SUBOTNICK: Suzanne Ciani on Morton Subotnick

[@dougcl_]

It's great to see Suzanne embracing the 200e. This is indeed an exciting time for electronic music.

[@rasputin1917]

Oh! I know Suzanne Ciani! Met her in 1986 at Vangelis' flat in london! Hi Suzanne! Euri here! I remember you complemented me on my keyboards playing when I sat on vangelis' keys for a laugh. You look great! @EuripidesGeorge

[@mark12011972]

I hope you can remember 1986! Her videos when she was younger are wonderful from a youthful standpoint and she had more enthusiasm certainly but she's still so wonderful in a different way! We were maybe short circuited but with enough focus programming you can find and design stuff that your excited just to think about, and think about playing and then not play. Layering synth module (the same ones detuned) and then programming them together to 'jive' together.... sigh

[@udomatthiasdrums5322]

still love it!!

[@jakoblaban429]

Love her

[@mpingo91]

No, no, no! It's me who love her!!! :D

[@hanawana]

same!

[@ferrellms]

i saw Subotnick at fau in the mid 70s he turned on a quadrophonic tape deck and sat next to it after the show he showed off his Buchla that he had built the tracks with - crazy weird stuff

[@steveslivka]

Where Oh Where is this movie?

[@autumnmatthews3179]

What an amazing and lovely lady

[@BvsMAcosh]

indeed.

[@neonvoid]

incredible

[@udomatthiasdrums5322]

love it!!

[@christoroppolo8742]

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️👽👽👽🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🐕🐕🔦☠️🤖🤖🤖👏🏻🕺🕺🙏🙏👍🏻👍🏻✌🏻✌🏻🛸🛸🛸love this! Respect! Peace Christo

[@AlexandreLeroux]

Nice interview. Interesting enough for me to go fund it :-)

[@DJANTONIVS]

I have always felt the same about Electronic Music. It never completed it's full potential. Electronic Music from the start, beginning with Musique Concrete was a quest for a new artform a new music unlike the original form. What derailed Electronic Music prematurely was the advent of polyphony which allowed music to become more melodic and more natural sounding tho those who didn't care much for unfamiliar sounds. The icing on the cake was the advent of drum machine which popularized the form and distorted it into a dance form medium in the late 70s and into our time. That's is not to say those musical forms are bad but people like what's familiar more and therefore this allowed for the original form to decline. Fortunately, music has become too predictable and now people are finally ready to embrace a new artform again. Suzanne and Morton have now become stratified by those who recognize where the artform started.

[@patrickbodine6010]

We must not forget T.O.N.T.O.! Or Wendy Carlos. Please.

[@loupasternak]

Larry Fast did quite well with it

[@toslinked]

now that AI is taking over conventional music and it will be the most boring thing in the world, we will hopefully see a new hunger in people to pushing the envelope of what’s possible in music.

[@GrootsieTheDog]

I would have to push back on Cainni’s assertion that the keyboard somehow disrupted electronic music’s advancement when it took, in her words, a “left turn”. The technology never took a single “left” turn, it simply evolved, twisting and turning in all sorts of directions, and it continues to evolve. The keyboard synth was the Apple desktop computer of its time. The technology she herself is so excited about, that same technology took a leap and, IMO, made a more refined instrument that allowed your everyday person to create amazing electronic music. If anything, it was the keyboard that allowed electronic music to take root. And when it did take root, it exploded in all sorts of forms and did exactly what Cianni was hoping for - for the synthesizer to revolutionize music. Dance and pop music, new age, Berlin School, Krautrock, rock and progressive rock music, avant- guard music, classical atonal...all made possible by the keyboard synthesizer. I too never loved the idea, especially in the 80s and 90s that synths were only synonymous with keyboards (thanks Keyboard Magazine), but that was true only on the surface.

[@FrancisMaxino]

You know it's real electronic music when it goes warble weeble wooble wooble, warble weeble wooble wooble...

[@TheMilford]

I like her early 80s period with keyboards married with electronics...

[@marctronixx]

me too

[@NickHchaos]

"The whole thing was hijacked" Truer words were never spoken. Meanwhile Moog has been making endless rehashes (and profit) of the same monophonic keyboard synth first released in 1970, accompanied by glowing marketing copy about how wonderful and groundbreaking it is, each and every time a slightly different and cheaper variation on this original theme is manufactured. But does Suzanne really self identify as "New Age," just because she made a record or two in that direction a long time ago? That wasn't my impression from interviews she's given and online Q&A's she's given. At a Red Bull appearance, she seemed bemused by the idea..I think she said something like, "oh, people are still listening to that? [in a non ironic way]"

[@bobrew461]

Most large companies do that re-hash thing nowadays. look at Adobe and Photoshop. You can't even buy it anymore, you can only rent! Don't get me started on Autodesk and Maya. :-(

[@mcmike100]

Wah! Hammond keeps making the same instrument over and over but each one makes the same sound. The only true organ is a pipe organ because each one is different.

[@pseudonym-mc3lq]

She's a artist that's how real artist artist are. She is still evolving those sounds x

[@pseudonym-mc3lq]

@@mcmike100 brilliant reply

[@Seekthetruth3000]

I love keyboards.

[@mpingo91]

The keyboard is a pure evil. It push you in the direction of bad music. You know, the one you can sing, march or dance to it.

[@marcogentile7292]

👏👏👏💕

[@Pamaracas]

Will the documentary ever be available to buy on DVD?

[@WaveshaperMedia]

yes

[@Pamaracas]

@@WaveshaperMedia Thanks for confirming. Any idea when?

[@danb1942]

wow I can barely figure out my Voltage Modular VSTI

[@conjured_up_skeletons6178]

I gotta say I love her solo piano stuff over the hippie synth stuff.

[@Rhythmicons]

6:08 "It's not that people aren't doing pure analog performance, they are. But I'm doing it with the Buchla." Shit, I'm just happy to have my Moog clone! Id like to see the original edit of this. What was her exact quote? The edit there distinguishes her, but what was the unedited quote? It could be construed as a bit elitist the way it comes across.

[@jasstack]

This is more about her than Mort.

[@markorendas1790]

HOW DID IT GET HIJACKED??? EMERSON?? WAKEMAN??

[@dr.getter7118]

Ahh, you know how Suzanne is lol. She just dislikes piano keyboards when attached to synthesizers :P

[@mooonddd]

The plebeian hordes couldn't afford to drop $15 grand for a Buchla, so we went with the DX7 instead, preventing the New Age ambient dronescape Renaissance from happening.

[@Miler97487]

​@@dr.getter7118I've seen videos of Suzanne Ciani from the early 1980s posted on KZbin like on David Letterman in 1980 where she appears on his show and she had with her a Buchla, as well as a Prophet 5, a keyboard synthesizer and she was gladly playing on it while using the Buchla for all the weird stuff the mainstream Prophet 5 couldn't do. She's played on a Moog System 55 (much more recently) as well proving you can do a lot of the same avant-garde things you can do on a Buchla (not everything, of course but still).

[@paxwallacejazz]

I met a composition professor who used the term pornophonic to describe music predicated on sounds that were impossible without synthesizers . But I am still waiting for that profound experience of electronic music 🤷‍♂️so as a jazz pianist I discovered in my 20s that I disliked experiments in other tuning systems arbitrary or tied to the harmonic series. I mean systems that aren't culturally derived. Ok so then what? tangerine dream? Boulez? Just using synthesizers as another source of orchestration🎹? 🤷‍♂️

[@compo36]

3:13

[@hanawana]

!!

[@Seekthetruth3000]

I see nothing wrong with a synth that has a keyboard.🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂

[@NateSassoonMusic]

it's not that there's anything wrong with it, it's the desire to liberate from conventions, particularly those of western 12-tone scale thinking am a pianist myself so i'm totally with you here, but there's benefits to both

[@patrickbodine6010]

OR a synth without a keyboard.

[@steadfastcoward]

The reason Moog 'stole the thunder' was because people wanted to hear tonal music and melodies, not just bleeps, bloops and loops of arpeggios. In other words an extension of an organ.

[@garyturner5204]

Actually, When Moog added a keyboard, more people could look at it and see that it was an “instrument”, so it must make music! Visual sells. And it did.

[@ShanghaiRooster]

People are always scared of the 'other', because they can't easily relate it to something they know. Strangely enough, I was watching some Buchla related videos yesterday, and it occurred to me that learning your way around a large instrument like those in the vids must be like learning your way around a cathedral organ, with all its hundreds of stops and multiple keyboards. 😎

[@Noiretranquility]

Pure analog, using 2 h9? I guess is “pure analog” in general terms

[@WaveshaperMedia]

I think she's referring more to the fact that it's all hardware/live

[@TM-sw2uw]

Oh god, stop nitpicking. No one gives a shit what you think you know, because you read about it on the internet. These people are out there doing stuff while you worry about your semantics.

[@ganjanaut]

never dropped

[@OFR]

Tired of the endless BS about keyboards. Any creative person can do creative, nontonal things with a keyboard. Does the Buchla sequencer MAKE people do looping 8-step sequences - usually! But a creative person sees beyond the basic limitation and traps.

[@waveshapertv3468]

True, but: "In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology." (McLuhan)

[@samcarswell9890]

wow, great quote! Where's it from? I tend to steer clear of the moog/buchla keyboard/no keyboard debate but it is interesting to think about it in that light. The point about sequencers having limitations is a great one, as well. I guess no instrument is limitless and it's interesting how the decisions designers make about limitations, coupled with the meaning that can be inferred about those decisions from a marketing/image/historical standpoint, can result in these really ideological discussions that almost come back (in their own way) to identity. We use music (making and listening) as an identifier - something to shape our image of ourselves - so, naturally, the way we choose to make music is personal and densely intertwined with the way we see the world. When we talk about keyboards, we're talking about history and life-experience and perception and image and a whole lot else. It goes a lot deeper than I think I might have acknowledged before. I guess I'm just trying to say thanks for posting that - it made me think! :)

[@OFR]

Certainly, some people choose attitudes on how things ought to be, but as the larger story comes out about those days, it will be much clearer who many people are just talking and giving out theories, vs those who put out useful and enjoyable music for others. It's ALWAYS in the taste-level and the choices of the artist; everything you do involves choice, and any piece of art is made from hundreds of small choices.