Lamination by Morton Subotnick (10:23 Min.)

When last Morton Subotnick and I met, he had just picked

me up from a delightful coast-to-coast 747 fantasy, embellished

with a $2.00 air hose version of the complete works of Pierre

Boulez accompanied by Jean Paul Belmondo in a dashing 30’s

getup, driving fast and shooting hard. We were traveling in Subot-

nick’s mini-bus camper to a cabin in the mountains surrounding

Los Angeles when I said, “You know, Mort, I always seem to

come to California at the end of a hard year.” He replied, “That’s

because you always have a hard year.” It was typical of his pierc-

ing, lucid perceptivity, a knowingness about people and people’s

actions that cuts across time and continents. If there, are other

“Structuralist” aspects of his music that manifest themselves more,

fine, but to this writer it is that personability, that social percep-

tivity that shows in it the most. One can point to many of his

multi-media or theatre works, such as Play! 4 (1965), created

during his long association with visual artist, Anthony Martin,

and Ritual Electronic Chamber Music (1968), a game piece which

can be performed without audience, involving only a small

group of “interested persons”, to show that it’s the live organic

interaction between participants in pieces that is his prime concern.

Lamination is the participation of an orchestral body in

what was to become Subotnick’s prime medium, electronic music

in which he succeeded in recreating a kind of orchestral texture

over which he had complete control, though he exerted it only in

carefully and exactly measuredquantities. He composed three major

works of this nature for Don Buchla’s synthesizer equipment

alone, Silver Apples of the Moon (1967), The Wild Bull (1968)

and Touch (1969) and, most recently, one including visual per-

formance, Sidewinder (1970). All of these pieces have undeniable

instrumental qualities about them. When I heard some of the ma-

terial in preparation for The Wild Bull a few years ago I remarked,

“Hey, some of that sounds like the Berlioz Requiem.” He laughed

appreciatively. Lamination is important historically in this regard

for the structure of the orchestral part imitates in timbre and

texture those sounds that are created electronically. Indeed, many

of them are electronic sounds that have been directly translated

through orchestration. In perspective, one can see the orchestra

slowly being dissolved in the impending spectre of flexibility in

making electronic “Klangfarbenmusik”. The listener should find

it easy to hear the main structural principles of layering (as the

title suggests), between the electronic and orchestral parts.

Morton Subotnick was born in 1933 and was known as one

of the finest clarinetists in the country before becoming a

founder of the San Francisco Tape Center, which launched his

electronic music and multi-media career. He was later a Master

Artist in the Multi-media Program at New York University where

he maintained a studio and was one of the directors of the elec-

tric Ear series in multi-media. He now teaches at the California

Institute of the Arts in Valencia. He has been one of the most in-

fluential and productive of American composers working in

electronics and multi-media.

Lukas Foss, of course, has been responsible for introducing

many new American works and new faces, including this writer’s

and deserves credit for seeing fit to record such a work as

Lamination.

Violin Concerto by William Bergsma (22:25 Min.)

William Bergsma’s music is difficult to pidgeonhole. Strictly

speaking, he does not follow the trends set by any of the early

twentieth-century giants, such as Schoenberg, Bartok, Stravinsky

or Hindemith, nor has he been felt as a force in the avant garde.

All of his work has been devoted to a furtherance of the tradition-

al musical media. One can see in it strong emphasis on linearity.

He is a lyricist and a contrapuntalist. His structures are Beethoven-

ian in their economy of means and he shows marked interest in

integrating contrasting timbres.

Bergsma was somewhat of a prodigy, He was born in 1921

and at the age of 16 wrote Paul Bunyan Suite for his high school

orchestra which is still played by such groups. He studied at

Stanford and at Eastman with Howard Hanson and Bernard

Rogers. He received a Guggenheim in 1946 and taught at Juilliard

from 1946 to 1963 when he was appointed Director of the School

of Music at the University of Washington in Seattle. Probably his

most extensive work is his opera, The Wife of Martin Guerre. In

it one senses a typical Bergsma concern, extreme attention to the

balance between voice and orchestra, which manifests itself as

well in the Violin Concerto (1965) in the careful relation he

makes between the orchestral and solo lines.

Bergsma’s caution against overextending himself with dra-

matic force shows in the reserved manner in which he treats any-

thing virtuosic. He is never flashy, but always concerned with

precise relations between individual sounds. One arresting tech-

nique is his manner of treating the temporal spacing of harmonic

elements. It provides pointed references in time, very cyclic,

though in a style that is not primarily rhythmic in its emphasis.

This, along with constant lyric and contrapuntal variations pro-

vides deep structural strength in a music poetic in impact.

There is a long list of works to Bergsma’s credit. Some

important ones, besides the piece presented here and the opera,

are his Second Quartet (1944), commissioned by the Koussevitzky

Foundation, Tangents, a large work for piano, a Symphony,

Music On a Quiet Theme for orchestra, The Fortunate Islands for

string orchestra and his Toccata for the Sixth Day, commissioned

for the inaugural week concert of the Juilliard Orchestra in 1962

during the week of dedication of Philharmonic Hall in Lincoln

Center for the Performing Arts in New York.

DAVID ROSENBOOM

Mr. Bergsma’s Violin Concerto was recorded under a grant from the Grad-

uate School Research Fund of the University of Washington.

Concert Piece for Syn-Ket and Symphony Orchestra

by John Eaton (13:20 Min.)

The first performance of this work was by the Berkshire

Music Center Orchestra under the direction of Gunther Schuller

at Tanglewood, August 9, 1967. It has since been performed by

other groups including the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin

Mehta.

In an article for the Electronic Music Review, Joel Chadabe

suggests that the instrument should be reviewed as well as the

composition in order to understand the total design. He goes on to

say, “The Syn-Ket is a performable and portable electronic sound

system designed and built by Paul Ketoff in Rome, Italy, for the

American Academy in Rome. Basically, it consists of three sound

systems (Eaton calls them ‘combiners’) racked one above the

other . . . The Syn-Ket is performed by pushing buttons, turning

dials, playing keyboards, depressing a volume pedal, and every

now and then patching.”

For the orchestration of the Concert Piece Eaton has divid-

ed the orchestra into two sections, tuned a quarter-tone apart in

pitch, which, the composer says, “allows me to bathe rejuvenes-

cently in the ancient but still pure springs of microtonal melody”.

This tuning of the orchestra two sections (to quote Chadabe

again) “permits a meeting on common ground with the tuning of

the Syn-Ket, which is, of course, not played diatonically. With the

quarter-tone tuning of clusters occassional legato phrases in the

woodwinds and brass, strong shifts of register, and very sophisti-

cated timbre changes, the orchestra enters the Syn-Ket sound

world, which leaves Eaton free to mingle without fear of offend-

ing”- . ,

John Eaton was born in 1935 in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He received

his A.B. and M.F.A. degrees from Princeton University where he

studied composition with Milton Babbitt, Edward Cone, and

Roger Sessions. He has been awarded three American Prix de

Rome and two Guggenheim grants, a commission from the North

German Radio, special awards from ASCAP, and a Fromm Foun-

dation commission for this Concert Piece. (It is published by

Malcolm Music, Ltd. [BMI]).

Mr. Eaton has composed works in every medium. Pieces of

his have been played in concert and broadcast throughout the

U.S., Italy, and Germany. The composer is also the soloist in

this Concert Piece. JOHN EATON