Review Packet 1.

John Cage 1912-1992

--- 4:33 :: 1952; a piece where the score instructs the performer(s) not
to play their instrument(s) during the entire duration of the piece
throughout the three movements. The piece purports to consist of the
sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed,
although it is commonly perceived as "four minutes thirty-three
seconds of silence". The title of the piece refers to the total length in
minutes and seconds of a given performance, 433 being the total
length of the first public performance.

-- Water Walk :: For Water Walk, Cage rounded up a variety of

instruments all to do with that liquid a bathtub, a pitcher, ice
cubes in a mixer and the unconventional symphony they produce
culminates in the Rube Goldbergian mixing of a drink, the sipping of
which the composition dictates about two and a half minutes in.
Naturally, Cage being Cage, the piece incorporates audience reaction
noises; when host Gary Moore warns him that certain members of the
studio audience will laugh, Cage responds, I consider laughter better
than tears.
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Robert Arthur "Bob" Moog (May 23, 1934 August 21, 2005),
founder of Moog Music, was an American engineer and pioneer of
electronic music, best known as the inventor of the Moog synthesizer.
During his lifetime, Moog founded two companies for manufacturing
electronic musical instruments. He also worked as a consultant and
vice president for new product research at Kurzweil Music Systems
from 1984 to 1988, helping to develop the Kurzweil K2000.[3] He spent
the early 1990s as a research professor of music at the University of
North Carolina at Asheville.
Moog received a Grammy Trustees Award for lifetime achievement in
1970. In 2002, Moog was honored with a Special Merit/Technical
Grammy Award, and an honorary doctorate degree from Berklee
College of Music.

Boob MOOG The Moog Synthesizer

First customized MOOG modular synthesizer built :: 1965
went on to be used by Diana Ross, The Doors, The Monkees, The
Rolling Stones, The Beatles.

Commerical break through :: Clockwork Orange & The Shining (S.

Kubrick/film)
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Donald Buchla (born April 17, 1937) is an American pioneer in the

field of sound synthesizers, releasing his first units shortly after Robert
Moog's first synthesizers. However, his instrument was arguably
designed before Moog's. n 1970 the Buchla 200 series Electric Music
Box was released and was manufactured until 1985. Buchla created
the Buchla Series 500, the first digitally controlled analog synthesizer,
in 1971. Shortly after, the Buchla Series 300 was released, which
combined the Series 200 with microprocessors. The Music Easel, a
small, portable, all-in-one synthesizer was released in 1972. The
Buchla 400, with a video display, was released in 1982. In 1987, Buchla
released the fully MIDI enabled Buchla 700.[3]
Beginning in the 1990s, Buchla began designing alternative MIDI
controllers, such as the Thunder, Lightning, and Marimba Lumina. With
the recent resurgence of interest in analog synthesizers Buchla has
released a revamped 200 series called the 200e.
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Morton Subotnick (born April 14, 1933, in Los Angeles, California) is

an American composer of electronic music, best known for his Silver
Apples of the Moon, the first electronic work commissioned by a record
company, Nonesuch.[1] He was one of the founding members of
California Institute of the Arts, where he taught for many years.
Subotnick has worked extensively with interactive electronics and
multi-media, co-founding the San Francisco Tape Music Center with
Ramon Sender, and often collaborating with his wife Joan La Barbara.[5]
Morton Subotnick is one of the pioneers in the development of
electronic music and multi-media performance and an innovator in
works involving instruments and other media, including interactive
computer music systems. Most of his music calls for a computer part,
or live electronic processing; his oeuvre utilizes many of the important
technological breakthroughs in the history of the genre.

Early electronic music was made using wave generators and tape-
manipulated sounds. Subotnick was among the first composers to work
with electronic instrument designer Don Buchla. Buchla's modular
voltage-controlled synthesizer, which he called the Electric Music Box
and which was constructed partly based on suggestions by Subotnick
and Sender, was both more flexible and easier to use, and its
sequencing ability was integral to Subotnick's music.
At a time when electronic music was highly abstract, largely concerned
with pitch and timbre, with rhythm an afterthought or of no
consequence and patterns largely avoided, Subotnick broke with the
academic avant-gardists by including sections with regular rhythms.
Both Silver Apples and 1968's The Wild Bull (another Nonesuch-
commissioned work for tape; they have since been combined on a
Wergo CD) have been choreographed by dance companies around the
world.
In 1969 Subotnick was invited to be part of a team of artists to move to
Los Angeles to plan a new school. Mel Powell as Dean, Subotnick as
Associate Dean, and a team of four other pairs of artists carved out a
new path of music education and created the now famous California
Institute of the Arts. Subotnick remained Associate Dean of the music
school for 4 years and then, resigning as Associate Dean, became the
head of the composition program where, a few years later, he created
a new media program that introduced interactive technology and
multimedia into the curriculum. In 1978 Subotnick, with Roger
Reynolds and Bernard Rands, produced 5 annual internationally
acclaimed new music festivals.
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Les Paul :: Lester William Polsfuss (June 9, 1915 August 12,

2009), known as Les Paul, was an American jazz, country, and blues
guitarist, songwriter, luthier, and inventor. He was one of the pioneers
of the solid-body electric guitar, which made the sound of rock and roll
possible. Paul taught himself how to play guitar and while he is mainly
known for rock music, he had an early career in country music. [1] He is
credited with many recording innovations. Although he was not the
first to use the technique, his early experiments with overdubbing (also
known as sound on sound),[2] delay effects such as tape delay, phasing
effects and multitrack recording were among the first to attract
widespread attention.[3]

Multitrack-recording innovations[edit]
In the 1940s Paul was not happy with the way his records sounded. He
felt as though his sound was not different from anyone else's. This
reality struck him when his mother told him how great of a job he had
done on the radio, when in fact she had heard George Barnes, not Les
Paul.[36] Paul experimented with his playing techniques through the
1930s and 1940s, and played in private for many years before using
his ideas. He eventually put his own sound into a Bing Crosby song,
"It's Been a Long, Long Time," which was a number one single in 1945.
[37]
During a post-recording session talk with Bing Crosby, the crooner
suggested Paul try building his own recording studio so he might be
able to get the sound he wanted. At first Paul discounted the idea only
to give it a few more minutes thought before deciding Crosby was
right. Paul started his own studio in the garage of his home on
Hollywood's North Curson Street. The studio drew many famous
vocalists and musicians who wanted the benefit of Paul's expertise. In
his studio, Paul experimented with different techniques, including
microphone placement, the speed of the track, and overdubbed
recordings that had clarity that had not been seen before in this type
of multitrack recording. People also started to consider Les Pauls
mixed recording technique and tools to be actual instruments that
were just as important to the production of music as other, more
common instruments.[38] The home and studio were moved to
Pasadena at some point after Paul no longer owned the home.[39]
In 1949,[25] Les Paul was given one of the first Ampex Model 200A reel-
to-reel audio tape recording decks by Crosby and went on to work with
Ampex to create the eight track "Sel-Sync" machines for multitrack
recording.[25] Capitol Records released a recording that had begun as an
experiment in Paul's garage, entitled "Lover (When You're Near Me)",
which featured Paul playing eight different parts on electric guitar,
some of them recorded at half-speed, hence "double-fast" when played
back at normal speed for the master. ("Brazil", similarly recorded, was
the B-side.) This was the first time that Les Paul used multitracking in a
recording (Paul had been shopping his multitracking technique,
unsuccessfully, since the '30s. Much to his dismay, Sidney Bechet used
it in 1941 to play half a dozen instruments on "Sheik of Araby"). Paul's
early recordings were made with acetate discs. Paul would record a
track onto a disk, then record himself playing another part with the
first. He built the multitrack recording with overlaid tracks, rather than
parallel ones as he did later. By the time he had a result he was
satisfied with, he had discarded some five hundred recording disks.
Paul even built his own disc-cutter assembly, based on automobile
parts. He favored the flywheel from a Cadillac for its weight and
flatness. Even in these early days, he used the acetate-disk setup to
record parts at different speeds and with delay, resulting in his
signature sound with echoes and birdsong-like guitar riffs. When he
later used magnetic tape, he could take his recording rig on tour with
him, even making episodes for his fifteen-minute radio show in his
hotel room. He later worked with Ross Snyder on the design of the first
eight-track recording deck (built for him by Ampex for his home
studio.)
Electronics engineer Jack Mullin had been assigned to a U.S. Army
Signal Corps unit stationed in France during World War II. On a mission
in Germany near the end of the war, he acquired and later shipped
home a German Magnetophon (tape recorder) and fifty reels of I.G.
Farben plastic recording tape. Back in the U.S., Mullin rebuilt and
developed the machine with the intention of selling it to the film
industry. He held a series of demonstrations which quickly became the
talk of the American audio industry.
Within a short time, Crosby had hired Mullin to record and produce his
radio shows and master his studio recordings on tape. Crosby invested
US$50,000 in a Northern California electronics firm, Ampex. With
Crosby's backing, Mullin and Ampex created the Ampex Model 200, the
world's first commercially produced reel-to-reel audio tape recorder.
Crosby gave Les Paul the second Model 200 to be produced.
Les Paul invented Sound on Sound recording using this machine by
placing an additional playback head, located before the conventional
erase/record/playback heads. This allowed Paul to play along with a
previously recorded track, both of which were mixed together on to a
new track. This was a mono tape recorder with just one track across
the entire width of quarter-inch tape; thus, the recording was
"destructive" in the sense that the original recording was permanently
replaced with the new, mixed recording. He eventually enhanced this
by using one tape machine to play back the original recording and a
second to record the combined track. This preserved the original
recording.
Les Paul bought the first Ampex 8-track recorder in 1957. Rein Narma
built a custom 8-channel mixing console for Les Paul. The mixing board
included in-line equalization and vibrato effects. He named the
recorder "The Octopus" and the mixing console "The Monster". [ The
name "octopus" was inspired by comedian W. C. Fields who was the
first person Les Paul played his multi-tracked guitar experiments to.
"He came to my garage to make a little record (in 1946)," Les recalled.
"I played him the acetate of 'Lover' that I'd done. When he heard it, he
said, 'My boy, you sound like an octopus.'

Terminology ::

Oscillator
Enveolpe
LFO
VCA
VCF
FM Synthesis
Subtractive Synthesis
Low Pass Filter
High (Hi) Pass Filter
Band/Notch Filter
Equalizer
Compressor

Listening ::
Saw Wave
Square Wave
Sine Wave

Water Walk :: Cage

Silver Apples of The Moon :: Subotnick