By Hannah M.G.Shapero
The first electronic music that captivated me came from outer space. It was from the movie FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956), a movie that was a standard on Saturday-afternoon TV features. Walter Pidgeon, as the exiled genius Dr. Morbius, plays a recording of the music of the long-dead Krell race. I had never heard anything comparable to it, with its whistles and warbles and sweeping siren-tones. I wanted to make music like that. And in 1967, I indeed had my chance to enter the world of electronic music, thanks to my father. This story of my early years in electronic music is very much a "Life With Father" tale, as I would never have had the opportunity to work with the marvelous music machines without my father's hard work maintaining them and supplying musical creativity.
My father, Harold Shapero, is known in American classical music circles, but his work with electronic music is not so well known. Now retired, he taught for 37 years at the music department of Brandeis University, near Boston, Massachusetts. In 1966, when it came time for him to be the chairman of the department, my father decided to upgrade an already existing electronic music studio into a state-of-the-art facility. At the time, the Brandeis electronic music lab was built from old radio testing equipment - oscillators, or sound generators, and some rudimentary sound modification devices. A composer on the Brandeis faculty, Alvin Lucier, had already produced some avant- garde pieces using this custom-built assembly.
But the first compact electronic music synthesizers were just coming on the market, and my father decided to acquire one of these for Brandeis. The two leading synthesizers were the Moog, which was already famous as the synthesizer used by then-Walter Carlos for "Switched-on Bach," and the Buchla, which was developed by a musical inventor named Donald Buchla out in the San Francisco area. Like two different instruments from the same family, they had a different sound. The Moog had a hard-edged sound. The Buchla had a more flute-like, soft sound, though it could produce the harsher sounds as well. The Moog was oriented towards commercial music, could be tuned to conventional scales, and had a keyboard - which is why pop musicians used it. The Buchla, though, was designed more for experimental music; it was difficult to tune it to the conventional tonal scale, and it had no keyboard to speak of.
My father made the wise decision and bought the Buchla for our studio. In early 1968, I was introduced to it. Its warbles, tweets, whistles and swoops sounded wonderful to me....like the music of the long-lost Krell.
The Buchla had a major representative in the experimental music field. This was Morton Subotnick, who had worked closely with Buchla himself developing the synthesizer. He had already produced a widely played electronic piece, SILVER APPLES OF THE MOON (1967). In 1968 Subotnick came to Brandeis to premier his new Buchla piece, THE WILD BULL, which for its time was a masterpiece of big electronic sound. I was there at the presentation listening to everything, and thinking about how I could reproduce the sounds that Subotnick had created.
The Buchla, by modern standards, was primitive. It consisted of four boxes, about two and a half feet square apiece, which were packed with "modules." There were sound generators, each producing a different type of waveform and sound quality, and sound modifiers which could change the "shape" of notes or their texture. For changing pitches automatically, Buchla had sequencers, in which repeating sequences of notes could be pre- set, and something called a "random voltage generator," which was one of the most useful devices in the whole synthesizer. This produced, as its name suggests, random, unpredictable pulses of different voltages, which could turn into different pitches and intervals, or different rhythms, depending on how you used it. This was the main engine of musical creativity in the Buchla setup.
The Buchla also featured a reverberation simulator, which consisted of a metallic spring with a weight on the end, hanging down behind the machine. When I wanted to add extra sounds to the mix, I would shake the synthesizer and the spring would rattle, creating a crashing "industrial" sound texture.
To use the Buchla, I had to set up what was known as a "patch." The modules were not connected internally. Each one had to be connected to its fellow modules by a series of color-coded wires of varying lengths, or "patchcords." Some of these had "mini-phone-plugs" on their ends and snapped securely into place; they were grey. Others had "banana plugs" at their ends - whose metal ends were literally shaped like tiny bananas. These cords were red or black. Because of wear on the metal contacts, the "banana plugs" were constantly coming loose and falling out of their sockets, usually at an inopportune time.
A complete "patch" might take me as much as an hour to put together. I learned to make multiple patches on the machine so that I could switch back and forth between one sound-complex and another. By the time I was ready to play, the machine looked like a plate of spaghetti. I had to reach through the tangle to turn the knobs on the various controls - usually dislodging a patchcord while I did it.
While my father worked in his office in the Music Department after-hours, into the spring and summer of 1968, I spent day after day in the studio, learning to use the synthesizer. My workplace was a crowded little room filled with the outmoded equipment of the previous electronic music studio, and two dishwasher-sized Ampex tape recorders. I had reels and reels of tape at my disposal, gotten at discount electronics stores, and as I worked on the machine I recorded hours of electronic sounds. I nicknamed this flow of noise "Buch-puke." Perhaps ten minutes at most out of every day's session sounded good. But after a lot of practice, I learned not only to work the Buchla, but to play it live - unusual for a machine that was not really meant for real-time performance. Some of my improvisations, with some editing, even became the soundtrack for a summer-school experimental theater production, about African-American identity and pride, though I must confess that my concern for the play was purely technical.
This was the era of the Vietnam war and civil rights agitation, a time of protests and riots and violence and chaos. But I was unmoved by it all; I lived in the esoteric world of the Buchla synthesizer and experimental music. I could look out the window of the studio and see student demonstrators in the distance, marching around with their placards, and I might as well have been on another planet. The outside world meant little to me. I was fifteen years old, and not a teenager of my time.
As the summer of 1968 drifted on, I began to play duets with any instrumentalist who would volunteer. My father set up the microphone in the empty halls of the Brandeis music building, which had a nice reverberation. I played alongside a flutist, and a jazz guitarist, both talented amateurs. This combination of conventional instrument and Buchla was promising, and so my father, the professional composer and pianist, began to record duets with me as well. The piano in the next room was set up with microphones, and speakers, rather than headphones, allowed my father and me to hear each others' sounds.
Our piano and synthesizer improvisations went on into the fall and winter, into 1969. We would do our work in the late evening, after the business of the Brandeis music building was done for the day. Our sessions produced music which impressed even my exacting father, and he started editing some of them into listenable pieces. Our recording abilities were very limited; we had no capacity to overdub or modify what we had recorded, except by simple splicing. It was through this simple process that my father and I produced our Improvisation series, especially "Improvisations in B" and "Improvisations in C Sharp." These were not really set in those keys, but the Buchla notes and the piano improvisations centered around that tonal range.
We played these pieces for the sophisticated Brandeis audience. Those were the days of tape music, when an audience would sit still at concerts to listen to a taped piece, even if there were no live players. Though I was offered the option of playing the Buchla live on stage, I declined, because of the cumbersome nature of the instrument, not to mention the mishaps of patchcords falling out and bad connections. I was also hesitant to try to reproduce the magic of synthesizer improvisation in front of an audience.
Yet my father and I had a little reputation now. With these two pieces and many more, and with a constant interest in what other electronic musicians were doing, we decided to go on tour.