Excerpted from:
James Goode, Garage Sales and other Capitalist Ventures

JAMES GOODE: I find Morton Subotnick to be something of a has-been. Some of his records certainly have moments of rare beauty and rhythmic complexity - Touch and Silver Apples of the Moon, for example - but the electronic sounds he uses on many of his records are essentially the same; perhaps a more accurate term than "has-been" would be "one-trick pony."

M. MONROE: Why single him out?

Subotnick holds a certain lofty position at Mills College; along with Ramon Sender and Pauline Oliveros in about 1962, he started the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which relocated to Mills in 1966. In fact, a large portion of the electronic equipment in the music department at Mills still bears the gold and black stickers that give away their humble origins, but that's another story. If you roam the spacious and reboant halls located just outside the Mills Concert Hall, you'll notice a glass display case containing CDs by professors and students of Mills, along with several large photographs of David Behrmann sporting hefty sideburns, and Subotnick, Ramon Sender, Pauline Oliveros and others working on the gargantuan Moog and Buchla synthesizers in the Mills studios. What fun they must have had! In a number of these photos, some of these composers are laughing hysterically! This is one of the reasons I went to see Subotnick talk at Aquarius, and why I thought it would be worth my while. I have to say I was underwhelmed, if not disappointed, by his presentation.

Why?

I hadn't anticipated that foolish techno fans and 16-year-old nincompoop consumers without a fully formed brain between them would be eating him up and in so doing, sucking his once magnificent brain through a needle-sharp metal straw that had punctured the top of his head. I know I'm not being fair; there's no sense in making fun of someone for appealing to a certain personality, or for projecting the inadequacies of one's audience upon the performer.

And yet here you are doing it.

What irritated me was the total lack, on his part, of any suggestion of thought existing in his work, especially in his early experiments. His attitude was that he just turned the thing on, and voila! Instant genius! Just add splicing and editing. I don't see anything wrong with being controlled by the materials you decide to use, but if those materials are uninteresting, then what? I wanted to know what his ideas were, and, other than classical music, what his inspirations were.

*************************************************

The thought of composing music that incorporates phylogenetic, or evolutionary, concepts or structures occurred to me when I was looking into the origins of language, which, in all of its complexity, very likely evolved from the outward manifestation of primitive emotions such as displeasure at the taste of something exceedingly bitter, or a reaction of paralyzing fear to something unfamiliar, and very gradually, through perhaps thousands of centuries, attained the level of abstraction that we see today (especially in French intellectual culture). Thus, we can picture a slow transformation from facial expressions, some of which gradually developed into rudimentary, though effective vocal displays, such as can be observed in the higher primates; to facial and body movements associated with greeting, warning others of danger, etc.; and finally into spoken and written language. This progression seems credible, in contrast with an older theory insisting that language arose suddenly at an already well-developed stage of humankind's mental development.

-James Goode on Phylogenetic Music

Home | Order Bananafish | Midheaven main | Midheaven mailorder | Revolver USA