How was the recent tour in Europe?
It was hard, but I'm doing fine. I'm getting a little confused about things, but luckily the music is not giving me any problems, just all the details. I'd never done this before at this age, and, in addition, the COVID tests made everything more complicated.
What are your recollections of your early days in New York City?
The first time in New York for me was the summer of 1965, when they gave me a studio on Bleecker Street. I had been working at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, and we were given a $200,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. We didn't apply for it; we were handed it, but in order to do what we wanted to it had to be under the auspices of what they called "fiscally responsible people," and we were not considered that! We ended up in Mills College, and the grant was coming in around 1965 or '66. In the meantime, I got invited to work with the Actor's Workshop in San Francisco – Herb Blau and that group – on a production of [William Shakespeare's] King Lear. I created a score using tape manipulations, and that started me in electronics. That production created a huge stir nationwide. I had been mostly a clarinetist before that. As a result of that production, the main people of the company were invited to present the piece at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York.
Do you have a copy of that score?
There's an archive somewhere, but almost everyone's dead now so I don't know where anything is. I made all the sound effects and the trumpet calls. The big event was the storm scene, in which I made the sounds by manipulating the actor's voice on tape. We worked for a year on it, recording and so forth. I didn't have filters, so I had to make it faster or slower to allow the voice to come through. All of the sound was horrendously loud! Herb let me direct part of the scene. The idea was that the storm was in the actor's brain, and so at one point I had him go down and touch his knee to the ground, at which time the sound turned off and then turned on again when he stood up. It was just a sudden thing, but it was really powerful, at least at that time, anyway. I don't think it's in the script, but at the end we added a part where he went down, laid down on the ground, and began breathing – I had the breath recorded with a repeat following the rhythm of his breathing. It was dynamite, so we got invited to open the show in NYC in 1966. Also at that time, I got an invitation from the beginnings of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU to be an artist-in-residence. I met with Robert W. Corrigan, the dean. He ended up president at CalArts [California Institute of the Arts] later. He flew me out to go over my contract. I had told him that I hated to be in a university, telling him, "I didn't know you were in the middle of New York. I don't want to be on a campus. I don't want to be anywhere near a campus!" I needed a studio, plus he had to buy me a Buchla [synthesizer], because the Buchla 100 was just coming out. I made it hard for him! He took me to dinner at a famous steakhouse in [Greenwich] Village, and he brought the Ertegun brothers [Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, founders of Atlantic Records] because he wanted to make sure I understood this was not just academics as usual. I had a wonderful meal with them. Before we were done, with the Erteguns sitting there, and I said, "What about the contract?" He said, "Yeah, here!" This paper, which was signed at the bottom by him, had the logo of NYU, the date, and everything, but it was blank. He said, "I can't remember everything. Just write it! You have to give a lecture once a week, so please put that in there." So, I did! I gave a lecture to the whole student body once a week, and that was it. I ended up on Bleecker Street, since they owned the building. No teaching, but students who were artists could make appointments and come on in. We would talk, and it was wonderful. I had one 2-track tape recorder that recorded and played back, and one 2-track tape [deck] that only played back. No mixers or filters except what was in the Buchla. Nothing else. It wasn't musique concrète; it was all electronic. No cutting and pasting [tape].
Had you been performing live with the Buchla before the release of Silver Apples…?
No. My whole idea of the Buchla, to start with, was that it was not a musical instrument, but a conglomerate of modules that I could put together in some way to create. I could play on to tape and then overdub. What I did was to make a whole pass with one patch. I would make as many passes as I could, and then the only cutting I did was to separate them with paper leader [tape] and label them. I would play back one from the tape recorder that only played back, then have a new patch and play against it, which was recorded onto the second tape recorder. I had a stereo mix at the end. I still use the same process when I play in public, except that instead of recording it I have a huge number of samples and then I play against the samples. I can control the samples, what part of the sample, and all of that. It's the same process that I used then, but it's much more sophisticated now. That was only for Silver Apples… and The Wild Bull.
And on the album Touch?
No. Just those two records. Then Columbia Records gave me a contract, because both Silver Apples… and The Wild Bull had been big successes. They gave me, and Terry Riley, contracts for seven years to do a record every year. The first was to be for their quadraphonic vinyl player that they had sold 10,000 of. Touch sold 40,000 records that year because people didn't have anything to play on their machines! They gave me two Ampex 4-track tape recorders. I had a multitrack. Back to when I arrived in New York: I had been lecturing. I used to be good at lecturing, and I did a lot of them. I'd lecture about how my idea with the Buchla was that the new genre of music would be "composer as studio artist." It all seems so silly now, but, at that time, it was a brand-new idea. My idea was that I would make a machine for the studio artist, and it could also be for live performance, but only in bits and pieces. You could put it together live, but you would have the fine tuning of it in advance, and it would end up with the machine playing at someone's home. Because vinyl records began to be long-playing and high fidelity, the medium for the message of the studio artist was now the record player. I had been lecturing on the idea that, since this was the case, record companies would realize that it was wrong to take a Beethoven string quartet and record it, because it was meant to be played and interpreted on the spot in front of an audience. They would realize this, people would realize it, and everyone would stand up and say, "No more of this. We're going to create a new way."
How did Jac Holzman end up commissioning you to compose for Nonesuch Records?
I was working all night back in those days, and people sitting on my used sofa in the studio didn't introduce themselves. There was Viva, the actress from [Andy] Warhol [films]. I happened to know who she was. They all would be sitting there, talking among themselves, and listening to what I was doing. It was after midnight; the shows had all closed. In walks this guy at 2 o'clock in the morning with starched Levis, and I knew he was a fake. He had to be a fake. He says that he's the president of Nonesuch Records, which sounded like a phony name to me.
He talked about my lecture, and he'd decided that I was the one who could do the first new electronic album. I said, "Leave my studio now before I throw you out!" I pushed him, and he went out. I got back home about five in the morning, I had to get the kids up to get them to school, and I decided to listen to my [copy of Johann Sebastian] Bach's "Brandenburg Concerto." It was on Nonesuch Records! All day I tried to call, but there was no phone number for Nonesuch because it was part of some other company. I thought, "This is the way I'm starting my life. I throw everything away!" I went back to the studio that night to work, and at 2 in the morning he shows up again. I opened my arms and he said, "Don't hit me." I said, "I won't!" He said, "Just listen," and I listened. He began with, "We'll offer $500. Well... we'll offer you $1000." I said, "I'll take it!" After that, I didn't see him again until about three years later, when they were filming me for my own documentary in Los Angeles. He was living in Los Angeles, so they arranged to film me with him. I sat next to him, and it was wonderful. I said, "Do you remember that night? He said, "I'll never forget it. You almost pushed me down the stairs!"
What was important for you about the Buchla?
The whole notion for the Buchla was that it was this machine – as someone suggested at the time – that was more like a musical analog computer than a musical instrument. The big change was, after I did The Wild Bull, I realized that with all the ability to move your fingers and do all that, I had left a very important control voltage out, and it was my voice. I called Don [Buchla], I was just starting Touch, in 1968 or '69, and told him that I needed a control voltage from my voice. He said, "Oh, I can do that." It was less than two weeks after, and I had an envelope follower. I've looked on the web and I didn't find one made before that, but there could have been. I'd been turning the output into a control voltage, and I could then do real-time control of files. That changed everything for me, because then I started to build control tracks. CBS eventually gave me an 8-track tape recorder, which made everything better when I was doing quadrophonic audio. I could make a control track and use it for affecting anything that was on the tapes. Then all I needed to do was to press a button and I could make a thing that was going "ooo uh ooo a" and it would then go "tr-tr-dd-tr-de." It was amazing! I'm still doing that stuff that way. The only use of my voice live was to generate what you were hearing. That is, what you were hearing of my voice "live" was an imitation of what I had done on the tape. There was a groove created by the envelope follower controlling the electronic sounds that you were hearing. The samples were doing the same thing as my voice, and I could go back and forth between them. I had my voice in it, because my voice was recorded, but it was also controlling the speed of the modulation of my voice. That's what I wanted. I've been working on the opening segment now for our piece "As I Live and Breathe." I'm including pre-existing software and can now move the sound to different parts of the room on the spot. I'm not using joysticks, I'm using a Korg XYZ [Pad Kontrol], because with it I can trigger something and then move my finger at the same time – you can't do that so easily with a joystick. I can access any control at any time I want, in any way I want. It's safer and more foolproof, because when I get started with a thing on my finger, or anything physical, my whole body is activated by that and it's only doing one thing. My metaphor for the live performance is the conductor. I'm the conductor, the composer, the orchestra, and the orchestra is already playing. I don't play the orchestra, I conduct them, so I play at the highest level of who is going to play what, when, and how. I can do that and think about it and process it all, but if I'm doing this or this with a button, my brain is now located at the end of my finger, not on the whole score. It's taken me a while to figure that out, to get that metaphor straight. And it's very clear now, so I prepare my scores and my work that way.
Are you using pre-programmed sequences?
I don't use sequences at all. They're all performed, then I sample what was played in a loop form – a long loop, like eight-minutes. Then, when I go to key X, it goes to that huge sample. I may only take this much of it, or I may take it only from the starting point, or at a different point, and then go all the way around. I'm documenting all of that because it's taken me years to get to this point where the whole process is defined. Soon, it'll all be available; all of that. In fact, I have a meeting with my publisher: We're going to try to make it available on a free website that they're putting together for me featuring more technologies, including how to make the Ghost Score pieces, and how they work. Some of that's already there. [see sidebar]
How was Silver Apples of the Moon created and constructed?
First, we're talking 1959 to 1961. At that time, all of us, including myself, imagined music as marching on, so all the way back to [Arnold] Schoenberg and the first part of the 20th century, with him saying, "Now that I've made the 12-tone technique, I'm assuring the grandeur of the Austrian composer for 100 years." [Pierre] Boulez, [Luciano] Berio, and all, they started with Schoenberg and then they discovered [Anton] Webern. Boulez wrote an article that started "Schoenberg is dead," the king was Webern, and that was the beginning of the post-Webern movement. So, when we get to the beginnings of electronics, even [Karlheinz] Stockhausen and his earliest electronic works, Electronic Studies, were all basically post-Webern technique. The only thing he did is that he did it with oscillators and made fresh tunings. But they're all really dull.
