Silver Apples of the Moon (Morton Subotnick album)

Subotnick began creating electronic music as a student at Mills College in the late 1950s, a period during which he also played clarinet with the San Francisco Symphony. When commissioned to write incidental music for a production of King Lear, Subotnick instead recorded vocals from the play's lead actor Michael O'Sullivan and cut-and-pasted the tape of his voice in various fashions for almost a year until he had created a resulting piece of music constructed entirely out of O'Sullivan's voice. The composer realised that the technology he used could create a new environment for composing that he referred to as "music as studio art": "You would be composing music as a studio art. I made the decision at that point that this new technology was going to allow for everything to be different. A new kind of composer." Subotnick's new interest in electro-acoustic music led to him founding the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1961 with fellow musicians Ramon Sender and Pauline Oliveros. They and their collaborators and associates at the San Francisco Tape Music Center aspired to create compositions featuring sounds that could not be created with conventional acoustic instruments. Subotnick and Sender searched San Francisco for an engineer who could help materialize their concepts about sound manipulation via electronic circuits, and soon found engineer and amateur composer Don Buchla. Using a $500 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, they created the Buchla 100 modular synthesizer, an instrument sometimes believed to be the world's first analog synthesizer. As the creators' vision for the Buchla 100 was to provide a new way of creating music, the instrument lacked a black-and-white keyboard and instead focused on "the movement and manipulation of frequencies." Subotnick recalled: "To me, this was Day Zero for the evolution of music. A new new music. Not a new old music." The composer perceived the instrument to be an opportunity to radicalize traditional high culture, imagining that, if the instrument was inexpensively mass-produced, it would become popular in middle-class American households. synthesizer. Subotnick moved to New York City in 1966 to work at Lincoln Center and became a resident artist at New York University. Suspicious of institutional settings, he requested off-campus space and located a studio on Bleecker Street, in the centre of the city's downtown scene. Around this period, Jac Holzman, an executive from Nonesuch Records, visited Subotnick in the middle of the night, and offered him $500 to create an electronic album for the label. Subotnick had not heard of the label and, believing Holzman to be joking, kicked him out. The following day, the composer realized the label was real when he noticed he had a Nonesuch release of the Brandenburg Concertos in his collection. Although Subotnick thought he had "really blown it", having been unable to find a telephone number for the label, Holzman returned with a new offer of $1,000, which Subotnick accepted. Silver Apples of the Moon thus became the first electronic album commissioned by a major label, and the first electronic piece conceived specifically for the LP record format. During the production of Silver Apples, Columbia Records offered Subotnick a contract, but as he was on Nonesuch's roster he turned them down. He nonetheless felt that "I must have been unique to these people at that point because two different record companies came to me for the same thing." ==Production==

Subotnick was given a 13-month deadline by Nonesuch to complete Silver Apples of the Moon, and he recorded it in the studio at New York University's School of the Arts over 1966–67, working for 10–12 hours a day. Subotnick used two two-track tape recorders, one which recorded and played back and another which only provided playback. He kept track of production notes in several notebooks which he updated daily. He considered the album to be "pretty complex" for a debut piece, commenting that "I was offering something that isn't easy to do, but that was the point." ==Composition==

Silver Apples of the Moon is split into two separate parts, "Part I" and "Part II", with each part taking up one side of the vinyl record; He referred to this intention as a "rather special frame of reference" when writing the album, and later explained that the record was intended to be heard as a "trip" or "voyage." The entirely electronic album uses only the Buchla 100 and no other instrumentation, as the composer intended the album to be one of his "models" for showing "how synthesis could be used to create daring new musical languages." The record is considered to be experimental in style. According to writer Kevin Lozano, the sounds on Silver Apples of the Moon resemble "the byproduct of an experiment gone wrong: Its eerie tones, elliptical pulses, enigmatic thumps, and waves of cybertronic wails are still otherworldly." Unlike other contemporary synthesizer works, the album incorporates hooks into its experimentation with ostinatos and riffs. The usage of the Buchla 100 also enabled the album's improvisatory feel, highlighting the influence of Pauline Oliveros' "intuitive approach". Oliveros, one of Subotnick's colleagues, later said of his music from the period: "Sequencing now is something anyone can do anytime, anywhere. But this was the first time that you could do it in this way. He certainly made a great use of it and advised [Don Buchla] in that direction, I'm sure. Because before that, he was cutting and splicing tape." Running for over sixteen minutes, "Part I" is a slow, moody section, incorporating 'pinprick' tones which move around the stereo field, and calm passages which are abruptly interrupted by electronic noise. The track makes wide-ranging usage of glissandi, whistles, sirens and other sounds and tones, and also incorporates irregular sections and "capricious shapes." The "atomized melodies, eerie sighs [and] hissing explosions of sound" are reminiscent of early electronic compositions by Milton Babbitt and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The introduction to the piece, featuring undulating pitches that rise and fall, was the first part of the album recorded. A rhythm in the middle of the track emerges alongside numerous high-pitched melodies atop underlying minimal noise, while the coda features low and slow bass tones. By contrast, "Part II" opens with high-pitched "ding-y" sounds that Subotnick referred to as the sound of "silver apples," and develops a pulse before climaxing with frenzied "proto-club rhythms," with sequences pasted over a steady ostinato. "Beeps and bleeps" are played atop the sequenced phrases. Underlying the track is an ever-rising whirring that varies in pitch against numerous sounds which "flash" in and out of the piece. Sequenced synthesizer phrases were an innovation at the time. According to writer Alfred Hickling, "[t]his had simply never been heard before. Early electronic compositions were mostly about sine waves, oscillations, timbre – all devoid of rhythm, by and large." Subotnick nonetheless said his discovery of these rhythms happened almost by accident: "In the early days, it took a long, long time – sometimes even days – to programme a sequence. Quite unintentionally, I found I had created this pulsating rhythm. I started grooving with it – and it blew my mind." ==Title and packaging==

(pictured). Subotnick named Silver Apples of the Moon in reference to a line from "The Song of Wandering Aengus" by poet W. B. Yeats: "The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun." The album sleeve features a psychedelic design by William S. Harvey, incorporating artwork by Anthony Martin. ==Release and reception==

Prior to its release, Subotnick played Silver Apples of the Moon at the opening night of the famous New York nightclub Electric Circus in June 1967, where the composition was enhanced by the usage of strobe lights. Attendees included conductor Seiji Ozawa, writer Tom Wolfe, and several members of the Kennedy family. The attendees danced to the music, which dumbfounded Subotnick, but he was pleased they enjoyed the "pulse" of the music. Robert Barry of The Quietus believes that, with this, "Subotnick might just have been the first person to get a club full of people [...] dancing to purely electronic music." and also selling respectably for an experimental album. Fellow New York-based electronic musician Wendy Carlos, a design consultant and early exponent of the Moog synthesizer, also reviewed the album for Electronic Music Review. Although she hailed Subotnick as a "very talented" composer and felt the album to be among the prettiest electronic works, she nonetheless felt it was a "bore" that was too long "for a single electronic composition of this style and type." She also derided what she felt were inexpressive phrasings and articulations, feeling that "they either sound inflexible and mechanical, or aleatoric and unimportant." Although Silver Apples of the Moon pre-dated recordings containing the Moog by about a year, it was soon overshadowed by the popularity of Carlos' own 1968 album Switched-On Bach, which featured works by Johann Sebastian Bach played on the Moog. Switched-On Bach would become one of the best-selling classical albums of all time. The popularity of the Moog itself, which featured a keyboard unlike the Buchla, helped render the Buchla a niche instrument used largely by academic composers, despite the acclaim that Silver Apples of the Moon received. Julian Cope wrote in a retrospective review that the album reflected Subotnick's interest in both technology and music, and described it as an "unsung" release. ==Legacy==

Silver Apples of the Moon is celebrated as a landmark in the history of electronic music, being hailed as an important electronic composition that received significant sales despite being experimental in style. Not only was Silver Apples the first electronic composition composed exclusively for the album format, but Lozano also argues it to be the first electronic dance music album, highlighting how the album's "ghostly chorus of beats and rhythms" predicted the development of techno in the 1980s. and the first large-scale classical composition to have premiered with a recording on a physical release, rather than with a live performance, highlighting what writer Joseph Morpurgo felt was "a significant shift of gravity away from a culture of performance towards a culture of playback." and brought the composer celebrity. The rhythmic second side of the album attracted the attention of rock bands the Grateful Dead and the Mothers of Invention, who began spending time with Subotnick at his studio. The composer was worried his work would be treated as gimmickry, and he turned down two opportunities to appear on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Subotnick predicted the album would anticipate more art music than he felt it actually did, recalling: "I knew that I was making, more or less, high art music. I thought that there would be more interest in fine art music than actually happened." In 2014, Fact included the album in their list of "The greatest electronic albums of the 1950s and 1960s", with contributor Joseph Morpurgo describing the significant work as "an involving set of fizz-bang electronics." In 2015, Spin included it in a list of the 1960s' greatest alternative albums, where the editors called it an "electronic masterpiece" and Subotnick's "major statement, a manifesto on behalf of the idea that electronic music need not be forever in its textures or rhythms." In 2017, Pitchfork'' ranked it at number 83 in their list of "The 200 Best Albums of the 1960s". In its accompanying write-up, Kevin Lozano wrote that: "In a decade dedicated to the exploration of the fringes, of moon landings and subatomic exploration, Silver Apples was another attempt to break open the door into the future and walk on through." In 2009, it was one of 50 recordings chosen by the United States Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry, which selects recordings annually that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". BBC Radio 3 count the album among their "Fifty Modern Classics", and in an accompanying 2012 documentary, author Rob Young celebrated the album while Four Tet explained how the album stood out to him as a classic. On January 19, 2018, ARTnews hosted a symposium on the album at New York University, with the help of NYU Music Technology and the Humanities Initiative, to commemorate the album's 50th anniversary. A documentary on Subotnick, also named Subotnick, was also released as part of the album's anniversary celebrations, alongside vinyl and CD re-issues of the album. Subtonick performed Silver Apples of the Moon at Adelaide Festival on 7 March 2014, using a re-creation of the first Buchla (the original is housed in the Library of Congress). ==Track listing==

All tracks written by Morton Subotnick Side one • "Part I" – 16:33 Side two • "Part II" – 14:52 == Personnel ==

• Morton Subotnick - Buchla 100 modular synthesizer, liner notes, primary artist • Bradford Ellis - Digital restoration, mastering, remixing • Michael Hoenig - mastering, remixing • H.J. Kropp - cover design • Tony Martin - illustrations ==See also==