Silver Apples Of The Moon

Silver Apples Of The Moon

Silver Apples Of The Moon
For Electronic Music Synthesizer

A Nonsuch Records commission composed specifically for the LP record by
Morton Subotnick

Cover Art: Anthony Martin

Cover Design: William S. Harvey

Coordinator: Teresa Sterne

Nonesuch Records H-71174
1967

From the back cover: Morton Subotnick was born in 1933 in Los Angeles, California. He earned his undergraduate degree in English literature from the University of Denver and his Master of Arts in composition from Mills College, where he studied with Leon Kirchner and Darius Milhaud. A professional clarinetist, he was a member of the Denver and San Francisco Symphonies and has given chamber music and solo performances.

While in California, Subotnick co-founded the Mills College Performing Group (a chamber ensemble), and the San Francisco Tape Center. Through the efforts of the composer, the Center was awarded a $200,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, and subsequently the Tape Music Center and the Mills Performing Group were combined. At this time Subotnick also held a post as Assistant Professor of Music at Mills College. He then became Musical Director of the Repertory Theater at Lincoln Center and since Fall, 1966, has been involved with the Intermedia Program at the School of Arts at New York University. The purpose of this program is to bring together artists who specialize in various media – film, theater, tape, etc.

Subotnick has been working with tape since 1960; his present involvement with mixed media employs the theatrical. The following are excerpts of a recent work, "Play!" – illustrative of the technique Subotnick has evolved.

The dimensions of Morton Subotnick's Play No. 4 embrace not only music, but also theater and cinema and game-playing and light-shows and assorted ritualistic phenomena suggestive of contemporary society and its institutions. The work combines all these factors into an essentially new total-arts form, and the experience it creates is similar to that of happenings, although it has more point and structure – even though it is based on chance and indeterminacy...

And beneath, underneath and through all these sights and sounds is the scream and whine and slurp and krontch of some of the most affecting electronic music I've ever heard. – The Seattle Times

A total concept in music that integrates theatrical media and destroys audience inertia... – Seattle Post-Intelligencer