Highbrow, High-Tech, High Time : Music: Computer enables video images and real-time animation to unite in Morton Subotnick’s chamber opera ‘Jacob’s Room.’

These days we greet each new computer chip as a great step forward in technology. Morton Subotnick, however, remembers a more fundamental revolution.

“Technology was real crude at the time,” the composer says, of the period when he began his pioneering work linking electronics to music and performance. “I did see a potential, especially when the transistor came in, where technology would be able to extend human abilities.”

The transistor? Subotnick joined the ranks of the sixtysomethings last month but still finds himself perched on the technological cusp.

“Actually, the thing that excites me most is the fact that I worked so hard in those early years with a kind of vision about where technology and art were going to go, and now that it’s here, I find myself on the cutting edge again.”

An example is “Jacob’s Room,” which just had its premiere on the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia. Based on the Virginia Woolf novel, “Jacob’s Room” is a chamber opera taking place in a man’s mind, and the staging includes three different video images and real-time animation.

“ ‘Jacob’s Room’ is a work which is doing exactly what I envisioned back in the ‘50s and ‘60s,” Subotnick says. “The computer can work with what is going on onstage and then bring it back in ways no human could.

“This takes it one step further than ‘Hungers’ (Subotnick’s multimedia, technological tour-de-force from the 1987 Los Angeles Festival). ‘Hungers’ was a great display of technology, almost in the foreground,” Subotnick says. “In ‘Jacob’s Room,’ the technology is so embedded in the drama, nobody talks about it. That is the next step, getting it so the technology is transparent.”

Although a native Angeleno and one of the founding professors at CalArts, the composer is speaking from his home in Santa Fe, N.M., where he and his family have lived since 1984.

“We looked at Topanga Canyon, Santa Fe and Upstate New York,” Subotnick says. “I just wanted a very beautiful, quiet place. In a way, I feel like I’m still in L.A. Santa Fe is kind of a global suburb, where I spend my daily activity. Time and space is really important to me.”

Today and Friday the important time for Subotnick will be 7 p.m. and the space the Santa Monica Museum of Art, where he will discuss some of the directions his work has gone lately, on concerts presented by the California E.A.R. Unit in honor of his 60th birthday last month.

“At the beginning, I thought I would show a little of what is going on with the technology,” Subotnick says. “I’ll demonstrate the Interactor software, which I developed with Mark Coniglio. It can follow anything on stage.

“Next, I have a kid’s (software) program, where children will be able to compose at the level of finger-painting. Then they’ll actually be able to learn the basics of rather sophisticated ear-training though games.

“I actually had the ideas for this back in ’68 or ‘69, but only now has technology made it possible. Once I started on it, I saw new ideas emerge from the technology.”

Out now is “All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis,” performed by the E.A.R. Unit on a CD-ROM from Voyager. It includes “Five Scenes From an Imaginary Ballet,” which is supposed to be the first music conceived expressly for CD-ROM. In 1967, his “Silver Apples of the Moon” was the first electronic score commissioned for recording, and the release of the Nonesuch album became a defining moment for musically hip boomers.

“Silver Apples of the Moon” and its successor “Wild Bull” will also make the switch from LP to CD, but on Wergo, not Nonesuch.

“I wanted to do it this year,” Subotnick explains, “but Nonesuch had no specific plan for the pieces. The sound to some extent seems dated, and the electronics a little raw, but I was amazed. They seem to really hold.”

“All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis” is on the Friday program in Santa Monica, as is “Angel Music,” a study for “Misfortunes of the Immortals,” a multimedia opera scheduled to premiere next year.

“I’ve decided I’m a dramatic or theatrical composer,” Subotnick says. “I’m very much engaged with trying to find natural or biological metaphors. My music for the first part of my career was very visceral, with strong driving rhythms. It’s still visceral, but I think I’m getting a little more philosophical. It tends to deal a lot more with a kind of internal dialogue or narrative.”