Subontnick / Bergsma / Eaton

 

Subotnick / Bergsma / Eaton

Morton Subotnick

Lamination 

Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra

Lukas Foss, Conductor

Turnabout VOX TV-S 34428

1971

William Bergsma

Violin Concerto

Edward Statkiewicz, Violin

Polish Radio and Television Orchestra

Zdzislav Szostak, Conductor

John Eaton

Concert Piece For Synket & Symphony Orchestra

Dallas Symphony Orchestra

Donald Johanos, Conductor

From the back cover: Lamination by Morton Subotnick (10:23 Min.)

When last Morton Subotnick and I met, he had just picked me up from a delightful coast-to-coast 747 fantasy, embellished with a $2.00 air hose version of the complete works of Pierre Boulez accompanied by Jean Paul Belmondo in a dashing 30's getup, driving fast and shooting hard. We were traveling in Subotnick's mini-bus camper to a cabin in the mountains surrounding Los Angeles when I said, "You know, Mort, I always seem to come to California at the end of a hard year." He replied, "That's because you always have a hard year." It was typical of his piercing, lucid perceptivity, a knowingness about people and people's actions that cuts across time and continents. If there are other "Structuralist" aspects of his music that manifest themselves more, fine, but to this writer it is that personability, that social perceptivity that shows in it the most. One can point to many of his multi-media or theatre works, such as Play! 4 (1965), created during his long association with visual artist, Anthony Martin, and Ritual Electronic Chamber Music (1968), a game piece which can be performed without audience, involving only a small group of "interested persons", to show that it's the live organic interaction between participants in pieces that is his prime concern.

Lamination is the participation of an orchestral body in what was to become Subotnick's prime medium, electronic music in which he succeeded in recreating a kind of orchestral texture over which he had complete control, though he exerted it only in carefully and exactly measured quantities. He composed three major works of this nature for Don Buchla's synthesizer equipment alone, Silver Apples of the Moon (1967), The Wild Bull (1968) and Touch (1969) and, most recently, one including visual per- formance, Sidewinder (1970). All of these pieces have undeniable instrumental qualities about them. When I heard some of the material in preparation for The Wild Bull a few years ago I remarked, "Hey, some of that sounds like the Berlioz Requiem." He laughed appreciatively. Lamination is important historically in this regard for the structure of the orchestral part imitates in timbre and texture those sounds that are created electronically. Indeed, many of them are electronic sounds that have been directly translated through orchestration. In perspective, one can see the orchestra slowly being dissolved in the impending spectre of flexibility in making electronic "Klangfarbenmusik". The listener should find it easy to hear the main structural principles of layering (as the title suggests), between the electronic and orchestral parts.

Morton Subotnick was born in 1933 and was known as one of the finest clarinetists in the country before becoming a founder of the San Francisco Tape Center, which launched his electronic music and multi-media career. He was later a Master Artist in the Multi-media Program at New York University where he maintained a studio and was one of the directors of the electric Ear series in multi-media. He now teaches at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. He has been one of the most in- fluential and productive of American composers working in electronics and multi-media.

Lukas Foss, of course, has been responsible for introducing many new American works and new faces, including this writer's and deserves credit for seeing fit to record such a work as Lamination.

Violin Concerto by William Bergsma (22:25 Min.)

William Bergsma's music is difficult to pidgeonhole. Strictly speaking, he does not follow the trends set by any of the early twentieth-century giants, such as Schoenberg, Bartok, Stravinsky or Hindemith, nor has he been felt as a force in the avant garde. All of his work has been devoted to a furtherance of the tradition- al musical media. One can see in it strong emphasis on linearity. He is a lyricist and a contrapuntalist. His structures are Beethovenian in their economy of means and he shows marked interest in integrating contrasting timbres.

Bergsma was somewhat of a prodigy, He was born in 1921 and at the age of 16 wrote Paul Bunyan Suite for his high school orchestra which is still played by such groups. He studied at Stanford and at Eastman with Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers. He received a Guggenheim in 1946 and taught at Juilliard from 1946 to 1963 when he was appointed Director of the School of Music at the University of Washington in Seattle. Probably his most extensive work is his opera, The Wife of Martin Guerre. In it one senses a typical Bergsma concern, extreme attention to the balance between voice and orchestra, which manifests itself as well in the Violin Concerto (1965) in the careful relation he makes between the orchestral and solo lines.

Bergsma's caution against overextending himself with dramatic force shows in the reserved manner in which he treats anything virtuosic. He is never flashy, but always concerned with precise relations between individual sounds. One arresting tech- nique is his manner of treating the temporal spacing of harmonic elements. It provides pointed references in time, very cyclic, though in a style that is not primarily rhythmic in its emphasis. This, along with constant lyric and contrapuntal variations pro- vides deep structural strength in a music poetic in impact.

There is a long list of works to Bergsma's credit. Some important ones, besides the piece presented here and the opera, are his Second Quartet (1944), commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation, Tangents, a large work for piano, a Symphony, Music On a Quiet Theme for orchestra, The Fortunate Islands for string orchestra and his Toccata for the Sixth Day, commissioned for the inaugural week concert of the Juilliard Orchestra in 1962 during the week of dedication of Philharmonic Hall in Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York.

DAVID ROSENBOOM

Mr. Bergsma's Violin Concerto was recorded under a grant from the Graduate School Research Fund of the University of Washington.

Concert Piece for Syn-Ket and Symphony Orchestra by John Eaton (13:20 Min.)

The first performance of this work was by the Berkshire Music Center Orchestra under the direction of Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood, August 9, 1967. It has since been performed by other groups including the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta.

In an article for the Electronic Music Review, Joel Chadabe suggests that the instrument should be reviewed as well as the composition in order to understand the total design. He goes on to say, "The Syn-Ket is a performable and portable electronic sound system designed and built by Paul Ketoff in Rome, Italy, for the American Academy in Rome. Basically, it consists of three sound systems (Eaton calls them 'combiners') racked one above the other... The Syn-Ket is performed by pushing buttons, turning dials, playing keyboards, depressing a volume pedal, and every now and then patching."

For the orchestration of the Concert Piece Eaton has divid- ed the orchestra into two sections, tuned a quarter-tone apart in pitch, which, the composer says, "allows me to bathe rejuvenes- cently in the ancient but still pure springs of microtonal melody". This tuning of the orchestra two sections (to quote Chadabe again) "permits a meeting on common ground with the tuning of the Syn-Ket, which is, of course, not played diatonically. With the quarter-tone tuning of clusters occasional legato phrases in the woodwinds and brass, strong shifts of register, and very sophisticated timbre changes, the orchestra enters the Syn-Ket sound world, which leaves Eaton free to mingle without fear of offending".

John Eaton was born in 1935 in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He received his A.B. and M.F.A. degrees from Princeton University where he studied composition with Milton Babbitt, Edward Cone, and Roger Sessions. He has been awarded three American Prix de Rome and two Guggenheim grants, a commission from the North German Radio, special awards from ASCAP, and a Fromm Foundation commission for this Concert Piece. (It is published by Malcolm Music, Ltd. [BMI]).

Mr. Eaton has composed works in every medium. Pieces of his have been played in concert and broadcast throughout the U.S., Italy, and Germany. The composer is also the soloist in this Concert Piece. – JOHN EATON