Last week I heard something I hadn't heard for many many years. During my high school years, I did a lot of electronic music in the Brandeis electronic music studio, where my father was the director. The equipment there was, for the late sixties, state of the art: a Buchla modular synthesizer and large professional-grade Ampex tape recorders. During off hours, my father would let me into the studio to do what I wished there, and over the years 1968-1971, I produced a fair number of tapes full of Buchla sounds. Some of them were arranged into coherent "music," others were just explorations of sounds that the Bucha could make. During my active time there, I spliced together compositions (there was, of course, no digital editing or digital anything in those days). I also played duets with my dad on the piano and me on synthesizer, and a few other instrumentalists as well.

All this music, stacked in old reel-to-reel tapes, had sat in a cabinet in my dwelling for decades. It had taken up space in my old Cambridge house, and it took up a dusty space in my current place in Northern Virginia. At one point in the early 90s, I made a half-hearted attempt to play some of these tapes on an almost equally old reel-to-reel tape deck which is also sitting in a dusty closet. I managed to transcribe some of the electronic pieces onto cassette tapes, but after that I put it all away and didn't look at it for perhaps 15 years. I figured that by now the tapes would be so deteriorated that they would not be able to be played.

But just recently one of my ambient/electronic friends, who is an experienced sound engineer and who has a working reel-to-reel tape deck, persuaded me to unearth these tapes and send a couple to him for digitizing. I sent him, with much hesitation, two of my better tapes. These were the originals…the same tapes which I had loaded into the Ampex back in 1969 and 1970. I hoped that the splices, which were made of mere sticky tape, would not have disintegrated, and that the tapes would play.

To my surprise (and my friend's) the tapes were in more than adequate shape and he was able to record all the music and electronic noises off the tapes securely into digital form (MP3's). Not only that, he was so pleased with them that he played them on his internet radio show! This show was heard by only a very limited audience, but as far as I know, until then no one but I and perhaps my father had ever heard these sounds. Since the sounds had been retrieved so well, I am now planning to send all the electronic music tapes to my friend for processing.

Hearing the sound of the Buchla brought back vivid memories of my time at the Brandeis studio, despite forty years' (!) distance. In 1968, the campus was full of racial and political tensions. I was not yet a college student and kept away from the demonstrations, though on some days I could see the students marching with their placards in the distance, through the studio window. I wasn't totally uninvolved, though, because I did the electronic soundtrack for a summer school play about Black self-awareness. I hope to find that soundtrack on one of those tapes. I remember the technical difficulties of using the unwieldy Buchla machine to make music. The modules were connected by "patch cords" … wires which often had loose connections and would fall out during a session. There was no keyboard to speak of, just a small bar of touch pads which would often go off without any touch at all during humid weather. And nowhere could the Buchla be tuned to any conventional scale. It was always a microtonal adventure playing this machine.

I was impressed by the sounds I made back then; they were full of energy and humor and confidence, despite the fact that I was a whiny, morose, self-absorbed teenager. But once I finally went to university as a student, I never touched the Buchla again. I was no longer able to work in the studio after hours as a special guest, and I just didn't have the time anyway. Now, forty years later, I hear this music and find that the internet listeners, and my ambient/electronic friends, are fascinated and impressed by it. And I'm embarrassed. Guys, I made that when I was sixteen years old. How can anything by a sixteen year old who is not some "prodigy" be any good? My friends want to hear more, not only from the archive, but from me now.

The world is filled with noise. Am I entitled to make more of it? The Buchla has now fallen into disrepair, if it still exists at all. But in those decades of neglect, the world has changed. We have more power in a laptop than the entire Brandeis computer department in 1968. Electronic music has gone digital, and that laptop can now run the equivalent of many Buchlas using any number of "virtual synthesizers," big programs which run on a computer, such as the righteous Reaktor, which costs less now than the Buchla did back in 1967. There are others which are less costly, or even free to download. My Macintoshes come loaded with a simple music synthesizer system, GarageBand. So if I wanted to make electronic music, it's right here on the screen. The question is not availability of technology. Do I have the time to learn these programs and work with them? Did I really have more time to pursue creative projects when I was a high school student? I spend less time at my day job than I did at school. And yet I am always pressed for time now, living like a proper twenty-first century urban American.

And suppose I did have the time. Would I have the will? I now know too much about what music should be, what art should be. I know the rules and the canons of classical music making, or classical art making. I have read reams of criticism. Awareness of structure and constraint, form and balance, and a lifetime of listening to the truly great have made me reluctant to even try to produce anything new. Is it, well, "seemly" or appropriate for an older person to take up something that they did back when they were just sixteen, now that I am supposed to know better? My music friends are encouraging me to do just that.

Posted at 4:12 am | link