settings,a “patch,” making particular use of the sequencers.Because it was impossible to store a specific patchon an analog instrument, Subotnick and othercomposers working with the Buchla kept notes or

Figure 3. Laurie Spiegel’slist of Buchla modules atthe Composer’s Workshopat NYU. (Photograph fromthe collection of LaurieSpiegel.)

“patch diagrams” to recall their initial settings.Although Subotnick’s notebooks from his work inthe NYU studio no longer exist, Laurie Spiegel’s (b.1945) diagrams from 1971 document how composersat NYU patched the Buchla (see Figures 3–5).

Subotnick describes his distinct way of workingwith the Buchla: “My approach was to put every-thing in random motion, setting up random loopsand then picking what I wanted from this.” SilverApples was created in this manner.

I would generate music, listen to it, and continueto edit the patch until I got exactly what Iwanted. What came from those hours couldturn into only two, three, or five minutes ofmusic. I had a lot of outtakes. I recorded a lot ofstuff, I guess because I didn’t trust getting thepatch back on the Buchla. I was working very

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Figure 4. Laurie Spiegel’sBuchla input-to-outputchart, 30 November 1971.(Photograph from thecollection of LaurieSpiegel.)

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Figure 5. Laurie Spiegel’sBuchla patch diagram, 21October 1971. (Photographfrom the collection ofLaurie Spiegel.)

much like a remix artist today, except that itwas all my own material. I spewed out a lot,putting the material together in various waysuntil a final version came out.

Richard Friedman (b. 1944), one of Subotnick’sassistants, recalls: “He worked at night and, whenI came over at lunchtime, he would play the partsthat he had just done. He would create these longsequences, 10–15 minutes long. Mort would sit onthe couch and play one segment and then anotherand he would figure out how to connect them.I did some of the splicing.” Silver Apples of the

Moon was only his third work completed on theBuchla, following a theater piece completed in SanFrancisco, Play 4 (1966), and Prelude no. 3 (1966),for piano and electronics.

Subotnick Brings in Assistants, Creatinga De Facto Community Studio

NYU placed very limited institutional expectationsupon the two resident artists, Subotnick and kineticartist Len Lye (1901–1980), and Lye’s successor,visual artist Anthony Martin (b. 1937), Subotnick’s

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former associate at the San Francisco Tape MusicCenter. “[We] would each give a weekly two-hourlecture at the School of Arts for the entire school. Wewould also make ourselves available for students,who would help us or just watch us at work.” In itssecond year, the residency soon became the core ofa short-lived Intermedia Program, for which BoydCompton was hired as director and (unsuccessful)fundraiser. Compton, a former staff member at theRockefeller Foundation, had been influential in thefunding of such projects as the San Francisco TapeMusic Center. Although few NYU students availedthemselves of the invitation to visit Subotnick’sstudio, others who were not affiliated with theuniversity did.

Subotnick’s studio at NYU was, by arrangement,his personal studio, rather than a facility that servedan academic program. But his need for assistants,combined with personal kindness and an interest inyoung composers, led to the studio also functioningas a quasi-communal space. “Charlemagne Palestine[b. 1945] and Ingram Marshall [b. 1942] arrived andbecame my assistants, just as I use student assistantsnow.”

One of Subotnick’s assistants, Richard Friedman,a 22-year-old recent graduate from Brooklyn Poly-technic Institute, was at the time (1966) a computerprogrammer at NYU’s newly opened Courant In-stitute Computer Center on Mercer Street, run bythe by the Atomic Energy Commission (later calledthe Department of Energy). As Friedman recalls, theUniversity appointed

a humanities representative; Henry Mullish,I believe, interfaced between the humanitiespeople and the Computer Center. This is a hazymemory, but I think that somebody came tome and said: “You know, there are these peoplein the music department [faculty] who want togenerate music.” So, he put me in touch withBen Boretz . . .

. . . who brought Friedman to visit Bell Labs andsuggested that Subotnick had an analog synthesizerfor which “we could write a computer programto simulate what [the Music 3 program run atBell Labs] does.” Subotnick welcomed Friedman’sinterest in the studio, and told him (as Friedman

recalls): “Here’s the key! I work late at night, but ifyou want to come in after work, you are welcome.”Friedman became one of the musicians for whomSubotnick’s studio was something of a second home.

Subotnick describes the reason for the interesthis studio generated among young composers:

Since there was no other electronic music studioaround where people could just work [withoutformal affiliation or University matriculation],I offered them some time in the studio inexchange for doing work. They would helpme for a certain number of hours a week.Each of the people who worked in the studiocontributed something, like cleaning the flooror the equipment. We ended up with a schedule,but nobody really cared about it. When I neededto work, I could usurp anyone’s time, butnobody ever complained. If nobody was usingit, the space was available. Several of the peopledid some editing on the commercials I wasdoing at the time. The studio functioned in aloose way, like a kind of collective.

Friedman notes that “there was no formal ar-rangement for how the studio ran. It was mostly agroup arrangement. No one was really in charge ofthe studio, except Mort.” Ingram Marshall adds:

Everyone who used it had to pay a very smallamount of money for supplies, agree to keepthe place clean, and do housekeeping kinds ofthings. It was a typical late 1960s communalthing. There were no requirements and youdidn’t have to have any connection with NYU.It was amazing. It was sponsored by NYU andpaid for by them. The wonderful thing aboutit was it was open. If you wanted to work, youcould do that without too much hassle. It was awelcoming kind of place.

The young composers working in the studioincluded important early minimalists and dronemusic composers, among them Charlemagne Pales-tine, Rhys Chatham (b. 1952), Eliane Radigue (b.1932), and Ingram Marshall. Maryanne Amacher(1938–2009) engaged in early explorations intosound and perception. Serge Tcherepnin (b. 1941)began to develop circuitry that pointed towards

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his later work on the Serge synthesizer. Othercomposers who cultivated their craft in Subot-nick’s studio and its successor “Composer’s Work-shop,” also at NYU, included Michael Czajkowski(b. 1939), David Rosenboom (b. 1947), Brian Fennelly(b. 1937), Laurie Spiegel, William Bolcom (b. 1938),Bea Witkin, Robert Starer (1924–2001), and videoartists Woody (b. 1937) and Steina Vasulka (b. 1940),founders of The Kitchen.

Columbia-Princeton Uptown, Subotnick’sStudio Downtown

The NYU studio quickly became New York City’ssecond important site for electronic music composi-tion, described by Subotnick as:

the alternative to Columbia-Princeton, whichwas pretty traditional in terms of their approachto making music. Theirs was very well thoughtthrough, but it was a very different, moreacademic scene, which didn’t represent whatI was trying to do. The young composersdowntown felt more comfortable with me.They didn’t fit in the Columbia-Princetonsetting. If I thought of the Columbia-Princetoncomposers as pedigrees, my assistants weremongrels, and they were sweet and wonderfulpeople. It was an immensely exciting momentand we had a great time.

Charlemagne Palestine adds: “It was understoodthat we were all part of an underground andalternative society. But not Mort; Mort remainedsort of like a middleman. And that’s why he wasable to . . . connect between the musical and thedirectorate. He was a real good middleman.”

Subotnick was atypical of New York composersin that he maintained connections between both the“downtown” and the “uptown” Columbia scene.

When I arrived in New York, I didn’t know aboutthe concept of uptown/downtown. I didn’t growup here; I came from somewhere else and NYUhappened to be downtown. I was a close friend ofMario Davidovsky and Vladimir Ussachevsky; Iwent in and out of Columbia with no problem

and I was invited for two years at Princetonwith Milton Babbitt. I knew everybody and wasaccepted by all these people. Contact betweenthe two studios was just between people, such aswith Jim Seawright, an early electronic sculptor.

Richard Friedman adds: “When Mort first cameto New York, the people at Columbia were verysupportive right away.” Friedman suggests onereason for the cordial relations was the respectand credibility Subotnick gained because of hisorchestral compositions. Subotnick and Davidovskydid have their share of disagreements, however.

Maybe due to the growing fame of Silver Applesof the Moon, “The Bleecker Street studio,” as DavidRosenboom recalls, “was its own sort of little hubof activity. There were writers and theater people onsome of the floors there, too, as was Tony Martin.Don Buchla would show up every once in a while.Ultra Violet [Isabelle Collin Dufresne] walked inone day. You know, all sorts of things like thathappened. And we were building things and makingpieces and so on.” Subotnick recalls that “visitorsincluded the Grateful Dead and the Mothers ofInvention, the Warhol people, and, from the VelvetUnderground, Angus MacLise and Maureen Tucker;there was also an actress who came by a lot. Lotharand the Hand People were playing at the theateracross the street from the Bitter End and theycame. I think the Grateful Dead or another grouphas a coffee table book that mentions the studio.Frank Zappa mentioned me in a lot of reviews andinterviews and a Time Magazine article.” RichardFriedman remembers that among the “continuousflow of people in and out of the studio” were ToshiIchiyanagi and Steve Reich. Subotnick adds: “TomTadlock, a visual artist [who did creative video work]from the Rhode Island School of Design also hungout a lot.”

Composers’ Memories of the Subotnick Studio

Young composers using the studio have abidingmemories of their days working on Bleecker Street.Subotnick’s assistants Charlemagne Palestine andIngram Marshall met while working as salesmen

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Figure 6. CharlemagnePalestine in the early1970s. (Photograph fromPalestine’s collection, usedon the cover of the CDHoly 1 & Holy 2.)

at the store Record Hunter on Fifth Avenue andForty-Third Street. They both became acquaintedwith a customer at the store, Columbia-Princetoncomposer Ilhan Mimaroglu (b. 1926) who, likeMarshall, was a graduate student in musicologyat Columbia. Mimaroglu was also a producer ofrecordings by jazz greats Charles Mingus, OrnetteColeman, and others at Atlantic Records. Aftera year’s hiatus in Europe, Subotnick welcomedMarshall to make use of his studio at NYU. Marshallrecalls working in the studio after finishing hisRecord Hunter work shift at midnight. “I prettymuch worked in the studio until dawn, and thencollapsed. There was a bar right around the corner,so I spent a lot of time there, too. When I leftNew York in 1970, I was ready to leave becauseI was burning the fuse at both ends for sure. Itwas a wonderful place, but it was kind of veryintense and not very good for one’s health.” Aftermoving to the West Coast to complete his studiesat CalArts, Marshall became a celebrated composerof instrumental music and works using electronicprocessing.

Palestine (see Figure 6) began his musical careeras a young cantorial singer in the Jewish-immigrantBrooklyn neighborhood of East New York. Hemoved to upper Manhattan to attend Music andArt High School, and “met Stravinsky, Lukas Foss,and Varese, and became the carillonneur [carillonplayer] at St. Thomas Church and I began to do very

advanced, crazy bell music, like Quasimodo, whowas my hero. . .”

When I was a kid, I liked to hang out inthe Village, playing conga drum at a coffeehouse, the Fat Black Pussy Cat, a beatnik placefrequented by choreographer Alwin Nikolais,playing for poets. From the age of twelve, Iwore a beret, sunglasses and a scarf. I discoveredelectronic music through Nikolais, who createdhis own electronic tape music to use with hisdances using sound sources stored in his garagefilled with old springs, piano sound boards, andthe like. I had already heard Tod Dockstader,Pierre Henry, and Pierre Schaeffer, throughrecords from the St. George [Public] Library.

Palestine has remained an active composer,currently living in Belgium.

Subotnick carved out a small but separate spacein the building that housed the studio for “SergeTcherepnin, the steward’s room, and he lived inthere with Maryanne Amacher, who also workedin the studio.” Palestine remembers: “I used to liketo work at night from about one in the morninguntil about five in the morning. It was my thingto work when the noisy neighborhood began toquiet down, especially on the weekend. Serge andMaryanne were also night owls. They were up allthe night and became sort of the mice. We becamevery good friends.” Amacher’s time in the studiorepresented early stages in her exploration of humanperception. Her subsequent work, until her death in2009, examined how people experience sound andimages in space and time. Among her compositionswere immersive sound installations, psychoacousticworks, and sound sculptures.

Serge Tcherepnin often served as Subotnick’stechnical assistant on a series of outside projects.Among these was a work for seven elevators in aNew York City building. When the elevator doorsopened, visitors would hear gradually changingsounds recorded on tape loops of different lengths,played through speakers that emphasized differentfrequencies. A second collaboration was a multi-channel piece in which an audience, sitting aroundan amplified harpsichord, played what Subotnickdescribes as “cymbals and gongs, which served

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as controllers that sent the sounds to the variousgroups of speakers” surrounding the audience. Afterjoining Subotnick at CalArts, the two continued towork together, developing musical toys marketedat a New York store, as well as game rooms (col-laborating also with architect Frank Gehry) shownat the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and thecommission of a new synthesizer, the Serge, thatstudents could build and take home after theirgraduation.

David Rosenboom remembers his time workingwith Subotnick in New York:

Mort Subotnick was very generous in openinghis studio to me in 1967–68. I was twenty andit was an incredible year. I worked a lot in theBleecker Street studio. And we got to be veryclose. I had previously seen Mort and Tony’swork in San Francisco at the Fillmore West,during a trip I took while I was an undergraduatestudent at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana [where he was the drummer in a rockgroup that eventually traveled to New York]. Icame there by way of the Center for Creativeand Performing Arts at the State Universityof New York at Buffalo, where Lukas Foss hadoffered me a position. I wanted to be in NewYork City because I was a Midwestern kid; Iwent to the Interlochen summer program as ayoungster, so I had real, high-level professionalexperience in high school. But I wanted toget out of the cornfields and get to the bigcity. New York was a magnet [for] a lot of thereal experimental work going on. When I gotto New York, I met a lot of people throughthe ones I got to know—Nam June Paik, LaMonte Young, Mort Subotnick, David Behrman,Yuji Takahashi, Terry Riley, John Cale, MortFeldman, John Cage, and so many others.

For Rosenboom, the studio was a home basefor his technical work at the Electric Circus, amultimedia discotheque for which Subotnick wasfounding artistic director (Stickney 1967; Lobenthal1990; Gluck 2009, 2012a, 2012b). Rosenboom servedas artistic coordinator. “It was my job to help withthe technology side. . . . It was necessary to tryout electronic ideas or systems for some of the

performances before bringing them into the Circus.And I do recall doing that a few times in the studio,not so much for other people’s work as for our ownwork, including Mort’s, Tony’s, my own, and thethings we would do together. We would build andtest these out in the studio and then they wouldend up in a performance at the Electric Circus.”Rosenboom’s career developed as a multifacetedcomposer, educator, and pioneer of musical inter-faces extending the human nervous system. He iscurrently Richard Seaver Distinguished Chair inMusic at California Institute of the Arts and Deanof its Herb Alpert School of Music.

Rhys Chatham (see Figure 7) was the youngest ofthe composers to develop their craft at the NYU stu-dio. This came about because, as Subotnick recalls:“I felt so guilty for earning so much money betweenNYU and New York Repertory Theater that I do-nated my time to teach a class for [teenage] studentsat the Third Street Settlement Music School. Theysent four kids to take my class; one of them wasRhys Chatham.” Chatham picks up the narrative:

I grew up in a musical home. My father was aserious amateur harpsichordist and my motherwas a violist. I grew up with early music,hearing composers like Giles Farnaby and JohnBull, primarily composers from the Elizabethanperiod. But we also had modern music; welistened to Stravinsky and things like that. AndI listened to electric music back then like theway a 15 or 16 year old listens to rock and roll. . . my real passion was contemporary music ofall kinds, post-serial music, like Stockhausen’sPiano Pieces I–IV and Sonata I and II by Boulez,and so on, and of course everything Cage everdid. I used to go to the library at Lincoln Centerall the time, where I discovered Cage’s booksSilence and A Year From Monday.

Having recently heard Silver Apples of the Moon,Chatham was ecstatic about the opportunity tostudy with Subotnick.

I was in heaven. So we all met at [Third StreetSettlement Music] School, right up the streetfrom the Hell’s Angels, and they put us on abus to Morton’s studio at NYU. The weekly

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Figure 7. Rhys Chatham inthe early 1970s.(Photograph from thecollection of LaurieSpiegel.)

classes were absolutely fabulous. He did hisBachelor’s degree in English literature and hecan tell a story in such a warm way. Eachweek he focused on a different parameter ofmusic. One week he focused on amplitude, andwe looked at gates. Other weeks it was aboutfrequency and then duration. He also playedmusical examples, like Poeme electronique byVarese. By the end of the course we had a very,very good introduction to electronic music andwe finished by doing five-minute pieces onMorton’s original Buchla 100 series synthesizer.I fell in love with the synthesizer, so [afterthe final class], I went up to him and askedwhether it might be possible to study privately,and he graciously allowed me to do this onweekends, after the workshop was over. Soon,I knew every single thing about the Buchla, as

only a teenager could. The friendships I madeat NYU have lasted me for a lifetime. The firstpiece that I made was heavily oriented towardsthe sequencer. It was specifically playing withpolymetric rhythms, . . . working with twosequencers in which one was set to five, theother set to seven. Maybe a number of thingslike that going on. And it kind of goes like this:“boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-bop . . . .” When Ifirst started working with the Buchla, I was, Isuppose, a post-serialist. I was essentially an“uptown” composer by orientation.

Soon after his NYU time, Chatham becamefounding music director of the experimental artsvenue The Kitchen, and built a reputation as acomposer/performer of a minimalist/punk rockmusical hybrid, beginning with the work GuitarTrio (1977) and continuing through this day withmusic for massive electric guitar ensembles.

Another young composer who composed andsubsequently played an organizational role withthe studio was Michael Czajkowski, an NYUmusicology PhD candidate and teaching assistant.He had inherited a job from Peter Schickele teachingnight school at Julliard, where he completed hisMaster’s degree. Czajkowski was assigned to gradepapers and assist students (few of whom knew therudiments of music) in the only NYU lecture coursetaught by Subotnick, titled “The Nature of Sound.”

As an electronic composer, Czajkowski under-stood his

aesthetic in working with the synthesizer asto do as little tape editing as possible in post-production. I couldn’t avoid it entirely, but Iwanted to be able to generate gestures from theequipment itself rather than do a lot of splicingand over-dubbing. I would think of how I couldgenerate a section from the Buchla boxes; thatwas my aesthetic, and that is what I do best.But there are some things that we just had tosit down with a razor blade and chop. Mort’sapproach definitely had to be an influence onme. We were probably pretty similar in thatMort was also classically trained. And that washis world, in addition to the experimental part.

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Figure 8. The album coverof People the Sky.

Czajkowski crafted short interconnecting piecesfor a Vanguard recording, Illuminations (1969), byfolk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, for whom Schick-ele had written arrangements. The process was tomanipulate and process recorded material from theoriginal recording, using “the Buchla as a soundprocessor for the tape, using its filters, ring modu-lators, gates, and devices.” This was followed by afull-length solo album, People the Sky (1969) (seeFigure 8), also released by Vanguard. One side was“a compilation of previously generated material,”including music for dance choreographed by JeanErdman, and the other, a through-composed workinspired by a section of Handel’s oratorio Solomonthat depicts Solomon being visited by the Queenof Sheba. He calls upon the muses “to rouse us todraw a tear from hopeless love, rouse us to martialdeeds . . .”

The music composed by many of the youngercomposers was quite different from Subotnick’swork. About a colleague, Marshall said, “my friendCharlemagne Palestine’s attitude was not so muchmaking sequencer music, but doing live kindsof performance art things. He built a chime, aninstrument that was basically aluminum chimes.

He used the studio to record them.” Palestine notesthat in works such as Holy 1 & Holy 2 (Palestine2000):

I didn’t use sounds much like most others inthe studio did and I never used a sequencer.Mort’s music and some of the people who usedthe Buchla in those days were into voltagecontrol for filters and things like that, not fordrones, like “mmmm-oooo, oooo. . . ” In thosedays, the Buchla and Moog oscillators drifteda lot because of changes in temperature andhumidity. I like to play my oscillators for awhole day and they would drift a whole lot. Iwanted to build my own drone machine and Iwas searching for a stable oscillator to use formy drones.

Chatham had recently become acquainted withthe music of La Monte Young at a performance of oneof Young’s Drift Studies for sopranino saxophone,

. . . one of those high ones with very closeintervals, where, if you turned your head, thedifferences in air pressure meant that you’d heardifferent pieces. . . . Soon after that, I startedgetting into long durational electronic musicpieces. Since the Buchla oscillators would drifta little bit, I used ring modulators and madethe drifting of the oscillators part of the piece.Instead of using the Buchla sequencer, I startedusing the sine wave generators and I did lots ofpieces with ring modulation.

Palestine’s evening studio time often followedChatham’s hours. The two became fast friends,sharing interests in sonority. Of his own work in thestudio, Chatham comments: “There were two piecesI did at the NYU studio that I’m sure I would stilllike today. These came before Two Gongs, whichI did in 1971 [Chatham 2002]. Like most of thepieces I did at the time, both were purely electronic,music of long duration. They were made with ringmodulators and sine wave generators and focusedon overtones and sonority. Unfortunately, both ofthese pieces got lost in one of my moves. The work Idid in that studio really laid the foundation for howI became a minimalist.” Chatham also recalls, “We

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had two Ampex tape recorders, so it was possible todo tape pieces.”

Changes and Transitions

Morton Subotnick’s time in New York, and thus hisinvolvement with the NYU studio, lasted only until1969. During the second year of the program, NYUhad broadened the concept of the studio into anIntermedia Program, which as Subotnick describes,was short-lived.

We were given three years of money. BoydCompton, having talked himself into becom-ing director of the Intermedia program, wassupposed to raise money beyond our three-yearbudget and do something bigger with us andwith the program. He was brilliant, but spacedout on concepts and ideas and not in touch withreality, and he never raised the money. Then[NYU School of the Arts Dean] Bob Corriganleft for CalArts and brought me with him. 1969was the planning year; we started CalArts in1970.

Thanks to the efforts of Michael Czajkowski, anNYU Buchla studio continued to function in a newlocation, at NYU’s Film School on Seventh Street,between First and Second Avenues, and under newterms. Czajkowski adds:

Since the Intermedia Program didn’t [officially]have any students, there was no income fromNYU to keep it funded internally. When Mortleft the program, David Oppenheim, Dean ofthe School of the Arts, told me: “You can set upa little Composers’ Workshop.” And so I set upa small studio in a basement room. For a coupleof years, student composers could pay a nominalfee and get access to the Buchla boxes and taperecorders. During the summers, I dismantled itand took it out to Aspen where I ran a smallsummer electronic music workshop.

Palestine and Marshall continued their workat this new location. Thinking back upon theorganization of the Composers Workshop, Palestineconsiders Czajkowski to have been “a good choice,

Figure 9. Laurie Spiegel inthe early 1970s.(Photograph by StanBratman, from thecollection of LaurieSpiegel.)

because all the rest of us were kind of flaky in oneway or other and he was reliable. NYU probablywanted someone there who was not prone to dosomething outrageous or unusual.” Chatham, stilla teenager, “started out as a junior member of theComposer’s Workshop, so I got ten hours of studiotime each week. Once I was no longer in highschool, Michael graciously let me become a full-fledged member. I was so proud to be a full memberwith a full twenty hours, like every one else.”

Czajkowski also introduced Laurie Spiegel tothe studio (see Figure 9). The two had becomeacquainted at Julliard. As Spiegel remembers,

[he] invited me to visit Mort’s Bleecker Streetstudio, the place where I first saw a synthesizer.I visited maybe a couple of times before I startedworking with the Buchla [at its new location].When he introduced me to the Buchla for the

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first time it completely changed the course ofmy life. Rhys Chatham, Eliane Radigue, and Iall spent a lot of time together figuring out whatto do with the system before we each divergedinto our own paths. Rhys and I and Jesse Millerwere all working in the Buchla studio. Woodyand Steina Vasulka were very occasionally inthe studio. They got their own EMS synthesizerpretty fast.

Spiegel composed numerous works on the Buchlaand then Electrocomp synthesizers, and became acomputer music pioneer, first at Bell Labs, workingon the computer-controlled analog synthesis systemGROOVE (Generated Real-time Output Operationson Voltage-controlled Equipment), and subsequentlyon early Apple computers. Her software for theApple Macintosh, MusicMouse, was one of the firstinteractive compositional applications.

French composer Eliane Radigue discovered thestudio while she was spending a year in New YorkCity, living in a loft on the Bowery. She had been“educated by Pierre Schaeffer and by Pierre Henry,at Studio Apsom in Paris. This was in 1957–1958.There was no formal instruction at the time andso I learned about tape editing, looping, and mixingtechniques by doing actual work.” She workedas an assistant to Henry for a year, in 1967, andthen shifted to working “using electronic soundsproduced by the relatively primitive means of thetime and recording them. This musical vocabularyled me to a new type of work. My appreciation ofbeats and other natural effects grew” (Gluck 2010).

While in New York, Steve Reich introducedRadigue to Czajkowki. Although Radigue ultimatelychose the ARP 2600 as her preferred compositionalinstrument, due to the simpler user interface usingknobs and sliders in place of patch cords (the latterbeing optional), she

liked the way the Buchla sounds; it was areally beautiful instrument of that generation.Meeting the Buchla was the beginning of a greatlove affair. Oh my God! Sound was easier toproduce with the Buchla than it was with tape.My goal at the time was to work and tamethe synthesizer. My first piece on synthesizerwas first played on April 6, 1971 at the New

York Cultural Center, on Fifty-Ninth Street andCentral Park South. It was called Chry-ptus.

Chatham remembers that “it had a pulse toit that was very, very interesting, and I startedincorporating that into my own work.” For Radigue,

the instability of synthesizer oscillators wasnot a problem for me in the way that it was forothers who were doing drones . . . I loved theambiguity, which was a goal of my work. Ofcourse, you can always define a frequency rangefor the oscillators, but the resulting pitch couldbe ambiguous: maybe its in G or F#, or maybeit’s an A. The music was floating and very slowlychanging. And this requires time, patience, andgreat accuracy of listening and perception. Ihave always been very fascinated by changingmode or tune, sometimes by accident. Youcan guess where you are, but maybe you areno longer in the preceding tonality. By now itcould be another one. I was also fascinated bythe immense power of the partials, the naturalharmonic series within a tone.

Radigue influenced the work of Chatham, who,in turn, helped provide a venue for her early NewYork City performances when he started the MusicProgram at The Kitchen.

But even the relocated NYU studio was not to lastmore than a year. Czajkowski notes: “EventuallyNYU decided they needed that space, and so in late1970 the Composer’s Workshop fell apart.” NYUkept the tape recorders, but, as Subotnick recalls:“After I left, the School of the Arts wasn’t reallyinterested in the Buchla. They had no idea what theyhad. It was given to the School of Education, and thento Czajkowski. They realized later that electronicmusic was something worth pursuing.” Two yearslater, in 1972, NYU hired Sergio Cervetti (b. 1940) toteach electronic music in the School of Education,later named the Steinhardt School of Education. Forthat purpose, they purchased a new, smaller Buchla,albeit one manufactured, Subotnick believes, “whenthe company was owned by CBS. Buchla sold hisname to CBS in 1970 and thus couldn’t sell hisown equipment starting around 1969 until 1972or 1973.” The original Buchla system from the

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Intermedia Program and Composer’s Workshopwas recently donated to the Library of Congress.Subotnick used it in a live performance in 2010, onloan from that collection (Battaglia 2011). Cervetticontinued to teach at NYU, but the focus, as hesays, shifted away from the Buchla:

When I became full-time in 1975 I expandedthe studio with more recording devices anda Moog Synthesizer. I created a course in theTheater Program teaching basic synthesis andcomposing using both concrete technique andelectronic synthesis. It was quite successful andattracted quite a lot of students. The studiodidn’t have a name and only served Theatreand Dance students [the disciplines, along withCinema, offered at the School] who wanted tomake their own scores. There was no one elseat the time teaching anything like this at theSchool of Arts (Gluck 2006).

New York University’s Steinhardt School of Edu-cation would later become the home of substantialdegree programs in recording and engineering, aswell as composition and interactivity.

A Continued Legacy and a Bridge to New Venuesfor New Music and Multimedia Art

Subotnick’s NYU studio was first and foremost hispersonal studio. Its primary legacy is thus its statusas the site where he composed the first electronicworks commissioned for release on recordings. Ashis assistants and others began to utilize and, in atleast one case, inhabit the studio, it became a notablyinformal and open setting for young composers toexplore their early work in electronic music. Forsome, it became an opportunity to engage in studiowork that would have otherwise not been available.The lack of structure may have been emblematicof the late 1960s, but it also reflected Subotnick’spersonal openness and flexibility.

After Subotnick returned to California in 1969,its successor studio, the Composer’s Workshop,continued this tradition of openness to whomeversought the opportunity to compose with a Buchla

system. Thus, Subotnick’s presence in New YorkCity helped blossom creative work in electronicmusic by a cluster of young composers. As IngramMarshall observes, “[The studio provided] a wonder-ful opportunity for me. I think it was an importantplace for everyone who was there, even though itdidn’t last very long.”

Their work was quite eclectic. On one end ofthe spectrum was Michael Czajkowski’s focus onthe transformation of sequences over time, whichreflected Subotnick’s approach. On the other endwere the interests in drones and minimalism of RhysChatham and Charlemagne Palestine. Some of themavailed themselves of the opportunity to experienceor engage in live performances. Many of these tookplace in the new venues for which Subotnick wasa catalyst. These began with Subotnick’s artisticdirection of the Electric Circus and his inspirationfor its Monday night concert series, Electric Ear,and continued with others that followed. For NYUProfessor (now emeritus) Brian Fennelly, working atthe NYU studio was his primary experience workingin electronic music composition.

The creative careers of young composers who firstworked in the NYU studios continued to blossomin New York, California, and France. To offer a fewrepresentative examples, Serge Tcherepnin, IngramMarshall, Charlemagne Palestine, and (after yearsat York University in Toronto) David Rosenboomjoined Subotnick at CalArts. Eliane Radigue, whoreturned to France, visited and later appeared brieflyat CalArts as a composer-in-residence. Others,among them Rhys Chatham, Laurie Spiegel, andMichael Czajkowski, remained in New York.Ironically, the story travels full circle, as Subotnick’scurrent creative life is once again centered in NewYork City.

References

Battaglia, A. 2011. “The Man Who Electrified theMusic World.” The Wall Street Journal, 5 April.Available online at online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703712504576242823877957518.html. Accessed 17 June 2011.

Bernstein, D., ed. 2008. The San Francisco Tape MusicCenter: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde.Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Buchla and Associates. 2010. www.buchla.com/historical.html. Accessed 8 June 2010.

Chadabe, J. 1993. Unpublished interview with MortonSubotnick, 28 August. Quoted with the author’spermission.

Chadabe, J. 1997. Electric Sound: The Past and Promiseof Electronic Music. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey:Prentice-Hall.

Darter, T., and G. Armbruster. 1984. The Art of Elec-tronic Music (a compilation of articles from KeyboardMagazine, 1975–1983). New York: Quill.

Gluck, B. 2006. “Conversations with Alfredo DelMonaco and Sergio Cervetti.” EMF Institute.Available online at emfinstitute.emf.org/articles/gluck.delmonaco&cervetti 06.html. Accessed17 June 2011.

Gluck, R. 2007a. “The Columbia-Princeton ElectronicMusic Center: Educating International Composers.” InProceedings of the Electroacoustic Music StudiesNetwork 2007. Available online at www.ems-network.org/spip.php?article267. Accessed 17 June2011.

Gluck, R. 2007b. “The Columbia–Princeton ElectronicMusic Center: Educating International Composers.”Computer Music Journal 31(2):20–38.

Gluck, R. 2009. “Silver Apples, Electric Circus, Elec-tronic Arts, and Commerce in Late 1960s NewYork.” In Proceedings of the International Com-puter Music Conference, pp. 149–152. Available onlineat www.electricsongs.com/texts/gluck silverapplesicmc09.pdf. Accessed 7 February 2012.

Gluck, B. 2010. “Interview with Eliane Radigue.” Array.pp. 45–49.

Gluck, R. 2012a. “Electric Circus, Electric Ear and theIntermedia Center in Late-1960s New York.” Leonardo45:1. In press.

Gluck, R. 2012b. “Conversation with David Rosenboomon His Early Career: Late 1960s-Early 1970s.” Journalof the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the UnitedStates. In press.

Holmes, T. 2008. Electronic and Experimental Mu-sic: Technology, Music, and Culture. New York:Routledge.

Lobenthal, J. 1990. Radical Rags: Fashions of the Sixties.New York: Abbeville Press.

Pinch, T., and Trocco, F. 2002. Analog Days: TheInvention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer.Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UniversityPress.

Stickney, J. 1967. ”Non-Toxic Psychedelia for Squares.”Life 63(6):12.

Appendix A: List of Interviews

Except where noted in the text, all quotations in thetext are from the following interviews by the author.

Amacher, M. 2008. In-person conversationwith the author. 15 December.Chadabe, J. 2008. In-person conversation withthe author. 8 December.Chatham, R. 2008. In-person conversationwith the author. 31 May.Coons, T. 2008. In-person and email conver-sation with the author. 14 February.Czajkowski, M. 2008. In-person conversationwith the author. 29 March.Fennelly, B. 2008. In-person conversationwith the author. 15 December.Friedman, R. 2008 Telephone and emailconversation with the author. 14 December.Marshall, I. 2008.Telephone conversationwith the author. 8 March.Martin, A. 2008 In-person and email conver-sation with the author. 21 March.Mumma, G. 2008. Email conversation withthe author. November-December.Mumma, G. 2009. Email conversation withthe author. January.Palestine, C. 2008. Telephone conversationwith the author. 8–9 March.Radigue, E. 2008. Telephone conversationwith the author. 16 November.Rosenboom, D. 2008. Telephone conversationwith the author. 5 March.Salzman, E. 2008. Telephone conversationwith the author. 16 November.Spiegel, L. 2008. Email conversation with theauthor. 8–14 March.Subotnick, M. 2006. Telephone conversationwith the author. 25 August.Subotnick, M. 2006. Email conversation withthe author. 3 October.Subotnick, M. 2006. Telephone conversationwith the author. 4 October.

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Subotnick, M. 2008. Telephone conversationwith the author. 19 November.Subotnick, M. 2008. In-person conversationwith the author. 8 May.Tcherepnin, S. 2008. Telephone conversationwith the author. 26 June.

Appendix B: Compositions Realized at the NYUStudio (at Bleecker Street or the Composer’sWorkshop)Chatham, R. 2002. Two Gongs (1971). Included on the

compact disc An Angel Moves Too Fast To See: SelectedWorks 1971–1989. Table of the Elements TOE-CD-802.Also released on A Rhys Chatham Compendium. Tableof the Elements TOE-CD-56.

Czajkowski, M. 1969. People the Sky. Vanguard Record-ings Society VCS 10069.

Czajkowski, M. 2000. Processed sound for Illuminations(1969) by B. Sainte-Marie. Vanguard Records 79300-2,CD. Originally released as Vanguard Records VSD79300, LP.

Fennelly, B. 1997. Evanescences for Instruments andElectronic Tape (1969). Included on the compact discMusic of Brian Fennelly. Composers Recordings CRICD759.

Palestine, C. 2000. Holy 1 & Holy 2 (1967) and Alloy(1967). Included on the CD Alga Marghen plana-P13NMN 035.

Subotnick, M. 1994. Silver Apples of the Moon and TheWild Bull, Wergo WER 2035-2. Originally released asNonesuch Records H-71174, 1967, LP and NonesuchRecords H-71208, 1968, LP.

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