Electronic Composer Morton Subotnick Has a Vision for Music in the Future

You can take Morton Subotnick out of California, but you can’t take the California out of Morton Subotnick.

Although the 56-year-old composer and native Angeleno now lives in New Mexico, on Wednesday night he was once again playing the role of Californian delivering an insightful impromptu lecture and demonstration of his work. He was the fifth of six composers enlisted in recent months to speak as part of the California Contemporary Composers Series at the Laguna Art Museum.

“Ever since I was a kid, I can remember not being satisfied by the present, because I could always imagine where the future was taking us,” he said, with emphasis on imagine, to the small but attentive audience. “I’m still that way.”

Subotnick has been teaching at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia since 1969, where he has created a strong base of new-music activity and built his reputation as a composer of electronic music. He now commutes to Valencia every week from his home outside Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, composer and vocalist Joan La Barbara, and their son, Jacob.

Subotnick, who is bearded, bespectacled and unrelentingly energetic, paced back and forth as he spoke. He started off his talk with a recounting of his modest beginnings as a clarinetist and how he “somewhere along the line went astray” to become a composer in his mid-20s.

At that time, he said, he set three goals that have since become lifelong pursuits: First, he wanted to see a type of theater that tied many media together into a single medium; second, he wanted to determine why it would be important to go to a concert when recordings and new technologies are available, so as to redefine the conception of the stage; and last, he wanted to explore chamber music and to devise a way to create a more active involvement between the instruments and audience.

These goals have yielded a full, active career that has produced more than 60 compositions for mixed media. He remains, however, one of the most important American composers of electronic music.

“Let’s say we have a pair of identical twins,” he said in one of many analogies he used to compare recorded and live music. “One dies, and the other looks dead but is in a deep coma. Do we then bury both? Or do we investigate the situation further?”

There were also stories, including a humorous one about one an awkward first encounter with a record executive and another about a vandal’s throwing an orange into his electronically modified grand piano at the outdoor amphitheater in Ojai. “It made such a big, loud noise,” he said, his voice indicating an odd sort of delight.

Three samples of his work, taken from the recent compositions “A Desert Flowers,” “Jacob’s Room” and “Hungers,” lucidly demonstrated his remarks, although the poetic slant of his comments was often upstaged by the technological questions from the audience. But these questions gave him an opportunity to plug a computer program, called Interactor, that he has been developing for the past five years. It will--he reminded the crowd--be commercially available someday.

The California Contemporary Composers Series at the Laguna Art Museum will conclude April 11 with an appearance by Steven Stucky. Information: (714) 494-8971. Morton Subotnick’s “A Desert Flowers” and “And When the Butterflies Begin to Sing” will be included in the annual Ojai Festival, June 1 through 3.