The Score

While anticipating a Seattle appearance by one of the giants of
electronic music, Morton Subotnick (Thurs April 30, Chapel
Performance Space, 8 pm, $5–$15 sliding-scale donation), I’ve
been savoring The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s
Counterculture and the Avant-Garde (University of California
Press). A collection of lively interviews, photos, diagrams, an
enclosed DVD, and even a fold-out score, the book not only deflates the
notion of New York as the center of experimental music innovation in
the second half of the 20th century, but testifies to the ingenuity and
invention of a ragtag band of composers, musicians, dancers, visual
artists, and explorers.

“There’s so little documentation,” regrets Subotnick in one of the
book’s many interviews. Yet with Pauline Oliveros and Ramon Sender
along with engineer Michael Callahan—who fondly reminisces,
“When we should’ve been out chasing girls, we were out chasing
surplus oscilloscopes“—they did the unthinkable in 1962: They
established an electronic-music studio and performance space with no
corporate or institutional support. Craftily wangling borrowed,
surplus, and “sponsored” equipment, they staged performances of seminal
works including Terry Riley’s In C; the Fluxus scrapefest
Poem for Table, Chairs, and Benches,
etc. by La Monte Young; and Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna
Rain.”

In the Tape Music Center’s studio, Oliveros used a turntable,
Hewlett-Packard oscillators, and tape delay to create one of the most
haunting specimens of electronic music, Bye Bye
Butterfly. Subotnick’s Play! no. 1 daringly combined
film, magnetic tape, and chamber ensemble; he then collaborated closely
with synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla, resulting in a string of synth
masterpieces, notably Silver Apples of the Moon and the
rhythmically motile Touch.

Before he moved to Seattle, Stuart Dempster was there, too,
gigging in countless concerts and starring as the echoing
“trombonist in the tunnel” in City Scale, an epic 1963
event that combined the spectacle of Allen Kaprow’s Happenings with the
listener-centered sound walks advocated by R. Murray Schafer in the
1970s. “It was amazing,” recalls Dempster in the book’s closing
interview. “It was just a symbol of what things could be.”

Subotnick continues to compose, creating works for live or what he
calls “ghost” electronics. Phantom sounds, culled from the “live”
performer, duet, duel, and otherwise insinuate a symbiotic relationship
between acoustic and electronic sound.

Thursday’s concert features two new Subotnick pieces. Pianist
Cristina Valdés plays The Other
Piano with Subotnick on electronic processing. Valdés, clarinetist Sean Osborn, and Michael Jinsoo
Lim—a formidable violinist who gave a knockout reading of
Davidovsky’s Synchronisms No. 9 for violin and tape at the
Seattle Latin American Music Festival in 2007—tackle Then and Now Forever. A classic from the 1970s, A Sky of
Cloudless Sulfur, heard here quadraphonically, rounds out the
program: Funky, rattling squiggles of sound dribble and whirl
around the room, transmuting foreboding Kraut-rock pulsations into a
joyous dance.