Discussing “Silver Apples Of The Moon” puts me in a quandary. I like Morton Subotnick personally, and very much enjoyed studying with him. I appreciate his desire to liberate the world from the shackles of keyboard-centric thinking. There’s no question that his music is personal, original and forward-thinking. But I find myself unable to emotionally connect.
Allmusic’s artist profiles include user-submitted “moods.” The Allmusic artist moods for Subotnick are: Cerebral, Clinical, Detached, Reserved, and Hypnotic. I couldn’t have described “Silver Apples” any better. Subotnick certainly isn’t reserved in person; his willingness to sing and dance spontaneously in class is his most charming quality. But like most of his high modernist cohort, Subotnick’s music is austere.
The Cerebral and Hypnotic aspects are attractive to me, and I feel well equipped to handle Reserved. I have a hard time with Clinical and Detached, though. I want direct emotional connection. Subotnick has poured out a generous stream of ideas in “Silver Apples.” But it’s hard to know what emotions are present. I guess the spirit of fearless exploration is an emotion. Is it enough?
It could well be that I can’t find the feeling in high modernist music like “Silver Apples” because of my lack of familiarity with it. Maybe the feelings are in there, along with the structures and symmetries necessary to deliver them, and I’m just insufficiently sensitive to them. But after a semester with Professor Subotnick, absorbing his theories and philosophies, I don’t feel any closer to understanding “Silver Apples.” I agree with the YouTube commenter who says it sounds like a bar full of drunken Artoo units. There’s too much information, too much complexity, too many parameters left open. The insectoid quality is thought-provoking, but anxiety-producing.
Subotnick doesn’t want to make me anxious. But he does believe very strongly in the shock of the new. He wants to challenge my assumptions, push my comfort zone. His fans are quick to point out that “Silver Apples” is very rhythmic, which is true. But the rhythms consist of multiple fractured patterns at multiple tempos simultaneously. Subotnick studiously avoids a traditional steady pulse. He’s similarly resistant to conventional tuning. I admire his bold use of cross rhythms and microtones, but in the absence of an intelligible song form, the complexity crosses over into a feeling of randomness, leaving me with a sense of queasy disorientation.
I do get some pleasure from Subotnick’s recent live performances. First of all, they’re mostly improvised, and I’m always willing to grant improvisational music wider latitude not to make obvious sense. Also, Subotnick is using samples of “Silver Apples” triggered from Ableton Live, mixed in with his usual Buchla sounds. These samples are short and repetitive, and their familiarity is a foothold for me. I also appreciate Subotnick’s hat tip to current popular sample-based music and jazz (though with different results.) While I may not be able to connect with “Silver Apples,” live remixes of “Silver Apples” are a much more attractive proposition.
Our assignment for Subotnick’s seminar was to do a weekly session with the Buchla synth, seeing what we could get out of it. I found that it was easy to get the Buchla to make complex, novel and unearthly sounds. But it was hard to get it to make sounds that were musical by my standards. Rich, textural drones are nice and all, but after a while you start craving some structure. I “cheated” a lot and used Ableton as a MIDI sequencer, using the Buchla’s own sequencer mostly for randomness. Even with MIDI sequencing though, it took me a lot of editing of my Buchla sessions to get them into a shape that I wanted to listen to. I quickly reverted to dance-music forms, repeating chunks of Buchla in groups of four over beats. I didn’t play any of this pop-flavored stuff for Subotnick. The one piece I did play for him was a diffuse abstraction, but it still had a key center and a general sense of steady pulse. He rejected for being too conservative.
I really like Subotmick’s music. I’m sort of envious you get to study with him!
If I were forcecd to criticize it, I would say that like most avant postwar music it presents itself as just this huge chunk of sound without division. The world changed how it listened to music in the meantime. I have no time to listen to the whole thing in one setting, so I edit out my favorite parts and put those in my mp3 playlist.
If you did the same, I think you would find the edited exerpts of it quite expressive and cinematic. They don’t break your heart, but the only music that does does it by referring to or suggesting older music and playing on your memories.
I do find “Silver Apples” to be a remarkable work of art in short bursts. I’ve pulled some samples of it for dance music purposes and they work great.
Moment-to-moment, I agree, there are plenty of interesting patterns at work. But yeah, the overall narrative is mysterious to me, if there is one.
You are absolutely right about the disembodied quality causing me anxiety. My own attempts to make music on the Buchla synth were similarly anxiety-producing, because there was such a long distance between my fingertips and the resulting sounds. But I guess some people really enjoy that kind of dissociative feeling, Subotnick chief among them.
I expected worse from reading the article before hitting Play – I actually found Silver Apples Of The Moon not that random at all, although it does sound… arbitrary. At most points it makes sense to me, but over longer stretches it feels aimlessly meandering, without a narrative compelling its shifts.
(Maybe that is what you are calling randomness.)
But I agree it is purely cerebral and devoid of emotion.
The anxiety you feel, in my opinion, is nothing to do with the shock of the new. It is the purely cerebral feel of the piece: the music conveys a state of a fast pace of sensory input absorbed purely through the mind, with no grounding in the body, which is almost the definition of anxiety as an experience. The implication is that no level of familiarity will lessen the feeling of anxiety it induces.