Basslines to Baselines

Of the various attendants present at the special Making Music conversation, as part of the 2007 Spark Festival, I’m unsure how many were already aware of Morton Subotnick and his work. The Spark Festival is an annual convergence of contemporary electronic music culture hosted at the University of Minnesota. It’s a festival with over seven years under it’s belt, infusing academic flavor with undertones of bedroom experimentalism and general electronic music enthusiasm. The group gathered that night seemed to embody the range of professional to curious, trained to self-taught, no doubt many from the University’s School of Music, but also a definite fanboy constituency carried over from the initially scheduled Richard Devine (who cancelled due to illness). This was my first year attending a Spark festival event, and a prosperous entry point. For everyone present an illuminating conversation took place between – I believe his name is – JG Everest and one of the earliest living electronic music composers I will ever have the chance to see in person: Morton Subotnick. There is a fascinating quality about watching a man some 70 years of age, who participated in some of the earliest experiments of synthesized sound, talk lucidly about his experiences growing up a child prodigy clarinet player. My perceived barrier between electronic music and the older generations was completely punctured in a delightful way. Subtonick was completely self-assured of his impact on music, without an air of self-importance or snobbery. The man’s work and opinions are very intellectual but expressed in a very accessible way – the casual listener may not understand all of the names or places he references but it doesn’t make one feel stupid for not knowing either. His most well known work, Silver Apples of the Moon, is described as “[a commission] by Nonesuch Records, marking the first time an original large-scale composition had been created specifically for the disc medium”. Throughout the night Subtonick underlined this idea that there is a difference – in his mind a moral imperative – between music designed for live performance and music for the disc medium. This concept was one that I strongly resonated with. During the course of his talk I realized how Subtonik was practicing sound synthesis, filtering, and sampling at least 15–20 years before hip hop, electro and disco would take it to a mass audience. Even though I was well aware of some basic history about early electronic music, hearing a person relive it with their own story caused a new kind of understanding of these facts. The adoption of the avant garde tendencies espoused by Subtonick and his like minded contemporaries into mainstream culture were delayed (and consequently mutated by) technological access. In the pioneering days the equipment needed for electronic music cost tens of thousands of dollars (not adjusted for 45 some years of inflation) and sat in isolated University research labs for special practitioners use. It’s interesting to consider that the explosion of electronic music in wider music really happened when average (even poor) people (like the guys in Detroit, Chicago and the infamous Boroughs) had access to drum machines and samplers through in second-hand shops via well-paid label producers found no use for the novelty technology. It highlights — what I currently understand to be — an initial division between two separated but intellectually harmonious worlds of electronic music. In the past decade this gap between the two worlds of dance orientated music and the avant garde have kind of closed in a single loop, even more heightened by common tools which are widely available to anyone and highlighted by things like the Spark Festival (just look at their sponsors list) which clearly have an academic bent but also share the fringes with more experimental forms of dance music.