The name of electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick might not sound familiar, but the sounds he helped invent have been heard by millions.
Subotnick was among the first composers to make music with a synthesizer, an instrument that would go on to transform popular music and inspire generations of musicians throughout the world, from Nine Inch Nails to Paul McCartney to San Antonio’s very own Garrett T. Capps & NASA Country.
Now 90 years old, Subotnick will visit the Urban-15 headquarters in San Antonio Nov. 10-12 on what he says might be his last world tour. He will perform a new composition titled As I Live and Breathe using an updated version of the “voltage-controlled transistorized modular synthesizer” — or “an analog computer for music,” as Subotnick himself calls it — which he worked on with composer Don Buchla in 1960s San Francisco.
The modular synthesizer, which predates better-known keyboard synthesizers invented by Bob Moog, looks like a complicated version of an old telephone switchboard, with tangles of wires plugged into metallic boxes. A variety of electronic sounds are produced depending on which wires are connected to different inputs.
As with his influential 1967 album Silver Apples of the Moon, Subotnick will use his own vocal cords to produce sounds that will be transformed through the synthesizer’s oscillators. However, for the tour, he’ll use a digital version of Buchla’s original analog synthesizer, which Subotnick said is far too bulky to transport from city to city.
An old SA connection
San Antonio joins Venice, Berlin, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles as a tour stop because of the composer’s connection to George Cisneros, a multimedia artist who is music and media director of performance troupe Urban-15.
How and when the two composers first met is lost to memory, but Cisneros figures they encountered each other in California while performing and researching on the new music circuit.
Subotnick distinguishes between what he terms “new old music,” which is new types of music created using old instruments such as the piano, and “new new music,” which employs new instruments to create sounds that haven’t been heard before.
He would know. Subotnick trained as a classical clarinetist and performed regularly with the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Ballet and toured as a soloist before stepping over the threshold into uncharted musical territory.
“I gave that up to start working with a technology, to be able to create what a person like me could do with technology,” he said via phone from his home in New York City. “I was looking to get a new paradigm, or a new kind of genre.”
Justin Boyd employs a modular synthesizer to transform the acoustic guitar of singer-songwriter Garrett T. Capps into a wash of echoey, spacey sounds that give Capps’ backing band its moniker NASA Country.
Boyd took a class with Subotnick while studying at the California Institute of the Arts in 2002, hoping to learn about modular synthesizers. But in keeping with his forward-looking views of technology, Subotnick had forged ahead, teaching a computer application that allowed users to “program objects on a screen to do different things audibly or visually for you,” a technology still employed by Subotnick during his performances.
A keen ear
Long-playing vinyl records were a relatively new technology at the time Subotnick, Buchla and others began working with modular synthesizers. Making records gave Subotnick the idea that, like a painter, he could work in his studio and have his art go out into the world much like a painting, except in a more widely accessible format.
Subotnick admits that he and the record producer were surprised by the success of Silver Apples of the Moon. “I didn’t think anyone would pay any attention to it, but it was my chance to do it,” he said, and he has been composing, touring and performing ever since.
The record was entered into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2009, and a 50th-anniversary edition was released in 2017 in part to raise funds for a documentary film on Subotnick.
Boyd said Subotnick’s compositional skills are what has kept his name in the conversation through subsequent generations.
“His name continues to rise to the top because he has such a keen ear for composition and what sounds and what textures specifically sit next to each other,” Boyd said.
‘Hear the musicality’
Anyone who ventures out to witness what might be among Subotnick’s last live performances will hear not just the whooshes, squeaks, squonks and echoes typical of electronic music, but a whole new paradigm for composition based on the very unclassical instrument used for As I Live and Breathe.
“In this piece especially, you’ll hear the musicality,” he said. “It’s real music, but not based on any scale, not based on the sonata form, not based on the clarinet or the piano.”
The idea of the modular synthesizer was to make a whole new kind of multi-voiced, orchestral instrument, “to give the possibility that a person could be a composer, conductor, performer and the instrument-maker — everything all in one,” he said. “It’s for every individual to be able to … be a painter with music.”
Tickets for Subotnick’s three As I Live and Breathe concerts are available through the Urban-15 website. A free public open conversation will be held Nov. 11 at 1 p.m.
