“The Avant-Groove”: Excerpt from No Sounds Are Forbidden: Music, Noise, and the Eclipse of American Modernism.

By Matthew Friedman

Morton Subotnick with the Buchla synthesizer.

Morton Subotnick arrived in New York in the fall of 1966 already a giant of the burgeoning avant-garde music scene. Together with composer Ramon Sender, a tape recorder, scattered equipment borrowed from a local high school or through a fortuitous connection with the local Ampex representative, and support from Mills College, he had built the San Francisco Tape Music Center into a force in electronic music rivaling the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC), uptown. But that was uptown. Downtown was another story – another universe a lot farther from Columbia University than just a thirty-five-minute subway ride along the A train to W 4th Street.

Uptown, avant-garde music was a science, and there was little room for the "superfluities" and "idle talk" of irrationality. For the composers like Milton Babbitt and Vladimir Ussachevsky who had founded the CPEMC, the goal was to clarify and reinforce the boundary between music and rationality on one hand, and noise and irrationality on the other. Ussachevsky taught a seminar in Musical Science and, in a 1958 article in High Fidelity magazine which evoked the language of Taylorism, Babbitt advocated for an idiom that employed "a tonal vocabulary which is more 'efficient' than that of the music of the past, or its derivatives." [1] The editors of High Fidelity ran the article under the headline “Who Cares if You Listen?”

The downtown avant-garde was grouped around the composer John Cage, who held court at the San Remo Bar on Bleecker Street and the Minetta Tavern around the corner on MacDougall with luminaries like George Kleinsinger, Merce Cunningham, Julian Beck, and Judith. It had a different agenda; what Cage called “a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play.”

"They were looking for a way out," CPEMC founder Otto Luening would later recall of the "downtowners from Greenwich Village" with a modicum of envy. Exhausted with high modernism, they sought to "shed the weight of industrial living, technological advance, and megalomania…"[2] Nowhere was this more evident in the world premiere of Erik Satie’s “Vexations,” in recital at the Pocket Theater on Third Ave. at 13th Street. Cage organized a relay team of pianists, including John Tudor, Christian Wolff, and John Cale newly-arrived from Wales, to play through all 840 repeats of the French composer’s exercise in minimalism. The recital lasted eighteen hours and attendees received refunds of the ticket price as the show wore on. It was a kind of Dadaist blague, as Satie had intended.

Subotnick had come East to take a position as composer-in-residence at New York University’s new Tisch School of the Arts. The university hoped that, guided by one of the founders of the San Francisco Center, it could build an electronic music laboratory on the scale of its uptown rivals at Columbia. With impeccable avant-garde bona fides, Subotnick also came with deep connections to New York’s downtown avant-garde in a personal and professional network that included the ONCE group, founded by Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley in Ann Arbor, and the Theatre of Eternal Music, led by La Monte Young and Cale.

A revolution seemed to be underway in the storefront theaters, galleries, and artist lofts below 14th Street. Cage and artist Allan Kaprow staged happenings, the Fluxus group’s George Maciunus set up the Fluxhall on Canal Street. Artists crossed disciplines in an all-out assault on the boundaries between the arts, between high-and-low art, between the serious and the popular, and between the university and the seat. Perhaps counterintuitively, NYU wanted a piece of the action, and was willing to throw money and resources at Subotnick – including a vast electronic synthesizer designed and built by Don Buchla – to catch lightning in a bottle.

It was the moment of what New York Times music critic Donal Henahan would call the “avant-groove,” when artistic rebellion, the counter culture, new technologies, the burgeoning music industry, and hi-fi culture would converge to make the difficult sounds of avant-garde music cool, much to the chagrin of the uptown modernists like Ussachevsky and Babbitt. And Subotnick, newly arrived from hippie San Francisco on the eve of the Summer of Love, funded by the academy, and equipped with the Buchla synthesizer in his Greenwich Village apartment, was the agent of revolution.

For a brief moment, the boundaries fell. In 1967, the LP of Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon, performed on the Buchla synthesizer and commissioned by Nonesuch Records, a label of scrappy Elektra Records  better known for providing light classical and baroque music to a mass market, "was an unprecedented success: the reviews were almost unanimously good and the first pressing run sold out."[3] Its success encouraged Nonesuch to release other challenging works, including Cage's Piano Concerto and the Spectrum new music compilations. The impact of Silver Apples of the Moon reached far beyond the rarefied spaces of elite musical taste, and stodgy classical music labels like Columbia Masterworks and Turnabout Vox launched their own ventures to tap into the hip avant-garde market. In 1967, two aspiring musicians in the East Village dubbed their electronic psychedelic group The Silver Apples.

The happenings had begun to taper-off by 1969, but interest in avant-garde music had never been stronger, or broader. The Theatre of Eternal Music would play continuously in downtown venues like The Kitchen in Soho for at least another decade, often to sold-out crowds. John Cale departed the art music scene in 1965 to join Brill Building songwriter Lou Reed in The Velvet Underground. The following year, Andy Warhol hired the band to provide the sounds, if not exactly music, for his Exploding Plastic Inevitable! cabaret, playing at the Dom, a converted Polish community center downstairs from the Electric Circus. "We all knew something revolutionary was happening, we just felt it," Warhol recalled with characteristic hyperbole. "Things couldn’t look this strange and new without some barrier being broken."[4]

Subotnick continued to break barriers. Starting in the summer of 1968, he directed an ongoing series of avant-garde, usually electronic, music at the Electric Circus called "The Electric Ear." The critics continued to complain. Writing in the Times, Henahan moaned about the unconventional space at a performance of Subotnick's The Wild Bull. "If the avant-garde is going to give us traditional concerts, let it give us back out theater seats."[5] The Electric Circus was meant to provide anything but a civilized, academic atmosphere. After all, on Saint Mark's place, wrote John Leo in the Times, "the scene is more important than the dance… Stars glower in a black sky. The curved walls crawl with huge protoplasmic blobs of colored light throbbing with the beat."[6] A photograph accompanying the article shows young hipsters in ironed hair and mod suits chiaroscuro in flashing lights against an abstract-painted backdrop. Yet it was also home to avant-garde.

The Electric Circus ca. 1968  

Subotnick's guests included his San Francisco colleague Pauline Oliveros, who performed Big Mother is Watching You  and Beautiful Soop, "in which cultured voices, electronically fractured, read poems of Lewis Carroll over a whippoorwill-like accompaniment (among other sounds), while a nostalgic, childlike light show based on the alphabet and on simple words such as 'cat' and 'bat' was projected on the walls."[7] Terry Riley, also a San Franciscan, who was equally influenced by Indian ragas, happenings and indeterminacy, had emerged as a bearded guru of a West Coast avant-garde scene that eschewed structure and embraced altered states. His April 1969 appearance at the Electric Circus featured near-endless, repetitive improvisations on an electronic organ, looped and re-looped in a battery of tape recorders.

The Times’ Harold Schonberg, usually unimpressed by experimental music wrote approvingly of the “recital” as men in bell-bottoms and women with ironed-straight hair swayed trancelike to Riley’s hypnotic loops. “"The other nights of the week will see the normal dancing and allied entertainment" that the Electric Circus was known for, he reported.[8] But, on that night, the avant-garde had "made the scene."

Matthew Friedman is a Boston-based historian, writer, editor, and photographer. He is the editor of The Typescript, and a historian of modernism and of Diaspora Jewish life. Friedman is in the process of completing his fourth book, No Sounds Are Forbidden: Music, Noise, and the Eclipse of American Modernism. He has taught at Rutgers University, Newark, Dominican University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, and has worked as a journalist for a number of publications.

[1] Milton Babbitt, "The Composer as Specialist," The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 49.

[2] Luening, "Interview with Peter Dickinson, New York City, July 2, 1987," in Peter Dickinson, ed., CageTalk: Dialogues With & About John Cage, (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 129.

[3] Tod Dockstader, Review of The Wild Bull a Composition for Electronic-Music Synthesizer by Morton Subotnick, The Musical Quarterly 55, January 1969, 136.

[4] Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt Books, 1980), 204.

[5] Donal Henahan, "Blinking Machine Joins ‘Wild Bull,'" New York Times, 27 August 1968, 37.

[6] John Leo, "Swinging in the East Village Has Its Ups and Downs," New York Times, 15 July 1967, 20.

[7] Theodore Strongin, "Music and Theater Share Same Circuit at Electric Circus," New York Times, 9 July 1968, 30.

[8] Schonberg, "Music: The Medium Electric, the Message Hypnotic," New York Times, 15 April 1969, 42.