Silver Apples of the Moon is the debut album by the American composer Morton Subotnick, released by Nonesuch Records in July 1967. It contains the titular composition, which is divided into two parts corresponding to the two sides of the original LP record. A showcase for the Buchla 100 series modular synthesizer, an early analog synthesizer that the composer helped develop, it was the first piece of electronic music commissioned by a record company.
Recorded over a 13-month deadline, Subotnick spent up to ten hours a day working on the composition, hoping to create sounds that other musicians would find hard to recreate. Subotnick took the name of the album from W. B. Yeats' poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus". The composition is experimental in style, with "Part I" featuring slow, calm passages and experimentation in tone and "Part II" featuring a steady pulse and sequenced rhythms, the latter an innovation for the time. Subotnick premiered the piece at the opening night of the Electric Circus nightclub in New York City.
Upon release, Silver Apples of the Moon became a surprise success, selling well in the classical music category, and received critical acclaim. The record has since gone on to be considered a milestone in electronic music; it was the first album to feature a voltage-controlled synthesizer and the first piece of both classical and electronic music written specifically for the album format. The album's sequenced rhythms are credited with anticipating subsequent electronic dance music, and today the record is considered to be Subotnick's signature work. In a 1992 list, The Wire considered it among the 100 most important albums ever, and in 2009, the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.Web Extra: Silver Apples of the Moon|Studio 360|WNYC
Background 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.
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. The album incorporates a replica of the original Buchla 100, built for Subotnick by Buchla for the composer to take to New York. 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. Although he did not hire a producer, he felt that playing his in-progress work to audiences provided him with the same effect.
Subotnick felt he was not using the Buchla 100 on Silver Apples to create music, but rather to offer "a kind of sound that you would find it very hard to replicate." The instrument provided him with a wholly new way to create electronic music. He said: "I purposefully did not know what results I was after. I believed that with this new instrument, we were in a new period for composition, that the composer had the potential for being a studio artist, being composer, performer and audience all at once, conceiving the idea, creating and performing the idea, and then stepping back and becoming critical of the results." 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."
Subotnick worked on the piece in sections, each of which could take up to eight weeks until he felt he had fully realized them. After completing sections, he would record them onto tape, notate the patch so he could resume work later on, and put them aside, allowing him to re-patch the synthesizer to work on other elements. Production was stressful for the composer; as Silver Apples was the first electronic album to use a voltage-controlled synthesizer, Subotnick had no model on how to create it. Fine-tuning the Buchla until a desired sound was achieved could take up to ten hours a day, after which the composer made records and diagrams of what sounds were achieved with each knob. He would then record these sounds onto the only tape recorder that would record, and then, in his own words, "set another patch in motion and eventually record that mixed with what you had—mix the new one—with what you had on the old one, either to do it over the top of it or to dovetail or something like that."
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; Subotnick decided that "Part I" would explore pitch, whereas "Part II" would explore rhythm and pulse. The movements of the record are not necessarily presented in the order they were worked on, as the composer's production approach was to create musical sections in "gobs." On the album sleeve, Subotnick wrote that the record was intended to be experienced by listeners individually or in small groups listening in intimate surroundings, describing this as "a kind of chamber music 20th-century style." 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."
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