Subotnick, Morton (EN)

Subotnick Morton, * 14 April 1933 Los Angeles, American composer, pianist and pioneer of interactive electronic music. He studied English at the University of Denver and composition at Mills College in Oakland (California) under L. Kirchner and D. Milhaud, obtaining a Master of Arts degree in 1960. Subotnick, extremely active in organisational and didactic fields, was a music director of Ann Halprin’s Dance Company in 1961–63, of Repertory Theatre (Vivean Beaumont Theatre) in Lincoln Centre in New York in 1966, and a director of The Electric Circus in 1967–68, where he also was the co-founder and director of the San Francisco Tape Music Centre in 1961–66, and the founder of the electronic music studio at the University of Pittsburgh in 1965. He lectured at Mills College in 1959–66, at the School of Arts at New York University in 1966–69; he taught composition at the University of Maryland in 1968–69; he was associate dean of the department of music at the California Institute of Arts in Valencia in 1970–74, where he ran the electronic music studio (Centre for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology – CEAIT); in 1974, he took up the chair of composition at that university. He spent the years 1979–81 in Europe; first in Paris, working at Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), later in West Berlin as a scholarship holder of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). He was a composer in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (Massachusetts) in 1985. He has received, among others, the following awards: the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award (1979), the SEAMUS Award (Society for ElectroAcoustic Music in the United States, 1998) for lifetime artistic achievement, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and three Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, as well as Honorary Doctorate of the California Institute of the Arts (2009).

Purely instrumental music is a small part of Subotnick’s work. He was most interested in performing electronic music live, either with the voltage-controlled Buchla synthesiser or later with the Electronic Ghost Score (EGS) control tape, which is a record of control signals for electronic processing devices (according to the composer’s design). He is given credit for introducing electronic and multimedia music to the American record market. Subotnick was the first composer to create electronic music intended directly for records (vinyl LPs at that time). Major labels, like Columbia, Nonesuch, and Turnabout, commissioned more works from him.

Literature: R. Norton, The Vision of Morton Subotnick, “Music Journal” 1970 no. 1 (28); B. Schrader, Introduction to Electro-Acoustic Music, New York 1982; H. Whipple, Beasts and Butterflies: Morton Subotnick’s Ghost Scores, “The Musical Quarterly” 1983 no. 69; C. Roads, Interview with Morton Subotnick, “Computer Music Journal” 1988 no. 1 (12); M. Coniglio, Introduction to the Interactor language, “International Computer Music Conference” 1992; L. VanHandel, Von ‘Geister-Partituren’ zur CD-ROM: Die interaktive Musik von Morton Subotnick, “Positionen: Beiträge zur Neuen Musik” 1994 no. 21; L. VanHandel, The inherent primitivism in Morton Subotnick’s All my hummingbirds have alibis, “Music research forum” 1995 no. 10; T. Machover, Interview with Mort Subotnick, “Contemporary music review” 1996 no. 2 (13); K.H. Burns, An emerging digital community: The CDROM artists, “Organised sound: An international journal of music technology” 1997 no. 1 (2); K. Goldsmith, Don’t quit your day job. Yet…, “NewMusicBox” 2000; D.W. Bernstein, M. Payne, Morton Subotnick, in: The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s counterculture and the avantgarde, ed. D.W. Bernstein, Berkeley 2008; D.W. Bernstein, M. Payne, M. Subotnick, R. Sender Barayón, Don Buchla, in: The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s counterculture and the avant-garde, ed. D.W. Bernstein, Berkeley 2008;  A. Mika, Morton Subotnick: Jacob’s Room – Bregenzer Festspiele, ‘Kunst aus der Zeit’, “Österreichische Musikzeitschrift” 2010 no. 6 (65); R.J. Gluck, Nurturing young composers: Morton Subotnick’s late-1960s studio in New York City, “Computer music journal” 2012 no. 1 (36); Ch. Wagner, Musik als Studiokunst, “Neue Zeitschrift für Musik” 2014 no. 1 (175); F.A. Riberio, O impacto dos sintetizadores no processo composicional, “OPUS: Revista da Associação Nacional de Pesquisa e Pós-Graduação em Música (ANPPOM)” 2018 no. 1 (24); F.O. Gehry, M. Swed, Spaces for music, in: Ways of hearing: Reflections on music in 26 pieces, ed.  S. Burnham, M. Seltzer, D. von Moltke, Princeton 2021.